Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Picturing the Landscape’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 22nd May – 7th October 2012

Curator: Brett Abbott

Francis Frith (English, 1822-1898)
The Pyramids of Dahshoor, From the East
1857
Albumen silver print
11.6 x 16.2cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

“Hence the photographer’s most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically.”

Edward Weston. The Complete Photographer. January 20, 1943

Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Sir John Frederick William Herschel (British, 1792-1871)
Valley of the Saltina near Brieg at Entrance of the Simplon
1821
Graphite drawing made with the aid of a camera lucida
19.7 × 29.7cm (7 3/4 × 11 11/16 in.)
Gift of the Graham and Susan Nash Collection
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Dr Samuel A. Bemis (American, 1793-1881)
View within Crawford Notch, New Hampshire
c. 1840
Daguerreotype
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Boston dentist Samuel Bemis, one of the first Americans to use a daguerreotype outfit successfully, practiced photography during his summer months in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. His landscape views of the area are the earliest surviving American photographs to depict untamed nature. Here he depicts a scene of rugged beauty.

An innovative amateur, Bemis was not a masterful technician of the complicated daguerreotype process. The dark tone of the sky and the light areas along the slope of the mountain indicate inadequate processing of the daguerreotype plate.

John Beasly Greene  (American, 1832-1856)
Thebes, Village of Ghezireh
1853-1854
Salted paper print from a waxed paper negative
9 1/8 x 12 inches
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

John Greene was an archaeologist, the well-to-do son of a banker from Boston who lived in Paris, and a photographer. By 1853 the twenty-one-year-old Greene had learned to use Le Gray’s waxed-paper process, the technique of choice for traveling Frenchmen. That same year he made the first of two expeditions to Egypt and Nubia, bringing back more than two hundred negatives of monuments and landscapes, some ninety-four of which, printed by Blanquart-Evrard in 1854, comprise the album “Le Nil, monuments, paysages, explorations photographiques par J. B. Greene.” So rare are these albums that we assume that Greene published them at his own expense. On his second trip, in 1854-1855, he not only photographed but also excavated, especially at Medinet-Habou. During an archaeological and photographic expedition to Algeria the following winter, this exceptionally talented young man died of an undisclosed illness.

Greene’s Egyptian landscapes are startlingly barren. Coalescing from large, softly nuanced tonal planes, the views seem to shimmer above the page almost to the point of evaporating, like distant desert mirages. Generally, Greene placed the geological or archeological structure of these pictures at a distance, surrounded by sand and sky. This, the most minimal of his visions, sums up the Egyptian landscape. Stretching between the great river and the endless expanse of sky, and between the great river and the desert, is a thin band of fertile earth – the ligament of life that gave rise to a great civilisation. That the picture functions like a diagram may owe to Greene’s knowledge of hieroglyphics; the Egyptian pictograph for “country” is a flat, floating disk, hardly more than a horizontal line.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Charles Marville (French, 1813-1879)
Fontainebleau
1854
Salted paper print
15.9 × 21.3cm (6 1/4 × 8 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Francis Frith (English, 1822-1898)
The Pyramids of Dashour
1856-1857
Albumen silver print
6.8 × 6.5cm (2 11/16 × 2 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Weston J. and Mary M. Naef

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Sugar Pine Cones
Negative 1925-1930; print 1931-1932
Gelatin silver print
11.6 x 16.2cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Kelp on Tide Pool, Point Lobos
1939
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Rather than depicting a traditionally picturesque vista or capturing accurate perspective, photographers of the 20th century began to explore the various but particularly photographic ways that the natural world could be seen through the camera lens. Often this led to spatial experimentation. Taken at Point Lobos in California, this image by Edward Weston plays with the perception, and misperception, of space. The photographer cropped his photograph of a tide pool to show kelp puncturing the water’s surface in the foreground, while in the upper register an underwater landscape appears simultaneously near and far.

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
[Detroit]
1941
Gelatin silver print
8.1 × 11.4cm (3 3/16 × 4 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of Harry Callahan

Callahan referred to this photograph, made shortly after an inspiring encounter with Ansel Adams, as “my first good picture.” Unlike Adams’s dramatic landscapes, Callahan’s composition focuses on an overlooked pedestrian setting in his native Detroit. Raising the horizon line, the artist achieved a delicate, calligraphic interplay among the reeds and telephone poles and their reflections across the surface of a bog.

Wyn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Point Lobos Tide Pool
1957
Gelatin silver print
19.1 × 24.1cm (7 1/2 × 9 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

In Focus: Picturing Landscape, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center, May 22 – October 7, 2012, offers a rich trove of landscape photography from some of the most innovative photographers in the genre. Drawn exclusively from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition brings together the work of twenty photographers, spanning the medium from the mid-1800s to the current decade, including Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Imogen Cunningham, William Garnett, John Beasly Greene, Eliot Porter, Clifford Ross, Toshio Shibata and Edward Weston.

“The range of photographs chosen for this exhibition were selected from hundreds of extraordinary landscape works in the Getty Museum’s photography collection with an eye towards the various ways that photographers have responded to the daunting challenge of depicting the natural landscape photographically,” says Karen Hellman, assistant curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition.

Since the invention of the medium, photographers have turned to the landscape as a source of inspiration. Changing artistic movements and continual technical advancements have provided opportunities for camera artists to approach the subject in diverse and imaginative ways. The Getty originally presented In Focus: The Landscape in June 2008, curated by Brett Abbott. Expanding on the first presentation of photographs, this second exhibition on landscape in the Getty Museum’s In Focus series examines how photographers have sought to capture the breadth and perspective of the landscape through a camera lens. The exhibition is organised around three main themes: nineteenth-century technical developments by photographers such as Francis Frith who captured intriguing views of the Egyptian Pyramids in the 1850s; works that show purely photographic approaches such as those by Edward Weston and Harry Callahan; and more recent ways in which photographers have framed the landscape to make environmental and conceptual statements.

One of the earliest works in the exhibition is actually not a photograph but a drawing made by Sir John Frederick Herschel in 1821 with the aid of a camera lucida, an optical device sometimes used as a drawing aid by artists of the period. The exhibition also includes a very early full-plate daguerreotype of a landscape made by Boston dentist Samuel Bemis in 1840. During the first decades of the 20th century, artistic experimentation flourished and tested the boundaries of the genre. Photographers such as Edward Weston and Harry Callahan sought to explore the landscape as abstraction and pure form. In the second half of the 20th century, photographers began to explore the landscape in more socially conscious ways. Eliot Porter devoted himself to publishing work in concert with conservation efforts. Virginia Beahan has delved into the landscape as a site of human history, rather than simply a subject of aesthetic contemplation.

Contemporary artists continue to be inspired by the rich tradition of landscape photography. Also included in the exhibition is a large-scale photograph by Clifford Ross from his 2006 Mountain series, produced from extremely high-resolution digital files in order to make prints that came as close as possible to replicating reality. Several works will be on view for the first time, including a photograph taken in the forest of Fontainebleau, outside of Paris, by Charles Marville in the 1850s, and a photograph from Point Lobos, California, by Wynn Bullock, as well as a work by the Japanese photographer Toshio Shibata acquired with funds from the Getty Museum Photographs Council.

In Focus: Picturing Landscape is the eleventh installation of the ongoing In Focus series of thematic presentations of photographs from the Getty’s permanent collection, and includes twenty-two works by twenty photographers.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Sandbars, Cape Cod, Massachusetts
1966
Cibachrome print
34.4 x 51cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of William A. Garnett

Nature and photography have been linked since the inception of the medium. Whether driven by the challenge of capturing the expanse and perspective of a vista or by the myriad possibilities of creating a unique artistic experience, the act of depicting the natural landscape has inspired photographers from the 1800s to the present.

To create this image, photographer William Garnett piloted his plane over sand bars in Cape Cod. In addition to the natural beauty of the ocean, the photographer invites us to explore space and perception in a unique way. The undulating forms of the sandbars play with the boundaries between foreground and background. Changing tones of blue challenge us to know if we look at water, sky, or even a view from outer space.

Eliot Porter (American, 1901-1990)
Aspens and Grass, Elk Mountain Road, New Mexico, October 3, 1972
1972
Dye transfer print
26.2 x 20.6cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Bequest of the artist
© 1990 Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Toshio Shibata (Japanese, b. 1949)
Tsuru City, Yamanashi Prefecture
1989
Gelatin silver print
44.5 × 55.5cm (17 1/2 × 21 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Toshio Shibata

Virginia Beahan (American, b. 1946) and Laura McPhee (American, b. 1958)
Apple Orchard, Manzanar Japanese-American Relocation Camp, Owens Valley, California
1995
Chromogenic print
75.3 × 95.3cm (29 5/8 × 37 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Nancy and Bruce Berman
© Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee

Here Beahan and McPhee delve into the landscape as a site of human history and conflict. With the High Sierra as a backdrop, rusty remnants of the Manzanar relocation camp, used to detain Japanese Americans during World War II, occupy the foreground. In the middle ground stand the desiccated trunks of an orchard, part of an 1860s settlement that was abandoned after the land’s water was diverted in the 1920s to irrigate Los Angeles. The orchard, in turn, had uprooted a community of Paiute Indians, who had lived there for generations.

Virginia Beahan (American, b. 1946) and Laura McPhee (American, b. 1958)
Mount Rainier, Washington
2000
Chromogenic dye coupler print
75.5 x 96.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Nancy Goliger and Bruce Berman
© Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee

Clifford Ross (American, b. 1952)
Mountain IV
2004
Chromogenic colour print
63 x 118 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Clifford Ross Studio

A persistent aspect of picturing a landscape has been the concept of the ideal. Recent photographers have framed nature not only to emphasise its beauty but also to highlight its unattainability in a modern context.

Photographer Clifford Ross was inspired to create this image of Mount Sopris while on a family holiday. In order to, as the photographer put it, “grab as much of the mountain as [he] possibly could in one shot,” Ross invented a camera, the R1, which exposes 9 x 18 inch aerial film. When processed by hand and scanned, the negatives produce files with a hundred times higher resolution than those made with the average professional digital camera. Yet even though he pursues a near replica of reality, Ross also manipulates the digital file to re-create the landscape as he remembers experiencing it. Viewers have the ability to examine the scene in greater detail than they might even in person.

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Lutz Bacher / MATRIX 242’ at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco

Exhibition dates: 18th July – 7th October 2012

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

Lutz Bacher (American, 1943-2019)
Bien Hoa (detail)
2006-2007
inkjet print mounted on aluminium
24 x 36 in.
Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco

Since Lutz Bacher’s first MATRIX exhibition in 1993, the Berkeley-based artist has become a leading figure in contemporary art; she was the subject of a retrospective at MoMA PS1 in 2009 and was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. MATRIX 242 presents an important but rarely seen series from 2006-2007 that sheds light on the artist’s often elusive practice.

Bien Hoa is is based on a set of ten photographs Bacher discovered at a Berkeley salvage store. All of the photographs were created by an American soldier named Walter, who was stationed at Bien Hoa Air Base during the Vietnam War. Walter inscribed the backs of all but two of the pictures before mailing them home to his partner in Oakland. Bacher has enlarged and reprinted the photographs to hang above the verso of the originals, which disclose Walter’s annotations. These have a surprisingly casual tone, given what must have been the harrowing experience of being a soldier stationed in Vietnam. In some cases, Walter’s inscriptions sound almost like a tourist writing a postcard; in others, he seems to have been more concerned with the composition of the image than with the grisly content of a scene. “This is Bien Hoa looking at it from the Air Base. This is a pretty good picture. Now do you think that’s beautiful? Can you see the wire, keeping the people from attacking the Air Base? That’s what those fences are out there for.”

By strategically juxtaposing these images and texts, and placing them in a museum setting, Bacher reveals the slippery nature of perception. She prompts us to wonder, Why was Walter so concerned with the quality of his images? Why were these photographs discarded? What became of Walter?”

Text from the BAM/PFA website

Lutz Bacher (American, 1943-2019)
Bien Hoa (detail)
2006-2007
inkjet print mounted on aluminium
24 x 36 in.
Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco

The ten photographic sets that make up Lutz Bacher’s Bien Hoa (2006-2007) are deceptively simple. Large colour inkjet images, reproductions of yellowed black-and-white photographs, are presented above handwritten notes written on the backs of the original prints. The annotations were made by a man stationed at Vietnam’s Bien Hoa Air Force Base in 1969, identified only as Walter, who is alternately the author and the subject of the images. We see Walter posing at a military desk with his section chief, in an armed helicopter adorned with a playboy bunny, in front of sand bagged barracks, and at gunpoint, “surrendering” to a Vietnamese woman. Other photographs depict the bleak situation – burned-out helicopters, fire drills, and fences separating the base from the local town. Bacher found the cache of photographs, which had been mailed from Vietnam, at a Berkeley salvage store. Originally meant for an intimate audience, the photos are displaced by Bacher’s decision to remake them as her art. She channels the voice of an African American man fighting in the Vietnam War, decisively situating that voice, through her own authorship, in a new time and context.

On their own, the images are charged with America’s uneasy history of armed aggression and recall our complex legacy of racism and popular unrest; with Walter’s notes, however, that general discomfort becomes deeply personal. Referring to an image of himself seated inside a helicopter he writes: “This is a Huey Cobra, the badest [sic] Helicopter in Vietnam. Those are rockets on the side of the ship. I wish I could take off and come home. Your Man, Walter.” With his comments, Walter reveals feelings of complicity in the military apparatus of the war, as well as his desire to return home. It is hard not to wonder how Walter wound up in Vietnam and what became of him: was he drafted or enlisted by the many recruiters targeting African American neighbourhoods at the time, promising subsidies? Did he return home safely?

Presented, as they are here, in a museum setting, Walter’s self-conscious commentaries on his photographs take on new relevance. In some cases, Walter’s inscriptions sound almost like a tourist writing a postcard; in others, he seems to have been more concerned with the composition of the image than with the grisly content of a scene: “This is a practice session that the Fire Department has every now and then. They are practicing on a burning helicopter. I messed up on my border at the top of the picture.” Bacher’s enlargements invite us to hone in on these details and scrutinise the photographs aesthetically, as Walter directs: “This is Bien Hoa looking at it from the Air Base. This is a pretty good picture. Now do you think that’s beautiful? Can you see the wire, keeping the people from attacking the Air Base?” Walter’s grim interjections foil our sense of detached aesthetic judgment.

Likewise, Bacher, conspiring with Walter, complicates easy explanations of her work. Curiously, the only two photographs in the series that remain unannotated feature a gun. In the first, Walter poses solemnly in front of sandbagged barracks in full military uniform. In the second, he is dressed in Vietnamese garb, playfully surrendering at gunpoint to a local woman. This reversal, from American soldier to Vietnamese prisoner, illustrates not only the paradox of Walter’s situation, but also Bacher’s. Without captions to describe Walter’s feelings, it is unclear if he fought willingly or if, like many soldiers at that time, he was ambivalent about our presence in Vietnam, or perhaps even sympathised with the local’s desire to enact political change. Faced with these gaps in explanation, viewers are left to wonder about Walter’s intentions in setting up the photographs as he did, with this strange role reversal. The reasons for Bacher’s own reversal, exchanging her voice for Walter’s, is also left ambiguous.

Shifting between Walter, of whom nothing is known, and Bacher, Bien Hoa’s narrative refuses to be fixed in any one time or place. For that reason, the work feels contemporary, alive with the contradictions that make up our present moment. Bacher uses found images, objects, and text to confound easy understandings of authorship, gender, race, violence, and power. Despite being composed of discarded photographs, Bien Hoa resonates as a pivotal description of a fraught moment in United States history, yet this history still feels open to interpretation. Bacher, exhuming the photographs and aligning her voice with Walter’s, inverts any sense of their cohesion.”

Dena Beard
Assistant Curator
Exhibition brochure

Lutz Bacher (American, 1943-2019)
Bien Hoa (detail)
2006-2007
inkjet print mounted on aluminium
24 x 36 in.
Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

BAMPFA is located at 2155 Center Street
between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue, in downtown Berkeley
Phone: (510) 642-0808

Opening hours:
Thursday – Sunday, 11am – 7pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive website

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Exhibition: ‘Elliott Erwitt. Retrospective’ at Kunst Haus Wein, Vienna

Exhibition dates: 14th June – 30th September 2012

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
USA. Fort Dix, New Jersey. 1951
1951
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

There is something whimsical and abidingly Chaplinesque about Elliott Erwitt’s photographs (see the feet in FRANCE. Paris. 1989, below) – that is until he lands a knockout blow flush on the chin with a devastatingly serious, weighty image like USSR. Moscow. 1959. Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon (even though the two protagonists were apparently talking about banalities). Erwitt’s “art of observation” is a gift of the eye and the mind, where the artist must be truly aware of the world around them in order to capture the mosaic of reality.

