street photographyArt Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition: ‘The Gender Show’ at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

Exhibition dates: 15th June – 13th October 2013

Vincent Cianni (American, b. 1952)
Anthony hitting on Giselle, Vivien waiting, Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
1996
From the series We Skate Hardcore
Gelatin silver print
Purchased with funds from Mary Cianni
© Vincent Cianni

I am so sick of museums and art galleries not allowing me to publish photographs that I collect freely available elsewhere on the web to illustrate their exhibitions.

1/ I am promoting the exhibition free for them to over 9,000 people over 3 days
2/ The images are freely available elsewhere on the web
3/ I am promoting artists so that the work is more widely known, and that can only be a positive for the artist (and the price of their art through greater recognition)
4/ The images are 72dpi jpg – what do they think, that people are going to rip them off. They are such low quality anyway who cares!

If artist’s are so precious about their work, even when someone is trying to promote it, then perhaps they should stop making art. Or perhaps it’s the archives and institutions, the patriarchies, that are just too protective of their precious mother-load.

Photography and photographs are ubiquitous. They are taken in the world and live in that world, not stuffed in some curators drawer or surrounded by a circle under the letter ©

This exhibition seems to have a finger in every gender pie without going hard core or in depth at anything. There seems to be no rhyme or reason, no catalogue to the exhibition (as far as I can ascertain), and no indication on how the exhibition is structured, even in the press release. How you would hope to cover such a broad topic in one exhibition is beyond me. That given, there are some fascinating photographs from the exhibition in this posting. My personal favourites in the posting are:

~ Donald York, Jr. standing beside his father’s wrecker, Millerton, New York by Mark Goodman (1974, below). Ah, the jouissance of youth (jouissance means enjoyment, in terms both of rights and property, and of sexual orgasm). Here “junior” is possessing the masculinity of his father’s truck while at the same time emphasising his youthful sexuality with short shorts, naked body, tilt of the hips, pose of the arm and slight cock of the head replete with hair falling over the eyes. There is a certain prepossession about this Donald York, a sexual knowing as he flirts with the camera. Beautiful image

~ Greta Garbo by Edward Steichen (1928, below). My god, how would you be as a photographer looking in the ground glass to see this visage staring back at you. Strength of character, vulnerability and eyes that seem to bore right through you. Face framed with black surmounted by pensive hands. A masterpiece

~ Ophelia Study No. 2 by Julia Margaret Cameron (1867, below). What an impression. Wistful, delicate, a ghostly slightly mad presence with hardly an existence but oh so memorable (Ophelia is a fictional character in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare that suffers from “erotomania, a malady conceived in biological and emotional terms which is a type of delusion in which the affected person believes that another person, usually a stranger, high-status or famous person, is in love with him or her.”(Wikipedia)) Madness and sexuality. The divine Miss Julia does it again…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Mark Goodman (American, b. 1946)
Donald York, Jr. standing beside his father’s wrecker, Millerton, New York
1974
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr and Mrs Maurice Miller
© Mark Goodman

Elias Goldensky (American born Russia, 1867-1943)
Head and shoulders study
c. 1920
Gelatin silver print
Gift of 3M Company
Ex-collection of Louis Walton Sipley

Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Greek Wrestling Club
c. 1910
From the series Hull House, Chicago
Gelatin silver print
Transfer from Photo League Lewis Hine Memorial Committee; ex-collection of Corydon Hine

Nickolas Muray (American born Hungary, 1892-1965)
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. & Joan Crawford
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray
© Nickolas Muray Archives

Victor Keppler (American, 1904-1987)
First Hair Cut
1943
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the photographer

Unidentified Photographer
Two women fencing
June 16, 1891
Tintype
Museum Collection

Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940)
The boys learn to cook
c. 1935
From the series The Ethical Culture Schools NYC
Gelatin silver print
Transfer from Photo League Lewis Hine Memorial Committee
Ex-collection of Corydon Hine

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Hispanic Girl with Her Brother, Dallas, Texas
1987, print c. 1991 by Sarah Jenkins
From the series Urban Poverty
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the photographer
© Mary Ellen Mark

In common use, the word gender may refer to biological sex, self-identity, perceived identity, or imposed identity. Gender can be both fluid and ambiguous. Many of the ways we express and identify gender are based on visual clues. George Eastman House is proud to present The Gender Show, an exhibition that explores ways gender has been presented in photographs, ranging from archetypal to non-traditional to subversive representations, with a special emphasis on the performances that photography can encourage or capture.

With a collection that spans over 170 years of photography, Eastman House is uniquely able to thoughtfully examine our changing cultural and social landscape, in which evolving ideas of gender are framed as photographic images. The Gender Show offers the opportunity to see important photographs from our collection in a new context. The Gender Show sets the stage for a lively discussion of both photographic and cultural conventions and can be enjoyed by a variety of audiences for both its subject matter and content. Those interested in material, visual, and popular culture; gender, identity, and equality; and photographic history will find this exhibition captivating.

George Eastman House’s exhibition The Gender Show will explore how photographs, from the mid-19th century to today, have portrayed gender – from archetypal to non-traditional to subversive representations – with a special emphasis on the performances that the act of photographing or being photographed can encourage or capture. The Gender Show, presenting over 200 works, draws primarily from the Eastman House collection, which spans more than 170 years, and also features contemporary art photographs and videos on loan from artists and private collectors. The exhibition will be on view from June 15 through October 13, 2013.

The Gender Show is the first major Eastman House exhibition organised under the direction of Dr. Bruce Barnes, who assumed the role of Ron and Donna Fielding Director last October. “This exhibition is an extraordinary survey of how photographers and their subjects have presented gender over the course of more than 150 years,” said Barnes. “George Eastman House is uniquely able to review the ever-changing cultural and social landscape through depictions of gender ranging from innocent assertion to elaborate masquerade.”

From the Eastman House collection are photographs by many of the biggest names in the history of the medium – including Julia Margaret Cameron, August Sander, Edward Steichen, Nickolas Muray, Brassaï, Robert Frank, Andy Warhol, Barbara Norfleet, Mary Ellen Mark, Cindy Sherman, and Chuck Samuels – as well as rarely seen vernacular photographs, in the form of cabinet cards depicting early vaudeville and music-hall stars. The exhibition will also present works by contemporary artists, including photographs by Janine Antoni, Rineke Dijkstra, Debbie Grossman, Catherine Opie, and Gillian Wearing, and videos by artists Jen DeNike, Kalup Linzy, and Martha Rosler.

“Since before Duchamp photographed Rrose Sélavy, his female alter-ego, artists have used photography to explore issues of identity, sex and gender,” said Barnes. “In recent decades, the artist’s identity and gender have been an increasingly prominent theme within photography. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see works by leading contemporary artists in the context of photographs from our world-class collection.”

Included in The Gender Show are tintypes and daguerreotypes by unknown artists; advertising images; self-portraits by artists, sometimes in disguise; and portraits of celebrities who in their time were a paragon of their own gender or of androgyny. Subjects include Sarah Bernhardt, Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Additional famous subjects presented in the show include Frida Kahlo, Auguste Rodin, Franklin Roosevelt with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, and Andy Warhol.

Press release from the George Eastman House website

B. J. Falk (American, 1853-1925)
Verona Jarbeau
c. 1885
Albumen print
Museum Collection

Cabinet card of 19th century burlesque artist Verona Jarbeau. Comedienne Verona Jarbeau dressed in masculine costume, and carrying a big stick.

Nickolas Muray (American born Hungary, 1892-1965)
Gloria De Haven
1947
Carbro print
Gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray
© Nickolas Muray Archives

Nickolas Muray (American born Hungary, 1892-1965)
Torso
c. 1927
Descriptive Title: Torso, Hubert Julian Stowitts
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray
© Nickolas Muray Archives

Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Guiding a beam
From the series Empire State building
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
Transfer from Photo League Lewis Hine Memorial Committee
Ex-collection of Corydon Hine

Debbie Grossman (American, b. 1977)
Jessie Evans-Whinery, homesteader, with her wife Edith Evans-Whinery and their baby
Nd
From the series My Pie Town
Collection of the Artist, courtesy of Julie Saul Gallery
© Debbie Grossman

Debbie Grossman’s series My Pie Town reworks and re-imagines a body of images of Pie Town, New Mexico, originally photographed by Russell Lee for the United States Farm Security Administration in 1940. Using Photoshop to modify Lee’s pictures, Debbie Grossman has created an imaginary, parallel world – a Pie Town populated exclusively by women.

Jessica Todd Harper (American, b. 1976)
Self-Portrait With Christopher and My Future In-Laws
2001, print 2013
Inkjet print
Gift of the photographer
© Jessica Todd Harper

Lejaren à Hiller (American, 1880-1969)
Men posed in front of backdrop with ship
c. 1950
Carbro print
Gift of 3M Company, ex-collection Louis Walton Sipley
© Visual Studies Workshop

Melissa Ann Pinney (American, b. 1953)
Bat Mitzvah Dance, Knickerbocker Hotel, Chicago
1991, print 2003
Chromogenic print
Gift of Richard S. Press
© Melissa Ann Pinney

Cig Harvey (British, b. 1973)
Gingham Dress with Apple
c. 2003
Chromogenic print
Gift of the photographer
© Cig Harvey

Victor Keppler (American, 1904-1987)
Housewife in Kitchen
1939
Digital Inkjet reproduction, 2012

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
Ophelia Study No. 2
1867
Albumen print
Gift of Eastman Kodak Company
Ex-collection Gabriel Cromer

James Jowers (American, 1938-2009)
New Orleans
1970
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the photographer
© George Eastman House

William Mortensen (American, 1897-1965)
Preparing for the Sabbot
c. 1926
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. C.E.K. Mees

B. J. Falk (American, 1853-1925)
Sandow
c. 1895
Albumen print
Gift of Charles Carruth

Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (German, 1856-1931)
Youth with wreath on head
c. 1900
Albumen print
Anonymous gift

William Mortensen (American, 1897-1965)
The Kiss
c. 1930
From the portfolio Pictorial Photography
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. C.E.K. Mees

Anne Noggle (American, 1922-2005)
Lois Hollingsworth Zilner, Woman Air force Service Pilot, WWII
1984, print 1986
Gelatin silver print
Purchased with funds from Charina Foundation
© Anne Noggle

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
Marlene Dietrich, The Teuton Siren
1931
Gelatin silver contact print
Bequest of Edward Steichen by direction of Joanna T. Steichen
© Estate of Edward Steichen

Nickolas Muray (American born Hungary, 1892-1965)
Marilyn Monroe … Actress
1952
Carbro print
Gift of Michael Brooke Muray, Nickolas Christopher Muray, and Gustav Schwab
© Nickolas Muray Archives

George Eastman House
900 East Avenue
Rochester, NY 14607

Opening hours:
Tues – Sat 10am – 5pm
Sunday 11am – 5pm
Closed Mondays

George Eastman House website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Ed Ruscha’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 9th April – 29th September 2013

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Contact sheet for Pacific Coast Highway
1974
Inkjet print
32.8 x 48.2cm (12 15/16 x 19 in.)
The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
© Edward Ruscha

“Yes, there’s a certain power to a photograph. The camera has a way of disorienting a person, if it wants to and, for me, when it disorients, it’s got real value.”