As the press release astutely observes, “Erwitt has a gift that few photographers possess, the gift of conveying a subtext with each photo: sentiment, anger, a little happiness; an emotion that can only be recognised by looking very closely; a “before” and an “after”. Erwitt himself calls this the “essence of what happens”. For Erwitt, photography is about really seeing things: “You either see, or you don’t see.”

Very perceptive and so very true.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Kunst Haus Wein, Vienna for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“It’s not the subject, it’s how you treat the subject.”

“I take a lot of pictures of dogs because I like dogs and because they don’t object to being photographed and they also don’t ask for prints.”

Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt @ Kunst Haus Wien

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
Small dog standing by woman, New York City
1946
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
ENGLAND. Brighton. 1956. Elizabeth Allan
1956
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
France
1965
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
Netherlands
1973
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
USA. New York. 1974. Felix, Gladys and Rover
1974
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
FRANCE. Paris. 1989
1989
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
New York City, USA
2000
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt, the “Woody Allen of photography”, who views his subjects with his heart as much as with his eye, captures human – sometimes all-too-human – situations in his oeuvre. Kunst Haus Wien presents pieces of the mosaic that is Erwitt’s reality, taken from over half a century of his photographic work. This comprehensive retrospective includes about 150 works by a highly active photographer. Erwitt embodies a type of photographer that has become extremely rare, one who views his subjects with his heart as much as with his eye and thereby sees things that most people rarely notice: the little humorous situations and passions of everyday life, the tiny moments in which gestures and facial expressions say more than a thousand words.

Erwitt is one of the leading photographers of his generation. Extremely versatile, with a broad spectrum of interests, he points his camera at human – sometimes all-too-human – situations: Some of them involve animals, others are political, still others capture a touching moment. Photography, for Erwitt, is above all an “art of observation” that depends first and foremost on the special way in which one views the world. In our world of fast-moving TV images and digitally enhanced pictorially compositions in advertising and fashion, Erwitt’s works restore to the photographic medium its original power. His snapshots are pieces of the mosaic of reality. Erwitt has a gift that few photographers possess, the gift of conveying a subtext with each photo: sentiment, anger, a little happiness; an emotion that can only be recognised by looking very closely; a “before” and an “after”. Erwitt himself calls this the “essence of what happens”. For Erwitt, photography is about really seeing things: “You either see, or you don’t see.”

Kitchen Debate

The ability to tell a whole story in one picture is Elliott Erwitt’s strength – as in the summer of 1959, when US Vice President Richard Nixon met Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. Erwitt’s snapshot documents how Capitalism and Socialism collided head-on in the form of the volatile Nixon and the surly Khrushchev. Actually, what he photographed was – as he later discovered – merely a conversation about banalities between two politicians during the Cold War, and yet this turned out to be the political photograph that would make him famous. Erwitt’s photo of the so-called Kitchen Debate cemented Nixon’s image as a hardliner and Erwitt’s own reputation as a journalistic photographer who had the qualities of an “invisible insider”.

Dogging Dogs

Erwitt has always taken photographs for his own pleasure as well: street scenes, people – and dogs. The photographer relates to dogs on a very friendly basis; he barks at them and photographs them in situations that show how “human” they can be. He takes some of these photos on walks in Central Park in New York, others at dog fairs and dog pageants. Erwitt’s dog photos have filled whole books and he could probably pride himself on having created the first image of dogs as cultural creatures.

Museum Watching

The “art of observation” has led Erwitt to take numerous photographs of people in museums: He portrays people in their silent dialogue with art when they pause – engrossed or sceptical – to take a closer look at an artwork. The particular environment of the museum is an ideal one for his sharp and at the same time affectionately ironic eye for people.

Naked

When Elliott Erwitt mingles with nudists and takes photographs, the result is very different from the usual photographs of nudes. Erwitt shows people unclothed and undisguised, far from ideals of beauty and staged poses. These photos form a kind of sociogram of nudist culture and are perhaps Erwitt’s most extreme attempt to capture the “conditio humana” in photographs.

Personal Exposures

Between politics and irony, between concerned photography and street photography, these works reveal touching moments that Erwitt has encountered and observed. These photographs allow room for intimacy. They include pictures of his family as well as famous portraits of actors and artists.

Photographs and Anti-Photographs

Elliott Erwitt, the son of Russian émigrés, was born in 1928 in Paris. After his birth, the family moved to Milan, where Elliott spent the first ten years of his life. In 1938, the Erwitts fled the Italian fascists and returned to Paris, after which they escaped the Nazis on the last passenger ship to the USA. The family landed in New York, but Elliot’s father soon decided he did not want to stay there. The family travelled all the way across the USA to California and started a new life in Los Angeles. Today, Elliott Erwitt lives in New York.

As a photographer, Erwitt has always worked for the advertising industry and at the same time realised his own photographic projects. This double context of assignment photography and authorship photography has typified his entire career, although the borders between the two fields have often been fuzzy. In 1948, Erwitt met the photographic legend Robert Capa, who invited him to join Magnum Photos. In 1954 he became a full member of the agency, where he soon felt completely at home. He served as President of Magnum Photos from 1966 to 1969.

Elliott Erwitt is one of an elite group of photographers whose pictorial language has heavily influenced American photojournalism. In decades of successful work as a photographer and as a director of documentaries and television films, Erwitt has always also remained an “amateur” – in the sense of its Latin root, meaning “lover” – of photography. In his photos he combines irony with insight and lightness with profundity, thereby creating humorous images that can often make life just a little bit easier for the beholder.

Press release from Kunst Haus Wein, Vienna

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
USA. Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh. 1950
1950
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
Eric Ambler
1952
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
USSR. Moscow. 1959. Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon
1959
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
Shreveport, LA
1962
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
USA. California. Pasadena. 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
USA. New York. 1963. 57th Street Gallery
1963
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
USA. California. Elliott Erwitt. 1976
1976
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
London, England
1978
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
USA. California. Bakersfield. 1983
1983
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
1984
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
GB. ENGLAND. Kent. 1984
1984
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

KUNST HAUS WIEN
Museum Hundertwasser
Untere Weißgerberstraße 13
1030 Vienna
Phone: +43-1-712 04 91

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Kunst Haus Wein website

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Exhibition: ‘Eva Besnyö 1910-2003: The Sensuous Image’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 22nd May – 23rd September 2012

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Self Portrait
1932
Silver gelatin photograph
Private Collection, Berlin
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

One of the purposes of this archive is to bring relatively unknown artists into the spotlight. Eva Besnyö is one such artist. Leaving the repressive atmosphere of Hungary in 1930, Besnyö joined László Moholy-Nagy, Martin Munkácsi, György Kepes and Endre Friedmann (Robert Capa) in Berlin before, sensing the danger of National Socialism, she moved to the Netherlands in 1932. After the invasion of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in 1940 Besnyö survived four long years in hiding before obtaining false papers in 1944 that allowed her to emerge into the open. She was Jewish.

Exploring elements of the New Vision and New Objectivity in her work, Besnyö explored “the different terrains that photography was opening up” through various bodies of work: “ranging from experimental to the photojournalistic, from street scenes to portraits, and from new architecture to the aftermath of the aerial bombardment of Rotterdam.” As John Yau observes in the quote at the top of the posting, “The various bodies of work make it difficult to characterise her… she seems to have no signature body of work, which is one of her abiding strengths. Just when you think you have gotten some sense of her, she slips through your fingers.”

Continuing the conversation from my recent review of the work of Pat Brassington (where I noted that curators and collectors alike try to pigeon hole artists into one particular style, mainly so that they can compartmentalise and order the work that they produce: such and such produces this kind of work – and that the work produced in this style is not necessarily their best), Besnyö can be seen to be a transmogrifying artist, one that experimented and investigated the same themes through different subject matter – hence no signature body of work. One of my friends observed that this kind of art making could be mistaken for a strange form of nihilism (in which nothing in the world has a real existence). It could be argued that the artist keeps changing subject matter, just dabbling really, pleasing herself with the images that she took, without committing to a particular style. Without seeing the 120 vintage prints it is hard to make a judgement.

From the work posted here it would seem that for Besnyö, observation and exploration of the lines of sight of life were the most critical guide to her art. In other words her shifting viewpoints create a multi-dimensional narrative that coalesces in a holistic journey that challenges our point of view in a changing world. As Victor Burgin notes in Thinking Photography, “The structure of presentation – point-of-view and frame – is intimately implicated in the reproduction of ideology (the ‘frame of mind’ of our ‘points-of-view’)” (1982, p. 146). The frame of mind of our points of view… this is what Eva’s work challenges, the reproduction of our own ideology. Her morphology (the philosophical study of forms and structures) challenges the cameras and our own point of view. As Paul Virilio observes,

“In calling his first photographs of his surroundings ‘points of view’, around 1820, their inventor, Nicéphore Nièpce came as close as possible to Littré’s rigorous definition: ‘The point of view is a collection of objects to which the eye is directed and on which it rests within a certain distance.'” (Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine (trans. Julie Rose). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 19.)

Besnyö changes the collection of objects to which the eye is directed as she also changes the distance and feeling of the objects upon which the eye rests. Notice how in most of the photographs the human subjects all have their back to the camera or are looking away from the instrument of objectification (or looking down into it). Even in the two self portraits Besnyö – formal in one with bobbed hair and skirt, wild in the other with a shock of tousled hair – she avoids the gaze of the camera. Like most of her subjects she remains hard to pin down. What Besnyö does so well (and why she isn’t just pleasing herself) is to construct a mythology of the city, a mythology of life which resonates through the ages. She creates a visual acoustics (if you like), a vibration of being that is commensurate with an understanding of the vulnerability of existence.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Ranging from the experimental to the photojournalistic, from street scenes to portraits, and from new architecture to the aftermath of the aerial bombardment of Rotterdam, July 1940, Besnyö explored the different terrains that photography was opening up, while at the same time helping to define them. The various bodies of work make it difficult to characterise her… she seems to have no signature body of work, which is one of her abiding strengths. Just when you think you have gotten some sense of her, she slips through your fingers.”

John Yau. “Something Special About Her, Eva Besnyö at the Jeu de Paume” on the Hyperallergic website, July 8th 2012

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Self Portrait
Nd
Silver gelatin photograph
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled [boy with a violoncello, Balaton, Hungary]
1931
Silver gelatin photograph
29.4 x 24.3cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Gypsies
1931
Silver gelatin photograph
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Der Monteur am Ladenfenster
Berlin, 1931
Silver gelatin photograph
20.1 x 17.7cm
Collection Iara Brusse, Amsterdam.
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Starnberger Straße
Berlin, 1931
Silver gelatin photograph
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Renger-Patzsch was associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), an attitude towards life and art that many Germans understood as distinctly American: the cult of the objective. Along with Regner-Patzsch, August Sander is another photographer associated with this tendency. (Karl Hubbuch, Otto Dix and Christian Schad are among the painters associated with it). The difference between the two photographers is that the human being is at the center of Sander’s work, while the world of things is at the center of Renger-Patcsch’s. Besnyö situates herself between the two, finding her own way.

The other influence on Besnyö was Låslø Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision, a term he coined to define his belief that photography enabled the viewer to see the world in ways the eyes could not. In 1930, at the age of 20, she moved to Berlin, rather than to Paris, where Hungarian photographers such as Andre Kertesz and Brassaï had gone. According to Besnyö, “The whole German side interested me. Paris was the Romantic, old-fashioned trend. The second reason was Gyørgy Kepes, who was a good friend of mine and had gone to Berlin as an assistant to Moholy.”

It was Gyørgy Kepes who said to Besnyö; “If you want to be a photographer, you must go to Berlin.” It was from this relationship and the circle around Moholy-Nagy that Besnyö learned of Russian Constructivism and began incorporating the diagonal into her photographs.

John Yau. “Something Special About Her, Eva Besnyö at the Jeu de Paume” on the Hyperallergic website, July 8th 2012

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled [Shadow play]
Hungary 1931
Silver gelatin photograph
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled [dockers on the Spree]
Berlin, 1931
Silver gelatin photograph
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled [Vertigo #3]
Nd
Silver gelatin photograph
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (1910-2003) is one of those women who found in photography not just a profession but also a form of liberation, and of those cosmopolitan avant-garde artists who chose Europe as their playing field for both play and work. Immediately after her photographic training in the studio of József Pécsi in Budapest, Eva Besnyö left the repressive, anti-progressive environment of her native Hungary for ever. Then aged 20, she decided, like her compatriots László Moholy-Nagy, Martin Munkácsi, György Kepes and Endre Friedmann (Robert Capa), to go to Berlin. As soon as she arrived in autumn 1930, she discovered there a dynamic photographic scene, open to experimentation and placed under the double sign of the New Vision and the New Objectivity, whose modern language would allow her to develop her personal style.

Of Jewish origins, Eva Besnyö, who foresaw the threat of National Socialism, moved to the Netherlands in 1932 where she met again her companion the film director John Fernhout. There she was welcomed into the circle of international artists around the painter Charley Toorop, and rapidly became known in Amsterdam, where she had her own photographic studio. A solo exhibition at the Kunstzaal van Lier in 1933 gained the attention notably of the Dutch followers of the “Neues Bauen” (New Building), whose architecture she recorded, in a highly personal manner, over a long period. The invasion of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in 1940 marked a dramatic turning point in Eva Besnyö’s life. If she managed to come out of hiding in 1944, thanks to an invented genealogy, the traces of this experience would remain acute throughout the postwar decades. During the 1950s and 60s, her family life led her to abandon street photography for commissions. Finally, in the twilight of her career, the photographer militated in the Dolle Mina feminist movement, whose street actions she chronicled in the 1970s.

With more than 120 vintage prints, some modern prints and numerous documents, this first French retrospective devoted to Eva Besnyö aims to show the public the different facets of her work, which is situated between New Vision, New Objectivity and social documentary, at the crossroads between poetry and political activism.

With other eyes

In 1929, during her second year of apprenticeship to József Pécsi, portrait and advertising photographer in Budapest, Eva Besnyö received the book of photographs Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful), published a few months earlier in Munich. Its author, Albert Renger-Patzsch, is the precursor of New Objectivity in photography. While pictorialism reigned in Hungary, Eva Besnyö discovered the world with other eyes: from up close and under unexpected angles. With these new models in mind and her Rolleiflex in hand, she strode along the banks of the Danube in search of subjects and daring viewpoints, showing concern for a precise, close-up description of the most diverse objects, as well as a taste for fragmentation and for the repetition of the motif in the frame.

As soon as she finished her studies, Eva Besnyö went to Berlin on the advice of the painter and photographer György Kepes – and against the wishes of her father who would have preferred that she chose Paris. The Berlin years, between 1930 and 1932, were for her those of a political and aesthetic awakening. Besides the influence of the revolutionary aesthetic of Russian cinema, she came under that of the New Vision, which took off with László Moholy-Nagy and his book Painting Photography Film (1925), using a whole stylistic grammar, advocating downward perspectives or low-angle shots, a taste for the isolated object and its repetition, as well as optical manipulations revealing an unknown, but very real, world. The activity of the town or the empty crossroads of Starnberger Straße, portraits and images of summer on the banks of Lake Wannsee count among Besnyö’s most successful compositions.

Worker and social photography

At the Marxist Workers’ School in Berlin, Eva Besnyö schooled her social and political conscience. In her circle of friends gathered around fellow Hungarian György Kepes, she discussed passionately the role of the workers’ movements. In Berlin, as earlier in Budapest, Eva Besnyö took her camera to the principal sites of trade and business, where she photographed labourers hard at work: dockers on the Spree, coalmen in the street, fitters perched on ladders; in the city centre, she followed the workers at Alexanderplatz, in around 1930 the largest construction site in Europe. In Hungary, where she returned from time to time from Berlin, she carried out an extraordinary documentary project on the people of Kiserdö, in the suburbs of Budapest. Blessed with a heightened political awareness, she had already understood by 1932 that, as a Jew, her future was not in this country, and left Berlin for Amsterdam.

New Vision and New Building

In 1933, the solo show devoted by the Kunstzaal van Lier to Eva Besnyö just one year after her arrival in Amsterdam aroused the enthusiasm of numerous architects – her principal clients in the years to come. Mostly members of the group de 8 in Amsterdam and the radical abstract collective Opbouw in Rotterdam, they discerned in her images, which emphasised the functional side of objects, their structure and their texture, a suitable approach for explaining their buildings.

Equipped with a Linhof 9 x 12 cm plate camera acquired especially for the purpose, Eva Besnyö went to building sites and photographed public and private buildings, notably the studios of the Dutch radio station AVRO at Hilversum, the Cineac cinema in Amsterdam and a summer house in Groet, in the north of the country. Become, in the 1930s, the preferred photographer of Dutch New Building, Eva Besnyö made most of her income at the time from architectural photography.

Bergen and Westkapelle

From Amsterdam, where from 1935 to 1939 she shared a studio at Keizersgracht 522 with the photographer Carel Blazer and the architect Alexander Bodon, Eva Besnyö went regularly to Bergen and Westkapelle, two villages where many artists gathered. In Bergen, north of Amsterdam, Charley Toorop, Expressionist painter and mother of the film director John Fernhout, whom Eva had married in 1933, held an artistic salon in the De Vlerken studio. It was at Westkapelle, a centuries-old village built on a polder in Zealand, that the family often spent their holidays. In this landscape shaped by the natural elements, Eva Besnyö returned to a free photographic practice, with views of vast beaches of white sand, of black silhouettes against a background of old windmills and cut-out shadows.

Rotterdam

In July 1940, Eva Besnyö photographed the old town of Rotterdam destroyed by German airforce bombing. Far from classic photo-journalism, these images of ruins and traces of devastation – from which, in retrospect, she distanced herself – are today silent, bare statements of the wounds and scars of history.

Dolle Mina

The Dolle Mina feminist movement gathered both men and women, mainly from the student protest movement. In the 1970s, Eva Besnyö militated actively within it, alongside sympathisers of all ages. In a second phase, she focused on photographic documentation of the movement’s actions and activities, taking responsibility for sending out images daily, like a press agency.

Text by Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat, curators of the exhibition

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled
1934
Collection Iara Brusse, Amsterdam
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled [Summer house in Groet, North Holland. Architects Merkelbach & Karsten]
1934
18.2 x 24.2cm
Collection Iara Brusse, Amsterdam
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Stadion, Berlin, 1931
1931
16.8 x 23.9cm
Collection Iara Brusse, Amsterdam
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled [Lieshout, The Netherlands]
1954
Silver gelatin photograph
25.3 x 17.7cm
Collection Iara Brusse, Amsterdam
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

In 1930, when Eva Besnyö arrived in Berlin at the age of only twenty, a certificate of successful apprenticeship from a recognised Budapest photographic studio in her bag, she had made two momentous decisions already: to turn photography into her profession and to put fascist Hungary behind her forever.

Like her Hungarian colleagues Moholy-Nagy, Kepes and Munkacsi and – a little later – Capa, Besnyö experienced Berlin as a metropolis of deeply satisfying artistic experimentation and democratic ways of life. She had found work with the press photographer Dr. Peter Weller and roamed the city with her camera during the day, searching for motifs on construction sites, by Lake Wannsee, at the zoo or in the sports stadiums, and her photographs were published – albeit, as was customary at the time, under the name of the studio. Besnyö’s best-known photo originates from those years: the gypsy boy with a cello on his back – an image of the homeless tramp that has become familiar all over the world.

Eva Besnyö had a keen political sense, evidenced by the fact that she fled in good time from anti-Semitic, National Socialist persecution, leaving Berlin for Amsterdam in autumn 1932. Supported by the circle surrounding woman painter Charley Toorop, filmmaker Joris Ivens and designer Gerrit Rietveld, Besnyö – meanwhile married to cameraman John Fernhout – soon enjoyed public recognition as a photographer. An individual exhibition in the internationally respected Van Lier art gallery in 1933 made her reputation in the Netherlands practically overnight. Besnyö experienced a further breakthrough with her architectural photography only a few years later: translating the idea of functionalist “New Building” into a “New Seeing.” In the second half of the 30s, Besnyö demonstrated an intense commitment to cultural politics, eg. at the anti-Olympiad exhibition “D-O-O-D” (De Olympiade onder Diktatuur) in 1936; in the following year, 1937, she was curator of the international exhibition “foto ’37” in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

The invasion of German troops in May 1940 meant that as a Jew, Eva Besnyö was compelled to go into hiding underground. She was attracted to a world view shaped by humanism in the post-war years, and her photographs became stylistically decisive for neo-Realism and immensely suitable for the moralising exhibition, the “Family of Man” (1955). The mother of two children, she had experienced the classic female conflict between bringing up children and a profession career as a crucial and very personal test. Consequentially, Besnyö became an activist in the Dutch women’s movement “Dolle Mina” during the 70s, making a public commitment to equal rights and documenting demonstrations and street protests on camera.

This first retrospective exhibition, showing approximately 120 vintage prints, aims to introduce the public to the life and work of this emigrant and “Berliner by choice”, a convinced cosmopolitan and the “Grande Dame” of Dutch photography. “Like many other talents, that of Eva Besnyö was lost to Germany and its creative art as a direct consequence of the National Socialists’ racial mania.” (Karl Steinorth, DGPh, 1999)

Press release from the Jeu de Paume website

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Narda, Amsterdam
1937
Private collection, Berlin
40 x 50cm
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled
Berlin, 1931
17.4 x 17.4cm
Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Berlin
1931
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled [John Fernout with Rolleiflex at the Baltic seaside]
1932
44.2 x 39.5cm
Private collection, Berlin
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled [Magda, Balaton, Hungary]
1932
40.5 x 30.6cm
Collection Iara Brusse, Amsterdam
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Untitled [The shadow of John Fernhout, Westkapelle, Zeeland, Netherlands]
1933
25.3 x 20.4cm
Collection Iara Brusse, Amsterdam
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

Eva Besnyö (Dutch-Hungarian, 1910-2003)
Borgerstraat, Amsterdam
1961
Gelatin silver print
© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam

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Review: ‘Pat Brassington: À Rebours’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 11th August – 23rd September 2012

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Installation photographs of Pat Brassington: À Rebours at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Life and imagination on the path to alienation

This is a disenchanting exhibition of Pat Brassington’s photographic work at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Despite two outstanding catalogue essays by Juliana Engberg and Edward Colless (whose textual and conceptual pyrotechnics morphs À Rebours – against the grain / against nature – into a “rebus,” an iconographic puzzle, a cryptic device usually of a name made by putting together letters and words; who notes that the work has strong links to the idea of perversion (of nature) and that the artist corrupts the normal taxonomic ordering of the photogenic so that the work becomes alien ‘other’, “an army of invaders from ‘the other side’ of the print, who give away their identities with the flick of reptilian tongue or a vulval opening on the back of the neck”) – despite all of this, the smallish images fail to live in the large gallery spaces of ACCA and fall rather flat, their effect as pail and wane as the limited colour palette of the work itself (which is why, I perceive, some of the gallery walls have been painted a sky blue colour, to add some life to the work).

Unlike most, I have never been convinced of the perceived importance of Brassington’s mature style. The work might have seemed fresh when it was originally produced but it now seems rather dated, the pieces too contrived for the viewer to attain any emotional sustenance from the work. The vulvic openings, the blind steps on a path to nowhere, the libidinal tongues, fallen bodies, slits, effusions, effluxions and fleshy openings (where internal becomes external, where memories, dreams and alienness toward Self become self-evident) are too basic in their use of surrealist, psycho-sexual tropes, too singular in their mono-narrative statements to allow the viewer answers to the questions which the artist poses. In other words the viewer is left hanging.

While it is instructive to see the work collectively because it builds the narrative through a collection of themes of disembodiment the claim (in the video) that sight lines are important in this regard does not stand scrutiny because the work is too small for the viewer to discern at a distance the correlation between different works. Look at the slideshow at the top of the posting and notice how the gallery hang makes the work and the space feel dead: too few pieces hung at too large a distance apart only adds to the isolation, both physically and conceptually, of the work.

For me the revelation of the exhibition was the earlier work. As can be seen from the photographs posted here, the groupings of analogue silver gelatin prints within the gallery spaces have real presence and narrative power because the viewer can construct their own meanings which are not didactic but open ended. These pieces really are amazing. They remind me of the best work of one of my favourite artists David Wojnarowicz and that is a compliment indeed. In the video Brassington rails against the serendipity of working with analogue photography whilst acknowledging that this was one of its strengths because you sometimes never knew what you would get – while working in Photoshop the artist has ultimate control. Perhaps some of that serendipity needs to be injected into the mature work! I get the feeling from the analogue work that something really matters, but you are unsure what whereas the digital work has me fixed like a rabbit in the headlights and leaves no lasting impression or imprint on my memory.

It amazes me in these days of post-photography, post postmodernism where there is no one meta-narrative … how curators and collectors alike try to pigeon hole artists into one particular style, mainly so that they can compartmentalise and order the work that they produce: such and such produces this kind of work. Of course the other reason is that when a person walks into a room and there is a Henson, Arkeley or Brassington on the wall, the kudos and social standing of the person becomes obvious. Oh, you have a Bill Henson, how wonderful! It’s like a signature dish at a restaurant and everybody expects it to be the same, every time you go there. In art this is because the curators have liked the work and the collectors have bought the work so the artist thinks, right, I’ll have some of that and they make more of the same. Does this make this artist’s “style” the best thing that they have done. Sadly no, and many artists get trapped in the honey pot and the work never progresses and changes. Such is the case in this exhibition.

Of course some artists have been more successful at evading this trap than others such as the master Picasso (who constantly reinvented himself in his style but not his themes) and in photography, Robert Mapplethorpe, who went from personal narrative to S & M photographs, to black men, to flowers and portraits as subject matter. What all of these transmogrifying artists do in all their bodies of work, however disparate they may be, is address the same thematic development of the work, ask the same questions of the audience in different forms. It is about time curators and collectors became more aware of this trend in contemporary art making.

In conclusion I would say to the artist – thank you for the strong, evocative work, especially the powerful analogue photographs, but how is the work going to develop further. Let’s see whether the journey has stalled or there is life and imagination yet on the path to alienation.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Download The Secret: The Photo Worlds of Pat Brassington by Juliana Engberg as a pdf (100kb pdf)
Download A Rebus by Edward Colless (140kb pdf)

Pat Brassington: Á Rebours, interview at ACCA 2012

Pat Brassington Speaks about her practice, Beauty, her use of source material and colour, and her show Á Rebours at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
Installation and individual photographs from Cumulus Analysis
1986-1987
18 silver gelatin photographs
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

As part of its Influential Australian Artist series, ACCA will present a survey of works by leading Australian photo-based artist Pat Brassington from August 11. Pat Brassington was one of the first artists to recognise the potential of the digital format, and has used it to create an enormous body of work – images that are hauntingly beautiful, deeply psychological, and sometimes disturbing.

Her works reference the tradition of surrealist photography. Recurring motifs usually include interior and domestic spaces and strange bodily mutations that take place within the human, predominantly female, form. The manipulation of the image is restrained, but the effect often uncanny and dramatic. À Rebours brings together works from Brassington’s exceptional 30 year career, presented over a series of small rooms aimed to emphasise the unsettling domesticity and claustrophobic atmosphere in her images. The exhibition title is inspired by the banned 1884 French novel of the same name, which in English translates as ‘against nature’ or ‘against the grain’.

Brassington was born in 1942 in Tasmania, and studied printmaking and photography at the Tasmanian School of Art in the early eighties She has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions including Feminism never happened, IMA, Brisbane (2010), On Reason and Emotion, Biennale of Sydney (2004) and in solo exhibitions at Art One Gallery, Melbourne, Monash University Museum of Art and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne. ACCA’s Influential Australian Artist series celebrates the works of artists who have made a significant contribution to the history of Australian art practice, and the exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial catalogue documenting the artists’ career.”

Press release from ACCA

Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
Installation and individual photographs from Untitled (triptych)
1989
3 silver gelatin photographs
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

The Secret: The Photo Worlds of Pat Brassington

Juliana Engberg

The photo-based works of Pat Brassington gained significant attention in the mid to late 1980s. Black and white images, sourced from reproductions, were arranged in grid and cluster formations to establish their status as a visual language which signified meaning beyond the apparent information they delivered. Adopting a modus operandi inherited from the montage, frisson-based tactics of surrealism, Brassington’s works seduced the viewer into a psycho-linguistic game of puns, Freudian jokes and visual metaphors by careful juxtaposition of images. Exploiting the license permitted by appropriation, and registering a knowledge of the use of signs and signifiers as part of an engagement with psychoanalysis and visual theory, Brassington’s works can be seen in the historical context of surrealist artists such as Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Brassai, Luis Buñuel and Raoul Ubac, as well as contemporary, post-modern artists, such as Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler, John Baldessari and Silvia Kolbowski, who used image / linguistic associations and provocations to create meta-narratives.

Brassington’s early works, like The Gift, 1986, with its set of images showing details of the paintings of Christ as the ‘Man of Sorrows’ exposing the slit of wounded flesh, crops of cacti, hyper details of vampire movie stills in which blood gushes from a girl’s eyes, and the face of a man with eyes wide open and mouth agape, develop a disquieting set of associations – wounds, pricks, mouths, blood. These are the stuff of B-Grade horror movies, as well as evangelical ecstasy, and perhaps hint at more sinister rites. Similarly, Cumulus Analysis, 1987/8 with its play of clouds, shattered glass, fish, female body in the throws of a spasm, tensed hands, brail, hat crowns upturned to the sky, praying bodies, and angel statuettes, are a lexicon of signs that signify the female genitalia combined with violations and evangelical obsessions. Right of the grid, a solitary female face is seen, and with this simple exclusion from the ‘system’, Brassington turns the tables on the male gaze and replaces the ‘peephole image’ with a feminine look. Nevertheless in this ensemble, gathering analysis, the use of the female voyeur is an uncomfortable reversal. Instead of being witnesses to an oedipal drama, we are perhaps collusive on-lookers on an unspeakable trauma, along with a maternal watcher.

These earlier works of Brassington play out like story-boards for an inconclusive matrix of events. Like the early surrealists who looked outside ‘art’ towards forensic and medical images for their content, Brassington also borrows images from photographs depicting the research into hysteria conducted by Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere hospital, Paris: an infamous 19th century asylum for (so-called) insane and incurable women; and from medical photographs of biological abnormalities. As well as their links to surrealism, Brassington’s borrowings from medical archives also acknowledge the feminist revisioning that took place during the 1980s, which saw in these images of women patients used as ‘hysterical’ evidence for the photographic and medical gaze, a female oppression by the patriarchal system. With this evident historical distancing and their clear links to popular culture through the borrowing of images from films, media and art, these mid-1980s works adopt an almost academic detachment from the personal: the open ended narratives become more general and part of a semiotic universality to some extent. For this reason many commentators, then and since, have been comfortable in describing these mid ’80s works as being within the theoretical, psychological-based feminisms of the 1980s.

Before these elegant, crisp and delineated works of the mid 1980s, however, Brassington made a series of small black and white images that carried a heavier, subjective and domestic load. Untitled VI, 1980, shows a young girl bound in rope and in Untitled IV, 1980, a little girl carries a decapitated doll. These small black and white photographs, altered in the development and printing process through over-exposure and intentional fuzziness, seem to burn like afterimages from some other time. Through visual manipulation, innocuous play obtains a macabre, torturous character. These photographs court unsettling ambiguity and suggestiveness. Unlike the more academic photo grids, these works also seem closer to home.

In the series 1+1=3, 1984 a male figure haunts the domestic space, his blurry outline, highlighted from behind to accentuate hirsuteness, seems ominous and domineering, his body is oversized to the frame of the image. In accompanying images from the same series, child like legs protruding from under a table, the skirt and dressed legs of a woman viewed from above, and a dog lying under a cover, all photographed with a kind of forensic clarity, suggest some ‘incident’ and portray hiding, and partial truths. These small, early works establish a precedent in Brassington’s future images in which very often legs are oddly organised, hoisted and disjointed from bodies, peculiar points of view are shown and bodies in partial concealment are all activated to produce mystery and unease.

In the early 1990s, the development of digital-format photography, with its capacity for image building, akin to, but even more potentially malleable then analogue forms of montage and collage, saw Brassington return to the mood of these earlier and enigmatic works with their focus on interiors and curious figures. The digital format provided Brassington with the opportunity to blend, blur, almost shake, and stain the photographic paper to unleash a new subjectivism. Works from the ’90s also see Brassington moving from black and white formats to experimenting with colour, which becomes vivid, livid and adds a kind of visceral saturation and abstraction to images with mute tonality.