“My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of “facts”; my book is more like a collection of “Ready-mades”.”

Ed Ruscha

Cultural curiosities. A language of the street.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. The rest I sourced from the internet (and spent hours cleaning) to make a better posting about the exhibition. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Camera-ready Maquette for Every Building on the Sunset Strip
1966
Gelatin silver print on board
63.5 x 92.1cm (24 15/16 x 36 1/4 in.)
The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
© Edward Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Beeline, Holbrook, Arizona
1962
Gelatin silver print
11.7 x 12.1cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Shell, Daggett, California
1962
Gelatin silver print
11.9 x 12cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Standard, Figueroa Street, Los Angeles
1962
Gelatin silver print
12.4 x 14.6cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Standard, Amarillo, Texas
1962
Gelatin silver print
11.8 x 12.1cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

In Focus: Ed Ruscha, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, at the Getty Center, April 9 – September 29, 2013, offers a concentrated look at Ruscha’s deep engagement with Los Angeles’s vernacular architecture and the urban landscape. The exhibition is part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in Los Angeles, and opens simultaneously with Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990, another exhibition presented at the Getty Museum as part of this regional initiative. The Overdrive exhibition also contains images by Ruscha.

One of the most influential American artists working today, Ed Ruscha moved to Los Angeles in 1956 and continues to live and work in the city, incorporating local architecture, streets, and even the city’s attitude into paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs that are known for their graphic directness. Beginning in the 1960s, he began publishing photo books and using photographs to document thoroughfares in the Los Angeles area.

“Throughout his career, photography has played an important role in Ruscha’s exploration of the vernacular architecture, urban landscape, and car culture of Los Angeles,” commented Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “By bringing together photographs from our collection and archival materials from the Getty Research Institute, we have been able to present a much richer understanding of Ruscha’s work and process.”

Highlighting an important joint acquisition of the artist’s work by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute in 2011, this exhibition features a selection of vintage prints related to Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), the original camera-ready maquettes for Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), and contact sheets from this documentation of the Pacific Coast Highway (1974). The exhibition is co-curated by Virginia Heckert, curator in the Department of Photographs at the Getty Museum, and John Tain, assistant curator in Collection Development at the Getty Research Institute.

“Gas stations and apartment buildings are among the quintessentially Southern Californian motifs that feature in Ruscha’s work,” says Heckert. “The Getty Museum’s acquisition of photographs made in conjunction with his photo books of the early 1960s gives us the opportunity to share his enthusiasm for the logos, signage, and language that enliven even the most banal architecture.”

Adds Tain, “What’s exciting about the photography that came out of Ruscha’s documentation of the Sunset Strip is that it really altered the sense of what was possible with street photography, which had always been from the viewpoint of the pedestrian. Today we have the Google Maps roving fleet of camera cars, but Ruscha was doing this kind of photography more than forty years ago.”

The exhibition gives visitors the opportunity to appreciate Ruscha’s photographs not as halftone reproductions in modest, mass-produced books, but as prints of the period. One of the best known images included in the exhibition is Standard, Amarillo, Texas (1962), which Ruscha used as the basis for his iconic oil painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963). Other unpublished images from the iconic series of gasoline stations will be on view as well. Also included are the original camera-ready maquettes and press pulls for Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha’s fourth and arguably best-known photo book. Due to light sensitive annotations, each panel will be on view for eight weeks. The complete set of three maquettes will be on view during the first week of the exhibition only, April 9-14.

On display for the first time is a selection of contact sheets of the Pacific Coast Highway, representing a small sample of this monumental undertaking. Ruscha’s documentation captures the dramatically different landscapes of both the view west toward the Pacific Ocean and the view east toward the cliffs. The Pacific Coast Highway is just one of several streets that Ruscha has photographed over the past four and a half decades, beginning in 1965 with Sunset Boulevard. These contact sheets are part of Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive, including thousands of photographic negatives, proof sheets, contact prints, and related documents and ephemera, which was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2011. Nearly sixty photographs were acquired by the Getty Museum at the same time, making the Getty a preeminent resource for understanding the role of photography in Ruscha’s practice.

In Focus: Ed Ruscha is co-organised by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute, and features 50 works from both collections.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
708 S. Barrington Ave. [The Dolphin]
1965
Gelatin silver print
11.8 x 11.9cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
1018 S. Atlantic Blvd.,
1965
Gelatin silver print
10.8 x 11.1cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
1323 Bronson
1965
Gelatin silver print
11.8 x 12cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
1555 Artesia Blvd.,
1965
Gelatin silver print
11.1 x 11.4cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
4489 Murietta Ave.,
1965
Gelatin silver print
11.4 x 11.4cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
5947 Carlton Way
1965
Gelatin silver print
11.9 x 12cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
6565 Fountain Ave.,
1965
Gelatin silver print
11.8 x 11.8cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
10433 Wilshire Blvd.,
1965
Gelatin silver print
11.7 x 11.8cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
818 Doheny Dr.,
1965
Gelatin silver print
11.6 x 11.7cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
3919 N. Rosemead Blvd.,
1965
Gelatin silver print
12 x 12cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ed Ruscha

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

Opening hours:
Tues – Friday 10am – 5.30pm
Saturday 10am – 8pm
Sunday 10am – 5.30pm
Monday closed

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘French Twist: Masterworks of Photography from Atget to Man Ray’ at the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE

Exhibition dates: 29th June – 15th September 2013

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
Cancan Dancers
Moulin Rouge 1931
Gelatin silver print
6 1/4 × 9 in. (15.9 × 22.9cm)
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© Estate of Ilse Bing. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

C’est magnifique!

Marcus

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

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
Champ-de-Mars from the Eiffel Tower
1931
7 1/2 x 11 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© Estate of Ilse Bing, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
Boarding House for Young Women, Tours
1935
Gelatin silver print
11 1/8 × 7 1/2 in. (28.3 × 19.1cm)
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© Estate of Ilse Bing. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Lovers, Bal Musette des Quatre Saisons, rue de Lappe
c. 1932
9 3/8 x 7 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© The Brassaï Estate-RMN

In the early 20th century, between the two world wars, Paris saw a fervour of change. From 1910 to 1940, the city became a creative epicentre for artistic exploration, attracting international avant-garde artists – including photographers experimenting with Surrealism, Modernism, and the new reportage. French Twist: Masterworks of Photography from Atget to Man Ray, on view at the Delaware Art Museum from June 29, 2013 through September 15, 2013, features 100 vintage prints from this golden age of French photography and explores the variety and inventiveness of native and immigrant photographers working in France in the early 20th century.

This exhibition presents a number of themes that capture the flavour and nightlife of Paris at this exciting moment. “Life of the Streets,” “Diversions,” and “Paris by Night” are just some of the topics that these masterful photographs explore. Visitors will experience Eugène Atget’s lyrical views of Paris streets and gardens, Man Ray’s surrealist experiments, and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pioneering photojournalism, as well as works by Ilse Bing, Brassaï, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, André Kertész, and Dora Maar. Many of these artists settled in France for life, while others, fleeing the Nazis, brought their Paris‐trained sensibilities and influences to America.

Eugène Atget

The exhibition opens with one of the most significant figures in the history of photography, Eugène Atget, whose work influenced a range of artists from Surrealists to documentary photographers. This selection encompasses pictures of city streets, architectural details, and the gardens at Versailles and includes one of his most famous photographs, Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets (1912).

La vie de la rue (Life of the Street)

This section includes images of the streets and buildings of Paris – of the bustling Champ-de-Mars and the deserted Avenue du Maine – and features a large selection of photographs by Ilse Bing. In her modernist views of urban architecture, Bing provides a modern take on the old city through unexpected angles and dramatic cropping.

Divertissement (Diversions)

Divertissement focuses on the myriad amusements available in the City of Lights. Lartigue provides an insider’s view of upper-class life in the Belle Epoque, while Bing and Brassaï chronicle the attractions of the dance hall, the theatre, and the street.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The master of the “decisive moment” and one of the most significant photojournalists of the 20th century, Henri Cartier-Bresson is featured along with 17 famous photographs from his travels around the world. This section includes his stellar images of the Spanish Second Republic and his iconic view of the coronation of George VI in London.

Les basses classes (The Lower Classes)

Between the wars, photographers from Ilse Bing to Andre Kertész to Brassaï chronicled lives of poor Parisians, often bringing a Modernist sensibility, rather than a reformer’s eye, to scenes of urban poverty.

Paris de nuit (Paris by Night)

In 1933 Brassaï released his photo book Paris by Night, which chronicled the city’s streets and amusements after dark. The book became an immediate success and Brassaï became famous as the foremost photographer of the city’s bars and brothels, performers, and prostitutes.

L’art pour l’art (Art for Art’s Sake)

This section focuses on the technical experimentation and virtuoso technique of photographers including Pierre Dubreuil, Edward Steichen, and Pal Funk Angelo. It features examples of unusual techniques like cliché-verre, solarisation, and oil printing.

Cliché verre is a combination of art and photography. In brief, it is a method of either etching, painting or drawing on a transparent surface, such as glass, thin paper or film and printing the resulting image on a light sensitive paper in a photographic darkroom. It is a process first practiced by a number of French painters during the early 19th century. The French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was the best known of these. Some contemporary artists have developed techniques for achieving a variety of line, tone, texture and colour by experimenting with film, frosted Mylar, paint and inks and a wide assortment of tools for painting, etching, scratching, rubbing and daubing.

Cliché verre is French. Cliché is a printing term: a printing plate cast from movable type; while verre means glass. (Text from Wikipedia)

Andre Kertész, Dora Maar, Man Ray

These three important photographers – all immigrants to Paris between the Wars and all involved in Surrealist movement – are featured in individual sections that highlight their most famous works. Kertész is represented by his photographs of the painter Piet Mondrian’s studio. Maar’s Surrealist street photographs capture her dark humor, and a full complement of Man Ray’s experimental and psychologically charged images summarize his photographic interests.

La figure (Portraits and Nudes)

La Figure showcases experimental approaches to the classic subject of the female nude, including a cameraless photograph and a solarisation by Man Ray and a distortion created with fun-house-type mirrors by Kertész.

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998), nicknamed the “Queen of the Leica” after her camera of choice, moved to Paris in 1930 and immersed herself in its cultural milieu, interacting with painters like Pavel Tchelitchev and fashionistas Elsa Schiaparelli and Carmel Snow. The decade she spent in France is considered the high point of her artistic career.

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) created startlingly imaginative Surrealist photographs under the tutelage of Man Ray. However, she is best known as Picasso’s lover, muse, and “Weeping Woman” from 1936 to 1943. Her photographs documenting Picasso’s creation of Guernica hang alongside the painting in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid.