In the works of the 1990s and 2000s Brassington enters into an extra-surreal phase, producing images that are cast adrift from reality or popular culture references and built from the imagination. Brassington’s own visual language is developed in these works that manipulate figures, surfaces, textures and odd attachments and visual interventions. As her expertise in image building increases Brassington’s works take on dense, viscous, and sometimes translucent qualities that tamper with natural tactility. Figures become phantasmic and morph-like, at times transparent or artificially bulky. Nostalgic colours are played off against sharper, off-registered hues. Bio-morphs appear liked strange growths attaching themselves to, or coming forth from bodies, especially mouths.

Brassington’s reoccurring symbolism is confirmed in these works in which fish are clutched, wounds appear like stigmata in necks and on dresses, tongues protrude and become uncanny matter, mouths are gagged, hold things or bring forth pearls of blood-red caviar seeds. The use of fabric, stockings and lace add a weird feminine monstrosity to the muted subject – mostly a child. This digital phase of newest works produce beautiful visual qualities in pearlescent colours and shiny surfaces, which make their clandestine, convulsive subjects all the more disconcerting to consider. Brassington lures the viewer into a game of guessing and provokes us to know – to dig deep into our collective unconscious, which innately understands these unnatural things. In these later works there is little, if any academic distancing. The images are compellingly honest and close.

During this time Brassington’s affiliation with surrealism and its deployment of artistic intuition drawn from the unconscious is strongly evident. Equally evident is the deliberation in these images, which is clear and unavoidable given the digital process which cannot provide an ‘accident’ like over-exposure, shaking, mis-framing or those usual happy ‘chance’ things that gave analogue photography its exciting edge for finding the surreal moment in a snap of reality. Brassington consciously works the unconscious. The domestic setting also reasserts itself in these later works in which odd things play out. In the series Cambridge Road, 2007 the atmosphere of reality is used in an almost bland, de-saturated way to give greater emphasis to figures which become smudges, dogs that seem electrified with alertness to some danger outside the frame, strangely framed corners of furniture, beds, and dressing tables that appear as dramatic items in some bizarre theatre of domesticity.

In Cambridge Road coated humans wear animal and portrait masks and adopt roles that are unclear: a wire clothes hanger, leaning on the wall, hung on a hook or discarded in the background takes on a nasty aspect. In these works an over exposed flash adds a spectral, apparitional aspect to the scene, causing it to seem inhabited by a haunting, or ghostly return. In another series Below Stairs, 2009, an x-ray rat and small child emerge from a trap door in the floor of a barren room. In a further work the trap door is vanished and a grown woman stands, with her back to the viewer indicating a closure against these hallucinations. These works, which have affinities with Max Ernst’s drawing, The Master’s Bedroom, confirm Brassington’s knowing attachment to the idea of the room-box as theatre explored in surrealism by Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Joseph Cornell and female surrealists such as Dorothea Tanning, Lenora Carrington and Louise Bourgeois.

Around the same time as these picture theatres Brassington has created single figures. A scarlet dressed woman walks, retreating through an imaginary landscape in By the Way, 2010: a bag or pillow slip over her head – still hiding, or not seeing – but escaping – surviving perhaps. A doll, dressed in a blue frock, Radar 2010, replaces the head with a light bulb stretched from the ceiling – rope like – unsettlingly similar to a noose, which demolishes cuteness. The bulb, standing in for the head, becomes a Cyclops, one-eyed thing, reminding us of the surrealist trope of the single eye ever used by Bataille, Ernst, Dali, Magritte, Man Ray, Buñuel and others, which in the surrealist visual language can so quickly become the mouth, the vagina dentate and object of possible castration. This bright spark of a doll is not all she seems.

These strange personages are like escapees from Brassington’s domestic dramas, new protagonists ready for their own story in the photo and digital world that Brassington has conjured from places we will never know, that are lived and returned in her own mind. Among these personae Brassington creates an image of a person wrapped head to feet in a shiny eiderdown, a lone hand exposed clutches the cover closed. The figure stands against the wall where shadow stripes stretch behind. This strangely real image reminds us of the small girl, in Untitled IV, 1980 once bound, who is now unleashed and protected, but still in hiding. In this most recent group Brassington has also delivered the compelling close-up face of a young child whose one eye turns inward towards the other. A torn blue piece of fabric covers the mouth. This image is called The Secret.

Juliana Engberg

Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
Installation and individual photographs from The Gift
1986
11 silver gelatin photographs
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

An interview with Pat Brassington

What sorts of things have inspired your work?

Ideas. Ideas that come from life’s experiences, from family and friends, the ideas embodied in the vast array of exhibited and published visual artworks. Literature, cinema and music, the natural world and human nature.

Are there any particular artists who have influenced you?

There is a moving feast of artist’s works that passes through one’s consciousness. Here are a few from the past that popped into my head as I write: Goya, Giacometti, Fuseli, Magritte, Ernst, Hoch, Hesse, Bourgeois….

Can you explain the processes and techniques in your work?

They vary but I often recycle a lot of material from my own photographic archive, something I continue to accumulate. As a work develops a specific requirement may arise so I will hunt around, or create the elements to produce a result I’m after. Clarification about the shape of new work emerges during the making process. It’s important to entertain possibilities and not shut them off unexplored_:it can be like being in an extended state of uncertainty. But decisions are made.

When you began working digitally and using Photoshop and digital colour printing techniques how did this develop or change the themes in your work?

I didn’t have the opportunity to explore analogue colour photography, but I probably didn’t want to really. I liked working in black and white. My early digital work was monochromatic – the outcome of scanning black and white negatives – but I quickly realised that the potential was there to enhance the expressive qualities of an image by introducing colour.

How did you realise its potential?

It is part of the form of the visual world. Generally I don’t try to feel or deal separately with the components of an image

People comment on the personal nature of your work – what do you think about that?

I’m assuming that you are asking whether my work is autobiographical! I would certainly attribute or acknowledge that my life experience has influenced how I respond to, or interpret, ‘being in the world’. Some things stick, they become a part of you whether you like it or not. Art endeavours bring strange impressions back to life and create a different past, a new past with new phantoms miming actions and walking through walls.

Was the emergence of feminist theory and film theory guided by semiotics important to you?

Yes. And exposure to key texts was a liberating experience.

What kinds of literature do you enjoy reading?

Fiction mostly, including poetry on occasion. Just wish I could engage more often. The last book I read was Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and that was at least 12 months. I have bookshelves containing books I have read. A few missing links mind you but those I have managed to keep are a reminder to me of where I have been.

How would your work have developed if the digital process had not become available?

Well there can be an unstable relationship between content and process. Maybe the subject matter may not have been much different in much of the work, but you can find yourself projecting ideas in the mind through process or more specifically in the forms typical of a process. Possibly the demonstrated capacity of computers to store, manipulate and converge images lead the way. Without drama it happened and the chemical playground moved over and the pixel playground dominated my thinking, not about what to do but how to do it.

Does the digital permit a freedom from reality?

Look if you did a count digital manipulation may provide a few more options more easily, but the real struggle for freedom is in the mind.

Installation view of the exhibition Pat Brassington: À Rebours at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne

Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
Sensors
2010

Installation view of the exhibition Pat Brassington: À Rebours at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne showing at centre, Brassington’s Radar (2009, below)

Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
Radar
2009

Installation view of the exhibition Pat Brassington: À Rebours at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne showing at left, Brassington’s By the Way (2010, below)

Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
By the Way
2010

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
111 Sturt Street
Southbank
Victoria 3006
Australia

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm
Saturday – Sunday 11am – 5pm
Monday by appointment
Open all public holidays except Christmas Day and Good Friday

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art website

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Exhibition: ‘True Stories: American Photography from the Sammlung Moderne Kunst’ at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Exhibition dates: 2nd March – 20th September 2012

Lewis Baltz (American, 1945-2014)
Greenbrae
1968
from the series The Prototype Works
Vintage gelatin silver print
13.1 x 21.4cm
Sammlung Moderne Kunst in the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, Acquired in 2011 by PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.
© Lewis Baltz

You can’t get much better than this to start a posting: Baltz, Friedlander, Winogrand, Nixon, Baldessari, Eggleston and Shore. I recall seeing my first vintage Stephen Shore at the American Dreams exhibition at the Bendigo Art Gallery last year. What a revelation. At the time I said,

“Two Stephen Shore chromogenic colour prints from 1976 where the colours are still true and have not faded. This was incredible – seeing vintage prints from one of the early masters of colour photography; noticing that they are not full of contrast like a lot of today’s colour photographs – more like a subtle Panavision or Technicolor film from the early 1960s. Rich, subtle, beautiful hues.”

You can get an idea of those colours in the image posted here. Like an early Panavision or Technicolor feature film.

Perhaps there is something to this analogue photography that digital will never be able to capture, let alone reproduce…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
T.V. in hotel room – Galax, Virginia
1962
From the portfolio 15 Photographs
Gelatin silver print
© Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Untitled (Self-Portrait Reflected in Window, New Orleans)
c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
© Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Flag, New York City
1965
Gelatin silver print
© Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1966
Gelatin silver print
Baryt paper (card)
21.9 x 32.8cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Provincetown, Massachusetts
1968
Gelatin silver print
© Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Route 9W, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print, Baryt paper (card)
20.4 x 30.5cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Lee Ave., Butte, Montana
1970
Gelatin silver print on baryta paper
© Lee Friedlander

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York World’s Fair
1964
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Los Angeles, California
1969
Gelatin silver print (pre 1984)
21.8 x 32.8cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York City
1969
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Peace Demonstration, Central Park, New York
1970
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Garry Winogrand

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947)
Buildings on Tremont Street, Boston
1975
From the series Boston Views 1974-1976
Gelatin silver print, Baryt paper (card)
© Nicholas Nixon

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947)
View of Beacon Hill, Boston
1975
From the series Boston Views 1974-1976
Gelatin silver print, Baryt paper (card)
© Nicholas Nixon

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947)
View of State Street, Boston
1976
From the series Boston Views 1974-1976
Gelatin silver print, Baryt paper (card)
20.3 x 25.2cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Nicholas Nixon

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947)
View of Essex Street and Downtown Entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike, Boston
1976
From the series Boston Views 1974-1976
Gelatin silver print, Baryt paper (card)
© Nicholas Nixon

John Baldessari (American, 1931-2020)
Man Running/Men Carrying Box
1988-1990
Gelatin silver prints, vinyl paint and shading in oil
Part 1: 121.3 x 118.6cm; Part 2: 121.3 x 146.6cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© John Baldessari

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1970-1973
From the portfolio Troubled Waters 1980
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1980
From the portfolio Troubled Waters 1980
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1970-1973
From the portfolio Troubled Waters 1980
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1980
The first of 15 works from the portfolio Troubled Waters
Dye transfer print
29 x 44cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Tennessee (Gulf Sign)
1971
Dye transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
from Southern Suite (10-part series)
1981
Dye transfer print
25.0 x 38.2cm
Sammlung Moderne Kunst in the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich. Acquired in 2006 through PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

American photography forms an extensive and simultaneously top-quality focal point in the collection, of which a selected overview is now being exhibited for the first time. The main interest of young photographers, who have been examining changes in political, social and ecological aspects of everyday American life since the late 1960s, has been the American social landscape. They have developed new pictorial styles that define stylistic devices perceived as genuinely American while at the same time being internationally recognised. Whereas Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Larry Clark, who are now considered classical modern photographers, have remained true to black-and-white photography, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore in particular have established colour photography as an artistically independent form of expression. The exhibition brings together around 100 works that, thanks to the Siemens Photography Collection and through acquisitions, bequests and donations, are now part of the museum’s holdings. True stories covers a spectrum from the street photography of the late 1960s to New Topographics and pictures by the New York photographer Zoe Leonard, taken just a few years ago.

“A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their work betrays a sympathy for the imperfection and frailties of society. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it.” With the exhibition New Documents in spring 1967, John Szarkowski, the influential curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, rang in a new era in American photography. Those photographers represented, including Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in addition to Diane Arbus, stood for a change in attitude within documentary photography that was conditioned exclusively by the subjective viewpoint of an individual’s reality. The object of photographic interest lay in the American social landscape and its conditions. It was less concerned with the natural landscape and its increasingly cultural reshaping than with the urban or urbanised space and how people move within it. In so doing, the New Documentarians rejected any obviously explanatory impetus, turning instead to the everyday and commonplace.

The exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape that was staged in the mid 1970s at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, represented a countermovement to this subjective form of expression. Their protagonists, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Stephen Shore, also pleaded for a documentary approach and were influenced by figures such as Walker Evans und Robert Frank, but considered themselves rooted in the tradition of 19th-century topographical photography in particular. The prime initiator of this working method, that was expressly not governed by style, is the Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha. Their central aim is a distanced and seemingly analytical depicition, free of judgement; their topic, the landscape altered by mankind. It is the image of the American West in particular, so much conditioned by myths and dreams but long since brought back to reality as a result of commercial and ecological exploitation, that is visible in their works.

The decisive quantum leap to establishing the position of colour photography was made by the Southerner William Eggleston in his exhibition in 1976, also held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the publication of the William Eggleston’s Guide. The harsh public criticism of his pictures was not to do with his use of colour but the fact that Eggleston photographed things and everyday situations – on the spur of the moment and in a seemingly careless manner – that, until then, had not been considered worthy of being photographed turning them into exquisite prints using the expensive and complicated dye-transfer process. In Eggleston’s cosmos of images that is strongly influenced by motifs and the light of the Mississippi Delta, colour constitutes the picture. The “rush of colour” championed by this exhibition led to the comprehensive implementation of colour photography in the field of artistic photography in the years that followed, starting in the USA and then in Europe – and especially in Germany.

An artistic attitude became established at the end of the 1970s that, with recourse to existing picture material from art, film, advertising and the mass media, formulated new pictorial concepts and, in the same breath, opened up traditional artistic and art-historical categories such as authorship, originality, uniqueness, intellectual property and authenticity to discussion. Appropriation Art owes its decisive influences to the artist John Baldessari, who lives and teaches in California. One of its most famous representatives is Richard Prince, who became famous in particular as a result of his artistic adaptation of advertising images. Concept art in the 1960s and ’70s similarly makes use of photography, both as part of an artistic practice using the most varied of materials and as a unique medium for documenting campaigns, happenings and performances. As works by Dan Graham and Zoe Leonard clearly show, the previously precisely delineated boundaries between photography that alludes to its own intrinsically, media-related history and the use of photography as an artistic strategy, have become more fluid.

Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
East from Flagstaff Mountain, Boulder County, Colorado
1975
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Robert Adams

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Missouri River, Clay County, South Dakota
1977
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Robert Adams

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Nebraska State Highway 2, Box Butte County, Nebraska
1978, printed 1991
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Robert Adams

Dan Graham (American, b. 1942)
View Interior, New Highway Restaurant, Jersey City, N.J., (detail)
1967 (printed 1996)
C-prints
Each 50.6 x 76.2cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Dan Graham

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
U.S. 1, Arundel, ME.
1974
Chromogenic print
© Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
Wilde Street and Colonization Avenue, Dryden, Ontario
1974
Chromogenic print
© Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
West 9th Avenue, Amarillo, Texas
1974
Dye coupler print
© Stephen Shore

Shore was a consummate New York City boy who dropped out of high school when he was 17 and instead spent his time watching and making films and photographing Andy Warhol and his compatriots at his studio, the Factory. But a 1969 trip to Amarillo, Texas, to visit the family of his friend Michael Marsh set him on a new path, spurring a decade of road trips exploring the United States. His itineraries usually included Amarillo, and its people and buildings appear throughout his photographs from the time. “I loved Amarillo, not just what it looked like but the way people hung out – the pace of the life, the car culture, the barbecue joints,” he said. This stark, frontal portrait of the Sunset drive-in conveys the withering Texas heat that has peeled the facade’s paint, as well as a sense of forlornness and neglect that proved prescient when the drive-in closed two years later.

Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023) on the American Carter Museum of American Art website

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
La Brea Avenue & Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, California
1975
Chromogenic print, Kodak professional paper (1998)
20.4 x 25.5cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Stephen Shore

Larry Clark (American, b. 1943)
Billy Mann Dead 1970
1968
From the series Tulsa
Gelatin silver print
© Larry Clark

Larry Clark (American, b. 1943)
Tulsa
1972
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 25.4cm (sheet)
Sammlung Moderne Kunst in the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich. Acquired in 2003 by PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne
© Larry Clark

Larry Clark (American, b. 1943)
Accidental Gunshot Wound
1971
Gelatin silver print
© Larry Clark

Judith Joy Ross (American, b. 1946)
Untitled
1984, printed 1996
From the series Portraits at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C. 1983-1984
Gelatin silver print on daylight printing-out paper, shading in gold
25.2 x 20.2cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Judith Joy Ross

John Gossage (American, b. 1946)
EL NEGRITO
1997
From the series There and Gone
Gelatin silver print, Baryt paper, screen print on photo mount card
55.4 x 45.0 cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© John Gossage

Pinakothek Der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40
Munich

Opening hours:
Daily except Monday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 8pm

Pinakothek der Moderne website

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Review: ‘Light Works’ at NGV International, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 23rd March – 16th September 2012

David Stephenson (Australian, b. 1955)
Star Drawing 1996/402
1996
40 x 40″
Cibachrome Print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1997
© Courtesy of the artist

This is an intimate and stimulating photographic exhibition at the NGV International featuring the work of artists Mike and Doug Starn, David Stephenson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bill Henson, Adam Fuss, Simone Douglas, Park Hong-Chun, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Sam Shmith, Christoph Dahlhausen and Patrick Bailly-Maitre-Grand. It is fantastic to see an exhibition of solely contemporary photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria taken from their collection (with nary a vintage silver gelatin photograph in sight!), one which examines the orchestration of light from which all photography emanates – used by different photographers in the creation, and there is the key word, of their work. Collectively, the works seem to ooze a mysterious inner light, a facing towards the transcendent divine – both comforting, astonishing and terrifying in part measure.

Works included range from photograms (camera-less images), large scale installations and photographs produced using digital light-based technologies. Every one of the fifteen works on display is worthy of inclusion, worthy of study at significant length so that the viewer may obtain insight into this element and its capture (by the camera, or not) on photographic paper, orthographic film and by the retina of the eye. What afterimage does this light leave, in the mind’s eye, in our subconscious thought?

The two Bill Henson photographs are evocative of the Romantic ideals of the nineteenth century where twilight possesses a luminescence that reveals shifting forms and meaning only through contemplation. As with all Henson the “mood” of the photographs is constructed as much by the artist as the thing being photographed. It is his understanding of the reflection of light from that object and the meaning of that reflection that creates the narrative “reality,” that allows the viewer the space for contemplation. In Sam Shmith’s photograph Untitled (In spates 2) (2011, below), Shimth turns day into night, creating his own reality by digitally compositing “30-40 photographs per pictorial narrative” taken during the day and then digitally darkened to form one single photographic instance. As a spectral ‘body’ the photograph works to create a new form of hallucination, one that haunts and perturbs the mind, like a disturbing psychological thriller. The viewer is (not really) flying, (not really) floating above the clouds contemplating the narrative, creating a visual memory of things. Spectral luminescences, not-quite-right perspectives, the photograph as temporal / temporary hallucination. The image takes me to other spaces and memories, opening up new vistas in my imagination (see more of my thoughts on Shmith’s work and the digital punctum).

Beginning in 1988, Adam Fuss began to explore studies of abstracted light and colour which “involved placing the paper in a tray of water and recording the concentric circles caused by disturbing the water or dripping droplets of water into the trays. These pieces, done between 1988-1990, have an eerie, spatial quality. Infused with bright, vibrant colours and blinding white light, they resemble some hitherto unknown solar system. [Here] Fuss is concerned with the metaphorical qualities of light.

In an interview with Ross Bleckner conducted in 1992, Fuss explained the role of light in his imagery: “Light is a physical sensation. If you look at it with purely scientific eyes, its a particle that behaves like a wave or a wave that behaves like a particle. No one knows exactly what it is. It travels very fast. It has something to do with our perception of time… When one works with the idea of light, one’s working with a metaphor that’s endless and huge and unspecific. because you’re talking about something that’s almost just an idea, we can think about it but we can never grasp it. The light of the sun represents life on Earth. Light represents the fuel that is behind our existence… It’s a mystery.”1

Another beautiful photograph is Eugenia Raskopoulos’ elegiac requiem to the dis/appearance of language and the body, Diglossia #8 (2009, below). Diglossic is defined as a situation in which two languages (or two varieties of the same language) are used under different conditions within a community, often by the same speakers, with one variety of speech being more prestigious or formal and the other more suited to informal conversation or taken as a mark of lower social status or less education. As Victoria Lynn states of the series, “Each of these images carries within it a letter from the Greek alphabet. There is a word in there somewhere, but the order has been disrupted. This word, or name, has been cut, and its pieces are now before us as fragments that refuse to re-collect themselves into meaning. As such, the relationship between the letters also becomes temporal, fluid, and heterogeneous opening up the question of translation between one language to another, and one culture to another.

The images have been created using the gesture of a hand writing on a steamed up mirror. The photograph is taken very quickly, before the image, the letter and the mark of the artist disappears. We have to ask, what is disappearing here? Is it the language, the name, the aura of the photograph (in the Benjaminian sense) or indeed the body? For behind each letter we can detect a human presence – the artists’ naked body as she makes the photograph. The apparatus of photography is revealed, undressed and made naked.”2

Sol Invictus (1992, below) by the Starn Twins overwhelms in the brute force of the installation, something that cannot really be captured in the two-dimensional representation posted here (go and see the real thing!). The layering and curving of orthographic film relates to the curvature of the sun, the film held in place by screw clamps as though the artist’s were trying to contain, to fix, to regulate the radiation of the sun. Sol Invictus (here is the paradox, it means “unconquered sun” even as the Starn Twins seek to tie it down) explores the metaphorical, scientific and religious properties that gives life to this Earth. A very powerful installation that had me transfixed. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s famous series Theaters is represented in the exhibition by the work Winnetka Drive-In, Paramount (1993, below) where Sugimoto “photographs auditoriums of American movie theaters, and drive-in movies, during showings. The exposure time used for the photograph corresponds with the projection time of the film. This allows him to save the duration of the entire film in a single shot. What remains visible of the film’s time-compressed, individual images is the bright screen of the movie theater, which illuminates the architecture of the space. That its content retreats into the background makes the actual film a piece of information, manifesting itself in the (movie theater) space. As a result, instead of a content-related event, film presents itself here as the relationship between time and spatial perception.”3

If we think of the camera lens as being fully open, like an eye without blinking, for the duration of the length of the film then the shutter of the lens has to be set on “B” for Bulb which allows for long exposure times under the direct control of the photographer. “The term bulb is a reference to old-style pneumatically actuated shutters; squeezing an air bulb would open the shutter and releasing the bulb would close it… It appears that when instantaneous shutters were introduced, they included a B setting so that the familiar bulb behaviour could be duplicated with a cable release.”4 In other words light waves, reflecting from the surface of objects, are controlled by the photographer over an indefinite period (not the short “snap” of the freeze frame / the decisive moment), accumulating light from thousands of years in the past through the lens of the camera onto the focal plane, coalescing into a single image, controlled and constructed by the photographer.

My favourite works in the exhibition are David Stephenson’s two Star Drawings (1996, below) which use the same Bulb technique to capture star trails travelling across the night sky. Stephenson says that drawing the stars at night by long time exposures, “are a contemporary expression of the sublime – a transcendental experience of awe with the vast space and time of existence” (DS, 1998). The photographs map our position and help us understand our space in the world, that we are all made of stars, every last one of us. As far as being expressions of the sublime, these almost Abstract Expressionist, geometric light drawings are only achieved through the tilting of the camera at certain points doing the exposure and the opening and closing of the shutter, to make the intricate patterns. Man and stars combine to create a spiritual force that emanates from everything and everyone. Stephenson tilts the axis of meaning. When we look at these photographs the light that has emanated from these stars may no longer exist. It had travelled thousands of light years from the past to the present to be embedded in the film at the time of exposure and is then projected into the future so that the viewer may acknowledge it a hundred years from now.

Emanation > recognition > existence . . . . . . . . . . ∞
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . death

How Light Works

In a truly inspired piece of writing, artist and author Pablo Helguera muses on the nature of light falling on a landscape in his piece How to Understand the light on a Landscape (2005). In the text he examines qualities of light such as experiential light, home light, ghost light, the light of the deathbed (think Emmet Gowin’s photograph of Rennie Booher in her casket, “dead now and committed to mystery,” as Gowin puts it), rain light, protective light, artificial light, the light of the truly blind, the light of adolescence, sunday light, hotel light, used light, narrated light, transparent light, the light of the last day and after light.

“The conjunction of a random site, the accumulated data in the body’s memory that is linked to emotion, and the general behaviour of light form experience. Experience is triggered by light, but not exclusively by the visible light of the electromagnetic spectrum. What the human eye is incapable to perceive is absorbed by other sensory parts of the body, which contribute to the perception that light causes an effect that goes beyond the merely visual.”5

This is the crux of the “matter.” As much as photography is a dialogue between the natural and the unnatural, it is also an invocation to the gods (inside each of us and all around us). It is the breaking down of subjective and objective truths so that the myth of origin becomes fluid in this light. It is the light of creation that goes beyond the merely visual, that is an expression of an individualism that rises above the threshold of visibility – to stimulate sensory experience; to prick the imagination and memory; to make us aware and recognise the WAVELENGTH of creation. It is the LIGHT OF EXPERIENCE.

Helguera concludes, “The intersection of our body with the light and the landscape and the coded form of language that we have to construct by ourselves and explain to ourselves is our daily ordeal, and we are free to choose to ignore and live without it, because there is nothing we can do with this language other than talking to ourselves. There is no point in trying to explain it to others because it is not designed to be this way, other than remaining a remote, if equivalent, language.

Some for that reason prefer to construct empty spaces with nondescript imagery, and thus be free of the seductive and nostalgic indecipherability of the landscape and the light. Or we may choose to openly embrace the darkness of light, and thus let ourselves through the great gates of placehood, where we can finally accept the unexplainable concreteness of our moments for what they are.”6

I believe this is the role of artists, to embrace the darkness of light and the trace of experience and to show it to people that may not recognise it or have turned away from the light of experience. So many people walk through life as if in a dream, neither recognising their energy nor the good or bad that emanates from that light. As Helguera notes it causes us to create our own coded form of language to explain the LIGHT OF LIFE to ourselves. We can choose to ignore it (at out peril!) but we can also embrace light in an act of recognition, awareness, forgiveness. We can banish the empty spaces and nondescript imagery in our own lives and make connection to others so that they make gain insight into their own existence and being.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Halpert, Peter. “Adam Fuss: Light and Darkness,” in Art Press International, July/August 1993 on the Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art website. Nd. [Online] Cited 08/09/2012 No longer available online

2/ Lynn, Victoria. “Writing Towards Disappearance,” on the Eugenia Raskopoulos website. Nd. [Online] Cited 08/09/2012 No longer available online

3/ Kellein, Thomas Sugimoto, Hiroshi. Time Exposed. Thames & Hudson, First edition, 1995, p. 91, quoted in Heike Helfert. “Hiroshi Sugimoto “Theaters”,” on the the Media Art Net website Nd [Online] Cited 08/09/2012.

4/ Anon. “Bulb (photography),” on the Wikipedia website. Nd. [Online] Cited 08/09/2012

5/ Helguera, Pablo. How to Understand the Light on a Landscape (video, 15 min., 2005) is a work that simulates a scientific documentary about light to discuss the experiential aspects of light as triggered by memory. The images and text, taken from the video, are part of the book by Patt,Lise (ed.). Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald. Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007, pp. 110-119

6/ Ibid.,

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

“Light is a scientific fact, a metaphorical construct and even a spiritual force. It is considered an agent of truth, authenticity and revelation just as the absence of light signals mystery, danger and disorder. Light is also fundamental in the creation of photographs.”

Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator, Photography NGV, 2012

“Light is a metaphor: where you have a dark place, and where that place becomes illuminated; where darkness becomes visible and one can see. The darkness is me, is my being. Why am I here? What am I here for? What is this experience I’m having? This is darkness. Light produces understanding.”

Adam Fuss 1990

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948, worked in United States 1972- )
Winnetka Drive-In, Paramount
1993
Gelatin silver photograph
42.3 x 54.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds donated by the Bowness Family Fund for Contemporary Photography, 2009
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy The Pace Gallery, New York

Simone Douglas (Australian)
Surrender (Collision) III (detail)
1998
Type C photograph
45.9 x 64.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
© Simone Douglas

Sam Shmith (Australian born London, b. 1980)
Untitled (In spates 2)
2011
from the In spates series 2011
Inkjet print
75.0 x 124.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2011
© Sam Shmith, courtesy Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

On March 23, the National Gallery of Victoria will open Light Works, a contemporary photography exhibition that explores various artists’ approaches to light – a fundamental element in the creation of photography. Drawn from the NGV’s Collection, the fifteen works on display show how photographers have exploited the creative potentials of natural and artificial light in their artworks.

Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator, Photography NGV said: “Light is a scientific fact, a metaphorical construct and even a spiritual force. It is considered an agent of truth, authenticity and revelation just as the absence of light signals mystery, danger and disorder. Through a careful selection of works by international and Australian artists the emotive potential and scientific capacities of light are explored.”

Dr Gerard Vaughan, Director, NGV said: “Light Works is an exhibition that has broad appeal as it will intrigue those who are artistically, spiritually, technologically or scientifically minded. The works on display demonstrate the diverse and limitless depiction of this vital element. This exhibition also provides visitors with an opportunity to see works by some of the most important contemporary global and local photography artists – a must-see exhibition for 2012.”

Works included range from photograms (camera-less images), large scale installations and photographs produced using digital light-based technologies highlighting the depth of the NGV’s remarkable photography collection. On display are works by Mike and Doug Starn, David Stephenson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bill Henson, Adam Fuss, Simone Douglas, Park Hong-Chun, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Sam Shmith, Christoph Dahlhausen and Patrick Bailly-Maitre-Grand.

Text from the NGV website

Eugenia Raskopoulos (Australian, b. 1959)
Diglossia #8
2009
from the Diglossia series 2009
Inkjet print
139.5 x 93.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2009
© Eugenia Raskopoulos

This photograph shows a letter from the Greek alphabet which has been marked by hand onto a foggy mirror.

Mike Starn (American, b. 1961)
Doug Starn (American, b. 1961)
Sol Invictus
1992
Orthographic film, silicon, pipe clamps, steel and adhesive tape
175.0 x 200.0 x 35.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds donated by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1994
© Doug Starn, Mike Starn/ARS, New York. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney

Adam Fuss (English, b. 1961, worked in Australia 1962-1982, United States 1982- )
Untitled
1991
Cibachrome photograph
164.3 x 125.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Rudy Komon Fund, Governor, 1992
© Adam Fuss. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

NGV International
180 St Kilda Road

Opening hours:
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National Gallery of Victoria website
David Stephenson website
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Exhibition: ‘Home Front: Wartime Sydney 1939-45’ at the Museum of Sydney

Exhibition dates: 31st March – 9th September 2012

Sam Hood (Australian, 1872-1953)
6th division AIF troops waving from troop-train carriage, 13 September 1940
1940
© Australian War Memorial

Some poignant photographs in this posting of young Australian men setting off to fight in the early stages of the Second World War. The message scrawled in chalk on the side of the train (below, at left) reads, “Berlin first stop. Look out Hitler, we’ll be there soon.” Little did they know it would be five long, hard years of fighting and countless deaths before that aphorism would come true. The 6th division AIF troops first fought in North Africa against the Italians at Tobruk and was then sent to Greece to fight the German advance. About 39 per cent of the Australian troops in Greece on 6 April 1941 were either killed, wounded or became prisoners of war. The division then fought in the Pacific War on the Kokoda Trail campaign in the New Guinea theatre until the end of the war.

I wonder how many of the men, smiling and leaning out of the train carriage or departing on a troop ship, returned to these shores?

The last photograph in the posting is so very eloquent it actually moved me to tears. The women being hoisted aloft to kiss her loved one last time – clutching her handbag, complete with rumpled, lumpy stockings. To the right (and this is what caught my eye), a man looks straight at the camera while another right next to him has this distant melancholy look on his face as though he is not actually there. A portent of things to come. Brave men, fighting in the only war that Australians have had to fight for their own freedom, not at the whim of a colonial power or overseas ally in some far of distant land. Brave men and women – we wouldn’t be here without them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Installation view of the exhibition Home Front: Wartime Sydney 1939-45 at the Museum of Sydney
Historic Houses Trust of NSW
Photos: Jenni Carter

Anonymous photographer
Troops of the 6th Division wave goodbye, Sydney 1940
1940
© Australian War Memorial

Anonymous photographer
Men of the 6th Division returning from Wewak crowd the deck of HMS Implacable, 18 Dec 1945
1945
© Australian War Memorial

Anonymous photographer
An Australian built DAP Bristol Beaufort VIII aircraft, serial no A9-700, in flight over Sydney Harbour near the Bridge
c. 1944
© Australian War Memorial

Anonymous photographer
Partly submerged RAN accommodation ship damaged during the unsuccessful Japanese midget submarine attack 1 June 1942
1942
© Australian War Memorial

Anonymous photographer
Two women donning gas masks as part of an air raid drill
Nd
© Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria

Installation view of the exhibition Home Front: Wartime Sydney 1939-45 at the Museum of Sydney showing at centre, a detail of Members of the Wardens’ Women’s Auxiliary making for the scene of an incident (c. 1943, below) by an anonymous photographer
Historic Houses Trust of NSW
Photo: Jenni Carter

Anonymous photographer
Members of the Wardens’ Women’s Auxiliary making for the scene of an incident
c. 1943
© Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria

In May 1942 three Japanese midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour in an attempt to sink allied ships, bringing the once far away war to the shores of the harbourside city and shaking the country to its core. Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Sydney Harbour, Home Front: Wartime Sydney 1939-45 a new exhibition opening 31 March at the Museum of Sydney, explores the experience of the women, men and children who rallied together to support the war effort from home.

Unprepared for another world war, Australians initially referred to the conflict as ‘the phoney war’, however it wasn’t long before propaganda posters were plastered around Sydney, censorship and food rationing became the norm, and tank traps and barbed wire replaced bronzed bodies on Sydney beaches. For six long years the world seemed to come to Sydney as soldiers, sailors and airmen from many nations called Sydney home, making wartime an exciting and thrilling period for some, while for others it was a long and lonely time interrupted by the occasional letter from a loved one serving overseas.

Almost 40,000 Australians lost their lives with the war leaving a lasting impact at home and transforming the lives of generations of Australians, in particular the lives of women, says Curator Annie Campbell. “As well as having to cope with war related anxieties and stress, many women were ‘manpowered’ to work in wartime industries such as ammunitions factories and aircraft construction. Everyone had to make sacrifices on the home front, however despite wartime shortages and rationing, women were expected and actively encouraged to look smart, which often involved some innovative thinking. One of my favourite objects in the exhibition is a wedding dress made out of parachute silk and mosquito net for a war bride, later worn by her sister and two girlfriends on their special days.

While the troops were busy on the battlefields, Sydneysiders prepared for the possibility of an enemy invasion on home soil. An anti-submarine boom net was installed across Sydney Harbour to keep out attacking forces, bomb shelters were constructed in Hyde Park and protective timbers were placed around landmark buildings. In 1942 blackout restrictions were introduced to limit the effectiveness of air raids, all Sydney lights were switched off and car, train and tram headlights were masked, giving the city a sinister feel. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, large numbers of people were ready to have fun in Sydney and the Trocadero on George Street became a mecca for white American servicemen, while the Booker T Washington Club in Albion Street Surry Hills serviced the African-American GI’s,” says Campbell.

Highlights of the exhibition include the microphone used by Prime Minister Robert Menzies to announce that Australia was at war, remnants of the Japanese midget submarines that attacked Sydney, over 100 photographs and artworks depicting wartime Sydney, and a short documentary featuring historic footage. Over 200 wartime Sydney mementoes will also feature in the exhibition including propaganda posters, warden’s memorabilia, letters from soldiers serving overseas and a selection of wartime fashions.

Press release from the Museum of Sydney website

Anonymous photographer
Sydney kindergarten children wearing air raid headgear designed to muffle sounds and prevent them from biting tongues
Nd
© Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

Anonymous photographer
Eve Holliman, Hilda Jamieson and Vera Thurlow converting a car into an ambulance
Nd
© Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria

Anonymous photographer
Woman war worker
1944
© Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

Anonymous designer and photographer
Change Over to a Victory Job propaganda poster
Nd
© Australian War Memorial

Anonymous designer and photographer
Advertisement for Ponds
1945
© National Library of Australia

Weaver Hawkins (English, 1893-1977)
Jitterbugs
1945
Oil on canvas, Art Gallery of New South Wales
© Estate of H F Weaver Hawkins
Photograph Jenni Carter

Sam Hood (Australian, 1872-1953)
Sydney embarkation, 13 September 1940
1940
© Australian War Memorial

Sam Hood (Australian, 1872-1953)
Sydney embarkation, 13 September 1940 (detail)
1940
© Australian War Memorial

Museum of Sydney
Cnr Bridge and Phillip Streets
Sydney, NSW 2000
Phone: (02) 9251 5988

Opening hours:
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Exhibition: ‘Naked Before the Camera’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 27th March – 9th September 2012

WARNING: this posting contains photographs of nudity. If you do not like please do not look.

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

Franck-François-Genès Chauvassaignes (French, 1831 – after 1900)
Untitled [Female Nude in Studio]
1856-1859
Salted paper print from glass negative
19.1 x 15.2cm (7.5 x 6 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1998
Public domain

This corner of a painter’s atelier somewhere in France in the middle of the nineteenth century is scarcely tethered to time or place; it could as easily be a loft in New York today or, had photography existed four centuries earlier, a studio in the Italian Renaissance. What is surprising here is the absence of even the thinnest disguise – no swags of drapery, elaborate coiffure, or skeins of beads as are commonly found in the work of other purveyors of “studies for artists.” Here, the model is utterly naked. With her intelligent head and dirty feet, this young woman helped found the matter-of-fact modelling sorority joined a decade later by Édouard Manet’s Olympia.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin (French, 1800 – after 1875)
Untitled [Two Standing Female Nudes]
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
Visible: 14.5 x 11.1cm (5 11/16 x 4 3/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Anonymous Gift and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997
Public domain

Although Moulin was sentenced in 1851 to a month in jail for producing images that, according to court papers, were “so obscene that even to pronounce the titles… would be to commit an indecency,” this daguerreotype seems more allied to art than to erotica. Instead of the boudoir props and provocative poses typical of hand-coloured pornographic daguerreotypes, Moulin depicted these two young women utterly at ease, as unselfconscious in their nudity as Botticelli’s Venus.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Unknown photographer (French)
[Seated Female Nude]
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
9.1 x 6.9cm (3 9/16 x 2 11/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Credit Line: Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005
Public domain

This daguerreotype was surely intended to serve artistic purposes, but the odd twist of the body and the strange relationship of the three visible limbs seem to render it inappropriate for artistic emulation. Such tension between an artistic ideal and realistic means – between the classicism of an academic pose and the awkwardness of the camera’s rendering of human movement – seems emblematic of the dilemma faced by the nascent medium striving to be an art.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866)
[Standing Female Nude]
c. 1853
Salted paper print from paper negative
12 x 16cm (4 3/4 x 6 5/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1993
Public domain

A student of the painter Jean François Millet (1814-1875) and a lithographer of scenes of daily life, costume, and erotica in the 1820s and 1830s, Vallou reportedly took up photography in the early 1840s. Because his early photographs have not been identified, it has been assumed that they depicted naked women, a subject for which it was to improper to acknowledge authorship.

Between 1851 and 1855, Vallou made a series of small-scale paper photographs of female nudes that he marketed (and legally registered) as models for artists. Vallou’s nudes have long been associated with those of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), who is known to have used photographs in his painting process. Though no absolute one-to-one correspondence can be pointed to, there are some striking similarities in pose, and the heavy, soporific quality of Vallou’s models is very close to Courbet’s concept of the nude.

Text from the Metropolitan Muesum of Art website

Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874)
Untitled [Seated Female Nude]
1853-1854
Albumen silver print from glass negative
6 13/16 × 4 11/16 in. (17.3 × 11.9cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Kravis Gift, 2005
Public domain

Durieu was a lawyer and early advocate and practitioner of photography in France who, in 1853-1854, made a series of photographic studies of nude and costumed figures as models for artists. The French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix helped him pose the figures and later praised the prints, from which he sketched, as “palpable demonstrations of the free design of nature.” While the painter saw the accurate transcription of reality as a virtue of photography, Durieu knew that a good photograph was not simply the result of the correct use of the medium but, more significantly, an expression of the photographer’s temperament and vision. In an important article he emphasised the interpretative nature of the complex manipulations in photography and explained that the photographer must previsualise his results so as to make a “picture,” not just a “copy.”

This photograph proves Durieu’s point: through the elegant contours of the drapery, the smooth modelling of the flesh, and the grace and restraint of the pose, the picture attains an artistic poise that combines Delacroix’s sensuality with Ingres’s classicism, and rivals both.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Charles Alphonse Marlé (French, 1821 – after 1867)
Untitled [Standing Male Nude]
c. 1855
Salted paper print from paper negative
25.7 x 17.6cm (10 1/8 x 6 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Ezra Mack Gift and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991

Marlé’s photograph was probably intended as an aid for painters and sculptors. The jury-rigged arrangement of podium, books, and potted tree, as well as the painting held in the background by a studio assistant, may strike the modern viewer as an incongruous contrast to the heroic gesture of the model. Marlé and those who bought his photograph, however, would have been absorbed by the grand academic pose and likely would have thought the awkward accoutrements of little consequence.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Nadar (French, Paris 1820 – 1910 Paris)
[Standing Female Nude]
1860-1861
20.2 x 13.3cm (7 15/16 x 5 1/4 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
Public Domain

Famed for his portraits of writers, artists, and left-wing politicians, Nadar is known to have photographed only three female nudes. This one was made at the behest of the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme to assist in the process of painting Phryné before the Areopagus, displayed at the Salon of 1861. Gérôme’s painting depicts the moment when the famous courtesan Phryné, on trial for impiety, is suddenly unveiled by her lawyer; persuaded by Phryné’s divine beauty, the jurors acquit her.

Like Phryné, who is said to have modelled for the ancient Greek painter Apelles and other artists of antiquity, Nadar’s model, Marie-Christine Leroux (1820-1863), was widely sought by artists of her time and was the basis for the character Musette in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Depicting the human body has been among the greatest challenges, preoccupations, and supreme achievements of artists for centuries. The nude – even in generalised or idealised renderings – has triggered impassioned discussions about sin, sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty, especially when the chosen medium is photography, with its inherent accuracy and specificity. Through September 9, 2012, Naked before the Camera, an exhibition of more than 60 photographs selected from the renowned holdings of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveys the history of this subject and explores some of the motivations and meanings that underlie photographers’ fascination with the nude.

“In every culture and across time, artists have been captivated by the human figure,” commented Thomas P. Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan. “In Naked before the Camera, we see how photographers have used their medium to explore this age-old subject and create compelling new images.”

The exhibition begins in the 19th century, when photographs often served artists as substitutes for live models. Such “studies for artists” were known to have been used by the French painter Gustave Courbet, whose Woman with a Parrot (1866), for instance, is strikingly similar to photographer Julien Vallou de Villeneuve’s Female Nude of 1853. Even when their stated purpose was to aid artists, however, the best of these 19th-century photographs of the nude were also intended as works of art in their own right. Two recently acquired photographs, made in the mid-1850s by an unknown French artist, are striking examples. Not only are they larger than all other photographic nudes from the time, they stand out due to an extraordinary surface pattern that interrupts the images and suggests a view through gossamer or a photograph printed on finely pleated silk rather than paper. The elegant Female Nude harkens back to an Eve or Venus and is vignetted by the camera lens as if seen through a peephole, while her male counterpart is shown in strict profile in a pose that recalls precedents from antiquity. Each figure draws from the past while being presented in a strikingly modern way, without any equivalent among other 19th-century studies for artists.

Not all photographers of the nude were motivated by artistic desire. The second section of Naked before the Camera includes photographs made for medical and forensic purposes, as ethnographic studies, as tools to analyse anatomy and movement, and – not surprisingly – as erotica. The lines between such categories were not always clearly drawn; some photographers called their images “studies for artists” merely to evade the censors, while viewers of the G. W. Wilson Studio’s Zulu Girls (1892-93) or Paul Wirz’s ethnographic photographs of scantily clad Indonesians from the 1910s and 1920s were undoubtedly titillated by the blending of exoticism and eroticism.

Beginning in the fertile period of modernist experimentation that followed on the heels of World War I, photographers such as Brassaï, Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, André Kertész, and Bill Brandt found in the human body a perfect vehicle for both visual play and psycho-sexual exploration. In Distortion #6 (1932) by André Kertész, a woman’s body is stretched and pulled in the reflections of a fun-house mirror – a figure from a Surrealist dream that stands in stark contrast to the images of perfect feminine beauty by earlier photographers.

In mid-20th-century America, photographers more often communicated an intimate connection with their subjects. Following the example of Alfred Stieglitz’s famed portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, photographers such as Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, and Emmet Gowin made many nude studies of their wives. Callahan’s photograph of his wife and daughter, Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago (1954), for instance, gives the viewer access to a private, tender moment of intimacy.

In the wake of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the AIDS crisis that began in the 1980s, artists began to think of the body as a politicised terrain and explored issues of identity, sexuality, and gender. Diane Arbus’s Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. (1963) and A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. (1968), Larry Clark’s untitled image (1972-1973) from the series Teenage Lust, and Hannah Wilke’s Snatch Shot with Ray Gun (1978) are among the works featured in the concluding section of the exhibition.

Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Unknown photographer (French)
[Nude with Mirror]
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
Dimensions: visible: 7 x 5.7cm (2 3/4 x 2 1/4 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997
Public domain

Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866)
[Reclining Female Nude]
c. 1853
Salted paper print from paper negative
11.8 x 16.0cm (4 5/8 x 6 5/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1993
Public domain

A student of the painter Jean François Millet and a lithographer of scenes of daily life, costume, and erotica in the 1820s and 1830s, Vallou reportedly took up photography in the early 1840s, but his early photographs have not been identified. Perhaps they depicted naked women, a subject for which it was improper to acknowledge authorship.

Between 1851 and 1855, however, Vallou made a series of photographs of female nudes that he marketed (and legally registered) as models for artists. Vallou’s nudes have long been associated with those of Gustave Courbet, who is known to have used photographs in his painting process. Although no absolute one-to-one correspondence can be pointed to, the heavy soporific quality of Vallou’s models is very close to Courbet’s concept of the nude, and the reclining figure displayed here is strikingly similar in pose to the painter’s Woman with a Parrot (1866), on view in the galleries for nineteenth-century painting.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Nu féminin allongé sur un canapé Récamier (Female nude lying on a Recamier sofa)
c. 1856
Albumen silver print from glass negative
21.7 x 32.9cm (8 9/16 x 12 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
Public domain

The central figure in French photography of the 1850s, Le Gray was a master of many genres including landscape and seascape, architectural photography, and portraiture. Only four nude studies by Le Gray are known, however, each in a single example. In this striking image, the photographer departed from the usual academic treatment of the nude, such as he might have learned from his years in the painting studio of Paul Delaroche, in favor of a more psychologically charged spirit. The daybed’s velvet upholstery, the tassels on the pillow, and the heavy curtain fabric have a reassuring and familiar presence, but the serpentine locks of hair evoke Medusa and hint at strangulation, while the legs and feet cross and tense in the manner of a crucifixion. Withdrawn in sleep – or is it death? – the beautiful young woman reminds one of a drowning victim, an Ophelia freshly recovered from the Seine, a theme favoured by the painters and poets of Paris.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Unknown photographer (French)
[Standing Female Nude]
c. 1856
Salted paper print from collodion glass negative
43.4 x 28.3cm (17 1/16 x 11 1/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Edwynn Houk and Hans P. Kraus Jr., Alfred Stieglitz Society, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Anonymous, Adam R. Rose and Peter R. McQuillan, Joseph M. Cohen, Susan and Thomas Dunn, Kurtz Family Foundation, W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, Christian Keesee Charitable Trust, and Robert A. Taub Gifts; and Funds from various donors, 2012
Public domain

The original impulse behind these boldly ambitious figure studies may have been to aid a painter or sculptor, but they are nonetheless without parallel in the early history of photography. Enlarged to the size of drawn académies – drawings of the live model that were a standard part of art instruction in France – their scale alone sets them apart from the more modest productions of Vallou de Villeneuve, Durieu, and other artists of the 1850s. More unusually, the images are interrupted by a surface pattern that gives the impression that the photographs are printed on finely pleated silk rather than paper – likely the result of a technical error. Instead of wiping clean his glass-plate negatives and starting over as virtually all other photographers would have done, this artist recognised that the pattern created a veil that, like time or memory, removed the images from their merely utilitarian purpose and elevated them from the mundane to the realm of art.