Jacques‐Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986), considered by many to be a child prodigy, received his first camera as a gift when he was six years old and immediately set to work documenting the activities of his energetic family and circle of friends. Lartigue’s light‐hearted snapshots capture the essence of France’s Belle Époque, the halcyon period before World War I when it seemed that modernity would bring nothing but progress and delight.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Boulevard de Strasbourg Corsets
1912
Printing-out paper
8 3/4 x 7 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Rue Egynard
1901
Albumen print
8 1/4 × 7 in. (21 × 17.8cm)
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Solarized nude
1930
11 5/8 x 8 7/8 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Three Pears and an Apple, Voulangis, France
1921
Gelatin silver print
14 x 11 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Kiki de Montparnasse
1923
11 x 8 3/4 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Fille de Montmartre playing Russian billiards, Blvd Rochechouart
1932-1933
11 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© The Brassaï Estate-RMN

Delaware Art Museum
2301 Kentmere Parkway
Wilmington, DE 19806

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Sunday 10am – 4pm
Closed Monday and Tuesday

Delaware Art Museum website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACBEOOK

Back to top

Review: ‘Ian Strange: SUBURBAN’ at NGV Studio, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 27th July – 15th September 2013

Ian Strange (Australian, b. 1982)
Corrine Terrace
2011
Archival digital print
Collection of the artist, New York
© Ian Strange

It is disappointing when you invite friends from Melbourne and interstate to an opening and one of them turns to you and says, “Well, what was all the fuss about?” The trick is to go with no expectation and you will never be disappointed and may even be pleasantly surprised. Unfortunately, not in this case.

Despite all the years, not to mention money, that have gone into the Crewdson-esque production of this small body of work, what emerges in my mind at least are three interesting and beautiful images (a ying / yang black circle / white circle and a red painted house) and not much else. The three images are outstanding in their psychological excoriation of suburban belonging. Through use of colour and form the images interrogate a sense of home, place, identity and ‘fitting in’ that suburbia promotes, though under the surface there bubbles away the heart of the malcontent (the film American Beauty is a perfect example of this paradigm). In their Zen-like intensity these are incisive, insightful images.

And that’s it. The rest of the exhibition is stocking-filled with a couple more images that don’t really work, a series of stills of a house being set on fire from a film of the same thing. The photos and film of the house being set on fire mean nothing, take me nowhere.* In a word this exhibition is ‘THIN’ to say the least.

While the NGV is to be congratulated for promoting contemporary art, including street art, there has to be at least some basis of depth to an artist’s work, not just the fact that they are”now a noted contemporary artist with a developing international standing.” This is not enough. When you really look at this work it is obvious it needs more matter, more substance. Like a house of cards its foundation is built on shifting sands, foundations that need time to develop and solidify, thoughts that needed greater time to be delineated and teased out. There is no rush with this kind of investigation and that’s what it feels like here – an interesting idea, painted over, over produced and not fully developed to the point where it becomes unmissable, unmistakable.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

* Look no further than Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (House Fire) from the series Beneath the Roses (2004), for the use of a burning building to create an interesting narrative about hope and despair in suburbia.

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. All the installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation photograph of Ian Strange’s Corrine Terrace 2011 taken at the opening of the exhibition
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Ian Strange (Australian, b. 1982)
Lake Road
2012
Archival digital print
© Ian Strange 2013

Ian Strange (Australian, b. 1982)
Lake Road (detail)
2012
Archival digital print
© Ian Strange 2013

The remarkable work of New York-based Australian artist Ian Strange will take centre stage at NGV Studio from 27 July. Suburban is the culmination of Strange travelling for two and a half years through neighbourhoods in the US. Working on a massive scale across key cities, Strange painted directly on to the surfaces and facades of suburban homes, and in some cases burnt them to the ground, to create a moving statement around Western ideas of home.

These unique interventions staged across the cities of Ohio, Detroit, Alabama, New Jersey, New York and New Hampshire were documented with a film crew and volunteers and will be shared at NGV Studio as part of Strange’s multifaceted photographic, film and installation work.

Cinematic in both tone and scale, Suburban investigates the iconography surrounding the family home and its place in the current economic climate. Through the work, Strange articulates his own conflicted relationship with suburbia he experienced growing up in the Australian suburbs, juxtaposed with living in New York City and the United States. Strange’s exploration of suburban experience articulates a distinctively Australian sensibility to a global audience.

David Hurlston, Curator of Australian Art, NGV, said that Strange was fast becoming recognised, both locally and internationally, for his distinctive practice and, in particular, for this new and unique body of work.

“We are excited to be able to present this ground-breaking exhibition of work by Ian Strange. From his early work as a street artist in Australia he is now a noted contemporary artist with a developing international standing. Strange is one of the most exciting young artists to have emerged from the street art genre in recent times,” Mr Hurlston said.

Suburban considers the status of the family home in the United States and Australia through nine large-scale photographic works and a dramatic multi-channel, surround sound video installation. Carefully selected fragments of the original houses will also be on display in the exhibition as both sculptural objects and social artefacts. Exhibiting artist Ian Strange said that Suburban was a culmination of more than two years’ work.

“This project has been all consuming for the past two and a half years of my life. I wanted to create a body of work that reacted to the icon of the suburban home and to the suburbs as a whole. The suburbs have played an important role in shaping who I am as a person and an artist. The suburbs have always been home, but I have always found suburbia isolating. Suburban is my reaction to that,” Mr Strange said.

Strange’s early artistic career evolved as a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Perth. Here he took on the name Kid-Zoom and from the late 1990s played an active role in Australia’s street art movement. After relocating to New York in 2010 under the mentorship of Ron English, he participated in the now legendary underground exhibition The Underbelly Project, before his first solo exhibition and pop-up show in the Meatpacking district, This City Will Eat Me Alive, which generated critical acclaim and attention from the art world. Now an internationally recognised artist living between the United States and Australia, Strange has more recently been exploring the notion of home and identity and exhibited in the inaugural Outpost Street Art Festival on Sydney Harbour’s Cockatoo Island with his work Home, a full-scale replication of his childhood house installed in the Turbine Hall.

Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria

Ian Strange (Australian, b. 1982)
Harvard St
2012
Archival digital print
Collection of the artist, New York
© Ian Strange

Ian Strange (Australian, b. 1982)
Harvard St (detail)
2012
Archival digital print
Collection of the artist, New York
© Ian Strange

Installation photograph of Ian Strange’s Harvard St 2012 taken at the opening of the exhibition
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

On location in Detroit, July 2012
Photo: Jedda Andrews

Graffiti crosses the picket line

Dan Rule

Indeed, the works that populate the exhibition hardly fit the stylised representational or textual archetypes that have come to typify graffiti and street art. In this series, average suburban homes are immersed in monochrome-painted gestures and motifs or, in one case, flames. But while they bear a resemblance to impulse vandalism, their effect is allegorical rather than literal. In one work, a home in a Detroit street bears a bold, blood-red “X”, which could be read as a metaphor for the wave of loan foreclosures and socio-economic turmoil that has supplanted the city’s suburban dream. Another residence is coated in black paint but for an unpainted circular vacuum, a window into the psychological and emotional underpinnings behind the ideal of the weatherboard home on the spacious block.

And that’s precisely the level on which Strange sees the work operating. “There are some very strong political implications for this work … and I definitely acknowledge that,” he says. “But I was really careful not to make works that were just about these broken-down suburbs and this ‘ruin porn’ thing. I know that in Detroit they’re really sensitive about that kind of thing, and we were really aware of keeping this project focused on the idea of being a reaction to the icon of the house in the suburbs, rather than a reaction to some of those socio-economic factors.”

Dan Rule. “Graffiti crosses the picket line,” on The Age website July 20, 2013 [Online] Cited 05/09/2013

Ian Strange (Australian, b. 1982)
Film still from SUBURBAN
© Ian Strange 2013

Installation photograph of Ian Strange film still from SUBURBAN
© Marcus Bunyan

Installation photograph of Ian Strange film stills from SUBURBAN
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

NGV Studio
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Lewis Hine – Photography for a Change’ at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich

Exhibition dates: 8th June – 25th August 2013

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Midnight at the Brooklyn Bridge
1906
Gelatin silver print
12 x 17cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

“While human truth may be ephemeral qualities like justice are not; the struggle is to define justice and to live it. And for artists to display it.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Here is one artist who certainly used photography for social good. Hine “represents the beginning of a long tradition of politically engaged, social documentary photography, so called “concerned photography”… He firmly believed that every person, every individual, was worthy of respect, and he believed photography to be the best tool for clearly and visibly expressing this view.” Bravo to him.

Unfortunately, like so many of these visionary and revolutionary artists, Hine died in 1940, completely impoverished. As a society, why is it that we don’t value these brave human beings until years after they have passed? Is it because of petty jealousies, the rush of life, people in positions of power too long or a lack of understanding of the visionary nature of their work? Or is it just that time passes them by. I would like to pose this question.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Spinner in New England mill
1913
Gelatin silver print
12.6 x 10.1cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Italian family looking for lost baggage, Ellis Island
1905
Gelatin silver print
33.4 x 27.2cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Candy worker, New York
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
17.2 x 11.8cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

To what extent can images effectively combat injustice and social inequity? The American photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940) offered an early answer to this question through his work. Trained as a teacher and sociologist, he ardently wished that Americans would become conscious of the injustice of American labor laws. He also firmly believed that every person, every individual, was worthy of respect, and he believed photography to be the best tool for clearly and visibly expressing this view.

His work represents the beginning of a long tradition of politically engaged, social documentary photography, so called “concerned photography.” His photographs of immigrants from Ellis Island, child labor in American factories, and the construction of the Empire State Building high above Manhattan have become major icons of the 20th century. Simultaneously, the photographs also point to the fact, that the documented problems have not lost their currency, even one hundred years later. Today, even in Europe, we are experiencing intensive migrations, which will continue to increase in the future. Here we are not confronted with child labor, because we have transferred the kinds of industrial production that used child labor to distant countries. Accidents in non-European factories indicate the risky conditions under which our consumer goods are still produced today. Hine’s photographic eye and his black and white images form a trajectory that leads directly to the present.

Lewis Hine grew up in a family that owned a simple restaurant in the small town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He lost his father at age 18 due to an accident. He provided for himself and his family first as a factory worker in a furniture production company and then as a doorman, salesman, and bookkeeper. After training as a teacher and studying sociology at the University of Chicago, Hine moved to New York, where he first came in contact with photography while teaching at the Ethical Culture School. Using the camera in his lessons, he made portraits of immigrants on Ellis Island in conjunction with a research project. From then on Hine viewed his camera as a weapon for revealing social injustice and effecting change through the power of images. With this motivation he traveled some 75,000 km through the United States for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) and photographed children at work in the fields, mines, factories, mills, and on the streets. His photographs played no small part in raising awareness for child labor and instigating initial reforms. They also represented some of the earliest and most significant contributions to the social documentary genre of photography. During the construction of the Empire State Building Hine was commissioned with documenting the phases of construction over the course of six months in 1930/1931. In over one thousand photographs he recorded the perspective of the construction workers and their hard work on the ultimately 381 m high building. Despite his early success and the use of his images by many governmental agencies, Hine died in 1940, completely impoverished, after an operation.

Fotomuseum Winterthur presents this comprehensive retrospective including 170 images and extensive documentation material in cooperation with the Fundación MAPFRE (Madrid), the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Paris) and the Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam). All works come from the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, USA.

Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Paris gamin
c. 1918
Gelatin silver print
24.4 x 19.4cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Jewess at Ellis Island
1905
Gelatin silver print
24.1 x 19.1cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Mechanic at steam pump in electric power house
1920
Gelatin silver print
16.9 x 11.7cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
[Man on girders, Empire State Building]
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
12 x 9.2cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
[Steelworker touching the tip of the Chrysler Building]
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
16.9 x 11.9cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Icarus atop Empire State Building
1931
Gelatin silver print
9.3 x 10cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

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

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

Fotomuseum Winterthur website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Globelight ’13 [New Light Art + Design]’ at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 30th July – 24th August 2013

Curators: James Tapscott and Sam Mitchell-Fin

The Tam Projects (Tess Hamilton, Adriana Bernado, Melissa Acker)
Colour box (installation view)
2013
Lightbox, A3 print on cotton rag + film slides on acrylic
15 x 14 x 33cm

Although I could not get to the second part of the exhibition at Abbotsford Convent, what I saw of this exhibition of light-based art and design by Australian and international artists at Anita Traverso Gallery in Richmond was fascinating. I love interesting concepts and works constructed with light / space / images and this show is certainly exuberant and inventive.

Of particular interest were three artists who use multiple images and objects in boxes to form three-dimensional sculptures, the images inside resembling the spatiality of early stereographs (for- mid- and background). In the work by The Tam Projects the perspex slide at the front of the box with the topographic dots can be removed and replaced with another screen of dots, thus altering the mapping of the image. Catherine Johnstone’s work Grief Keeps Watch 7, 8 + 9 (2012, below) uses collections of bits and pieces, remnants, traces which enable the artist to hold onto the memory of her father who has passed away. Perran Costi’s beautifully made wooden boxes hold Sydney-based scenes in 3D printed on glass and were ravishing in their collective density. Ilan El’s ORA (2011, below) features three black knobs that control the Red, Green and Blue spectrum (RGB), enabling the viewer to create an endless rainbow of colours to match their shifting moods.

My favourite piece in the exhibition was George Angelovski’s light box LUKAS (2012, below), a portrait which cycles through various colours using remote controlled RGB LEDs which lends the portrait different characters such as threatening or placid, depending on the colour of the moment. This feeling of un/ease is increased because the eyes of LUKAS are white as in a supernova (probably red eye from a flash which has printed white in the black and white image), and in the right eye there is a black spot, an inclusion, a dark star that further disturbs the handsome features of the man. I really loved this beautiful, cerebral work.

Both curators (James Tapscott and Sam Mitchell-Fin) and artists are to be congratulated for this New Light Art + Design initiative. It’s a great idea to have a festival that exhibits a such a wide variety of works across both light art and design in Australia. Let’s hope it is even more successful next year.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Catherine Johnstone (Australian)
Grief Keeps Watch 7, 8 + 9 (installation view)
2012
Pigment on x-ray + found objects on acrylic, light boxes
25.5 x 23 x 17cm

Catherine Johnstone (Australian)
Grief Keeps Watch 8 (installation view detail)
2012
Pigment on x-ray + found objects on acrylic, light boxes
25.5 x 23 x 17cm

Perran Costi (Australian)
Autumn (nearest), Bird House, Sunset on King Street and Oasis (installation view)
2012
Glass, hardwood + light
Dimensions variable

Perran Costi (Australian)
Sunset on King Street (installation view)
2012
Glass, hardwood + light
16 x 16 x 8.7cm

Perran Costi (Australian)
Landgrab (installation view)
2012
Suitcase, glass, soil, acrylic + light
57 x 50 x 34cm

Kent Gration (Australian)
Leviathan 1 + 2 (installation view)
2013
Carbonised + natural bamboo, LED lighting
50 x 50 x 125cm each

Globelight ’13 is an exhibition of light-based art and design by Australian and international artists. Curated by James Tapscott and Sam Mitchell-Fin, this is the inaugural event of what is to become an annual festival-style event that aims to grow into a significant part of Victoria’s cultural calendar. An exciting cross-section of Australian and international artists and designers will occupy both spaces at Anita Traverso Gallery and the grounds of the Abbotsford Convent with light-based sculpture, installation, design objects and video art throughout the month of August.

The Festival aims to become an important inclusion on the local and international cultural calendar being the only festival of its kind that exhibits a such a wide variety of works across both light art and design in Australia. The festival has already attracted the attention of the lighting community and related industries, thus confirming the need for such an event that supports the growing number of artists and innovative designers working in this medium.”

Text from the Anita Traverso Gallery and Globelight website

Sam Mitchell-Fin (Australian)
Open infinity (blue) (installation view)
2013
Neon
Size variable

Sam Mitchell-Fin (Australian)
I Wish I could tell you, but I can’t find the words (installation view)
2013
Neon + timber
Size variable

Ilan El (Australian born Israel, b. 1971)
ORA (installation view)
2011
Zenolite front face, RGB LEDs + powder coated mild steel body
4 x 60cm (diameter)

James Tapscott (Australian, b. 1980)
Primaries and Secondaries (installation view)
2013
RGB LEDs, perspex, wood
65 x 65 x 65cm

George Angelovski (Australian, b. 1974)
LUKAS (installation view)
2012
Remote controlled RGB LEDs + mixed media
100 x 130cm

Laura Lay (Australian)
The Established Child Series (installation view)
2013
Acrylic panels with EL wire threads, 4 inverters + plug in adapters
4 x 30 x 30cm

George Angelovski (Australian, b. 1974)
LUKAS (installation view)
2012
Remote controlled RGB LEDs + mixed media
100 x 130cm

Anita Traverso Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

Anita Traverso Gallery website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Japan’s Modern Divide: The Photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 26th March – 25th August 2013

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
The Village up on a Cay, Aomori Prefecture
1955
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

According to the press release, “Hamaya focused inward toward rural life on the back coast of Japan, [while] Yamamoto found inspiration in the art of European Surrealists,” the two artists responding differently to upheaval in their country in two different ways. While Yamamoto is more obviously influenced by the Surrealists, almost becoming the Japanese version of Man Ray, for me Hamaya’s photographs are equally if more subtly influenced by the cultural movement. Observe Woman Planting Rice, Toyama Prefecture (1955, below). I relate this image to the atomisation of bodies during the conflagration of Hiroshima, however subconsciously the artist is expressing this feeling. Similarly, the faceless humans in Rice Harvesting, Yamagata Prefecture (1955, below), blind musicians, disembodied man in a raincoat or poet thinking the void all have an essential quality, that of a disturbing psychological undertow which juxtaposes two more or less distant realities – reality and dream – to form images of great emotional and poetic power.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
The United States-Japan Security Treaty Protest, Tokyo, May 20, 1960
1960
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
New Year’s Ritual, Niigata Prefecture
1940-1946
Gelatin silver print
30.6 x 20.2cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Japan’s Black Coast

“Knowledge of the back coast, along the Sea of Japan, is somewhat vague to those not living there, and in the minds of most people it is a country obscured by snow. In Japan, the back coast is where the old era still lingers on… The supporting industries of this back coast are primitive – agriculture, forestry, and fishing. The work involved is backbreaking physical labor. A narrow land, a heavy population, and climatic drawbacks invite a vicious circle of poverty. The basic Japanese foods are fish and rice. And they are obtained by these people only through hard labor.”

Hiroshi Hamaya, Ura Nihon (Japan’s Back Coast), 1957

A Chronicle of Grief and Anger

In 1959 the proposed ten-year renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty of 1952 meant the continuation of the presence of U.S. troops and the persistence of U.S. political and cultural influence. When Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, with the aid of the police, forced the Japanese parliament to ratify the treaty in May 1960, the public upheaval was immense. Hamaya, a pacifist living outside Tokyo, entered the fray with his camera, chronicling the demonstrations. His pictures were published both individually and in the form of a quickly assembled paperback under the title Ikari to kanashimi no kiroku (A Chronicle of Grief and Anger).

Portraiture

Japanese society had a pronounced respect for artists, authors, craftsmen, and scholars. As a freelance photographer, Hamaya was often enlisted to make portraits of them for publication. He compiled a selection of these portraits made since the 1940s for the 1983 book Japanese Scholars and Artists, which included the renowned poet, art historian, and calligrapher Yaichi Aizu. Hamaya also produced a series of genre studies that featured his wife, Asa Hamaya, who was a skilled master of the tea ceremony. After her death in 1985 Hamaya prepared a memorial to her in the form of a portfolio of prints, titled Calendar Days of Asa Hamaya, following the earlier ukiyo-e tradition of woodblock series such as bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women).

Observing Nature

“I spent three years and four months on an extended walking tour to observe nature in Japan, from the drifting ice packs off the Shiretoko Peninsula to the coral reefs of Okinawa … Nature breathed, sometimes deeply and sometimes violently, with the climatic changes of the seasons, and with the changing face of daily weather, humidity, seasonal winds, and typhoons. In particular, the distribution of plants from the subarctic to the subtropical zones, and of lichen and mosses, was both complex and varied… I came to realise that natural features in Japan, like the nature of its people, were extremely diversified and complex. I intended to investigate this conclusion with my own eyes.”

Hiroshi Hamaya, My Fifty Years of Photography, 1982

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Woman Planting Rice, Toyama Prefecture
1955
Gelatin silver print
42.1 x 28cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Rice Harvesting, Yamagata Prefecture
1955
Gelatin silver print print
29.5 x 19.7cm (11 5/8 x 7 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Blind Musicians, Niigata Prefecture
1956
Gelatin silver print print
30.1 x 20cm (11 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Man in a Traditional Minobashi Raincoat, Niigata Prefecture
1956
Gelatin silver print print
30.6 x 19.8cm (12 1/16 x 7 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Yaichi Aizu, Poet, Calligrapher, and Japanese Art Critic
1947
Gelatin silver print print
24 x 16cm (9 7/16 x 6 5/16 in.)
Estate of Hiroshi Hamaya, Oiso, Japan
© Keisuke Katano

The Taishō era (1912-1926) was a brief but dynamic period in Japan’s history that ushered in a modern state with increased industrialisation, shifting political parties, radical fashions, and liberal thinking in many areas. However, this era of heightened experimentation ended with the arrival of an international depression, the promotion of ultranationalism, and the country’s entry into what would become the Greater East Asia War.

Reflecting both sides of this dramatic transition, two disparate representations of modern Japan will be displayed together in Japan’s Modern Divide: The Photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto, on view March 26 – August 25, 2013, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. Curated by Judith Keller, senior curator of photographs, and Amanda Maddox, assistant curator of photographs, the exhibition includes photographs from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, the Toyko Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the estate of Hiroshi Hamaya, the Nagoya City Art Museum, and other public and private lenders.

Born during the Taishō era, photographers Hiroshi Hamaya (1915-1999) and Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-1987) responded to Japan’s rapidly-changing sociopolitical climate in very different ways. While Hamaya focused inward toward rural life on the back coast of Japan, Yamamoto found inspiration in the art of European Surrealists. As the ebb and flow of Japan’s political, economic, and social structures persisted across the 20th century, Hamaya and Yamamoto continued to pursue divergent paths, thus embodying both sides of modern Japanese life: the traditional and the Western, the rural and the urban, the oriental and the occidental.

“Much is known about the Surrealists living and working in Europe, as well as the celebrated documentary tradition of 20th-century photography, but the Japanese artists who embraced these movements remain relatively unknown in the West,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This exhibition illuminates the extraordinary work of two artists who responded to upheaval in their country in two different, but equally powerful ways.”

Hiroshi Hamaya

The son of a detective, Hamaya grew up in Tokyo’s Ueno neighbourhood during the rise and decline of the Taishō era. After attending Kanto Junior College, he began his photographic career by taking aerial images for the Practical Aeronautical Institute. He later photographed downtown Tokyo from street level, and provided images of daily city life and local events to a number of magazines. In 1939, an assignment that took him to Ura Nihon, or the rural back coast of the Sea of Japan, changed his view of photography and society.

Known for its unforgiving winter snowstorms and the difficult lives of its impoverished inhabitants, Ura Nihon was a mystery to most of Japan and the world. Moved by the customs and lifestyles of a much older era, Hamaya shifted from journalism toward a more humanistic and ethnographic approach to photography, capturing the everyday life of the region’s residents. This included documenting labourers in fields and at sea, as fish and rice were the primary sources of nourishment throughout the year.

From 1940 to 1955 Hamaya pursued a long-term personal interest in the region of Echigo (now known as Niigata Prefecture). He recorded the people, traditions, and landscape of a district that was, at the time, Japan’s chief rice-producing region in spite of a four-month long snow season. Among his many subjects, Hamaya focused on the winter in Kuwatoridani, a small agricultural village that practiced elaborate, long-standing New Year’s Eve rituals. In New Year’s Ritual, Niigata Prefecture (1940-1946), boys in the village are seated with their hands clasped and their eyes closed in prayer. The close-up of the boys’ faces in deep concentration emphasises the respect for customs of the region.

In late 1959, the proposed ten-year renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty of 1952 raised doubts about Japan’s sovereignty and its future prosperity. When Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, with the aid of police, forced the Japanese parliament to ratify the treaty in May 1960, the political upheaval was immense. While Hamaya was a pacifist, he felt obligated to return to his journalistic roots and entered the fray with his camera. He chronicled the demonstrations day by day, sometimes hour by hour.

“These demonstrations profoundly affected Hamaya, causing him, in the 1960s, to turn from the social landscape to an investigation of nature,” explains Judith Keller. “His disillusionment with Japan’s political apparatus provoked a rejection of the human subject. Much of the work he created in his late career depicts the volcanoes, seas, mountains, forests, and other natural wonders of Japan and other small island nations.”

Hamaya’s career also included portraiture of noted artists and scholars. As a freelance photographer, he was often enlisted to make portraits of well-known men and women, and in 1983 published Japanese Scholars and Artists, a book that included prominent novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, woodcut artist Shiko Manakata, literary critic Kenichi Yoshida, and renowned poet, art historian, and calligrapher Yaichi Aizu. He also documented the daily life of his beloved wife, Asa, and upon her death in 1985 created a portfolio of these sensitive photographs, Calendar Days of Asa Hamaya.

Kansuke Yamamoto

Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-1987) learned about photography from his father, an amateur pictorialist photographer and owner of the first photo supply store in the city of Nagoya. His interest in photography developed at a time when two movements based on experimentation and new modes of expression – Shinkō Shashin (New Photography) and Zen’ei Shashin (avant-garde photography) – were dominant. However, it was Surrealism – particularly Surrealist artists and writers such as René Magritte, Paul Éluard, Yves Tanguy, and Man Ray that appears to have made the most profound impact on his work.

Yamamoto was an influential figure in the avant-garde photography movement in Japan in the 1930s, helping to establish the group Nagoya Foto Avant-Garde by the end of that decade. In 1938 he created a journal, Yoru no Funsui (The Night’s Fountain), which promoted Surrealist poems, literature, ideas, and art in Japanese.

His first photographs date to the early 1930s and reveal an interest in myriad techniques and subjects, including abstract architectural studies, still life, and collage. From the outset, he created work suffused with mystery, provocation, and humour. He often utilised photography as a means to address controversial issues or express avant-garde ideas. For example, in Buddhist Temple’s Birdcage (1940), the telephone enclosed in the cage is possibly a metaphor for the control exercised by the Japanese government during the Showa Era (1926-1989), a theme that reappears in work produced throughout his career. The experience of being interrogated by the Tokkō (Thought Police) in 1939 for his journal, Yoru no Funsui, and its potentially subversive content made a profound impact on Yamamoto, but never deterred his avant-garde spirit.

Yamamoto remained part of the artistic vanguard in Japan during the 1940s and 1950s. He was a member of VOU, a club founded by poet Katue Kitasono that organised exhibitions and published a journal promoting visual “plastic” poetry, photography, literature, and other arts. In 1947 Yamamoto founded VIVI, a collective in Nagoya that allowed further dissemination and promotion of avant-garde ideologies. Yamamoto continued to produce innovative work during this period, experimenting with colour photography, combination printing, photograms, and sculpture.

“At the end of his career in the 1970s, Yamamoto maintained his ardent nonconformist spirit, employing art as a means of criticism, dialogue, and rebellion,” explains Amanda Maddox. “He never failed to generate provocative imagery in an effort to represent his convictions concerning war, liberty, and avant-garde ideologies.”

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
My Thin-aired Room
1956
Gelatin silver print print
34.9 x 42.9cm (13 3/4 x 16 7/8 in.)
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
© Toshio Yamamoto

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
Rose and Shovel
1956
Gelatin silver print print
31.9 x 34.9cm (12 9/16 x 13 3/4 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
A Forgotten Person
1958
Chromogenic print
46.2 x 33cm (18 3/16 x 13 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
Stapled Flesh
1949
Gelatin silver print print
31.1 x 24.8cm (12 1/4 x 9 3/4 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
From the Collection of Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
Buddhist Temple’s Bird Cage
1940
Gelatin silver print
© Toshio Yamamoto
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
Butterfly
1970
Gelatin silver print print
16.4 x 11.4cm (6 7/16 x 4 1/2 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
A Chronicle of Drifting
1949
Collage print
30 x 24.8cm (11 13/16 x 9 3/4 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

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

Opening hours:
Tues – Friday 10am – 5.30pm
Saturday 10am – 8pm
Sunday 10am – 5.30pm
Monday closed

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light’ at The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 6th March – 12th August 2013

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Parlourmaid Preparing a Bath before Dinner
c. 1936
Gelatin silver print
9 1/16 x 7 11/16″ (23 x 19.5cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel
© 2012 Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

“Brandt ranks among the visionaries who, in the diversity of their approach, established the creative potential of photography based on observation of the world around them. Brandt’s distinctive vision – his ability to present the mundane world as fresh and strange – emerged in London in the 1930s, and drew from his time in the Paris studio of Man Ray. His visual explorations of the society, landscape, and literature of England are indispensable to any understanding of photographic history and, arguably, to our understanding of life in Britain during the middle of the 20th century.”

Text from the press release

Along with Julia Margaret Cameron, Bill Brandt is the greatest British photographer of all time.

Why is it so?

1/ There is the diversity of his approach over decades of artistic endeavour, from social documentary, portrait and landscape photography to nudes.

2/ There is a consistency to this enquiry. He is concerned with the same ideas in the 1930s as the 1960s, only expressed in a different form.

3/ There is a subtle ambiguity to all his work, no doubt influenced by his time in the Paris studio of Man Ray. For example, in the portrait of Northumbrian Miner at His Evening Meal (1937, below), there is an odd sense of surrealism to the mise-en-scène.

Notice the placement of the objects on the table, the positioning of both people’s heads with the jardiniere between, and the askance attitude of the satchel and framed image covered by drying, hanging clothes on the wall behind. And then, just to emphasise this pictorial disjunction, we notice that the miner is leaning one way and, in the framed image, another man with a tie is leaning the other, peering around the edge of the drying clothes. The man and wife and the framed man for a triangle within the pictorial plane

4/ There is his understanding of light. Look at any of the images in this posting – Bombed Regency Staircase, Upper Brook Street, Mayfair (c. 1942, below), Evening in Kenwood (c. 1934, below) etc… and marvel at Brandt’s “ability to present the mundane world as fresh and strange.” Looking at the light of the world with a sense of wonder!

5/ And his understanding of “perspective”.

Brandt is not afraid of the out of focus photograph as long as it gives him the “feeling” that he wants from the image. For example, see Losing at the Horse Races, Auteuil, Paris (c. 1932, below), shot from below, quickly, to capture the pensiveness of loosing money.

Brandt is not afraid of foreshortening as in the photographs Evening in Kenwood (c. 1934, below) or A Snicket in Halifax (1937, below), where the use of this device leads the viewers eye into the body of the image. Brandt is also not afraid of a shallow depth of field or of placing objects or people right in the forefront of the image in order to create a complex picture plane. For example, in Kensington Children’s Party (c. 1934, below) the two children at bottom right are completely out of focus but hold up that corner of the image and give the image the stability and energy it needs to lead the eye into the small, frontal boy and the suspended balloons.

Notice the really shallow depth of field, as only the girl at extreme right and a small number of balloons are in focus. Another later and more extreme example is the photograph Seaford, East Sussex Coast (1957, below) and the distortions in his book Perspective of Nudes (1961) – “a series that is both personal and universal, sensual and strange… rendering what might otherwise have been hopelessly clichéd aspects of the female form unfamiliar and surprising.

Brandt’s skewed perspectives are not only literal but also have psychological undertones. His work challenges traditional ideas of identity, place and time and makes the mundane seem fresh and strange. Over and over again. These photographs remain as fresh today as the day they were taken BECAUSE OF THE COMPLEXITY OF THOUGHT THAT LIES BEHIND EACH IMAGE.

Many a photographer could do no better than study the work of this incredible artist. I see so many images in Melbourne and from around the world that really say nothing and go nowhere, because of a lack of understanding of what is POSSIBLE when making a photograph, when telling a story. Rules are there to be broken, out of focus, shallow depth of field, complex pictures, complex thoughts succinctly and elegantly told. For Brandt in any photograph, the artifice necessary to make a work was irrelevant so long as he felt the picture rang true. That does not mean lazy story telling, poor conceptualisation, bland visual construction.

As a good friend of mine artist Joyce Evans is fond of saying, “There is no excuse for bad photography.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Northumbrian Miner at His Evening Meal
1937
Gelatin silver print
8 3/4 x 7 3/8″ (22.2 x 18.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. John Parkinson III Fund
© 2012 Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

Analysis of Brandt’s visual exploration in Northumbrian Miner at His Evening Meal (1937)

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Packaging Post for the War
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
8 3/16 x 7 13/16″ (20.8 x 19.9cm)
Acquired through the generosity of Mark Levine
© 2013 Estate of Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Liverpool Street Underground Station Shelter
1940
Gelatin silver print
11 11/16 x 9 11/16″ (29.7 x 24.6cm)
© 2013 Estate of Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Kensington Children’s Party
c. 1934
Gelatin silver print
8 5/8 x 7 3/16″ (21.9 x 18.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of David Dechman and Michel Mercure
© 2012 Estate of Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Evening in Kenwood
c. 1934
Gelatin silver print
9 x 7 3/4″ (22.9 x 19.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the generosity of David Dechman and Michel Mercure and the Committee on Photography Fund.
© 2012 Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

The Museum of Modern Art presents Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light, a major critical reevaluation of the heralded career of Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983) from March 6 to August 12, 2013. A founding figure in photography’s modernist traditions, Brandt ranks among the visionaries who, in the diversity of their approach, established the creative potential of photography based on observation of the world around them. Brandt’s distinctive vision – his ability to present the mundane world as fresh and strange – emerged in London in the 1930s, and drew from his time in the Paris studio of Man Ray. His visual explorations of the society, landscape, and literature of England are indispensable to any understanding of photographic history and, arguably, to our understanding of life in Britain during the middle of the 20th century. Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light is organised by Sarah Meister, Curator, with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography.

The impressive breadth of Brandt’s career, which suggests his restless experimental impulse, and the dramatic transformations of his printing style have often confounded those seeking to understand the link between the highly celebrated and seemingly unrelated chapters of his oeuvre. The exhibition brings together more than 150 works divided into six sections, each corresponding with a distinct aspect of Brandt’s achievement: London in the Thirties; Northern England; World War II; Portraits; Landscapes; and Nudes. Beginning with a highly selective display of albums and prints made around the European continent as Brandt was forming his artistic identity, the exhibition presents an opportunity to understand Brandt in a new light: one that establishes a chronological trajectory of his career, with an expanded consideration of his activity during World War II. In addition, a closer look at his printing methods with the finest known prints from across the range of Brandt’s career will clarify how the artist, whose early work is characterised by the muted, wistful portrait of a young housewife scrubbing the threshold to her home (East End Morning, 1937), would come to create a bold and unpredictable series of nudes on the rocky English coast (East Sussex Coast, 1957).

Brandt established his reputation before the Second World War with the publication of The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938), books that distilled his early photographic studies of life in Britain. Noted works from this period on view include: Parlourmaid Preparing a Bath before Dinner (c. 1936); Soho Bedroom (1934); Street Scene, London (1936); and Losing at the Horse Races, Auteuil, Paris (c. 1932), which Brandt later re-titled Racegoers in Sandown Park in order to present it in the context of his English pictures, an expression of his disdain for slavish adherence to facts.

During this same period, Brandt ventured to several industrial towns in northern England to witness firsthand the impact of the Depression. Striking images from this group, including A Snicket in Halifax (1937), Coal-Searcher Coming Home from Jarrow (1937), and Northumbrian Miner at His Evening Meal (1937), bear unequivocal witness to the devastating unemployment that plagued the region at the time, but there is a subtle ambiguity to many of these images that suggests Brandt found the artistic potential of these soot-blackened structures and faces competing for his attention.

Brandt’s activity during the Second World War – long distilled by Brandt and others to a handful of now-iconic pictures of moonlit London during the Blackout and improvised shelters during the Blitz – are presented for the first time in the context of his assignments for the leading illustrated magazines of his day, establishing a key link between his pre- and postwar work. In addition to photographs such as Liverpool Street Underground Station Shelter (1940) and Deserted Street in Bloomsbury (1942), this section includes lesser-known works from the period such as: Bombed Regency Staircase, Upper Brook Street, Mayfair (c. 1942); Packaging Post for the War (c. 1942); and a suite of extraordinary wartime portraits.

Brandt’s assignments for Picture Post and Lilliput magazines, as well as Harper’s Bazaar (UK and US), led variously into extended investigations of portraiture and landscape photography, with a strong emphasis on contemporary literary figures in Britain and the country’s rich literary heritage. A solemn, vaguely distracted expression became a hallmark of Brandt’s portraiture, and notable examples on view include Dylan Thomas, Norman Douglas, Evelyn Waugh, Reg Butler, Harold Pinter, Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard, Vanessa Redgrave, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Francis Bacon.

Brandt’s crowning artistic achievement – published as Perspective of Nudes in 1961 – is a series that is both personal and universal, sensual and strange, collectively exemplifying the “sense of wonder”, to quote Brandt, that is paramount in his photographs. His extended investigation of the female nude remains his most original and memorable work, defying preconceived notions of the genre with his choice of settings (inhospitably barren seashores or prim Victorian interiors that conflated the domestic and the sexual in lieu of sterile, but safe, studios), as well as the extreme exaggeration of his distortions, cropping, and printing styles, rendering what might otherwise have been hopelessly clichéd aspects of the female form unfamiliar and surprising. On view are over 40 photographs from this period, including four prints of his iconic London (1952), which together suggest Brandt’s willingness to reinterpret even the most supremely resolved images in his oeuvre.

Through a rigorous analysis of each chapter of Brandt’s career across a half century of work, the exhibition clarifies the achievement of this towering figure in photography’s modernist tradition.

Press release from the MoMA website

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Bombed Regency Staircase, Upper Brook Street, Mayfair
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
9 x 7 5/8″ (22.8 x 19.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the generosity of Clarissa A. Bronfman
© 2012 Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
A Snicket in Halifax
1937
Gelatin silver print
9 x 7 11/16″ (22.9 x 19.6cm)
Carl Jacobs Fund
© 2013 Estate of Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Street Scene, London
1936
Gelatin silver print
9 1/16 x 7 11/16″ (23 x 19.6cm)
© 2013 Estate of Bill Brandt

This picture, first published in Brandt’s book A Night in London in 1938, recalls the work of the Hungarian-born photographer Brassaï, who had a particular talent for capturing illicit, marginalised, or unconventional activity in the lamplit streets of Paris. Many of Brandt’s pictures, however, feature his family members playing roles. Here he placed his brother and sister-in-law, Rolf and Esther Brandt, in front of a large poster. Using a nearby streetlight or perhaps his own floodlight, Brandt cast Rolf’s profile in melodramatic shadow. The artifice necessary to make a work was irrelevant for Brandt so long as he felt the picture rang true.

Text from MoMA website

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Soho Bedroom
1934
Gelatin silver print
8 3/4 x 7 9/16″ (22.2 x 19.2cm)
Acquired through the generosity of Michèle Gerber Klein
© 2013 Estate of Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Haworth Churchyard
1945
Gelatin silver print
8 15/16 x 7 11/16″ (22.7 x 19.5cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the generosity of Jon L. Stryker
© 2012 Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Losing at the Horse Races, Auteuil, Paris
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
8 3/8 x 6 15/16″ (21.3 x 17.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Edwynn Houk
© 2012 Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Jean Dubuffet
1960
Gelatin silver print
8 3/8 x 7 1/4″ (21.3 x 18.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. John Parkinson III Fund
© 2012 Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
London
1954
Gelatin silver print
9 1/8 x 7 3/4″ (23.1 x 19.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the generosity of Clarissa Alcock Bronfman and Richard E. Salomon
© 2012 Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

Bill Brandt A Perspective of Nudes 1961

A book that looks back to Kertesz’s Distortions and forward to the psychedelia of the late 60s. As Vince Aletti writes in The Book of 101 Books, Brandt “conjure[d] a dream world of skewed perspectives in which his nude female subjects appeared to float unanchored or loom like giants.” Parr and Badger writing in The Photobook: A History, vol. 1, assert that these images “rewrote the language of nude photography in not one, but several quarters… [they are] as interesting for their psychological undertones as for the wealth of unexpected forms he conjured… Brandt pictured a world of faded grandeur, of Edwardian bourgeois homes metamorphosing into 1940s bedsit land – cavernous refuges for European émigrés or bohemian nonconformists.”

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Seaford, East Sussex Coast
1957
Gelatin silver print
9 x 7 11/16″ (22.9 x 19.5cm)
The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of David Dechman and Michel Mercure
© 2012 Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
10.30am – 5.30pm daily

MOMA website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Tim Hetherington / Doug Rickard’ at Stills Gallery, Sydney

Exhibition dates: 22nd May to 22nd June 2013

In association with Yossi Milo Gallery and Head On Photo Festival

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Alcantara, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

“Our generation is not attached to this myth of photography as objective reporting because we know it’s not. And so he and I had been kind of playing with the idea of, so where is that line? What does that mean? Are we, by definition, objective? Is there something else that can be reported about war that can be more about the experience? That touches on what it’s like to be there, on the individual conflict of what it means to be there? That’s what that particular work is about.”

Chris Anderson

The intimacy of war

Both of these series depict human bodies under surveillance. In one (Tim Hetherington) the subject is un/aware. Having given the photographer prior consent to be photographed while they were sleeping the American servicemen remain blissfully unaware of the result of the camera “snapping” them. Just as they seem to be on the very verge of snapping in the video Sleeping Soldiers_single screen (2009, below). The psychological scars of war don’t differentiate between awake and asleep, aware and unaware:

“The photographer wanted to reveal the soldiers how they must seem to their mothers: innocent, vulnerable. Still it is a portrait of the scars of war because, as Hetherington said, their sleep was often helped along by drugs… That a soldier allowed Hetherington to capture him while asleep illustrates the photographer’s dedication and connection to the platoon.” (Philip Brookman, Corcoran chief curator on the Washington Post website [Online] Cited 12/06/2013)

Hetherington spent 15 months in Afghanistan between 2007-2008 following the members of a 15-strong platoon of US paratroopers at one of the most remote and dangerous outposts in the war zone. He went on to make the award winning film Restrepo (2010) with the footage that he shot during his year-long engagement with the spaces of war. In repose, the US soldiers seem angelic, contemplative, or vulnerable: in the photographs posted here I see Adonis (Alcantara), foetal (Kelso), corpse (Lizama) and death mask (Richardson). As Michael Fried comments on the 1930s Walker Evans subway photographs were he took pictures of commuters with a hidden camera, “the notion that persons who are unaware of being photographed who at the limit are unaware of being beheld manifest the inner truth of their meaning on their faces.” This way of capturing an inner truth is rare in the history of art. While there are plenty of individual paintings that depict sleeping men in art I could find no body of work that depicts men sleeping in photography.

Although the exhibition is of the still photographs, what I find most chilling however is how Hetherington melds the sleeping bodies with action footage in the video. The overlaying of the sound of helicopters onto images of the sleeping soldiers, the blending of bodies and machines, the reverberation of voices with the rat tat tat of heavy weapons fire is particularly disturbing. The look in the soldier’s eyes as he freaks out when one of his compatriots is shot at 3.24 – 3.38 of the video is frightening. The grief, the fear, palpable – and then to end the video with the corpse-like body of Lizama… THIS is the horror of war. Kill or be killed, boredom, nightmares, as if fighting and sleeping in a dream. Hetherington lays it all on the line for the viewer.

“For me, it’s kind of the closest thing I’ve seen, in any form, that actually shows what it must feel like to be in combat. You’re right there with the soldiers, and they’re not heroic; they’re really just struggling to come to terms with what is going on around them. That’s really what this is. So instead of showing them just being honourable, he’s showing this stuff, the scenes of them being in combat, as a kind of dream.” (Philip Brookman, Corcoran chief curator)

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Donoho, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Kelso, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

“The book and film are about the intimacy of war,” explains Hetherington. “And that’s what I see when I see the photographs of these guys sleeping. We are used to seeing soldiers as cardboard cut-outs. We dehumanise them, but war is a very intimate act. All of those soldiers would die for each other. We’re not talking about friendship. We’re talking about brotherhood.”

“You can get bored of taking pictures of fighting,” he says. “I got more interested in the relationship between the soldiers. That’s where the shots of them sleeping came from. If you go to these places you can sometimes get all your media oxygen sucked up by the fighting; we were lucky to have time to explore other things.”

“In America, soldiers are used by the right wing as a symbol of patriotic duty, but the truth is they are all individuals,” he concludes. “And the Left want a moral condemnation of the war. What I say is that if we have a full understanding of what the soldiers can and can’t do out there, it is a good starting point for peace-building. The heart of the war machine is in fact taking a group of young men and putting them on the side of a mountain. We need to understand that experience. Certainly if we have any hope of properly reintegrating them into society.”

Rob Sharp. “Combat fatigue: Tim Hetherington’s intimate portraits of US soldiers at rest reveal the other side of Afghanistan,” on The Independent website, 11th September 2010 [Online] Cited 19/09/2022

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Kelso, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Kim, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Lizama, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Nevalla, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Richardson, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Sleeping Soldiers_single screen (2009) from Tim Hetherington.

In association with Head On Photo Festival, Stills Gallery is delighted to host compelling works by two internationally acclaimed artists, Tim Hetherington and Doug Rickard, brought to Australian audiences from Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

Without the guns and artillery of war, or the armor of bravado and aggression, Tim Hetherington’s images of sleeping American soldiers are disarmingly peaceful and childlike in their vulnerability. Hetherington observed this active-duty battalion while they were stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley during 2007-08, capturing beneath the camouflage the most intimate of moments, which are seemingly at odds with common reportage images of adrenaline-fuelled and stony-faced soldiers. Through his photographs, writing and films, Tim Hetherington gave us new ways to look at and think about human suffering. Tim was tragically killed on April 20, 2011, while photographing and filming the conflict in Libya.

Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture depicts American street scenes, located using the internet platform Google Street View. Over a four-year period, Rickard virtually explored the roads of America looking for forgotten, economically devastated, and largely abandoned places. After locating and composing scenes of urban and rural decay, Rickard re-photographed the images on his computer screen, freeing the image from its technological origins and re-presenting them on a new documentary plane. Rickard’s work evokes a connection to the tradition of American street photography. He both follows and advances that tradition, with a documentary strategy that acknowledges an increasingly technological world. Collectively, these images present a photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised and economically powerless, those living an inversion of the American Dream.

Both artists are highly regarded for their contributions to contemporary photographic and film practices. Before his untimely death Hetherington received numerous accolades for his documentation of conflict zones, including the 2007 World Press Photo of the Year, the Rory Peck Award for Features (2008), an Alfred I. duPont Award (2009), and an Academy Award nomination for Restrepo (2011). His work has posthumously become part of the Magnum Photo Archive. Doug Rickard is founder of American Suburb X and These Americans, and his work has been widely exhibited including in New Photography 2011 at MOMA, New York, Le Bal, Paris, and the 42nd edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles. A monograph of A New American Picture was first published in 2010 and was rereleased in 2012.This is the first opportunity for Australian audiences to see many of these works, and it is also a new collaboration with the prestigious Yossi Milo Gallery, established in 2000, and focused on the representation of artists specialising in photo-based art, video and works on paper.

Text from the Stills Gallery website

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#32.700542, Dallas, TX (2009)
2011
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#34.546147, Helena-West Helena, AR (2008)
2010
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#40.700776, Jersey City, NJ (2007)
2011
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#40.805716, Bronx, NY (2007)
2011
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#82.948842, Detroit, MI (2009)
2010
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
101.6 x 162.56cm
Edition of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#114.196622, Lennox, CA (2007)
2012
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Stills Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

Stills Gallery website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951’ at The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida

Exhibition dates: 14th March – 16th June 2013

Alexander Alland (Ukranian-American, 1902-1989, born Sevastopol, Ukraine)
Untitled (Brooklyn Bridge)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: William and Jane Schloss Family Foundation Fund

Conscience of the brave

Bradley Manning.
A slight, bespectacled, intelligent gay man.
A man who has the courage of his convictions.
He revealed truth at the heart of the world’s largest “democracy.”

There is something insidious about the American nation. Not its citizens, not its place, but its government. This government has perpetrated evil in the name of its people. Think of Iraq and Afghanistan, invasions in the name of freedom, the support of puppet governments, the assassinations, the military advisors on the ground, the profits made.

The torture. The deaths.

Bradley Manning revealed all of this because he has a mighty moral compass. He knows right from wrong. He was not afraid to expose the hypocrisy that for many years has beaten, unfettered, in the breast of a nation. The home of the brave and the free is sadly under attack from within. In the name of its people.

And why is this text relevant to this posting?

So often in the history of America, dissension is shut down because of some imagined menace, from within or without. Here another group of people (photographers documenting American social conditions) were persecuted for standing up for social causes, for the freedom to expose injustice where it lives. The paranoia of patriotism.

As Harold Pinter has so pithily observed,

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Except the hypnotist is a deranged psychopath, a divided split personality arraigning god, greed and guns. Out of one, many sins.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to The Norton 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.

“When the persecution of an individual who has exposed an evil is pursued so ruthlessly and yet the evil itself is studiedly ignored, all of us know that there is something very wrong with the way that our society is conducting itself. And if we do not protest in the strongest terms about what is being done in our name, then we become complicit.”

Alan Moore

“The US has shown remarkable energy in its pursuit of alleged whistleblowers. Has it investigated the deaths of those innocent civilians with the same vigour? With any vigour whatsoever? And which would you consider a crime? To conceal the deaths of innocent civilians, or to reveal them? I know what my answer would be.”

Les Barker

“To suggest that lives were put in danger by the release of the WikiLeaks documents is the most cynical of statements. Lives were put in danger the night we invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq, an act that had nothing to do with what the Bradley Mannings of this country signed up for: to defend our people from attack. It was a war based on a complete lie and lives were not only put in danger, hundreds of thousands of them were exterminated. For those who organised this massacre to point a finger at Bradley Manning is the ultimate example of Orwellian hypocrisy.”

Michael Moore

“Private Manning is the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to ‘a moral choice.’ His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.”

John Pilger

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Coming to America
c. 1951
Gelatin silver print The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Photography Acquisitions Committee Fund

Louis Stettner

Louis Stettner (November 7, 1922 – October 13, 2016) was an American photographer of the 20th century whose work included streetscapes, portraits and architectural images of New York and Paris. His work has been highly regarded because of its humanity and capturing the life and reality of the people and streets. Starting in 1947, Stettner photographed the changes in the people, culture, and architecture of both cities. He continued to photograph New York and Paris up until his death. …

Back from the war Stettner joined the Photo League in New York. Stettner visited Paris in 1946 and in 1947 moved there. From 1947 to 1949 he studied at the “Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques” in Paris and received a Bachelor of Arts in Photography & Cinema. He went back and forth between New York and Paris for almost two decades and finally settled permanently in Saint-Ouen, near Paris, in 1990. Stettner still frequently returned to New York.

Stettner’s professional work in Paris began with capturing life in the post-war recovery. He captured the everyday lives of his subjects. In the tradition of the Photo League, he wanted to investigate the bonds that connect people to one another. In 1947 he was asked by the same Photo League to organise an exhibition of French photographers in New York. He gathered the works of some of the greatest photographers of the era, including Doisneau, Brassaï, Boubat, Izis, and Ronis. The show was a big success and was largely reviewed in the annual issue of U.S. Camera. Stettner had begun a series of regular meetings with Brassaï who was a great mentor and had significant influence on his work. In 1949, Stettner had his first exhibition at the “Salon des Indépendants” at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

In 1951 his work was included in the famous Subjektive Fotografie exhibition in Germany. During the 1950s he free-lanced for Time, Life, Fortune, and Du (Germany). While in Paris he reconnected with Paul Strand, who had also left New York because of the political intolerance of the McCarthy era – Strand had been a founder of the Photo League that would be blacklisted and then banned during those years.

In the 1970s Stettner spent more time in New York City, where he taught at Brooklyn College, Queens College, and Cooper Union.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Erika Stone (German, b. 1924)
Lower Eastside Facade
1947
Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection
Museum purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth M. Ross, the Derby Fund,
John S. and Catherine Chapin Kobacker, and the Friends of the Photo League

Stone’s adroit cropping of this image emphasises the coy upward gaze of the woman in the advertisement, away from the laundry line (emblem of poverty), and suggests the social mobility of the postwar era.

Erika Stone’s documentary photographs reflect her long, active career as a photo journalist and magazine photographer. In the 40’s, Stone was a member of the legendary Photo League, an organisation of photo documentarians which she feels most influenced her approach to her personal photographic work. It was during the years as a League member that she developed her interest in documenting people and at the age of seventeen, produced her Bowery series.

Although she considers herself mostly self-taught, she studied at the New School of Social Research with Bereniece Abbott and George Tice.

Stone was a stringer for both Time and Der Spiegel magazines and worked as a general photojournalist until 1960. After the birth of her two sons, she made photographing children and family her specialty. Her photographs have been and are widely published in magazines and textbooks around the world.

Anonymous. “Erika Stone,” on the American Photography Archives Group website Nd [Online] Cited 13/07/2024

Marvin E. Newman (American, 1927-2023)
Halloween, South Side
1951
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Photography Acquisitions Committee Fund

Marvin Newman

Born in New York; Newman attended Brooklyn College, where he studied sculpture with Burgoyne Diller and photography with Walter Rosenblum. Following Rosenblum’s suggestion, he joined the Photo League in 1948, taking classes with John Ebstel. The Photo League, founded in 1936, blazed a trail for serious photographers for 15 years, providing a forum for ideas, cheap darkroom space, and the vision of using the art of picture taking to change the world. Newman then attended the Institute of Design, Chicago (1949-52), where, after studying with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, he received one of the first MS degrees in photography (1952).

During this time, Newman won national contests, including one sponsored by American Photography (1950) and another by Time, Inc. (1951). His work appeared in the Always a Young Stranger exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in a one-man show at Roy De Carava’s A Photographer’s Gallery (1956). Well-known as a photojournalist, Newman has been a major contributor to Sports Illustrated since its inception (1953), as well as to Life, Look, Newsweek, and Smithsonian magazines. In addition, he has been the national president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, authored or coauthored eight books on photography, and received the Art Director’s Gold Medal for Editorial Photography.

Ida Wyman (American, 1926-2019)
Spaghetti 25 Cents, New York
1945
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Photography Acquisitions Committee Fund

This Italian restaurant was near the offices of Acme Newspictures, where Wyman became the company’s first female photo printer in 1943. After the war she lost her job at the agency. The “Ladies Invited” sign on the window is a reminder of a time when unescorted women were not always welcome in public dining establishments.

Ida Wyman

When I began working in the 1940s, few women were doing magazine photography in a field that was almost exclusively male. As I progressed from box camera to Speed Graphic (my first professional camera), and then to a Rolleiflex, I stopped thinking about the mechanics of film speed, f-stops, shutter speed, and began focusing on subject matter that interested me. What interested me so much were ordinary people and their everyday activities. Early on, I had documented children’s games and unusual architectural details in my Bronx neighbourhood. I decided to expand, to go elsewhere, taking the subway to Harlem, Chinatown, and lower Manhattan, exploring those neighbourhoods and looking for photos.

I became a member of the Photo League in 1946. I considered myself a documentary photographer and the League’s philosophy of honest photography appealed to me. I also began to understand the power of photos to help improve the social order by showing the conditions under which many people lived and worked. Even after leaving the League the following year, I continued to emphasise visual and social realities in my straightforward photographs.

Beginning with my earliest photos seeing New York City with my feet, and in whatever part of the country I was in, I continued my own walkabout, learning the area, engaging my subject, listening, and respecting their dignity. This continued to be my approach when taking photos. My photographs depicted daily life in America’s modern metropolitan centres, including Chicago and Los Angeles as well as New York.

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
The Wishing Tree
1937, printed later
from Harlem Document, 1936-40
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Lillian Gordon Bequest

Harlem’s legendary Wishing Tree, bringer of good fortune, was once a tall elm that stood outside a theatre at 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue. When it was cut down in 1934 Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the celebrated tap dancer, moved the stump to a nearby block and planted a new Tree of Hope beside it to assume wish granting duties. A piece of the original trunk is preserved in the Apollo Theatre on 125th Street, where performers still touch it for luck before going onstage.

Sonia Handelman Meyer (American, 1920-2022)
Hebrew Immigration Aid Society
c. 1946
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin in memory of Max Alperin

The efforts of the New York based Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS) to rescue European Jews during the war were severely hampered by US immigration laws. After the war it aided in the resettlement of some 150,000 displaced persons, including, presumably, these three, whom Handelman Meyer has chosen to photograph in close-up. She conveys both their common suffering and their individuality, emphasising differences in body language and dress.

Sonia Handelman Meyer

I first heard of the Photo League from Lou Stoumen in Puerto Rico in 1942. I was working for the U.S. Army Signal Corps and Lou was preparing to join Yank Magazine. When I returned to New York City, I walked up the rickety stairs to League Headquarters and took a beginners class with Johnny Ebstel. I bought a used Rolleicord for a precious $100, and dared to go out on the city streets to photograph the life around me. Soon the guys began to come back from the war and the heady life of Photo League workshops, exhibits, lectures, photo hunts, and committee assignments intensified. I took eye-heart-soul opening workshops with Sid Grossman, worked as the paid (!) secretary for a year or so, and worked on the Lewis Hine Committee under Marynn Ausubel.

I photographed in Spanish Harlem, Greenwich Village, midtown Manhattan, at the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, at an anti-lynching rally in Madison Square Park, at a Jehovah’s Witness convention in Yankee Stadium, and on Coney Island. Mostly, I photographed children and reflections of my city – rough-edged, tender, and very beautiful in its diversity. Some of this work was shown in the major 1949 exhibition, This is the Photo League.

The heartbreaking end of the League coincided with a huge change in my personal life. I got married and my husband began to go to college and we were out of NY for a while. And then the biggest change: our own family arrived and the joys of our son, and later our daughter, absorbed my time. Prints and negatives were stashed away in boxes and I lost track of all the old friends at the League. After so many years of being in the shadows, you can imagine my pleasure, at 90+ years of age, to have my photographs out of their boxes and onto walls where they can be seen, thought about, and enjoyed – and perhaps again take their place in the history of the Photo League.

Arthur Leipzig (American, 1918-2014)
Chalk Games, Prospect Place, Brooklyn
1950
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Rictavia Schiff Bequest

Arnold Eagle (Hungarian-American, 1909-1992)
Chatham Square Platform, New York City
c. 1939
Silver gelatin print

Joe Schwartz (American, 1913-2013)
Slums Must Go! May Day Parade, New York
c. 1936
Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection
Museum Purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth M. Ross, the Derby Fund, John S. and Catherine Chapin Kobacker, and the Friends of the Photo League

Morris Huberland (Polish-American, 1909-2003 born Warsaw, Poland)
Union Square, New York
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund

The Norton Museum of Art’s newest special exhibition, The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951, is a formidable survey of the League’s history, and its artistic, cultural, social, and political significance. Opening March 14 and on view through June 16, 2013, this striking exhibition includes nearly 150 vintage photographs from Photo League collections at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, and The Jewish Museum in New York City.

The exhibition is organised by Mason Klein, Curator of Fine Arts at The Jewish Museum and Catherine Evans, the William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography of the Columbus Museum of Art. It premiered in at The Jewish Museum in 2011 to rave reviews. The New York Times called The Radical Camera a “stirring show,” and the New York Photo Review hailed it as “nothing short of splendid.” The New Yorker named the exhibition one of the top 10 photography exhibitions of 2011. The Norton is the final venue on the exhibition’s tour.

The exhibition explores the fascinating blend of aesthetics and social activism at the heart of the Photo League. League members were known for capturing sharply revealing, compelling moments from everyday life. The League focused on New York City and its vibrant streets – a shoeshine boy, a brass band on a bustling corner, a crowded beach at Coney Island. Many of the images are beautiful, yet harbour strong social commentary on issues of class, race, and opportunity. The organisation’s members included some of the most noted photographers of the mid-20th century – W. Eugene Smith, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Lisette Model, Berenice Abbott and Aaron Siskind, to name a few.

In 1936, a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organisation in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centred on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph, and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. (The Photo League also helped validate photography as a fine art, presenting student work and guest exhibitions by established photographers.) The Radical Camera presents the development of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Offering classes, mounting exhibitions, and fostering community, members of the Photo League focused on social reform and the power of the photograph to motivate change. At the height of their influence, their membership included the most important photographers of their day including Berenice Abbot, Aaron Siskind, Barbara Morgan, Sid Grossman, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), and Lisette Model. Featuring more than 175 works by these artists as well as many more Photo League members, The Radical Camera traces the organisation’s interests, attitudes toward photography, and impact during its 15-year lifespan.

The innovative contributions of the Photo League during its 15-year existence (1936-1951) were significant. As it grew, the League mirrored monumental shifts in the world starting with the Depression, through World War II, and ending with the Red Scare. Born of the worker’s movement, the Photo League was an organisation of young, idealistic, first-generation American photographers, most of them Jewish, who believed in documentary photography as an expressive medium and powerful tool for exposing social problems. It was also a school with teachers such as Sid Grossman, who encouraged students to take their cameras to the streets and discover the meaning of their work as well as their relationship to it. The League had a darkroom for printing, published an acclaimed newsletter called Photo Notes, offered exhibition space, and was a place to socialise.

The Photo League helped validate photography as a fine art, presenting student work and guest exhibitions by established photographers such as Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Edward Weston, among others. These affecting black and white photographs show life as it was lived mostly on the streets, sidewalks and subways of New York. Joy and playfulness as well as poverty and hardship are in evidence. In addition to their urban focus, “Leaguers” photographed rural America, and during World War II, took their cameras to Latin America and Europe. The exhibition also addresses the active participation of women who found rare access and recognition at the League. The Radical Camera presents the League within a critical, historical context. Developments in photojournalism were catalysing a new information era in which photo essays were appearing for the first time in magazines such as Life and Look. As time went on, its social documentary roots evolved toward a more experimental approach, laying the foundation for the next generation of street photographers.

In 1947, the League came under the pall of McCarthyism and was blacklisted for its alleged involvement with the Communist Party. Ironically, the Photo League had just begun a national campaign to broaden its base as a “Center for American Photography.” Despite the support of Ansel Adams, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Paul Strand, and many other national figures, this vision of a national photography centre could not overcome the Red Scare. As paranoia and fear spread, the Photo League was forced to disband in 1951. The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 has been organised by The Jewish Museum, New York, and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Major support was provided by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Limited Brands Foundation.”

Press release from The Norton Museum of Art website

Sy Kattelson (American, 1923-2018)
Untitled (Subway Car)
1949
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift

Jerome Liebling (American, 1924-2011)
Butterfly Boy, New York
1949
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund
© Estate of Jerome Liebling

Lee Sievan (American, 1907-1990)
Salvation Army Lassie in Front of a Woolworth Store
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund

This is a classic photograph. Look at the triangle that forms the central part of the image, from the girl at left looking with disdain at the matriarch singing then down to the look on the organ players face. Notice the girl at right covering her ears so she cannot hear the racket. Imagine the legs of the organ player going up and down, pumping air into the organ; and finally observe the shadow of a man’s face captured by reflection in the shop window as he walks past the scene. Magic.

Rosalie Gwathmey (American, 1908-2001)
Shout Freedom, Charlotte, North Carolina
c. 1948
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Gay Block and Malka Drucker Fund of the Houston Jewish Community Foundation

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
Max Is Rushing in the Bagels to a Restaurant on Second Avenue for the Morning Trade
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Joan B. and Richard L. Barovick Family Foundation and Bunny and Jim Weinberg Gifts

Bernard Cole (English, 1911-1992, born London, England)
Shoemaker’s Lunch
1944
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York,
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift

Rebecca Lepkoff (American, 1916-2014)
Broken Window on South Street, New York
1948
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Esther Leah Ritz Bequest

Arthur Leipzig (American, 1918-2014)
Ideal Laundry
1946
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Esther Leah Ritz Bequest

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled (Tenements, New York)
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift

Leftist political activism was a strong element in Kanaga’s work, beginning with her photographs of a labor strike in San Francisco in 1934. She provided photographs for progressive publications such as New Masses, Labor Defender, and Sunday Worker. Underlying this formal study of tenement laundry lines (a common motif in League imagery) is Kanaga’s empathy for the living conditions of the working class.

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Boy Jumping into Hudson River
1948
Gelatin silver print The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund

Sol Prom (Solomon Fabricant) (American, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Dancing School)
1938
from Harlem Document, 1936-40
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund

Mary Bruce opened a dancing school in Harlem in 1937. For fifty years she taught ballet and tap, giving free lessons to those who could not afford them. Her illustrious pupils included Katherine Dunham, Nat King Cole, Ruby Dee, and Marlon Brando.

The Norton Museum of Art
1451 S. Olive Avenue
West Palm Beach, FL 33401
Phone: (561) 832-5196

Opening hours:
Thursday – Tuesday 10am – 5pm
Closed Wednesdays

Norton Museum of Art website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top