Just as the eye and mind may be pleasantly torn between bravura brushwork and the ostensible subject of a painting, there is a tension here between the beauty of the subject – the elegant female draped in gossamer; the strict profile and geometric setting of the male – and the visible traces of their creation, such as the flowing surface pattern and the strong vignetting of the female, which suggests a view spied through a peephole.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Unknown photographer (French)
[Standing Male Nude]
c. 1856
Salted paper print from collodion glass negative
43.4 x 28.4cm (17 1/16 x 11 3/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Edwynn Houk and Hans P. Kraus Jr., Alfred Stieglitz Society, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Anonymous, Adam R. Rose and Peter R. McQuillan, Joseph M. Cohen, Susan and Thomas Dunn, Kurtz Family Foundation, W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, Christian Keesee Charitable Trust, and Robert A. Taub Gifts; and funds from various donors, 2012
Public domain

Oscar Gustav Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
Ariadne
1857
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Mount: 16 1/16 in. × 13 1/16 in. (40.8 × 33.2cm)
Image: 8 1/4 × 6 1/2 in. (21 × 16.5cm); oval
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
Public domain

Working in a place – Victorian England – where any photographic nude was considered offensive because the process implied not only the “nastiness” of the artist and vendor, but also “the degradation of the person who serves as model on the occasion,” Rejlander sought to ally his work with that of noted painters. This nude study is one of a series based on figures in the work of Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Rubens, Murillo, and Gainsborough; the precedent here is Titian’s Venus and Adonis, and Rejlander’s intention was to show how the painter adhered to or strayed from the ways a real body can twist and turn. Critic A. H. Wall defended the propriety of Rejlander’s Studies from the Nude, saying, “Refined and ennobled by art, real beauty, palpable flesh and blood, speaks of nothing but its own inherent loveliness.”

Such references to painting did not always afford adequate protection, however. Writing of Rejlander’s famous Two Ways of Life, photographer and critic Thomas Sutton wrote, “There is no impropriety in exhibiting such works of art as Etty’s Bathers Surprised by a Swan or the Judgment of Paris but there is impropriety in allowing the public to see photographs of nude prostitutes, in flesh-and-blood truthfulness and minuteness of detail.”

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Unknown photographer (French)
[Female Nude with Mask]
c. 1870
Albumen silver print from glass negative
26 x 19.1cm (10 1/4 x 7 1/2 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005
Public domain

Even as she seems to part her tresses to expose her naked body, the model here masks her face in an effort to conceal her identity. While drawing, painting, and sculpture of the human figure commonly involve elements of transformation, idealisation, or the combination of features from various models, photography usually presents a recognisable image of its subject. It was not uncommon, therefore, for models who routinely posed nude for artists in other media to hide their faces when standing naked before the camera. For the viewer – not always an artist looking for help in figure drawing – the mask added an element of erotic frisson.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Louis Igout (French, 1837-1881)(Photographer)
A. Calavas (French)(Editor)
Plate from Album d’Études – Poses
c. 1880
Albumen silver prints from glass negatives
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993
Public domain

This album is an excellent example of the type of photography produced in the nineteenth century as an aid to artists in the study of contour, modelling, and proportion, and as a vocabulary of expression, gesture, and pose sanctioned by the art of antiquity and the Old Masters. Groupings representing Cain and Abel, the Drunken Silenus, Hercules and Antaeus, the Dying Gaul, the Cnidian Aphrodite, and others are recognisable among the photographs. Single prints showing sixteen small images, such as the page shown here, served as a type of stock catalogue, allowing clients to survey a broad range of possible poses and order larger prints of those which best served their needs.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Louis Igout (French, 1837-1881)(Photographer)
A. Calavas (French)(Editor)
Plate from Album d’Études – Poses (details)
c. 1880
Albumen silver prints from glass negatives
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993
Public domain

Thomas Eakins (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1844–1916 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
[Thomas Eakins and John Laurie Wallace on a Beach]
c. 1883
Platinum print
25.5 x 20.4cm (10 1/16 x 8 1/16 in.), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1943
Public domain

The great American painter and photographer Thomas Eakins was devoted to the scientific study of the human form and committed to its truthful representation. While he and his students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were surrounded by casts of classical sculpture, Eakins declared that he did not like “a long study of casts. … At best they are only imitations, and an imitation of imitations cannot have so much life as an imitation of life itself.” Photography provided an obvious solution.

This photograph, in which Eakins and a student affected the elegant contrapposto stances of classical sculpture, was probably taken during an excursion with students to Manasquan Inlet at Point Pleasant, New Jersey, during the summer of 1883. Valuing his photographs not only as studies for paintings but also for their own sake, Eakins carefully printed the best images on platinum paper. In this case, he went to the additional trouble of enlarging the original, horizontally formatted image and cropping it vertically to better contain the perfectly balanced figures.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Albert Londe (French, 1858-1917)
Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (French, 1849-1933)
[Male Musculature Study]
c. 1890
Albumen silver print
Image: 14.9 x 9.6 cm (5 7/8 x 3 3/4 in.)
Mount: 14.9 x 9.9 cm (5 7/8 x 3 7/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro, 2012

Author of a treatise on the importance of the camera in medical practice, Albert Londe declared, “the photographic plate is the scientist’s true retina.” In collaboration with a laboratory director and professor of anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts, Londe found that photographs intended for physiological analysis could also serve artistic applications. Their careful portraits of athletes – whether taken with stop-action cameras specially designed by Londe or in static poses such as the example here – were used in scientific texts on musculature and became templates for illustrations to aid artists in rendering ideally proportioned figures.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Guglielmo Plüshow (Italian born Germany, 1852–1930)
[Young Male Nude Seated on Leopard Skin]
1890s-1900s
Albumen silver print from glass negative
22.2 x 16.2cm (8 3/4 x 6 3/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museum Accession
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Censors have long struggled to keep pace with evolving technology and expanding distribution networks of photographic erotica. In nineteenth-century France, government officials regularly seized thousands of photographs similar to the daguerreotype displayed here, which were deemed lewd.

Male nudity has frequently been subject to stricter control than pornography featuring women. The Arcadian photographs of Plüshow and his cousin and student Wilhelm von Gloeden were avidly collected in the late nineteenth century, but in the 1930s many of their prints and negatives, considered deviant by the Italian Fascist government, were destroyed. For much of the twentieth century, it was illegal in the United States to mail photographs that might be judged prurient, forcing photographers to mask genitalia and pubic hair with strategic props or with overpainting that could be easily removed by purchasers. Sale of erotic male physique magazines and bodybuilder pin-ups, ostensibly circulated to promote fitness, was legalised in a 1962 Supreme Court ruling, which concluded that “portrayals of the male nude cannot fairly be regarded as more objectionable than many portrayals of the female nude that society tolerates.”

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853–1914)
Assasination of C. Lecomte 711 Rue des Martyrs
1901-1908
From Album of Paris Crime Scenes
Gelatin silver print
Overall: 24.3 x 31cm (9 9/16 x 12 3/16in.)
Page: 23 x 29cm (9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001
Public domain

Alphonse Bertillon, the chief of criminal identification for the Paris police department, developed the mug shot format and other photographic procedures used by police to register criminals. Although the images in this extraordinary album of forensic photographs were made by or under the direction of Bertillon, it was probably assembled by a private investigator or secretary who worked at the Paris prefecture. Photographs of the pale bodies of murder victims are assembled with views of the rooms where the murders took place, close-ups of objects that served as clues, and mug shots of criminals and suspects. Made as part of an archive rather than as art, these postmortem portraits, recorded in the deadpan style of a police report, nonetheless retain an unsettling potency.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853–1914)
Untitled
1901-1908
From Album of Paris Crime Scenes
Gelatin silver print
Overall: 24.3 x 31cm (9 9/16 x 12 3/16in.)
Page: 23 x 29cm (9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001
Public domain

Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938)
[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]
c. 1916
Gelatin silver print
8.8 x 6.3cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Rebelling against the narrow values of upper-class Edwardian society, Lady Ottoline Morrell, an eccentric hostess to Bloomsbury, surrounded herself in London and on her estate at Garsington with a large circle of friends including Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster. These images of an improvised dance show Lady Ottoline’s ten-year-old daughter, Julian, and her slightly older companions embroiled in a naked whirl, pagan in its exuberance, that reflects the emancipated attitudes of the photographer’s circle.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938)
[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]
c. 1916
Gelatin silver print
8.8 x 6.2cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Edward Weston (American, Highland Park, Illinois 1886 – 1958 Carmel, California)
[Nude]
1925
Gelatin silver print
Image: 14.8 x 23.4 cm (5 13/16 x 9 3/16 in.)
Mount: 35.2 x 43.9 cm (13 7/8 x 17 5/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
Public domain

In his early attempts to merge the realism of photography with the expressive effect of abstract art, Weston honed in on close-up details of his subjects. That the faces of his models were often cropped or averted served practical as well as aesthetic purposes, enabling the photographs to be read as figure studies rather than as individual portraits while also protecting the privacy of the friends and lovers who served as models.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

George Platt Lynes (American, East Orange, New Jersey 1907–1955 New York)
[Male Nude]
1930s
Gelatin silver print
24.5 x 18.9cm (9 5/8 x 7 7/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© Estate of George Platt Lynes

Brassaï (French born Romania, Brasov 1899 – 1984 Côte d’Azur)
Nude
1931-1934
Gelatin silver print
14.1 x 23.5cm (5 9/16 x 9 1/4 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2007
© The Estate of Brassai

One of the most radically abstract of Brassaï’s nudes, this image was published in 1933 in the inaugural issue of the avant-garde magazine Minotaure. With the figure’s head and legs cut off by the picture’s edges, the twisting, truncated torso seems to float in space like an apparition – an ambiguous, organic form with an uncanny resemblance to a phallus. This transformation of the female figure into a fetish object is a hallmark of Surrealism that reflects the important influence of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory on European art of the early twentieth century.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Brassaï (French born Romania, Brasov 1899 – 1984 Côte d’Azur)
L’Académie Julian
1931, printed 1950s
Gelatin silver print
29.7 x 23.7cm (11 11/16 x 9 5/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
© Estate Brassaï Succession – Paris

Brassaï (French born Romania, Brasov 1899 – 1984 Côte d’Azur)
Introductions at Suzy’s
1932-1933, printed later
Gelatin silver print
23.1 x 16.8cm (9 1/16 x 6 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© Estate Brassaï Succession – Paris

Brassaï made his name as a chronicler of the night, with images that ranged from reflections on wet cobblestones to the denizens of bars and brothels. Like so many of his photographs, Introductions at Suzy’s was not an impromptu scene caught by an undetected observer but rather a carefully constructed tableau meant to highlight the dynamic between buttoned-up bourgeois clients and Suzy’s bevy of prostitutes, naked but for their bracelets and high heels. The “client” was actually Brassaï’s friend and bodyguard; the “girls,” however, were not stand-ins.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Chez Suzy / Armoire à glace dans un hôtel de passe, rue Quincampoix (Mirrored cabinet in a brothel, rue Quincampoix)
1932, printed 1950s
Gelatin silver print
23.3 x 16.8cm (9 3/16 x 6 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1980
© Estate Brassaï Succession – Paris

A keen observer of Parisian nightlife in the 1930s, Brassaï was drawn to the visual conundrums and optical innuendos of everyday life. The play of reflections and absences in this image, made in a Paris brothel, suggests the materialization of subconscious impulses. Evoking Freud’s definition of desire as the sensation arising from a perceived absence of remembered pleasure, this blatantly sexual scene suggests but withholds a specific narrative.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

André Kertész (American born Hungary, Budapest 1894 – 1985 New York City)
Distortion #6
1932
Gelatin silver print
23.4 x 17.3cm (9 3/16 x 6 13/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© The Estate of André Kertész / Higher Pictures

Although Kertesz had long been interested in mirrors, reflections, and the idea of distorting the human figure, he did not seriously investigate their photographic possibilities until 1933, when the risqué French magazine Le Sourire commissioned him to make a series of figure studies. Using a funhouse mirror from a Parisian amusement park, Kertesz, who had never photographed nudes before, spent four weeks making about two hundred negatives.

Kertész accentuated the narrow ribcage and long waist of the ideal contemporary woman by photographing his model in a carnival mirror. If the top half of this beautiful nude resembles those Modigliani painted, the swell of the haunch recalls Mannerist nudes and their nineteenth-century revivals, especially Ingres’ grande odalisque.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Man Ray (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1890 – 1976 Paris)
Arm
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
29.7 x 23.0cm (11 11/16 x 9 1/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© 2012 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris

Man Ray’s photograph of an arm is cropped so abstractly that it seems to metamorphose into other body parts – a knee, a calf, a thigh – or into some utterly unidentifiable yet heroic form. This image appeared on the cover of Formes Nues (1935), which also included the work of Brassaï, László Moholy-Nagy, Franz Roh, and George Platt Lynes, among others.

In the magazine’s introduction, Man Ray wrote, “were it not for the fact that photography permits me to seize and to possess the human body and face in more than a temporary manner, I should quickly have tired of this medium.”

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, New York 1896 – 1959 Laguna Beach, California)
Nude with Mask and Hat
c. 1936
Carbro print
43.3 x 30.0cm (17 1/16 x 11 13/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1977

Outerbridge was a successful commercial photographer, but although he found such work stimulating, he also made photographs as a means of personal expression throughout his career. Photographing nude models in colour in the 1930s was challenging – not only in the difficulty of correctly capturing skin tones using complicated new processes, but also because finding a venue to publish or exhibit the work was unlikely. Although he began by posing his models in the manner of painted masterpieces, Outerbridge’s compositions became increasingly provocative in the late 1930s. The sexualised charge and commercial palette of works such as this were not in keeping with attitudes of the period and were not shown during the artist’s lifetime.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Hans Bellmer (German born Poland, Katowice 1902–1975 Paris)
La Poupée
1936
Gelatin silver print with applied colour
Mount: 9 5/8 in. × 7 1/2 in. (24.5 × 19cm)
Image: 5 5/16 × 5 9/16 in. (13.5 × 14.1cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In his nightmarish tableaux of mutilated and reassembled dolls posed in domestic interiors, Bellmer grappled with the base condition of the human body and with the bodily fragment as fetish object. Mannequins and dolls – simultaneously familiar and strange – supplied the material for his primal expressions of terror and awe, which often evoked the innocent violence and latent sexuality of childhood games. Whether they are read as Freudian emblems of the uncanny or as ominous harbingers of Nazi atrocities, Bellmer’s images exemplify the Surrealist view of the female body as the source of simultaneous fascination and revulsion.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Edward Weston (American, Highland Park, Illinois 1886 – 1958 Carmel, California)
Printer: Brett Weston (American, Los Angeles, California 1911-1993 Kona, Hawaii) or Cole Weston (American, 1919-2003)
Nude on Sand, Oceano
1936, printed c. 1954
Gelatin silver print
19.1 x 24.2cm (7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.)
David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1957
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

Charis Wilson, the model for this series, admitted to being shocked upon seeing Weston’s nudes for the first time, as she had previously known only the romantically retouched photographs of depilated bodies then popular. In studying Weston’s work she found, “I couldn’t get past the simple amazement at how real they were. Then I began to see the rhythmic patterns, the intensely perceived sculptural forms, the subtle modulations of tone, of which these small, perfect images were composed. And I began to appreciate the originality of the viewpoint that had selected just these transitory moments and made them fast against the current of time.”

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917 – 2009 New York City)
Nude No. 57
1949-1950
Gelatin silver print
39.4 x 37.5cm (15 1/2 x 14 3/4 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of the artist, 2002
© 1950-2002 Irving Penn

By 1950, Penn was a well-known Vogue portrait and fashion photographer but had already made, privately, a major series of nudes – a personal but lesser-known body of work. During the week, he photographed models wearing fashionable clothes for the magazine, but weekends and evenings he made studies of female nudes. The women were full-bodied and the photographs unorthodox, recalling the form and spirit of archaic fertility idols.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Eleanor and Barbara
1954
Gelatin silver print
22.8 x 22.1cm (9 x 8 11/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993
© The Estate of Harry Callahan; Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Muses throughout his career, Callahan’s wife and daughter played, posed, and aged before his lens. With their attention to the physicality of light, however, Callahan’s photographs transcend mere family portraiture by calling attention to the simple beauty of life’s fleeting moments. “He just liked to take the pictures of me,” Eleanor recalled in her nineties. “In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.”

Eleanor Callahan died in February 2012 at the age of ninety-five.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J.
1963
Gelatin silver print
39.9 × 37.9cm (15 11/16 × 14 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Joyce Frank Menschel, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gifts; Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Family Foundation, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, Diana Barrett and Robert Vila, Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher, Charlotte and Bill Ford, Lita Annenberg Hazen Charitable Trust and Hazen Polsky Foundation Inc., Jennifer and Joseph Duke, Jennifer and Philip Maritz, Saundra B. Lane, The Jerry and Emily Spiegel Family Foundation and Pamela and Arthur Sanders, Anonymous, and The Judith Rothschild Foundation Gifts, 2007
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Arbus’s interest in the tension between revelation and concealment comes into starkest focus in the portraits she made at Sunshine Park, a family nudist camp in New Jersey. While nudism might be considered the ultimate form of exposure, it often required a different kind of cover-up. As the artist remarked in an unpublished article written for Esquire magazine in 1966: “For many of these people, their presence here is the darkest secret of their lives, unsuspected by relatives, friends, and employers in the outside world, the disclosure of which might bring disgrace.”

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C.
1968
Gelatin silver print
38.2 x 36.2cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Joyce Frank Menschel, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gifts; Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Family Foundation, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, Diana Barrett and Robert Vila, Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher, Charlotte and Bill Ford, Lita Annenberg Hazen Charitable Trust and Hazen Polsky Foundation Inc., Jennifer and Joseph Duke, Jennifer and Philip Maritz, Saundra B. Lane, The Jerry and Emily Spiegel Family Foundation and Pamela and Arthur Sanders, Anonymous, and The Judith Rothschild Foundation Gifts, 2007
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Untitled [Two Men in Silhouette]
c. 1987
Gelatin silver print
28.4 x 20.8cm (11 3/16 x 8 3/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2009
© The Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection) at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Sexuality and mortality – which many would say are central preoccupations of humankind – are key to Morrisroe’s biography and art. The son of a drug-addicted mother, a teenage hustler, and a precocious punk queer, Morrisroe carried a bullet (shot by a disgruntled john) in his chest from the age of eighteen and consequently walked with a limp that added one more element to his outsider self-image. Sex and death were persistent themes in his work, with pronounced poignancy after his 1986 AIDS diagnosis. In this work, Morrisroe has taken a page from a gay S&M magazine, cut out the shapes of two naked men, and used the sheet as a negative to print a unique image in which the figures – literally absent – appear as dark silhouettes against a netherworld of sexual activity.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Weegee: Murder Is My Business’ at the International Center of Photography, New York

Exhibition dates: 20th January – 2nd September 2012

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of killing a policeman, New York]
January 16, 1941
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

If you want a good read about the life and times of Weegee then Mark Svetov’s ‘Life and Death (Mostly Death) in the Streets’ (2010) on American Suburb X website is the way to go. I can’t really add much to this excellent piece of writing in terms of the history of the man and the social milieu in which he surrounded himself. What I can comment on are my personal feelings about his photographs.

Weegee’s photographs are no masterpiece of fine art printing, they are rough and direct, and I love them all the more for this quality. Their roughness – all sellotaped over, edges cut at odd angles, drawn and written on – only adds to their power and immediacy. If you can call photographs of dead bodies in the street vibrant and alive, then these photographs are just that. Svetov sees Weegee as the quintessential noir photographer; I see him not so much as that but as a sensitive, formalist photographer, a wonderful collagist and an artist who is a precursor to the pop art of the mid-late 1950s (think Warhol’s screen prints of the electric chair, or his mangled car crash series).

In the installation photographs of the exhibition Weegee: Murder Is My Business at the Photo League, New York (1941, see below) you get a sense of this master of assemblage, the animator and promoter (another pop trait!) at work. The large prints are casually pinned to the back board, surrounded by drawings of guns with smoke emanating from their barrels, cause of death certificates, photographs of Weegee himself “On the Spot”, Weegee’s press pass, newspaper clippings about the man and his work (including a photograph of his tiny bedroom) where Weegee “introduces” himself to his audience. The photographs flow around the room, from Faces, to Murder and Society. People are drawn into the aura of these photographs, you can see them leaning forward to take in every detail. They peer intently at the them trying to decipher every nuance of the narrative being told (the frequent hats lying about, the discarded pistols, the hand emerging from underneath the draped sheet).

As Svetov notes, Weegee’s news pictures were never haphazard snapshots, for they always seem perfectly arranged. Underneath the spontaneity and the humanism imparted by the artist is that fact that Weegee is a master of formalism. He knows exactly how to structure the picture plane as a classical pianist knows how to bring alive the themes of a Mozart sonata. Usually arriving before any other photographer because he lived opposite the police station and had a police radio in his car, Weegee “cased the joint” as I would put it, prowling quickly around the scene to get the best angle, the best shot before other photographers arrived or the scene was closed off by police. This instinctive framing only comes through having a good eye and training that eye so that what to shoot and how to crop the scene “in camera” becomes second nature.

Evidence of the formal structure implicit in Weegee’s photographs can be seen in my analysis of two photographs Line-Up for Night Court (c. 1941, below) and Police officer and assistant removing body of Reception Hospital ambulance driver Morris Linker from East River, New York (August 24, 1943, below). In the first image the epicentre (or the enigma if you like) of the photograph is the dance of hands at the lower centre of the image, formed by two triangles and emphasised by two radial diagonals. The top points of the upper triangle are anchored by the men and women at both windows (see detail photographs), the patriarchal men in suit and tie at one window – a detective, a chief of police? – separated from the woman at another. Weegee’s splits this triangle with his frieze of faces showing the depths of human despair, despondency and ambivalence.

The second image has a much more complicated structure. In the first analysis we observe the different horizontal, vertical and diagonal planes as they march up the photograph. The “heart” of this image, where the yellow lines cross, is actually a point of absence. Look at the real photograph: it is the heart shaped empty space between the man’s outstretched hands that form the emotional centre of the image. In the second analysis we can simplify this down into a zigzagging line that passes directly through this point. To see this, to assess this and visualise the flowing movement in a split second is in any visual language outstanding. Weegee wasn’t averse to manipulating his images to achieve the desired result. The photograph Hold up man killed (November 24, 1941, below) shows his notations over the top of the image, the crop he envisaged and the words “Take out hat” and “Make sock black” so that he achieved the desired dynamic within the photograph.

Weegee was a master of flash and the use of foreshortening – to create atmosphere in the first instance and used as a visual entre into the photographs in the second. Sometimes he combines both. The policeman at left in Line-Up for Night Court is both out of focus and the highlights (his face) are blown out by the flash. Does this matter: not one iota, for the policeman “grounds” the whole left hand side of the image. Again, in Murder (c. 1940, below) the backside of the policeman is blown out by the flash but this only leads the eye of the viewer to the foreshortened body of the murder victim nestled in the crook of his knee and then onto the starkly lit pram, beyond. Finally, in Hold up man killed (November 24, 1941, below) the feet of the hold up man actually lead the viewer into the space between the two policeman’s shoes were the Surgeon from Gouverneur Hospital crouches over the body. Weegee also loved to weave detail into his images, so that even though the story is about human content, as Svetov observes, it is just as much about human materiality as well: notice the reflection of people in the car bonnet in At an East Side Murder (1943, below) at lower left and then the procession of worn shoes and the bagginess of the trousers – I didn’t realised they wore their trousers so baggy in the 1940s!

Svetlov sees Weegee’s photographs as containing an almost sacred squalor, a brash but anguished cry in an endless nightscape with nothing judgemental or distanced about them. I concur with the last part for Weegee was a man of the people whom he photographed. On the other points I am less sure: to me they are about light not darkness. They are about the aftermath of atrocity, of living, human beings dealing with death and its consequences. I see nothing sacred about this squalor. The photographs are about shining a light into darkness, the darkness that every human being must confront: the fact that we all have to die, somewhere, sometime, in the end.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film… and when that split second of time is gone, it’s dead and can never be brought back.”

“For the pictures… I was on the scene; sometimes drawn there by some power I can’t explain, and I caught the New Yorkers with their masks off… not afraid to Laugh, Cry, or Make Love. What I felt I photographed, laughing and crying with them.”

Arthur Fellig (aka Weegee, 1899-1968)

“Weegee’s work is connected by an umbilical cord to darkness; his images emerged from Gotham City’s nocturnal penumbra, spectrally streaked by streetlights, lit brightly only where there was a human focus, a tabloid John Alton at work.

Weegee called it his “Rembrandt light” as he caught the human protagonists in the white glare of his photo flash, the scene otherwise enveloped in darkness. Weegee’s news pictures were never haphazard snapshots, albeit they were taken by a man who had happenstance and chance as his helpmates; he and his camera, with its flash, seem to have a fateful meeting with his human subjects; pictures seem perfectly arranged, and what we focus on is their human content. Weegee is the quintessential noir photographer.”

Mark Svetov. “Life and Death (Mostly Death) in the Streets (2010)” on American Suburb X website May 2012 [Online] Cited 28/08/2012

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
The dead man’s wife arrived… and then she collapsed
c. 1940
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Girl jumped out of car, and was killed, on Park Ave.,
c. 1938
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Installation view of “Weegee: Murder Is My Business” at the Photo League, New York]
1941
Silver gelatin photographs
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Text and captions from the original Murder Is My Business exhibition:

~ “Introducing Weegee”
~ “Due to an increase in MURDERS The Photo League presents 2nd Edition of “MURDER IS MY BUSNESS” by Weegee”
~ “Weegee Lives For His Work And Thinks Before Shooting” (newspaper headline on the “Weegee” board at left)
~ “This space reserved for the latest muders”
~ “MURDER Manhattan bloodbath”
~ “Arthur Fellig Photographer / Do not disturbe / Except in case of Fire, Murder or Snow Storm” (caption underneath photograph)
~ “Why did you kill your Sweetie”? (caption underneath photograph)
~ “HUMAN BODY MINUS HEAD FOUND ON STREET” (caption underneath photograph)
~ “Cop & human head in package” (caption underneath photograph)
~ “Killed her husband after drinking brawl” (caption underneath photograph)
~ “Just a cheap murder” (caption underneath photograph)
~ “My man” (caption underneath photograph)
~ “Who done that” (caption underneath photograph)

“Weegee’s captions provided a visceral vernacular for the almost-sacred squalor of his imagery (see “Weegee’s Words” for a sampling). Taken together, they packed more than a mere punch; they were a brash but anguished cry in an endless nightscape. More than mere documents of a violent era, they also exuded a humanity that could only come from the photographer himself. There was nothing judgmental or distanced in Weegee’s work; he was the antithesis of the “slickers” who worked for glossy magazines. He remained a man essentially from the same New York working-class as the people he chose to photograph.”

Mark Svetov. “Life and Death (Mostly Death) in the Streets (2010)” on American Suburb X website May 2012 [Online] Cited 28/08/2012

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [“Ruth Snyder Murder” wax display, Eden Musée, Coney Island, New York]
c. 1941
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Line-Up for Night Court
c. 1941
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Construction of the pictorial plane in Line-Up for Night Court

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Line-Up for Night Court (details)
c. 1941
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
At an East Side Murder
1943
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
At an East Side Murder (details)
1943
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Hats in a pool room, Mulberry Street, New York]
c. 1943
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Gangland murders, gruesome car crashes, and perilous tenement fires were for the photographer Weegee (1899-1968) the staples of his flashlit black-and-white work as a freelance photojournalist in the mid-1930s. Such graphically dramatic and sometimes sensationalistic photographs of New York crimes and news events set the standard for what has since become known as tabloid journalism. In fact, for one intense decade, between 1935 and 1946, Weegee was perhaps the most relentlessly inventive figure in American photography. A surprising new exhibition at the International Center of Photography (1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street), titled Weegee: Murder Is My Business and organised by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis, will present some rare examples of Weegee’s most famous and iconic images, and will consider his early work in the context of its original presentation in historical newspapers and exhibitions, as well as Weegee’s own books and films.

Taking its title from Weegee’s self-curated exhibition at the Photo League in 1941, Murder Is My Business looks at the urban violence and mayhem that was the focus of his early work. As a freelance photographer at a time when New York City had at least eight daily newspapers and when wire services were just beginning to handle photos, Weegee was challenged to capture unique images of newsworthy events and distribute them quickly. He worked almost exclusively at night, setting out from his small apartment across from police headquarters when news of a new crime came chattering across his police-band radio receiver. Often arriving before the police themselves, Weegee carefully cased each scene to discover the best angle. Murders, he claimed, were the easiest to photograph because the subjects never moved or got temperamental.

Weegee’s rising career as a news photographer in the 1930s coincided with the heyday of Murder Inc., the Jewish gang from Brownsville who served as paid hitmen for The Syndicate, a confederation of mostly Italian crime bosses in New York. As a wave of governmental and legal crackdowns swept the city between 1935 and 1941, the rate of organised murders of small-time wiseguys and potential stool pigeons increased dramatically. Weegee often worked closely with the police but also befriended high-profile criminals like Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, and Legs Diamond. Weegee called himself the “official photographer for Murder Inc.” and claimed to have covered 5,000 murders, a count that is perhaps only slightly exaggerated. In asserting the true nature of his business, Weegee proudly displayed his check stub from LIFE magazine that paid him $35 for two murders, slightly more, he said, for the one that used more bullets.

Selling his photographs to a variety of New York newspapers in the 1930s, and later working as a stringer for the short-lived daily newspaper PM (1940-1948), Weegee established a highly subjective approach to both photographs and texts that was distinctly different from that promoted in most dailies and picture magazines. Utilising other distribution venues, Weegee also wrote extensively (including his autobiographical Naked City, published in 1945) and organised his own exhibitions at the Photo League, the influential photographic organisation that promoted politically committed pictures, particularly of the working classes. In 1941, Weegee installed two back-to-back exhibitions in the League’s headquarters. This visibility helped promote Weegee’s growing reputation as a news photographer, and he began stamping his prints “Weegee the Famous.” The general acceptance of his punchy photographic style, which did not shy away from lower-class subjects and humanistic narratives, led to the acquisition of his work by the Museum of Modern Art and inclusion in two group shows there, in 1943 and 1945.

“Weegee has often been dismissed as an aberration or as a naive photographer, but he was in fact one of the most original and enterprising photojournalists of the 1930s and ’40s. His best photographs combine wit, daring, and surprisingly original points of view, particularly when considered in light of contemporaneous press photos and documentary photography. He favoured unabashedly low-culture or tabloid subjects and approaches, but his Depression-era New York photographs need to be considered seriously alongside other key documentarians of the thirties, such as Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Walker Evans, and Berenice Abbott,” said Wallis.

The exhibition will feature over 100 original photographs, drawn primarily from the comprehensive Weegee Archive of over 20,000 prints at ICP, as well as period newspapers, magazines, and films. It will also include partial reconstructions of Weegee’s studio and his Photo League exhibition. The four galleries will each feature a touch-screen monitor allowing visitors to explore further details regarding the images and artefacts in that room.

Press release from the ICP

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Body of Dominick Didato, Elizabeth Street, New York]
August 7, 1936
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Murder
c. 1940
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Police officer and lodge member looking at blanket-covered body of woman trampled to death in excursion-ship stampede, New York]
August 18, 1941
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Hold up man killed
November 24, 1941
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Police officer and assistant removing body of Reception Hospital ambulance driver Morris Linker from East River, New York]
August 24, 1943
Silver gelatin photograph
© Weegee/International Center of Photography

Pictorial construction of Police officer and assistant removing body of Reception Hospital ambulance driver Morris

International Center of Photography
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Exhibition dates: 22nd May – 7th October 2012

Exhibition dates: 18th July – 7th October 2012

Exhibition dates: 14th June – 30th September 2012

Kitchen Debate

Dogging Dogs

Museum Watching

Naked

Personal Exposures

Photographs and Anti-Photographs

Exhibition dates: 22nd May – 23rd September 2012

With other eyes

Worker and social photography

New Vision and New Building

Bergen and Westkapelle

Rotterdam

Dolle Mina

Exhibition dates: 11th August – 23rd September 2012

Life and imagination on the path to alienation

The Secret: The Photo Worlds of Pat Brassington

Juliana Engberg

An interview with Pat Brassington

Exhibition dates: 2nd March – 20th September 2012

Exhibition dates: 23rd March – 16th September 2012

Emanation > recognition > existence . . . . . . . . . . ∞ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . death

How Light Works

Exhibition dates: 31st March – 9th September 2012

Exhibition dates: 27th March – 9th September 2012

Exhibition dates: 20th January – 2nd September 2012

Emanation > recognition > existence . . . . . . . . . . ∞
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . death