Exhibition: ‘Nineteenth-Century Photography Now’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 9th April – 7th July, 2024

Curators: the exhibition is curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator in the Department of Photographs. Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Getty Museum, served as organising curator with assistance from Claire L’Heureux, former Department of Photographs graduate intern and Antares Wells, curatorial assistant

At left, Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters 1872; and at right, Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) After Manet 2003 from the ‘Identity’ section of the exhibition

Magdalene Keaney, curator of the exhibition Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, observes that the exhibition “poses questions about how we might think in new ways about relationships between 19th and 20th century photographic practice…”

As does this exhibition:

~ Everything emerges from something. One must be “mindful of the origins and essence of photography.” (Moriyama)

~ History often repeats itself in different forms.

~ Memory often returns in fragmentary form.

~ The wisdom and spirit of the past speaks to the practitioners of the future.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

NB: Transubstantiation, an un/explainable change in form, substance, or appearance (from the Latin roots trans, “across or beyond,” and substania, “substance”)

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

“Ms. Hellman, a former associate curator, inspired by her work with the Bayard materials, conceived “Nineteenth-Century Photography Now” as a way to access the influence that early photographers still have. The exhibition includes work from the past by 23 named and three anonymous photographers plus an additional 16 included in an album; there are 21 present-day artists. It is organised around five themes: Identity, Time, Spirit, Landscape and Circulation. The picture that serves as an introduction to the show is “Untitled ‘point de vue'” (1827) by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a faded heliograph on pewter, that Daido Moriyama keeps a reproduction in his studio; the wall text quotes him saying, “it serves as a gentle daily reminder to be mindful of the origins and essence of photography.” There are two photographs by Mr. Moriyama prompted by Niépce’s bit of primitive technology.”

William Meyers. “Photography’s Past and Present at the Getty Center,” on The Wall Street Journal website May 29, 2024 [Online] Cited 16/06/2024

The earliest photographs – often associated with small, faded, sepia-toned images – may seem to belong to a bygone era, but many of the conventions established during photography’s earliest years persist today. Organised around five themes dating back to the medium’s beginnings, this exhibition explores nineteenth-century photographs through the work of twenty-one contemporary artists. These interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine nineteenth-century photography while exploring its complexities.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) 'Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters' 1872 from the exhibition 'Nineteenth-Century Photography Now' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April - July, 2024

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters
1872
Albumen silver print
Image: 34 x 25.6cm (13 3/8 x 10 1/16 in.)
Mount: 43.3 x 32.4cm (17 1/16 x 12 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Portrait of Florence Fisher posing with a rose stem with the leaves attached. She holds the rose in place with one arm folded across her chest.

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
After Manet
2003
From the series May Days Long Forgotten
Chromogenic print
Object: 84.3cm (33 3/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Carrie Mae Weems

The black and white photograph – one from the nine-part series May Days Long Forgotten – depicts four African American girls in summer dresses, with garlands in their hair, reclining on a lawn. The piece is mounted in a circular frame prepared by the artist, and is number five of an edition of eight.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833)
Untitled ‘point de vue’
1827
Heliograph on pewter
16.7 x 20.3 x .15cm

The invention of photography was announced simultaneously in France and England in 1839, dazzling the public and sending waves of excitement around the world. These astonishing breakthroughs depended upon centuries of developments in chemistry, optics, and the visual arts, accelerating in the decades after 1790. The Niépce Heliograph was made in 1827, during this period of fervent experimentation. It is the earliest photograph produced with the aid of the camera obscura known to survive today.

Text from the Harry Ransom Center website

At left, André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (French, 1819-1889) Uncut Sheet of Cartes-de-Visite Portraits, 1860s; and at right, Paul Mpagi Sepuya (American, b. 1982) Daylight Studio with Garden Cuttings (_DSF0340) 2022

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
[A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer]
Probably 1843-1846
Photogenic drawing negative
Image: 18.1 x 22.1cm (7 1/8 x 8 11/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The exceptional boldness of this image conveys a visual impression that at first may seem quite unlike other of William Henry Fox Talbot’s pictures. He made it with the same photogenic drawing process he used for much of his work by placing the stem of leaves directly on top of the prepared paper and then exposing to sunlight without the aid of a camera. Although the original plant was delicate, its sharply delineated white shadow on the rich dark brown background creates a graphic, two-tone effect. The same specimen was used in a slightly different orientation to make a negative that is preserved in one of the family albums formerly at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock and now at the British Library, London.

Other visually similar works in Talbot’s oeuvre help us to understand what we are seeing here. Some of them show the interior structure of the plant specimens he photographed, proving that the negatives at first had fuller details. Because the most vulnerable sections of the silver-based images are those that are light in tone, these areas will fade disproportionately faster than the darker parts. In this case, the lightest tones would have been in the interior spaces of the plant, and these at some point faded. It is unlikely that Talbot saw the same picture we see today, at least not when he first made it, but the boldness of the present state reminds us that changes over time can create as well as destroy.

Adapted from Larry Schaaf. William Henry Fox Talbot, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 68. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer, circa 1843-1846
2009
Toned gelatin silver print
Image: 93.7 × 74.9cm (36 7/8 × 29 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of the artist
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

“To look at Fox Talbot’s earliest experiments, the blurred and hazy images suffuse the excited anticipation of discovering how light could transfer the shape of things onto paper. … I decided to collect Fox Talbot’s earliest negatives, from a time in photographic history very likely before positive images existed, and print the photographs that not even he saw.”

~ Hiroshi Sugimoto (p. 349, in Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2005)

Hiroshi Sugimoto visited the Getty Museum in 2007 to study the earliest photographs in the collection. After photographing some of William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing negatives, he produced large-scale prints and coloured them with toning agents to replicate the hues of the paper negatives. The scale of the enlarged prints reveals the fibers of the original paper, which create delicate patterns embedded in the images.

At left, Herbert Bell et al, [Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers] (2 page spread); and at right, Stephanie Syjuco (American born Philippines, b. 1974) Herbaria 2021 (detail)

Herbert Bell (English, 1856-1946)
Frederick Nutt Broderick (English, about 1854-1913)
Gustave Hermans (Belgian, 1856-1934)
Anthony Horner (English, 1853-1923)
Michael Horner (English, 1843-1869)
C. W. J. Johnson (American, 1833-1903)
Léon & Lévy (French, active 1864-1913 or 1920)
Léopold Louis Mercier (French, b. 1866)
Neurdein Frères (French, founded 1860s, dissolved 1918)
Louis Parnard (French, 1840-1893)
Alfred Pettitt (English, 1820-1880)
Francis Godolphin Osborne Stuart (British born Scotland, 1843-1923)
Unknown maker
Valentine & Sons (Scottish, founded 1851, dissolved 1910)
L. P. Vallée (Canadian, 1837-1905)
York and Son
J. Kühn (French, active Paris, France 1885 – early 20th century)
[Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers] (2 page spread)
Albumen silver print
Closed: 35.4 x 28 x 3.5cm (13 15/16 x 11 x 1 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Google Arts & Culture website

Includes amateur photographs taken with early Kodak cameras, including the original Kodak or Kodak no. 1, and Kodak no. 2 cameras, as well as commercially produced images.

Stephanie Syjuco (American born Philippines, b. 1974) 'Herbaria' 2021 (detail)

Stephanie Syjuco (American born Philippines, b. 1974)
Herbaria (detail)
2021
From the series Pileups
Hand-assembled pigmented inkjet prints on Hahnemühle Baryta
Framed [Outer Dim]: 121.9 x 91.4cm (48 x 36 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Stephanie Syjuco

A collage composed of diverse naturalist archival sources, including photographs of bones, foliage, and crystal formations.

At left, Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard (French, 1850-1927) Passionate Ecstatic Position/Expression 1878; and at right, Laura Larson (American, b. 1965) The Mind Is a Muscle 2019

Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard (French, 1850-1927)
Passionate Ecstatic Position/Expression
1878
Part of Iconographie Photographique de la Salpetriere (Service de M. Charcot)
Photogravure
Image: 10.3 x 7.1cm (4 1/16 x 2 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Laura Larson (American, b. 1965)
The Mind Is a Muscle
2019
From the series City of Incurable Women
Inkjet print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Courtesy of and © Laura Larson

At first glance, photographs made in the 19th century may seem like faded relics of an increasingly distant and forgotten age, yet they persist in inspiring, challenging, and resonating with artists today.

Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, on view April 9 through July 7, 2024 at the Getty Center, offers new perspectives on early photography by looking through the lens of contemporary artists who respond directly to their historical themes and subject matter.

“This exhibition provides an opportunity to connect visitors with some of the earliest photographs in the Museum’s collection, now almost two centuries old, via the responses of contemporary makers,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The revelatory ability of early photography to capture images of the world around us still resonates with practitioners today, and bridges between past and present photography are as active and relevant as they have ever been.”

Organised around five themes, dating back to the medium’s beginnings, Identity, Time, Spirit, Landscape, and Circulation, this exhibition explores 19th-century photographs through the work of 21 contemporary artists. Reflecting the inventiveness of early practitioners as well as the more disturbing historical aspects of their era, these interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine 19th century photography while exploring its complexities.

In their work, artists Daido Moriyama, Hanako Murakami, and Carrie Mae Weems look back to the invention of photography to convey a sense of how this revolutionary discovery changed people’s perceptions.

As is still the case today, the most popular subjects for the camera in the 19th century were people. In the galleries focused on Identity, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Myra Greene respond to the complex history of photographic portraiture while Laura Larson, Stephanie Solinas, and Fiona Tan investigate the pseudosciences of the 19th century and how they reinforced stereotypes and identification systems that impact us today.

Photography and Time have been inextricably linked ever since early inventors struggled to permanently fix a fleeting moment on a sheet of paper. This section includes work by Lisa Oppenheim and Liz Deschenes exploring 19th-century photographers’ technical innovations and the ways in which the medium affects our perception of time.

The genre of Spirit photography emerged from the Victorian obsession with death in Europe and North America. Photographers exploited the ability to manipulate photographic images, employing multiple exposures and staged photography to create otherworldly scenes or to summon loved ones back from the dead. In this section, Khadija Saye and Lieko Shiga respond to the possibilities that spirit photography offers in rendering the unseen.

19th-century photographers went to great lengths to make images of remote Landscapes. Government-sponsored surveys and expeditionary programs employed the camera to justify the expansion and to record the resulting military conflicts. Mark Ruwedel, Michelle Stuart, and An-My Lê re-envision some of these same historical landscapes and offer up new ones that bring the past closer to our present.

By the middle of the 19th century, thousands of photographs were in Circulation worldwide, the result of photographers’ ability to reproduce the same image multiple times. Pictures of historical events, tourist destinations, and anthropological expeditions made the world seem more accessible, but with time and distance, they became disconnected from their original contexts. In this section, early photographs appear next to projects that make these historical absences present. Wendy Red Star, Stephanie Syjuco, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Andrea Chung recover what has been lost, calling out the residual effects of the 19th-century photograph on our present knowledge of global cultures and histories.

“Through the works of these visionary contemporary artists, 19th-century photography is not faded and dead but very much alive, an active material that enables us to rethink the medium and our relationship to it,” says Karen Hellman, curator of the exhibition.

Nineteenth-Century Photography Now is curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator in the Department of Photographs. Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Getty Museum, served as organising curator with assistance from Claire L’Heureux, former Department of Photographs graduate intern and Antares Wells, curatorial assistant.

Related programming includes Who or What is Missing in Nineteenth-Century Photography?, a discussion featuring artists Laura Larson, Wendy Red Star, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in a conversation about their artistic practices and how they are engaging with, and critiquing photography from the 19th century, and Art Break: The Precarious Nature of Photography, Society, and Life, June 6, 12pm. Artist Phil Chang talks with curator Carolyn Peter about his series “Unfixed” on view in Nineteenth-Century Photography Now and how an economic crisis and a pandemic inspired him to create photographs that will intentionally fade away to express the fragility of societal systems and life.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Introduction

At left, Maker unknown Kuroda Yasaburo, 50 Years Old January 6, 1882; and at right, Myra Greene (American, b. 1975) Undertone #10 2017-2018

Introduction

The earliest photographs – often associated with small, faded, sepia-toned images – may seem to belong to a bygone era, but many of the conventions established during photography’s earliest years persist today. Organised around five themes dating back to the medium’s beginnings, this exhibition explores nineteenth-century photographs through the work of twenty-one contemporary artists. Reflecting the inventiveness of early practitioners as well as the more disturbing historical aspects of their era, these interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine nineteenth-century photography while exploring its complexities.

Maker unknown
Kuroda Yasaburo, 50 Years Old
January 6, 1882
Ambrotype
Closed: 11.5 x 9 x 1cm (4 1/2 x 3 9/16 x 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Virginia Heckert in memory of Gordon Baldwin

Myra Greene (American, b. 1975)
Undertone #10
2017-2018
Ambrotype
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Myra Greene

__________________________________________

Identity

At left, Various makers Pickpockets at the Universal Exposition of 1889 1889; and at right, Fiona Tan (Indonesia, b. 1966) Marie Thiriot 2021

Fiona Tan (Indonesia, b. 1966)
Marie Thiriot
2021
From the series Pickpockets
HD video installation, stereo, flat-screen monitor
Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London
© Fiona Tan
Photo: Frith Street Gallery CC

‘As an artist working almost entirely with time-based and lens-based media, time is one of my major tools … time is both tool with which to shape and chisel and material to fold, distort and configure.’

Fiona Tan (b. 1966, Pekanbaru) explores history and time and our place within them, working within the contested territory of representation. Deeply embedded in all of Tan’s works is her fascination with the mutability of identity, the deceptive nature of representation and the play of memory across time and space in a world increasingly shaped by global culture. She investigates how we represent ourselves and the mechanisms that determine how we interpret the representation of others. …

A testament to Tan’s passion for archives, her video installation Pickpockets (2020) stems from an album of photographs she came across when in residence at the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles. It contained early examples of mugshots taken of pickpockets apprehended at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889. Fascinated by the subjects of these portraits, their names and countries of origin, and their unknown stories, she invited a group of writers to devise monologues from the point of view of these individuals, which were then performed and recorded by actors.

Anonymous. “Fiona Tan,” on the Frith Street Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 29/04/2024

[The identity section] has “Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin” (Nov. 2, 1902), a print by Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of the mug shot, showing the mustached villain full-face and in profile; it is accompanied by over 20 pictures of sites that played a significant role in Bertillon’s life taken in 2012 by Stéphanie Solinas employing a “crime scene” approach.

William Meyers. “Photography’s Past and Present at the Getty Center,” on The Wall Street Journal website May 29, 2024 [Online] Cited 16/06/2024

At left, Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853-1914) Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin November 2, 1902; and at right, Stéphanie Solinas (French, b. 1978) Untitled (M. Bertillon) – Two Faces 2012

Identity

As is still the case today, the most popular subjects for the camera in the nineteenth century were people. Early commercial portrait photographers set up studios and established standards for posing and props, serving clients who eagerly shared these prized images with family and friends. Other portraits of the time, however, such as the mug shot and studies of female “hysterics,” reinforced questionable forms of objectification. Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Myra Greene respond to the complex history of photographic portraiture. Fiona Tan, Laura Larson, and Stéphanie Solinas investigate the nineteenth century pseudosciences that relied on the perceived accuracy of the new medium.

Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853-1914)
Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin
November 2, 1902
Gelatin silver print
Image: 7.9 x 12.7cm (3 1/8 x 5 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The mugshot of Henri-Léon Scheffer, the man who murdered Joseph Reibel.

CAUGHT BY A FINGER PRINT

A unique piece of detective work has been accomplished in Paris by a retiring scientist. A mysterious murder had been committed. The detectives arrested one wrong man dis charged him, and were preparing .to arrest another when to their chief came the quiet scientist, saying,

“The assassin’s name is Henri Léon Scheffor. Here is his photograph, his description and past record.” M. Cochefert, chief of the police hesitated. “My men know nothing of this person.” he said. “How shall we accuse him ?”

“Arrest him,” insisted the other, “and should he prove to innocent I will pay him 1,000 francs as an indemnity.”

“But what basis have you for your certainty of his guilt ?” asked M. Cochefert.

“Some finger prints he left on a piece of broken glass,” replied the man of science.

It was not necessary to pay the indemnity. He who was thus strangely accused was arrested and confessed his crime. The quiet man of science was M. Alphonse Bertillon, already celebrated as the founder and present chief of tho anthropometric service of tho Paris prefecture of police. Alphonse Bertillon has the gentle, weary smile of the over-worked and nervous student. He speaks mildly, moves softly, like one on his guard against strain and haste, until now and again, his thoughtful face will light up with enthusiasm as he lets himself go. Then his conversation becomes rapid and eloquent ; he runs through books and documents with ardour, pulls down boxes from high shelves, spreads out charts, explains them, performs experiments to illustrate his statements and darts back by a short cut to tho point where he had left off; tho whole man is transformed. Thus we heard the tale of the Accusing Finger Prints.

“A man named Joseph Reibel, porter to tho dentist Allaux, in his apartment and offices in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, was found choked to death and clumsily tied, lying in his master’s office,” began M. Bertillon. “The place had been looted hastily, closets and drawers being open and their contents tossed about. In particular a handsome cabinet holding a collection of coins was found with its glass door broken and its gold coins absent. There were- practically no clues to the identity of the assassin, the janitress at the street door, having a confused memory as to visitors, which set the detectives on more than one wrong scent. They arrested one man and the papers published his portrait. Then the newspapers at least began to suspect the innocent dentist himself.

“They had taken a flashlight photograph of the office,” continued M. Bertillon. “Looking at that photograph one day, I noticed two glittering little white marks on the edge of the broken glass of the coin cabinet. I asked my self what they could be. They might be defects in the printing ; but, on the other hand their situation suggested that they might be finger prints – and finger-prints are very much in my line ! The thought wore upon me until at last I jumped into a cab and drove to tho place. Examining the edge of the glass I found tho marks to be really finger-marks, and in spite of the thousand chances still in good condition.

“Being composed of tiny quantities of grease and dirt they made the glass slightly opaque, so that they came out bright by contrast in the photograph. Except when looked at in a favourable light they were practically invisible to the naked eye. There were marks of a right-hand thumb in one place and of the same thumb and four fingers in another. I had the two pieces of glass cut out with a diamond. I gave one to a policeman, instructing him to hold it just so, and saw him start off to my office with it in a cab. Then I gave tho other piece to a second policeman, with the same instructions, and started him off in a second cab, so that if an accident should happen to one of the pieces the other might be spared.

“In the workrooms of the anthropometric service I had the finger-marks immediately photographed. At first I admit I did not attach overmuch importance to them. They might be the prints of one of the detectives, or of the dentist Allaux – naturally solicitous of his broken cabinet – or even the finger-prints of M. Cochefert ! One by one I took their finger-prints for comparison. One by one I found that they did not at all correspond with those on the glass. This started me in earnest,” admitted M. Bertillon. “I began to ask myself, if among the thousands of criminals, swindlers and violent and suspicious characters photo-graphed, measured, and, finger-printed yearly by the anthropometric service the author of these finger-prints might not, at some time or other, himself have passed.” Here M. Bertillon called our attention to the thumb mark (“pouce”) of Scheffer, the assassin, Just below his full-face and profile photographs. Though small it was very distinct.

“Look at the central point of that thumb-print,” he exclaimed. “Look where the innermost loop moves up and over a single diagonal. Now jumping two loops from that interior diagonal, towards tho direct left you see a plain little fork in tho third loop. It is the exact reproduction of just such another in the thumb-mark on the broken glass ! Tho next thing was to arrest Scheffer though it took a little time to find him. Here, again, the information obtainable from his ‘fiche’ in the anthropometric service rendered service. It was seen that he had been a native of Aubervilliers (the Paris suburb and had worked in the government match factory. When arrested he confessed, at the same time trying to make out a case of extenuating circumstances. According to his story, Reibel planned that they should simulate a burglary of his master’s premises. They quarrelled over the division of the spoils and Scheffer says he thought he had merely choked his friend into un-consciousness and left him tied – according to original agreement. And all discovered through an accidental finger-print which the assassin had left as an index to the crime. “Science Siftings.”

Anonymous. “Caught by a Finger Print,” in the Balmain Observer and Western Suburbs Advertiser (NSW: 1884-1907), Sat 4 Mar 1905, Page 2 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 29/04/2024

__________________________________________

Time

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
An Effect of Sunlight – Ocean No. 23
1857-1858
Albumen silver print from glass negatives
12 5/8 x 16 7/16 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Lisa Oppenheim (American, b. 1975)
An Effect of Sunlight – Ocean No. 23 (1857/2019)
2019
Gelatin silver print, exposed to sunlight and toned with silver
Framed [Outer Dim]: 35.6 x 47.7 x 3.7cm (14 x 18 3/4 x 1 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Lisa Oppenheim

Time

Photography and time have been inextricably linked ever since early inventors such as William Henry Fox Talbot struggled to permanently fix a fleeting moment on a sheet of paper. The development of the camera coincided with new discoveries about how we perceive an instant in time or an object in motion, and people praised photography for its ability to “stop time” and record what the unaided eye could not see. Lisa Oppenheim and Liz Deschenes respond to nineteenth century photographers’ technical innovations and the ways in which the medium affects our perception of time. Phil Chang and Hiroshi Sugimoto address the fate of photographs across minutes or even centuries.

At left, Étienne-Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) and Michel Berthaud (French, active 1860s-1880s) Walking/Running (La Marche/La Course Rapide) about 1890, published 1893; and at right, Liz Deschenes (American, b. 1966) FPS (120) 2018-2021

Étienne-Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) and Michel Berthaud (French, active 1860s-1880s)
Walking/Running (La Marche/La Course Rapide)
About 1890, published 1893
Collotype
Image: 11.3 x 17.6cm (4 7/16 x 6 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

__________________________________________

Spirit

At left, William H. Mumler (American, 1832-1884) Mrs. Swan 1869-1878; and at right, Khadija Saye (Gambian-British, b. 1992) Nak Bejjen [Cow’s Horn] 2017-2018

Spirit

The genre of spirit photography – which used photographic tricks to insert ghostly figures among the living – emerged during the nineteenth century from the Victorian obsession with death, séances, and mediums in Europe and North America and from the losses of the Civil War in the United States. Photographers exploited the ability to manipulate photographic images, employing multiple exposures and staged photography to create otherworldly scenes or to summon loved ones back from the dead. Khadija Saye and Lieko Shiga respond to the possibilities that spirit photography offers in rendering the unseen.

William H. Mumler (American, 1832-1884)
Mrs. Swan
1869-1878
Albumen silver print
Image: 8.9 x 5.7cm (3 1/2 x 2 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Khadija Saye (Gambian-British, b. 1992)
Nak Bejjen [Cow’s Horn]
2017-2018
From the series in this space we breathe
Silkscreen print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Estate of Khadija Saye

At left, Unknown maker (American) [Seated Woman with “Spirit” of a Young Man] about 1865-1875; and at right, Lieko Shiga (Japanese, b. 1980) Talking with Me 2005 From the series Lilly

Unknown maker (American)
[Seated Woman with “Spirit” of a Young Man]
About 1865-1875
Tintype
Image: 8.7 x 6.4cm (3 7/16 x 2 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Lieko Shiga (Japanese, b. 1980)
Talking with Me
2005
From the series Lilly

‘Lilly’ is a photographic essay that was initiated in 2005 when Lieko Shiga was living in London. During that period she produced a series of images of her neighbours that lived alongside her in a block of East London council flats, drawing techniques and inspiration from paranormal photographs that were popular in the early days of photography. Haunting, mysterious, playful and captured in an array of muted colours, the photographs [are] grouped around different subjects…

Publisher’s Description

__________________________________________

Landscape

At left, Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869) Plateau of Sebastopol II 1855; and at right, An-My Lê (Vietnamese American, b. 1960) Security and Stabilization Operations, Iraqi Police 2003-2004

Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869)
Plateau of Sebastopol II
1855
Albumen silver print
Image: 22.2 x 34.4cm (8 3/4 x 13 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

An-My Lê (Vietnamese American, b. 1960)
Security and Stabilization Operations, Iraqi Police
2003-2004
From the series 29 Palms
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
© An-My Lê

Landscape

Nineteenth-century photographers went to great lengths to make images of remote landscapes, which required traveling with large format cameras, glass plates, and chemicals. Ideological forces drove many of these journeys, with the ultimate goal of imperial expansion through industrial development and war. Government sponsored surveys and expeditionary programs employed the camera to justify the expansion and to record the resulting military conflicts. Mark Ruwedel, Michelle Stuart, and An-My Lê re-envision some of these same historical landscapes and offer up new ones that bring the past closer to our present.

At left, Timothy O’Sullivan (American, about 1840-1882) Desert Sand Hills Near Sink of Carson, Nevada 1867; and at right, Michelle Stuart (American, b. 1933) Timeless Land 2021

Timothy O’Sullivan (American, about 1840-1882)
Desert Sand Hills Near Sink of Carson, Nevada
1867
Albumen silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Timothy O’Sullivan’s darkroom wagon, pulled by four mules, entered the frame at the right side of the photograph, reached the center of the image, and abruptly U-turned, heading back out of the frame. Footprints leading from the wagon toward the camera reveal the photographer’s path. Made at the Carson Sink in Nevada, this image of shifting sand dunes reveals the patterns of tracks recently reconfigured by the wind. The wagon’s striking presence in this otherwise barren scene dramatises the pioneering experience of exploration and discovery in the wide, uncharted landscapes of the American West.

O’Sullivan’s photographs from the 1867 Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel expedition were intended to provide information for the purpose of expanding railroads and industry, yet they demonstrate his eye for poetic beauty.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Michelle Stuart (American, b. 1933)
Timeless Land
2021
Ambrotypes
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Michelle Stuart

A.J. Russell (American, 1830-1902)
Embankment No. 3 West of Granite Cannon [Wyoming]
April 1868
Albumen silver print
Image: 21.9 x 29.4 cm (8 5/8 x 11 9/16 in.)
Mount: 34.1 x 43.1 cm (13 7/16 x 16 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Mark Ruwedel (American/Canadian, b. 1954)
Union Pacific #67 (after A.J. Russell)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.9 x 23.9cm (7 7/16 x 9 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Mark Ruwedel

Mark Ruwedel’s statement in a wall text notes that “The legacy of nineteenth-century expeditionary photography was most important to me when working on my Westward series.” He cites Timothy O’Sullivan, Alexander Gardner and A.J. Russell. The Landscape section has a print by A.J. Russell, “Embankment No. 3 West of Granite Cannon. [Wyoming]” (April 1868), and seven pictures by Mr. Ruwedel: “Union Pacific #39 (After A.J. Russell)” and “Union Pacific #67 (After A.J. Russell)” (1994 and 1996, respectively) and five others with no specific acknowledgments but clearly influenced by his 19th-century mentors.

William Meyers. “Photography’s Past and Present at the Getty Center,” on The Wall Street Journal website May 29, 2024 [Online] Cited 16/06/2024

At left, Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Cathedral Spires – Yo Semite 1861; and at right, Ken Gonzales-Day (American, b. 1964) At daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak… Negative 2002; print 2021

Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Cathedral Spires – Yo Semite
1861
Albumen silver print
Image (Dome-Topped): 52.2 x 40.3cm (20 9/16 x 15 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

When Carleton Watkins photographed the remote Yosemite wilderness, America was not yet a century old. Conscious of their country’s lack of a national cultural identity, Americans adopted particularly dramatic geologic formations such as Cathedral Spires as their version of ancient ruins and soaring Gothic churches. The great pine tree in the foreground here became another form of this uniquely American history. Watkins’s images helped define America’s preference for landscape views depicting rugged wilderness and celebrating spectacular landforms on the grandest of scales.

Ken Gonzales-Day (American, b. 1964)
At daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak…
Negative 2002; print 2021
From the series Searching for California’s Hang Trees
Pigment print
Image: 92.7 × 117.5cm (36 1/2 × 46 1/4 in.)
© Ken Gonzales-Day

This print: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment

Through meticulous research, Gonzales-Day documented approximately 350 lynching incidents that occurred in California between 1850 and 1935, most of which involved victims of Mexican descent. To create the series Searching for California Hang Trees, the artist visited many of these sites and captured the likeness of trees that may have borne witness to these events. Gonzales-Day’s landscapes unearth traces of this little-known history.

Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, 2013

__________________________________________

Circulation

Charles M. Bell (American, 1848-1893)
Manulitó, Chief of the Navajos
1874
Albumen silver print
Image (Arched): 18.4 x 14.9cm (7 1/4 x 5 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Wendy Red Star (American/Apsáalooke, b. 1981)
Peelatchiwaaxpáash / Medicine Crow (Raven)
2014
From the series Crow Peace Delegation
Inkjet print
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Museum purchase with funds provided by Jennifer McCracken New and Jason G. New
© Wendy Red Star
Image courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art

Artist-manipulated digitally reproduced photograph by C.M. (Charles Milton) Bell, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, 24 x 16 9/20 inches

Circulation

By the middle of the nineteenth century, thousands of photographs were in circulation worldwide, the result of photographers’ ability to reproduce the same image multiple times. Pictures of historical events, tourist destinations, and anthropological expeditions made the world seem more accessible, but with time and distance, they became disconnected from their original contexts. Many eventually ended up in archives (including at Getty). Early photographs appear next to projects that make these historical absences present. Wendy Red Star, Stephanie Syjuco, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Andrea Chung recover what has been lost, calling out the residual effects of the nineteenth-century photograph on our present knowledge of global cultures and histories.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum

At left, Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) possibly with Anne Dixon (British, 1799-1877) Ceylon/Fern about 1854; and at right, Andrea Chung (American, b. 1978) Untitled 2016

Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) possibly with Anne Dixon (British, 1799-1877)
Ceylon/Fern
About 1854
Cyanotype
Image: 34.8 x 24.7cm (13 11/16 x 9 3/4 in.)
Sheet: 48.3 x 37.5cm (19 x 14 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants

After completing the highly ambitious, decade-long project Photographs of Blue Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in the summer of 1853, Anna Atkins turned to new botanical subjects. She would eventually produce several unique presentation albums with cyanotypes of ferns and flowering plants. Atkins most likely collaborated on these albums with her dear friend, Anne Dixon. Dixon came to Halstead Place for an extended stay in the summer of 1852 to comfort Atkins who was deeply shaken by the death of her father and frequent scientific partner John George Children earlier that year. Photo historian Larry Schaaf suggests that it was during this stay or perhaps one the next summer that Dixon began assisting Atkins and creating her own cyanotypes. Thus, it becomes difficult to know whether surviving works from this time period were created by Atkins, Dixon, or both.1

These seven pieces in the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection (figs. 1-7) were extracted from an 1854 presentation album Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants given by Anna Atkins to Anne Dixon in 1854. The album remained intact until sometime around 1981, when it was broken up after being sold at auction.

Atkins and Dixon shared a deep interest in botany, a science that was considered well suited to women since it could be studied locally, even in one’s own garden. Serious “lady botanists” could join the Botanical Society in London, one of the first scientific organisations to admit women. Atkins joined in 1839. The two friends’ interest in botany is documented in a letter of 1851 from Children to Sir William Hooker in which he discussed the two women’s longtime plant collecting. Later, in a letter that Atkins wrote to Hooker in 1864, she extended an offer from Dixon to send him samples of any of the plants from her own collection.2

Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs
2019
© J. Paul Getty Trust
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

1/ Larry Schaaf, Sun Gardens: Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins (New York: The New York Public Library, 2018), 77

2/ Ibid, 80

Andrea Chung (American, b. 1978)
Untitled
2016
From the series Anthropocene
Cyanotypes
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Andrea Chung

Anna Atkins was a 19th-century botanist who documented plant specimens to make the world’s first photo book.

Today, artist Andrea Chung makes images of lionfish. Invasive to the Caribbean, they stand as a metaphor for the impact of colonisation in the region.

Text and photograph from the Getty Museum X web page

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

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999’ at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Exhibition dates: 23rd February – 7th June 2024

Curators: Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images
Design: Ayumi Higuchi
Photography: Jeff Gutterman

A mid-week posting!

I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I had missed this important exhibition about an interesting subject, the “underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999.”

So I thought I would squeeze it into the posting schedule which stretches a couple of months into the future…

Other than the group photographs of the book covers and installation photographs of the exhibition (below), there were no individual book covers nor details about some of the books in the media images, so I have added a few were it has been possible along with accompanying text.

I have also included photographs from what I think is one of the most iconic photobooks, even though I am not sure it is in the exhibition: Marion Palfi’s There is No More Time: An American Tragedy (1949).

So many important photobooks by so many glorious photographers.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images (detail)
Design: Ayumi Higuchi
Photography: Jeff Gutterman

What They Saw project, a touring exhibition accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. The present show is organised in collaboration with 10×10 Photobooks, a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding.

In seeking out the omissions in photobook history, the standard definition of the photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher or a commercial publisher, needed to be expanded to incorporate those who do not call themselves photographers or artists but who nevertheless put together a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others: individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, mock-ups, fanzines and artists’ books to be more inclusive.

This iteration of the What They Saw exhibition includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are from the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. From the pioneers, such as Anna Atkins, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook, or Isabel Agnes Cowper, who used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books, to the independent and self-published photobooks of the 1990s, including Colored People: A Collaborative Book Project by Adrian Piper or Twinspotting by Ketaki Seth, this selection allows for greater inclusion of previously marginalised photographic communities, including women, queer communities, people of colour and artists from outside Europe and North America.

Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past anthologies documenting photobook history, and those included are already quite well known. This exhibition of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks is a necessary step in unwriting the current photobook history and rewriting an updated photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive.

Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía website

Anna Atkins, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843

Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) (French, 1894-1954) 'Aveux non avenus' (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) 1930

Claude Cahun (1894-1954) 'Aveux Non Avenus' Paris- Éditions du Carrefour, 1930

Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) (French, 1894-1954) Aveux non avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) 1930

In her 1930 publication, Aveux non Avenus, Claude Cahun used the relationship between her inwardly focused poetic writing and symbolic photomontages to construct a unique reality for self-expression. This article focuses on three chapters and respective photographic images from the publication to relate Cahun’s, and by association her partner Marcel Moore’s, discussion on sexuality and gender expression. The utopian dreamscape created investigates issues of narcissism and otherness, female homosexuality, dandyism and going beyond gender, individual and social critique, mocking the antiquated views of art and writing, accepting and breaking taboos, while allowing for other departures from the accepted norm. Through analysis of the publication and supporting evidence from early influences, it can be seen that Cahun created a world in Aveux non Avenus where she could exist in a space between the established feminine–masculine binary of 20th-century Europe.

Abstract from Erin F. Pustarfi. “Constructed Realities: Claude Cahun’s Created World in Aveux Non Avenus,” in Journal of Homosexuality, 67(5), pp. 697-711. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Germaine Krull (photographer) Cover design by M. Tchimoukow. MÉTAL cover 1928

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928, p. 33

I did not have a special intention or design when I took the Iron photographs. I wanted to show what I see, exactly as the eye sees it. ‘MÉTAL’ is a collection of photographs from the time. ‘MÉTAL’ initiated a new visual era and open the way or a new concept of photography. ‘MÉTAL’ was the starting point which allowed photography to become an artisanal trade and which made an artist of the photographer, because it was part of this new movement, of this new era which touched all art.

Germaine Krull. Extract from the Preface to the 1976 edition of ‘MÉTAL’

See my writing on Germaine Krull’s portfolio MÉTAL.

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928 p. 37

Eyes on Russia by Margaret Bourke-White. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931

In 1951, Westbrook Pegler wrote numerous articles attacking Margaret Bourke-White for her associations with leftist politics in the 1930s. It is probably for this reason that in her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, written about ten years later, Bourke-White didn’t mention her first book, Eyes on Russia, published in 1931. And yet, this book is of extraordinary interest, not only as a landmark in Bourke-White’s career but also as a source, both visual and narrative, on the Soviet Union during its first Five Year Plan. With letters of recommendation from influential people, including the Russian film maker, Sergei Eisenstein, Bourke-White arrived in Moscow in the fall of 1930, where she obtained the official endorsement of A.B. Khalatoff, chief of the Soviet publishing house (he was later liquidated in the 1937 purges). Khalatoff supplied her with a thick roll of rubles and a guide. Bourke-White then toured some of the most important industrial and other sites and came back with stellar images of Russia under construction, which she complemented by a spritely and charming narrative of her experiences as the first foreign photographer to photograph in the Soviet Union with official permission. On her trip, she made 800 negatives, of which 40 were published in Eyes on Russia in a sepia tone. This book, along with at least eight related illustrated articles in Fortune, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and other periodicals, significantly enhanced Bourke-White’s reputation (and commercial business). They also helped initiate relationships she established both with Soviet officials and Americans sympathetic to the U.S.S.R. She returned to Russia in 1931 and 1932 for additional photography, but Eyes on Russia, a fascinating book for a variety of reasons, remains the largest single published collection of her work in that country. It was very well received in numerous book reviews when it appeared. For a more detailed review, see my article, Gary D. Saretzky “Margaret Bourke-White: Eyes on Russia,” The Photo Review, 22: 3-4 (Summer & Fall 1999)

Text from a comment on the Amazon website

Roll, Jordan, Roll by Julia Peterkin (text) and Doris Ulmann (photographs) New York: Robert O. Ballo, 1933

Doris Ulmann’s photographic collaboration with Julia Peterkin focuses on the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. Peterkin, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne in today’s Calhoun County, SC, one of the state’s richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll. Ulmann’s soft-focus photos-rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here-straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory.

Text from the Amazon website

Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937)

Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937) pp. 220-221

Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939

“The camera alone can catch
the swift surfaces of the
cities today and speaks a
language intelligible to all.”

~ Berenice Abbott

Abbott’s landmark work on New York, illustrated with 97 halftone plates that display “the historical importance of the documentary model its power as a medium of personal expression” (Parr & Badger).

In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, Abbott boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she was struck by the rapid transformation of the built landscape and saw the city as ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. “Old New York is fast disappearing,” Abbott observed. “At almost any point on Manhattan Island, the sweep of one’s vision can take in the dramatic contrasts of the old and the new and the bold foreshadowing of the future. This dynamic quality should be caught and recorded immediately in a documentary interpretation of New York City. The city is in the making and unless this transition is crystallised now in permanent form, it will be forever lost…. The camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all.”

On the eve of the Great Depression, she began a series of documentary photographs of the city that, with the support of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939, debuted in 1939 as the traveling exhibition and publication Changing New York.

With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “tiny photographic notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale.

Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on thirty-two pages, Abbott’s New York album marks a key turning point in her career – from her portrait work in Paris to the urban documentation that became one of her lasting legacies.

From 1935 to 1965, Berenice Abbott and art critic Elizabeth McCausland (1899-1965) lived and worked in two flats they shared on the fourth floor of the loft building at 50 Commerce Street.

Lannyl Stephens. “Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York,” on the Village Preservation website July 17, 2023 [Online] Cited 26/05/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939

An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Photographs by Dorothea Lange; text by Paul Taylor. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939

“We need to be reminded these days about what women have been, and can be. It’s a question of their really deep and fundamental place in society. I have a feeling that women need to be reminded of it. They are needed.”

~ Dorothea Lange

First published in 1939, An American Exodus is one of the masterpieces of the documentary genre. Produced by incomparable documentary photographer Dorothea Lange with text by her husband, Paul Taylor, An American Exodus was taken in the early 1930s while the couple were working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) The book documents the rural poverty of the depression-era exodus that brought over 300,000 migrants to California in search of farm work, a westward mass migration driven by economic deprivation as opposed to the Manifest Destiny of 19th century pioneers.

Text from the Google Books website

In 1938, Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Taylor began sorting through the stacks of photographs she had made documenting migrant farmworkers and homeless drought refugees. Their goal was to create a book that would reveal the human dimension of the crisis to the American people and, hopefully, prompt government relief. One of several books released in the late 1930s that made use of the Farm Security Administration photo archive, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion was innovative in several ways. Rather than tell the story from their own perspective, Lange and Taylor used direct quotes from the migrants themselves, which Lange had painstakingly collected in the field. Released as war tensions were building in Europe and Asia, An American Exodus was largely overlooked at the time. In the years since its publication, the book has gained power, presenting an iconic image of the Dust Bowl era that has shaped the way we think of those difficult years.

Text from the Dorothea Lange Digital Archive, Oakland Museum of California website

Eslanda Goode Robeson. African Journey. New York: John Day Company, 1945

Eslanda Robeson’s 1936 African journal with her own photographs. Africa seen through the eyes of an African American. She went to South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Congo, and visited African kings and British governors, villages, gold mines, plantations, herdswomen, and modern African leaders.

Eslanda Goode Robeson (1895-1965) was an American anthropologist, author, actress, and civil rights activist. She was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Columbia University in 1917 with a degree in chemistry, and in 1921 married the singer and actor Paul Robeson. In 1936, she received her degree in anthropology from the London School of Economics, and in 1946, the year following the publication of African Journal, earned her anthropology Ph.D. from Hartford Seminary where she specialised in African studies and race relations.

Text from the Boyd Books website

Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945)

During the Second World War Lee Miller was the official war photographer for Vogue magazine. The images contained in Wrens in Camera were commissioned by the Admiralty and show the female navy officers and workers fulfilling their war duties. There are signallers, technicians, trainers, housekeepers and transport crews. The whole is an important document of women’s roles in war-time Britain.

Text from the Beaux Books website

Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945) p. 47

Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978)
Untitled (Black woman with a white child)
1949
From the book There Is No More Time: An American Tragedy
Marion Palfi/Center for Creative Photography
© All Rights Reserved

Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978)
Untitled (Portrait of Mrs. Caleb Hill, widow of a lynching victim)
1949
From the book There Is No More Time: An American Tragedy
Marion Palfi/Center for Creative Photography
© All Rights Reserved

“As a photographer, she was as interested in the discriminator as in the victims of discrimination. Long before what we tend to think of as the crux of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, Palfi went to Georgia at a particularly dangerous time. In 1949, she was drawn to do an in-depth portrait of Irwinton, a small community where a young black man had been torn out of jail and shot by a lynch mob. The tremendous public outcry over this barbaric incident included front-page coverage and editorials by the New York Times. Obviously, the presence of a photographer in such a community would attract unwanted attention and might have endangered her life. But by a happy stroke of luck, the Vice-President of the Georgia Power Company was interested in her work. Warning her that she must “photograph the South as it really is, not as the North slanders it,” he wanted her to get to meet the “right” people. As it happened, the “right” people turned out to be the very discriminators she wanted to photograph. Left in the protection of the local postmistress, she proceeded to take terms, objective pictures of overseers and white-suited politicians.

Even if the press had not indicted Irwinton for its racism, the extreme conservatism and tension were evident in the faces of its citizens. She found a white supremacist group, “The Columbians,” whose insignia was a thunderbolt, the symbol of Hitler’s elite guard. “Mein Kampf was their bible,” she believed. Meanwhile, the wife of the lunch victim said, simply, “Caleb was a good man … he believed in his rights and therefore he died.”

Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock. “Marion Palfi: An Appreciation,” in The Archive Research Series Number 19, September 1983, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, pp. 7-8. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978)
Untitled (A woman explained: “If a white man buys something…”)
1949
From the book There Is No More Time: An American Tragedy
Marion Palfi/Center for Creative Photography
© All Rights Reserved

Acapulco en el sueño by Francisco Tario (text) with photographs by Lola Alvarez Bravo, 1951

“If my photographs have any meaning, it’s that they stand for a Mexico that once existed.”

~ Lola Alvarez Bravo

Dare Wright. The Lonely Doll. New York: Doubleday & Co, 1957

Once there was a little doll. Her name was Edith. She lived in a nice house and had everything she needed except someone to play with. She was lonely! Then one morning Edith looked into the garden and there stood two bears! Since it was first published in 1957, The Lonely Doll has established itself as a unique children’s classic. Through innovative photography Dare Wright brings the world of dolls to life and entertains us with much more than just a story. Edith, the star of the show, is a doll from Wright’s childhood, and Wright selected the bear family with the help of her brother. With simple poses and wonderful expressions, the cast of characters is vividly brought to life to tell a story of friendship.

Text from the Amazon website

Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964

Le Clercq is the wife of choreographer George Balanchine; she wrote this book after Mourka became famous because of the photograph of Martha Swope in Life magazine, where George Balanchine assists Mourka in his grand jeté. Mourka writes about his exercises in dance and his aspirations to travel in outer space.

Text from the Cats in Books albums Facebook page

Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964

A Way of Seeing, 1965. Photographs by Helen Levitt

Dublin: A Portrait by V.S. Pritchett (text) and Evelyn Hofer (photographs). New York: Harper & Row, 1967

The starting point for this book is Evelin Hofer’s Dublin: A Portrait, which features an in-depth essay by V. S. Pritchett and photos by Hofer, and enjoyed great popularity upon its original publication in 1967. Dublin: A Portrait is an example of Hofer’s perhaps most important body of work, her city portraits: books that present comprehensive prose texts by renowned authors alongside her self-contained visual essays with their own narratives. Dublin: A Portrait was the last book published in this renowned series. …

In Dublin Hofer repeatedly turned her camera to sights of the city, but mainly to the people who constituted its essence. She made numerous portraits – be they of writers and public figures or unknown people in the streets. Her portraits give evidence of an intense, respectful engagement with her subjects, who participate as equal partners in the process of photographing.

Text from The Eye of Photography Magazine website

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, 1972

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence-even something of a legend-among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972 – along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art – offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented.

The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in making the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Diane Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages and remains the foundation of her international reputation.

Nearly half of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus’s photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it.

Text from the Fraenkel Gallery Shop website

Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975

A photographic documentation of the Beatty-Cole Circus, recording and portraying the customs, activities, animals, and singular personalities of an endangered way of life.

Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948) 'Carnival Strippers' book cover 1975

Susan Meiselas. Carnival Strippers book cover 1975

From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing women who performed striptease for small-town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. As she followed the shows from town to town, she captured the dancers on stage and off, their public performances as well as their private lives, creating a portrait both documentary and empathetic: “The recognition of this world is not the invention of it. I wanted to present an account of the girl show that portrayed what I saw and revealed how the people involved felt about what they were doing.” Meiselas also taped candid interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers and paying customers, which form a crucial part of the book.

Meiselas’ frank description of these women brought a hidden world to public attention, and explored the complex role the carnival played in their lives: mobility, money and liberation, but also undeniable objectification and exploitation. Produced during the early years of the women’s movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterised a complex era of change.

Text from the Booktopia website [Online] Cited 22/04/2022

Claudia Andujar, Amazônia, 1978

Since the early 1970s, Claudia Andujar has been committed to the cause of the Yanomami Indians living in the heart of the Amazon rainforest and is the author of the most important photographic work dedicated to them to date. A founding member of the Brazilian NGO Comissão Pró Yanomami (CCPY), the photographer has played a fundamental role in the recognition of their territory by the Brazilian government. …

Claudia Andujar first met the Yanomami in 1971 while working on an article about the Amazon for Realidade magazine. Fascinated by the culture of this isolated community, she decided to embark on an in-depth photographic essay on their daily life after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship to support the project. From the very beginning, her approach differed greatly from the straightforward documentary style of her contemporaries. The photographs she made during this period show how she experimented with a variety of photographic techniques in an attempt to visually translate the shamanic culture of the Yanomami. Applying Vaseline to the lens of her camera, using flash devices, oil lamps and infrared film, she created visual distortions, streaks of light and saturated colors, thus imbuing her images with a feeling of the otherworldly.

Text from the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain website

Cover image of Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979). Photographs by JEB (Joan E. Biren)

In 1979, JEB (Joan E. Biren) self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. Revolutionary at that time, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives-working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by testimonials from the women pictured in the book, as well as writings from icons including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and a foreword from Joan Nestle. Eye to Eye signalled a radical new way of seeing – moving lesbian lives from the margins to the centre, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years and featuring new essays from photographer Lola Flash and former soccer player Lori Lindsey, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that continues to resonate in the queer community and beyond.

Text from the Amazon website

Jo Spence. Putting Myself In The Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographic Autobiography. London: Camden Press Ltd, 1986

Photographer Jo Spence challenges the assumptions of conventional photography in this groundbreaking visual autobiography, which traces her journey from self-censorship to self-healing.

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986

Cristina García Rodero. España Oculta. 1989

When Spanish photographer Cristina Garcia Rodero went to study art in Italy, in 1973, she fully understood the importance of home. Yet her time abroad formented a deeper interest in was happening in her own country and, as a result, at the age of 23, Garcia Rodero returned to Spain and started a project that she hoped would capture the essence of the myriad Spanish traditions, religious practices and rites that were already fading away. What started as a five-year project ended up lasting 15 years and came to be the book España Oculta (Hidden Spain) published in 1989. At 39 years old, Garcia Rodero had managed to compile a kind of anthropological encyclopedia of her country. The work also captured a key moment in Spain’s history – with Spanish dictator Franco dying in 1975, and the country commencing a period of transition – something that would come to have a huge effect on the way the nation’s cultural traditions and rites were experienced and performed from then on.

Text from the Google Books website

Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. The MIT Press & The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999

This is the most comprehensive publication ever produced on the work of American artist Barbara Kruger. Kruger, one of the most influential artists of the last three decades, uses pictures and words through a wide variety of media and sites to raise issues of power, sexuality, and representation. Her works include photographic prints on paper and vinyl, etched metal plates, sculpture, video, installations, billboards, posters, magazine and book covers, T-shirts, shopping bags, postcards, and newspaper op-ed pieces.

This book serves as the catalog for the first major one-person exhibition of Kruger’s work to be mounted in the United States. The book, designed by Lorraine Wild in collaboration with the artist, contains texts by Rosalyn Deutsche, Katherine Dieckmann, Ann Goldstein, Steven Heller, Gary Indiana, Carol Squiers, and Lynne Tillman on subjects associated with Kruger’s work, including photography, graphic design, public space, power, and representation, as well as an extensive exhibition history, bibliography, and checklist of the exhibition. The cover features a new piece by Kruger, entitled Thinking of You, created especially for the catalog.

Text from the Amazon website

Graciela Iturbide. Juchitán de las Mujeres. Mexico: Ediciones Toledo, 1991

In 1979 Graciela Iturbide took a series of photographs of the Zapotec culture, published as Juchitán de la mujeres. This is certainly the best known of all her works. It is the result of ten years of work, numerous trips to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and a prolonged experience of living among its inhabitants. None of the subjects of these photographs was captured candidly; all were carefully posed.

Photobook history is a relatively recent area of study, with one of the first “book-on-books” anthologies published in 1999 with the release of Fotografía Pública / Photography in Print 1919-1939, a catalogue associated with an exhibition of the same title at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Over the past two decades, a virtual cottage industry of books-on-photobooks has emerged, documenting photographically illustrated books based on geography or around a theme. Photobooks by women are in short supply in most of these anthologies, which is why 10×10 Photobooks launched the How We See: Photobooks by Women touring reading room and associated publication in 2018. Focusing on contemporary photobooks by women from 2000 to 2018, the project was the first step in 10×10 Photobooks’ ongoing interest in reassessing photobook history as it relates to women. Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past photobook anthologies, and those included are already quite well known.

As a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding, the 10×10 Photobooks team frequently discusses how photobook history was – and continues to be – written from a skewed perspective and that a “new” history needs to emerge. Early in our discussions, we recognised photobook history as needing to be “rewritten,” but this implied we accepted the partial history already in existence, which we did not. Instead, we concluded that photobook history needs to be “unwritten,” as the existing history is riddled with omissions. What is left out is not by mistake – it indicates bias and incomplete research by the current gatekeepers. To present a more inclusive and diverse vision, we must collectively address these omissions.

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999, a touring reading room accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in some of the underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. We say “some photobooks” because we are keenly aware that much work is still required, and we have only opened the door a crack. In several cases, particularly for books done before 1900 in regions other than North America and Europe or by women of colour, we heard about an artist who may have produced a photographically illustrated book or album, but we were unable to find any further documentation other than a brief mention before the trail went cold. Other impediments emerged among the cohort of women who collaborated with their husbands. Many of their collaborative books are credited only with their husbands’ names, and their contributions, if mentioned at all, are included as footnotes. In some cases, women authors marked their works with a gender-neutral signature that used only their studio name or first initial and last name. In addition, our initial research was impeded by the standard definition of a photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher, or a trade publisher.

We found that we had to widen the frame to include individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, maquettes, zines, and artists’ books in order to be more inclusive. This wider frame necessitated redefining a photobook author to incorporate those who may not call themselves a photographer or artist but who nonetheless assembled a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others. Funding was another limitation. Many women photographers who actively exhibited their work either lacked the personal resources to produce a book or could not find anyone willing to underwrite such a venture.

This iteration of the What They Saw reading room includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are kept in the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. We begin with Anna Atkins, a British botanist, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook. Her simple desire to share images of her algae specimens ushered in a new art form that presents photography in the book format. In the following years, women such as Isabel Agnes Cowper, the Official Museum Photographer at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books. Until recently, her name was forgotten, as none of the South Kensington Museum publications credit her as the photographer.

In the early twentieth-century, women authors of photobooks gained some visibility. Fine-art photographer Germaine Krull published numerous books that approached photography from a creative and inventive perspective. Margaret Bourke-White emerged as a well-regarded photojournalist who traveled worldwide photographing for Fortune and Life magazines and producing countless books. In the 1930s, in Russia, Varvara Stepanova collaborated with her husband, Aleksandr Rodchenko, to create books filled with experimental photomontages. As the century progressed, women in other parts of the world also found their voices in photobooks. African American anthropologist Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson traveled to Uganda and South Africa and published African Journey in 1945, one of the earliest books written on Africa by a female scholar of color. In Mexico in 1951, Lola Álvarez Bravo contributed photographs to Acapulco en el sueño, a bold publication created to attract tourism to Acapulco. A few years later, Fina Gómez Revenga, a Venezuelan photographer, worked in Paris with the famed French printing house Draeger Frères to illustrate the poems of Surrealist poet Lise Deharme.

With the arrival of the 1960s, women emerged from the sidelines and began to produce widely distributed, often socially focused, photobooks. A New York City street photographer, Helen Levitt, published A Way of Seeing in 1965, while Carla Cerati collaborated on Morire di classe in 1969, a visually compelling commentary on the appalling conditions in Italian psychiatric hospitals. With the women’s movement finding its full voice in the 1970s, women photographers took center stage in the last three decades of the twentieth-century, releasing a steady flow of photobooks. A year after her death in 1971, Aperture published Diane Arbus’s monograph, a photobook that continues to influence generations of photographers. Barbara Brändli, a Swiss immigrant to Venezuela, documents the energy and rapid transformations of Caracas, while activist-photographer JEB (Joan E. Biren) toured the United States, capturing lesbian pride events. In South Africa, Lesley Lawson, a member of the Afrapix photo agency, combined interviews and her photographs to reveal the working conditions of Black women in Johannesburg. Cameroonian Angèle Etoundi Essamba shares the beauty and spirit of Black women in Passion (1989), while American Donna Ferrato unflinchingly explores domestic violence in Living with the Enemy (1991), and Nan Goldin exposes violent love and loss in her personal narrative, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). In books centered on cultural explorations, Wang Hsin photographs the fading traditions of Lanyu (Orchid Island) off the coast of Taiwan, Cristina García Rodero records religious festivals and rituals in her native Spain, and Ketaki Sheth documents twins and triplets in the Indian Gujarati community.

In reaching out to the far corners of the world, we uncovered numerous forgotten books, but many remain undiscovered. For example, we learned about a nineteenth-century woman in Iran who kept her husband’s diary and most probably added her photographs to the volume, but no visual documentation of this diary could be found. We also discovered several books that featured the participation of women in collaboration with male photographers where the women’s contributions were ambiguous. There were several “leads” of this nature, and we decided that leaving them out would be a missed opportunity. Therefore, in the associated anthology, we have included a “timeline” that presents several historically significant publishing, magazine, small press, photography, and feminist events that may or may not have produced a photobook, but have undoubtedly influenced its history. To support further exploration of these unresolved “leads,” 10×10 Photobooks has launched a research grant program to encourage scholarship on underexplored topics in photobook history.

From its inception, What They Saw has sought to include a diverse group of photographically illustrated publications by women. For photobook history to become more inclusive, it requires everyone (men, women, nonbinary, white, Black, Asian, African, Latinx, Indigenous, Western, Eastern, etc.) to contribute. We see this reading room of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks as a necessary step in the unwriting of the current photobook history and a rewriting of a photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive. We invite future researchers to take the next steps to explore further women and other marginalised people’s historical impact in the realm of photobooks and to expand upon the books we present in this reading room and its associated anthology.

Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Installation view of the exhibition 'What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999' at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Installation views of the exhibition What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Sabatini Building
Santa Isabel, 52
Nouvel Building
Ronda de Atocha (with plaza del Emperador Carlos V)
28012 Madrid
Phone: (34) 91 774 10 00

Opening hours:
Monday 10.00am – 9.00pm
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday – Saturday 10.00am – 9.00pm
Sunday 12.30am – 2.30pm

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía website

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Exhibition: ‘Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle’ at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

“Weegee’s photographs are an examination of a body (an autopsy) both external and internal.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 30th January – 19th May, 2024

Exhibition curator: Clément Chéroux, director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera' 1950 from the exhibition 'Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle' at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, January - May, 2024

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera
1950
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Collection Friedsam

To see ourselves as others see us

This exhibition attempts to reconcile the two sides of the work of American photographer Weegee (Arthur Felig, 1899-1968) – “First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948-1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his life” – by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is a critically coherent investigation into the omnipresence of the spectacle in modern society.

The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle:

“Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation… The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes, “rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.””1

While both halves of Weegee’s photographic work picture the spectacle, I believe that they are a different but connected order of being. Like yin and yang, Weegee’s scenes of chaos “Murder is my business” and “photo-caricatures” emerge from the same psyche but image equal opposites which both repel, attract and complement each other.

Weegee’s photographs which tell stories for the New York press are external representations or emanations captured from the world around us, whereas his later photo-caricatures of public personalities feel to me to be internalised, dream-like representations of his own feelings towards the celebrity people he observed and photographed as much as they are offer insights into their personality.2 Thus, Weegee’s photographs are an examination of a body (an autopsy) both external and internal.

Personally I don’t think that it is necessary to reconcile both halves of Weegee’s work. The bodies exist for what they are: perceptive insights into the existence and spirit of the world and the human race, spec(tac)ular images that mirror a social relation among people which don’t necessarily have to be conflated one with the other.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Debord, Guy (1994)[1967] The Society of the Spectacle, translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books), p. 4 quoted in “The Society of the Spectacle,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 10/05/2024

2/ “external exaggeration high-lights internal character and distortion offers surprising insights into personality”
“How your TV heroes look to Weegee’s magic camera” in Look magazine

Many thank to the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The curious […], they’re always in a hurry […], but they still find the time to stop and look.

Weegee

“Crime was my oyster,” Weegee wrote in his 1961 memoir, Weegee by Weegee. “I was friend and confidant to them all. The bookies, madams, gamblers, call girls, pimps, con men, burglars and jewel fencers.” … Weegee’s photos from the 1930s and ’40s defined Manhattan as a film noir nightscape of gangsters, bums, slumming swells and tenement dwellers.”

John Strausbaugh. “Crime Was Weegee’s Oyster,” on The New York Times website June 20, 2008 [Online] Cited 13/04/2024

“Weegee is not the first nor the only person to have taken interest in people watching. Not long before him, in 1937, Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed spectators at the Coronation of George VI for Ce Soir. And a quarter century prior, in 1912, Eugène Atget photographed passers-by observing a solar eclipse at Place de la Bastille. But Weegee took the idea even further. He systematised it. He made it a principle he never shied from applying at the first opportunity. It’s a way of placing things at a distance, pushing the viewers to ask themselves about the manner in which they look, making them aware of the fact that they themselves, like the people watching in the photo, are in a voyeuristic position. It’s also a critique of how American society transforms news into spectacle.”

Clément Chéroux

The specular image, then, is accompanied by anxiety-anxiety that it will “soon dissolve like a cloud.” It is the nature of visions (apparitions) to dissolve before our very eyes without disclosing their secrets, just as dream-images are quickly forgotten upon awakening.

Craig Owens. “Posing,” in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985, p. 12

There’s still a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948-1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. This project seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.

The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, coinciding with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators or other photographers in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular, its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds, and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.

Curator Clément Chéroux

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at left, Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera (1950, above); at second left, “Chevrolet”. Weegee in front of his typewriter, installed in the trunk of a 1938 Chevrolet, New York (c. 1943, below); at third left bottom, Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York (c. 1939, below); at fourth left, Self-portrait (1950,below); at fifth left, Frank Pape, Arrested for Homicide (1944, below); at sixth left, Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces (1942, below); and at eighth left, Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver) (1939, below)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) '"Chevrolet". Weegee in front of his typewriter, installed in the trunk of a 1938 Chevrolet, New York' c. 1943 from the exhibition 'Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle' at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, January - May, 2024

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
“Chevrolet”. Weegee in front of his typewriter, installed in the trunk of a 1938 Chevrolet, New York
c. 1943
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York / Collection Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Weegee Himself: “I have always been a doer and not a thinker.” Weegee enjoyed putting himself in front of the camera, re-enacting circumstances he was confronted with in his daily work. In the name of pedagogy, and probably a little out of narcissism and self-advertisement, he took pictures of himself writing captions for his photographs in the back of his car, in police wagons and behind bars, never without his camera.

Wall text from the exhibition

Unidentified photographer
Untitled [Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York]
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Self-portrait
1950
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee Tells How

Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, was a New York city freelance news photographer from the 1930s to the 1950s. Here he talks about his career and gives advice to those wanting to become news photographers.

Weegee (American, born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899 - 1968 New York) 'Frank Pape, Arrested for Homicide' 1944

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Frank Pape, Arrested for Homicide
1944
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces
1942
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver)
1939
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at second left, Weegee’s Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver) (1939, above); and at top right, a magazine print of his photograph Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York] (1941, below)

Off Road: “Sudden death for one… sudden shock for the other.” American culture is fascinated by twisted metal. In the 19th century, a railroad company staged public collisions between locomotives destined for the junkyard. Weegee photographed many traffic accidents introducing the “car crash” genre, later adopted by other figures, such as Andy Warhol, J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, etc.

Wall text from the exhibition

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York]
1941
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at right, Weegee’s photograph Henry Rosen (left) and Harvey Stemmer (centre) cover their faces with handkerchiefs after their arrest for bribery and conspiracy to fix a US college basketball match (25 January 1945)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Holiday Accident in the Bronx
1941
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Exhibition

How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.

The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, which coincides with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators, or other photographers, in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.

With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.

Biography

Weegee was born Usher Fellig on June 12, 1899, to a Jewish family in Zolochiv, a small town in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in western Ukraine. At 11 years old, he joined his father who’d emigrated to the United States. At the immigration station Ellis Island, he became Arthur Fellig. Living in the slums of the Lower East Side, he left school at 14 to earn money to support his family. After working in different professions, he became a traveling photographer, worked for photographers Duckett & Adler, then in the lab of ACME Newspictures agency.

Starting in 1935, he was self-employed as photo-reporter. Towards 1937, he began using the pseudonym Weegee, and around 1941, started marking the backs of his prints with a stamp in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Weegee the Famous.” For 10 years, connected to Police radio, he took photographs, mainly at night, of crime, arrests, fires, accidents and other news items. Though the photographer most certainly had connections within the Police, without whom his work would not have been possible, he also frequented left-wing circles. He was very close to the Photo League, a group of independent photographers who firmly believed in emancipation through the image and fought for social justice. In 1945, he published his best photographs in a book entitled Naked City, which met with great success both in its reception and sales.

In the spring of 1948, he moved to Hollywood to work in cinema as a technical advisor, sometimes as an actor. He photographed the endless party and developed different photographic techniques used to create his caricatures of celebrities. In December of 1951, after four years on the West Coast, he returned to New York with no intention of resuming his former practice. Up until his death on December 26, 1968, the majority of his work involved taking advantage of his notoriety to publish other books, go on tour, and promote his photo-caricatures in newspapers.

Text from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Installation view of the exhibition 'Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle' at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at centre, 'Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn' (1940)

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at left, Performer Jimmy Armstrong (c. 1943, below); at second left, Ladies keep their money in their stockings… (1944, below); and at centre, Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn (1940, below)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Performer Jimmy Armstrong
c. 1943
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Ladies keep their money in their stockings…
1944
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

“There is no cover charge nor cigarette girl, and a vending machine dispenses cigarettes. Neither is there a hat check girl. Patrons prefer to dance with their hats and coats on. But there is a lively floor show… the only saloon in the Bowery with a cabaret license.”

Weegee

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn
1940
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Courtesy Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Sleeping at the Circus, Madison Square Garden, New York
1943
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at centre left, Opening night at the Metropolitan Opera (1943); In the Lobby at the Metropolitan Opera, Opening Night (1943); and at centre right, The Critic (1943, below)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
The Critic
November 22, 1942
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Collection Friedsam

Even his most popular photograph was a set-up, says Wallis: “The Critic, which was taken in 1943, was surely staged and shows the wealthy Mrs George Washington Cavanaugh and Lady Decies arriving at the opera, greeted by a staggering drunk who seems to be mocking them and who Weegee reportedly rounded up at Sammy’s bar on the Bowery.

“This picture is a good example of how Weegee previsualized a scene, developed a punchy satirical narrative, and staged the picture. The Critic was widely reproduced at the time, and even shown at the Museum of Modern Art.”

Boo Paterson. “Big guns to big top: Weegee at circus,” on the Boo York City website [Online] Cited 13/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

In Weegee’s day similar culture clashes happened at Sammy’s Bowery Follies (267 Bowery, between East Houston and Stanton Streets), which from 1934 to 1970 attracted what The New York Times once described as a mixed crowd of “drunks and swells, drifters and celebrities, the rich and the forgotten.” …

Among the regulars, he wrote in his 1945 book, “Naked City,” was a woman they called Pruneface and a midget who walked the streets dressed as a penguin to promote cigarettes. When the midget got drunk, Weegee wrote, he “offered to fight any man his size in the house.”

Weegee held two book parties there. At the photography center Mr. George showed me silent-film footage taken in 1946 at the party for Weegee’s second book, “Weegee’s People.” Pretty uptown blondes and dowagers in pearls mingle with toothless crones and panhandlers, as models parade in their foundation garments, and a man with a flea circus puts his tiny performers through their paces.

John Strausbaugh. “Crime Was Weegee’s Oyster,” on The New York Times website June 20, 2008 [Online] Cited 13/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Installation view of the exhibition 'Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle' at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing Weegee's photographs in magazine layouts

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing his photographs in magazine layouts

“Il Fotografo cattivo”, Epoca, Vol. XIII, No. 636, December 1962
© International Center of Photography. Collection privée Paris

Weegee Looks At Dali

Weegee spoofs
the
new spring hats

Custom milliners often go to extremes. This spring, the have outdone themselves by creating 1957 version of the most exaggerated hats of the last fifty years. Here again are the flapper cloche, the slouch had Garbo wore in the ’30’s, the heavy veiling of the early 1900’s, the turban of the World War I era, the perennial mad profusion of fruit and flowers. Look had Michael A. Vaccaro photograph examples of these hats as they really are. Then camera artist Weegee turned out satirical prints, with these startling results.

Look magazine 1957

"How your TV heroes look to Weegee's magic camera" in Look magazine

WAIT. Don’t reach for a drink. Don’t reach for your glasses. And don’t – please don’t – write us an indignant letter. What you think you see on these pages is there, all right. It’s the work of a zany photographer named Weegee (few know his first name) who has a wicked sense of caricature and an outrageous sense of humor.

The subjects were not photographed under water. Wedge simply prints his negatives through bubbles glass, wire screens, press, kaleidoscopes or whatever gives him the characterization he is after. It’s a sort of three-way-stretch technique in which Weegee is assisted by photographic color expert Mike Lavelle.

The results of Weegee’s impudent manipulation of reality are both perceptive and astonishing: Faces take on a certain ga-ga verity; external exaggeration high-lights internal character and distortion offers surprising insights into personality. Weegee calls this “Photo-Caricature.” There was a man who might have enjoyed revelations like these. His name was Bobbie Burns and he wrote in one of his poems: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us.”

“How your TV heroes look to Weegee’s magic camera” in Look magazine

“”Modern Women Aren’t Human!’ … If You Don’t Believe It … This Man Tells Why” in the National Enquirer, 1967

There’s a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. One side includes his sensational photography printed in North American tabloids: corpses of gangsters lying in pools of their own blood, bodies trapped in battered vehicles, kingpins looking sinister behind the bars of prison wagons, dilapidated slums consumed by fire, and other harrowing documents on the lives of the underprivileged in New York from 1935 to 1945. Then come the festive photographs – glamorous parties, performances by entertainers, jubilant crowds, openings and premieres – to which we must add a vast array of portraits of public figures that Weegee delighted in distorting using a rich palette of tricks between 1948 and 1951, a practice he pursued until the end of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.

With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.

Curator Clément Chéroux

Press release from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Their First Murder
c. 1936
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Drowning victim, Coney Island
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York / Collection Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Mrs Bernice Lythcott and her son Leonard looking through a window broken by stones thrown by thugs, Harlem, New York
October 18, 1943
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Tenement sleeping during heat spell, Lower East Side, New York]
May 23, 1941
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Son of a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, Weegee knew the slums, like those children seeking coolness on the fire escape ladder. He produced “real social documents” on the living conditions of the poor.

“In Central Park the lawns were crowded before darkness with family groups,” reported the July 10, 1936 New York Times; the temperature had reached an astounding 106 degrees the day before. “On the Lower East Side traffic was seriously impeded as small armies of persons emerged from tenement houses with chairs, boxes and even beds which they set up in the streets.”

And from the Times on August 4, 1938, when the mercury hit 93 degrees:

“More than 3,000 persons slept on the sand at Coney Island and Brighton Beach to escape the heat last night, the police estimated. Ten additional patrolmen were assigned to the area to prevent molestation of the sleepers, many of whom brought blankets and sheets.”

Anonymous. “How New Yorkers survived hot summer nights,” on the Ephemeral New York website Nd [Online] Cited 14/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]
1947
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Simply adding boiling water
1943
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Lovers at the Palace Theater
c. 1953
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Anthony Esposito, Booked on Suspicion of Killing a Policeman
1941
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris

At noon Fifth Avenue was crowded. Alfred Klausman, middle-aged office manager of a linen firm, walked across the street from his office to the bank on the corner and drew the weekly pay roll: $649.

As the genial, round-faced Klausman walked back, two men silently threaded through the crowd behind him, two strange, grey-coated creatures washed up from the depths of New York City’s criminal world. One was Anthony Esposito, 35, a long-nosed, horse-faced hoodlum who had been in & out of New York’s prisons and reformatories for 16 years, had once been deported to Italy and sneaked back in. His brother William, 29, had robbed drunks, snatched pocketbooks, done a seven-year stretch in Sing Sing. Their father had served time for forgery. Their brother was in Clinton Prison, Dannemora, N. Y. for parole violation. Their lives had been spent in squalor, petty crime, prison and torpid, hard-eyed loafing.

Klausman entered the elevator to his office. The Esposito brothers stepped in after him. Between the second and third floors they drew revolvers from their overcoat pockets, ordered the operator to stop, face the door. He heard Klausman cry “No! No! No!” – then one of the gunmen put his revolver to Klausman’s head and pulled the trigger.

They ordered the operator to take the elevator down, ducked out into the street, disappeared into B. Altman’s big department store.

Out into the street the operator yelled “Holdup! Murder!” The cry spread. Two patrolmen raced from the corner, into the store, a long way behind.

Down the crowded aisles of the store darted the Espositos, through the block-long building. At the far entrance they climbed into a cab, put a gun at the driver’s head. But Madison Avenue was jammed with traffic; they were trapped. “Get going. Make it fast. Get moving or we’ll kill you.” Back in the store panic was spreading as police with drawn revolvers moved down the aisles shouting, “Get down!” The cab stalled behind a bus. Like men leaping over a cliff, the brothers jumped out into the traffic. At sight of the two running men, waving revolvers, people flattened themselves against the buildings or ducked to the sidewalk. A taxi driver ran to Patrolman Edward Maher, directing traffic on the corner, yelled “Stick-up!” and pointed at the fleeing men. Maher raced after them, only 20 feet behind, afraid to shoot into the crowd. Motorists left their cars and joined the chase. Maher saw a clear space, shot twice, and William Esposito staggered sideways, fell face downward, one arm outstretched, one twisted under him, apparently dead.

A little crowd collected around him. Patrolman Maher held the gunman by the overcoat, started to turn him over, turned to warn the crowd away. “Back up, please,” he said, “someone’s liable to get hurt.” As he rolled William over, the gunman’s .38 came up. William Esposito pulled the trigger and Patrolman Maher slumped over, dead.

The crowd surged back, then forward. A taxi driver named Leonard Weisberg leaped on the prone gunman. He grabbed for the revolver, missed. Esposito jerked it back a few inches, fired again. Weisberg, clutching his throat, gasping for breath, fell to the sidewalk.

Esposito, still lying down, drew another gun from his overcoat pocket. Two men leaped on him. Then the crowd closed in, kicking and beating.

Anthony ran on when his brother fell. Behind him the police fired into the air. He shot a few times, wildly, apparently to clear crowds out of his way on Fifth Avenue. He ducked into Woolworth’s, bowling over the women shoppers. He plunged to the basement, put away his guns, walked up again to hide in the crowd – and met six policemen at the head of the stairs, went down with revolver butts thudding on his skull.

The Espositos went to the hospital, to the lineup, to indictment for murder. Leonard Weisberg, recovering from his throat wound, was promised a new cab of his own, and won a hero’s praise. The Nazi press gleefully played up the crime as evidence of democratic depravity.

Anonymous. “National Affairs: SLAUGHTER ON FIFTH AVENUE,” in TIME Monday, Jan. 27, 1941 on the TIME website [Online] Cited 14/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Weegee (American, born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899 - 1968 New York) '[Outline of a Murder Victim]' 1942

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899 – 1968 New York)
[Outline of a Murder Victim]
1942
Gelatin silver print
33.9 x 27.4cm (13 3/6 x 10 13/16 in.)
Gift of Bruce A. Kirstein, in memory of Marc S. Kirstein, 1978
© Weegee / International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Harry Maxwell shot in a car
1941
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
“Hopper’s Topper” Hedda Hopper Hollywood
c. 1948
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Marilyn Monroe, Distortion
c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York / Friedsam Collection, Frankfurt am Main

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Charlie Chaplin, Distortion
1950
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Self-Portrait
1963
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (author)
Textual, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (editor)
January, 2024 (release)
ISBN 9782845979901
208 pages
55 euros

This book accompanies the exhibition Weegee, Autopsie du Spectacle presented from January 30, 2024 to May 19, 2024 at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.

There is a Weegee conundrum. His photographs fall into two distinct categories. On the one hand, there are his images of news items taken in New York during the 1940s, in a documentary, direct and raw approach. And on the other, photographs of starlets, politicians and other socialites taken in Hollywood in the following decade, for which he willingly resorted with special effects. Declaring himself “bewitched by the mystery of the murders,” Weegee stood out for his ability to arrive promptly at the crime scene or to wait for the salad baskets to arrive on the steps of the police stations to capture the defendants on the spot. Nevertheless, he strives to bring onlookers, often from the working classes, into his framework, or even to be interested only in them. Made up of around a hundred photographs – the best known, but also many images never highlighted – this book shows the coherence of Weegee’s work based on a radical and incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle, borrowing from an unexpected empathy towards the disadvantaged.

Weegee (1899-1968) was an American photojournalist known for his images of a New York marked by crime. In 1941, New York’s Photo League dedicated an exhibition to him which was followed by that of MoMA in 1943. He published his first book Naked City in 1945 and his autobiography Weegee by Weegee in 1961.

Hardcover
20 x 26cm
Texts by Isabelle Bonnet, David Campany,
Clément Chéroux and Cynthia Young.
Texts in French

Translated from the French by Google Translate from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 7pm
Closed Mondays

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation website

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Exhibition: ‘Consuelo Kanaga. Catch the Spirit’ at the KBr Photography Center KBr Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona

“Kanaga is a story teller. Her photographs are strongly modernist, realist compositions.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 15th February – 12th May, 2024

Curator: Drew Sawyer

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Self-portrait
Nd
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

What have you got to say?

We must acknowledge the importance of Consuelo Kanaga, a strong, compassionate human being, an under recognised photographer. What a trailblazer for future female and male photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, Berenice Abbott and Milton Rogovin.

Kanaga is a story teller. Her photographs are strongly modernist, realist compositions. The portraits are direct and revealing, no external flourishes necessary in capturing the essence of the person; her landscapes, dark and brooding atmospheric iterations of land and spirit.

Consuelo Kanaga:

~ one of the pioneers of modern American photography

~ one of the first women photojournalists on staff at a newspaper (1918)

~ a great supporter and a confidant for Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Tina Modotti, and Eiko Yamazawa, among many others

~ passionate about social justice … social marginalisation, poverty, racial harassment, inequality… especially in relation to the African-American population in the United States.

~ maintained a close relationship with avant-garde circles, in San Francisco with the f.64 Group and in New York with the Photo League

~ focused on marginal day to day and political motifs, including workers, African Americans, objects, and buildings that were often in a state of disrepair

~ interested in worker’s rights and the worker movement

~ became very active in civil rights and took part in and photographed many demonstrations and marches in the 1960s

Whatever type of photograph Kanaga took (and there are many) her photographs are always perceptive = having or showing sensitive insight.

The sensitivity of Hands (1930, below); the tired eyes and clasped hands of the Widow Watson (1922-1924 below) contrasting with the mannerist hands of the boy staring off camera; the stoicism of the mother in Tree of Life (1950, below) with her children’s faces in deep shadow coupled with the subconscious symbology of the unyielding, white brick wall behind; and the dark mesa of Landscape Near Taos, New Mexico (Nd, below) hello Georgia O’Keeffe … all reflect Kanaga’s superb handling of shadow and light, of energy and spirit.

“Her body of work, though comparatively small, is consistently exceptional.”1

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Barbara Head Millstein. “A Pioneer of Realism,” in The New York Times October 9, 1993 on the New York Times website [Online] Cited 04/05/2024

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

“One of America’s most transcendent yet, surprisingly, least-known photographers.”

Barbara Head Millstein and Sarah M. Lowe (1992). Consuelo Kanaga, An American Photographer. Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. 21-40.

“I could have done lots more, put in much more work and developed more pictures, but I had also a desire to say what I felt about life. Simple things like a little picture in the window or the corner of the studio or an old stove in the kitchen have always been fascinating to me. They are very much alive, these flowers and grasses with the dew on them. Stieglitz always said, “What have you got to say?” I think in a few small cases I’ve said a few things, expressed how I felt, trying to show the horror of poverty or the beauty of black people. I think that in photography what you’ve done is what you’ve had to say. In everything this has been the message of my life. A simple supper, being with someone you love, seeing a deer come around to eat or drink at the barn – I like things like that. If I could make one true, quiet photograph, I would much prefer it to having a lot of answers.”

Margaretta K. Mitchell (1979). Recollections: Ten Women of Photography. NY: Viking Press. pp. 158–160.

Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit is the first exhibition in Europe to present a comprehensive retrospective of the entire career of the American Consuelo Kanaga (Astoria, Oregon, 1894 – Yorktown Heights, New York, 1978). The exhibition covers six decades of her professional dedication to photography.

Passionate about social justice, Kanaga was more interested in people and their problems than in photography: social marginalisation, poverty, racial harassment, inequality…, especially in relation to the African-American population in the United States.

Consuelo Kanaga was one of the few women who became a professional photojournalist, and as early as the 1910s in the United States. She was also one of the few who maintained a close relationship with avant-garde circles, both in San Francisco and in New York, and whose friendship and professional support opened the way for important women photographers such as Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, among others.

Despite the fame she achieved during her lifetime, her work is still surprisingly little known. This exhibition aims to make a conclusive contribution to the recognition that Kanaga’s work undoubtedly deserves.

Exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Fire, New York
1922
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled (Downtown New York)
1922-1924
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
1920s
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
c. 1925
Toned gelatin silver print with graphite
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
c. 1928
Gelatin silver print, printed 2023
4 x 5 in. (10.2 x 12.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Louise Dahl-Wolfe (American, 1895-1989)

Louise Emma Augusta Dahl-Wolfe (November 19, 1895 – December 11, 1989) was an American photographer. She is known primarily for her work for Harper’s Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland. At Harper’s Bazaar she pioneered a new standard in colour photography. …

Among the celebrated fashion photographers of the 20th century, Louise Dahl-Wolfe was an innovator and influencer who significantly contributed to the fashion world. She was most widely known for her work with Harper’s Bazaar. Dahl-Wolfe was considered a pioneer of the ‘female gaze’ in the fashion industry and credited for creating a new image of strong, independent American women during World War II.

From 1943, Dahl-Wolfe introduced the “New American Look” to fashion photography, which Vicki Goldberg describes as “all clean hair, glowing skin and a figure both lithe and strong”. Dahl-Wolfe was known for taking photographs outdoors, with natural light in distant locations from South America to Africa in what became known as “environmental” fashion photography. The outdoor settings helped to evoke “a mood of freedom and optimism” associated with women’s liberation. Her photographs brought a new naturalism to fashion photography which had previously been dominated by a stiff and haughty “European” or “Germanic” studio style. Dahl-Wolfe described it as “that heavy, heavy look, with everybody looking very clumsy”. Her methodology in using natural sunlight and shooting outdoors became the industry standard even now.

Her models appear to pose candidly, almost as if Dahl-Wolfe had just walked in on them. In fact the poses are highly, constructed with an “almost abstract formal perfection” which she credited partly to the influence of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Dahl-Wolfe innovatively used colour in photography and mainly concerned with the qualities of natural lighting, composition, and balance. Compared to other photographers at the time who were using red undertones, Dahl-Wolfe opted for cooler hues and also corrected her own proofs, with one example of her pulling proofs repeatedly to change a sofa’s colour from green to a dark magenta.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
House Plant
1930
Bromide print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Kenneth Spencer
1933
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Kenneth Spencer (25 April 1913 – 25 February 1964), was an American operatic singer and actor. Spencer starred in a few Broadway musicals and musical films in the United States during the 1940s. Frustrated with the racial prejudice he experienced in the United States as a black man, Spencer moved to West Germany in 1950 where he had a successful singing career. He also appeared in a number of German films. His career was cut short when he died in the crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 304.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Clapboard Schoolhouse
1930s
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

A Pioneer of Realism

Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978) was one of America’s most important photographers. Yet largely because she disdained wealth, fame and self-promotion, her transcendent images have never received the acclaim they deserve. The photographs on this page appear in the first major retrospective of her work, “Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer,” which will open Friday at the Brooklyn Museum.

Born in Astoria, Ore., Kanaga was hired in 1915 as a reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle but quickly became more interested in the work of the paper’s photographers. She took a job in the darkroom and was eventually named a staff photographer.

Inspired by the images in Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine, Camera Work, she left the newspaper and moved to New York in 1922. She soon became closely associated with such photographers as Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Louise Dahl. In 1932, Miss Kanaga was represented in the landmark “f.64” exhibition in San Francisco, the first major photography show that stressed realism over romanticism.

Her talent was rooted in an almost mystical belief that photography was a sacred trust – she felt obligated to capture the true essence of her subject. Her drive to fulfill this trust helped Kanaga, who was white, to understand the lives of blacks and to produce some of the most moving works ever done in African-American portraiture. She was equally talented in still-life and landscape photography, and her feeling for urban architecture was stimulated by her involvement with the socially committed New York Photo League during the 1930’s.

She continued to work into her 70’s, despite suffering from emphysema and cancer, which were probably caused by the chemicals used in creating her prints. Her body of work, though comparatively small, is consistently exceptional. Consuelo Kanaga died virtually unknown in 1978, but her talent endures.

Barbara Head Millstein. “A Pioneer of Realism,” in The New York Times October 9, 1993 on the New York Times website [Online] Cited 04/05/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Sargent Johnson
1934
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Sargent Claude Johnson (November 7, 1888 – October 10, 1967) was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation. He was known for Abstract Figurative and Early Modern styles. He was a painter, potter, ceramicist, printmaker, graphic artist, sculptor, and carver. He worked with a variety of media, including ceramics, clay, oil, stone, terra-cotta, watercolour, and wood.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
1930s
Toned gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Horse’s Eye
1930s
Gelatin silver print
4 x 3 1/2 in. (10.2 x 8.9cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
The Bowery
1935
Toned gelatin silver print
22 13/16 x 16 13/16 x 1 1/2 in. (57.9 x 42.7 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Angelo Herndon
1936
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Angelo Herndon (American, 1913-1997)

Angelo Braxton Herndon (May 6, 1913 – December 9, 1997) was an African-American labor organiser arrested and convicted of insurrection after attempting to organise black and white industrial workers in 1932 in Atlanta, Georgia. The prosecution case rested heavily on Herndon’s possession of “communist literature”, which police found in his hotel room.

Herndon was defended by the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party of America, which hired two young local attorneys, Benjamin J. Davis Jr. and John H. Geer, and provided guidance. Davis later became prominent in leftist circles. Over a five-year period, Herndon’s case twice reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that Georgia’s insurrection law was unconstitutional, as it violated First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly. Herndon became nationally prominent because of his case, and Southern justice was under review. By the end of the 1940s he left the Communist Party, moved to the Midwest, and lived there quietly.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
1936
Gelatin silver print, printed 2023
4 x 5 in. (10.2 x 12.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Two Women, Harlem
c. 1938
Toned gelatin silver print
22 13/16 x 16 13/16 x 1 1/2 in. (57.9 x 42.7 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled (New York)
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

For the first time in Spain and Europe, Consuelo Kanaga. Catch the Spirit features the work of this North American photographer spanning her entire career. Kanaga (1894-1978) is considered today a key figure in the history of contemporary photography, both for her contribution toward the recognition of women in this field and for the intensity with which her images confront the spectator with the great social issues of our time, particularly the conditions of African Americans in the United States.

The exhibition

Consuelo Kanaga. Catch the Spirit features six decades of work by this key figure in the history of modern Photography. With this new project, Fundación MAPFRE renews its commitment to promote the work of women photographers. On this occasion, despite having garnered much notoriety in life, the artist’s work is today surprisingly little known. This exhibition aims to contribute conclusively toward the recognition that Kanaga’s oeuvre undoubtedly deserves.

Consuelo Kanaga (Astoria, Oregon, 1894 – Yorktown Heights, New York, 1978) was truly passionate about social justice. She was most interested in people and issues such as marginalisation, poverty, racial harassment, and inequality, particularly in relation to African Americans in the United States. These were some of the fundamental matters she addressed through her work. Likewise, she also defended the formal and poetic possibilities of photography as an art form.

An unconventional figure, Kanaga was able to become a professional photojournalist in the United States as early as the 1910s. She was also one of the few women involved in the avant-garde circles both in San Francisco with the f.64 Group and in New York with the Photo League, whose friendship and professional support paved the way for other important women photographers. However, gender inequalities and social conventions limited her ability to dedicate herself completely to her artistic work. Kanaga worked full time jobs during many years and was only able to practice her art on weekends. She repeatedly put her career on hold for her partners; these are but a few reasons why her work is not more recognised today.

Organised around the Brooklyn Museum’s collection – the institution that has preserved the artist’s archive – the exhibition features nearly 180 photographs and a wide range of documentary material; contextualising Consuelo Kanaga’s work while focusing on some of her most iconic images and her portrayal of African American life in the 1930s through her photography.

Exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Drew Sawyer, former Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum.

Keys

New Negro Movement

From the late 19th century, magazines and novels published by black men and women began to emerge as a response to the prevailing racism in cities such as San Francisco, Washington, and New York. This literary explosion was the precedent of what became known as the New Negro Movement, which developed in Harlem, New York, between 1920 and 1930; a movement that also lent its name to the most comprehensive anthology dedicated to said cultural renaissance, written by Alain Locke and considered at the time as “the fundaments of the black canon”. Not only did black artists flourish during this time, white artists were also encouraged to join this movement in defence of the freedom, rights, and equality of African Americans through culture.

Kanaga Photojournalist

In 1915, when she was only 21 years old, Consuelo Kanaga began to write for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she learned photography in order to illustrate her assignments: “For my articles requiring photographs, I went with the photographer to help make the pictures more interesting,” she later recalled. “The editor liked the results and encouraged me to learn photography, ‘from scratch’.” In 1918 she began to work as a photographer for the newspaper and was also hired by the Daily News the following year. Kanaga was undoubtedly one of the first women photojournalists on staff at a newspaper; as her friend Dorothea Lange remarked: “she was the first newspaper photographer I’d ever met. She was a person way ahead of her time.”

Kanaga and Women Photographers

Kanaga’s career was interwoven with a solid and broad circle of women photographers who she cultivated special relationships with over the course of five decades. She was a great supporter and a confidant for Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Tina Modotti, and Eiko Yamazawa, among many others, who she advised and shared her company and connections in the art world with. These women inspired her and likewise she was an inspiration for them. Despite the fact her accomplishments were as relevant as those of her colleagues, her oeuvre received much less attention. Kanaga spent little time self-promoting since she was always more interested in cultivating the affective bonds with the people closest to her.

Biography

Consuelo Delesseps Kanaga was born on May 15th, 1894, in Astoria, Oregon. The daughter of a lawyer who was interested in agriculture and of the writer Mathilda Carolina Hartwing, she helped her parents with tasks related to editing from a very young age, eventually leading her to study journalism. In 1915 she began writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. Three years later, she became staff photographer. Kanaga met Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange at the California Camera Club and became interested in artistic photography thanks to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work. Between 1927 and 1928 she travelled through Europe and northern Africa. Throughout her adult life, she lived both in San Francisco and New York, was married three times, and established her first portrait studio in San Francisco in 1932. She also participated in the f.64 Group and her images were exhibited for the first time at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1932. Kanaga participated in West Coast liberal politics. After returning from New York in 1935, she became associated with the Photo League in 1938. Edward Steichen defended her photography and included her work in the renowned exhibition The Family of Man in 1955. In 1974 Kanaga held a solo exhibition at the Lerner-Heller gallery in New York and in 1976 she produced a small yet relevant retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1977 she exhibited her work at Wave Hill in Riverdale, New York. She passed away at her Yorktown Heights (New York) home in 1978. One year later, Kanaga’s work was included in the exhibition Recollections: Ten Women of Photography at the ICP and was the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1992, where most of her work is currently preserved.

Press release from the Fundación MAPFRE

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
After Years of Hard Work (Tennessee)
1948
Toned gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Young Girl in Profile
1948
Toned gelatin silver print
22 13/16 x 16 13/16 x 1 1/2 in. (57.9 x 42.7 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Tennessee
1950
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Barbara Deming
c. 1964
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Barbara Deming (American, 1917-1984)

Barbara Deming (1917-1984) was one of the most dearly loved civil rights and feminist activists of her time. Born in New York City in 1917 and educated there at the Friends Meeting House Quaker School, she later studied literature and drama at Bennington College and earned a master’s degree in drama from Case Western Reserve University in 1941.

Deming began her career as a poet, professional writer, and film critic, and turned to political writing and human rights activism in the middle of her life. …

In the 1960s Deming joined demonstrations against Polaris submarines, took part in the 1962 San Francisco-to-Moscow walk for peace, and attended the International Peace Brigade in Europe. Protesting nuclear-weapons testing at the Atomic Energy Commission led to her first experience with being jailed for civil disobedience, this time at the Women’s House of Detention in New York City.

Acting on her belief that the struggles for racial equality and for peace were one effort, Deming marched in the bi-racial Nashville-to-DC walk for peace alongside SNCC members. In 1963 she joined black activists protesting segregation in Alabama and Georgia as well as attended the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. In 1964 she participated in the 2800-mile Quebec-Guantanamo walk for peace and freedom, a racially integrated protest over US actions in Cuba. During this march, she was arrested and jailed in Albany, Georgia, an experience she describes in her book Prison Notes.

Deming participated in political actions whenever and wherever individual rights and human dignity were being threatened. In 1965-1967 Deming traveled to North and South Vietnam to protest the war. In the 1970s she demonstrated for gay rights and feminist causes. In 1983 she was arrested on the march through Seneca Falls, organised by the Women’s Peace Encampment to protest the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe. Despite failing health, she was once again jailed.

Anonymous. “Barbara Deming,” on the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund website Nd [Online] Cited 03/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Photojournalism and the City

After having opted for journalism, influenced perhaps by her parents, Kanaga began to write for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1915, where she learned to produce photographs for her articles encouraged by the newspaper editor. In 1918 she became staff photographer, and the following year was hired by the Daily News, another San Francisco newspaper.

Between 1920 and 1950 she worked for newspapers and magazines in Denver and New York, capturing scenes of urban life and images of economic and racial inequality; as in The Widow Watson (1922-1924 below), which was taken while she was working for the newspaper New York American and depicts a woman suffering from tuberculosis next to her son.

Photojournalism led Kanaga to become aware of photography’s potential as an art form. Around 1918 she joined the California Camera Club in San Francisco. Not only did she gain access to a dark room and photographic equipment, but also books and magazines on the medium. The publication Camera Work by Alfred Stieglitz and the works of New York and San Francisco photographers, such as Arnold Genthe, who portrayed street scenes and urban architecture in their images, influenced her greatly.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
The Widow Watson
1922-1924
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Portrait Gallery

Kanaga began to produce portraits for additional income as a complement to her journalistic work, initially in San Francisco and later in New York. She opened her first studio in the early 1920s and was able to support herself and her partners financially for the rest of her life by taking photographs of wealthy clients and friends who were part of the avant-garde movements in San Francisco and New York. Thus, the portrait became the main focus of Kanaga’s creative production. It is also important to note that while most of her work as a photojournalist was lost, her portraits remain well represented among the negatives and prints that have been preserved.

Influenced by Stieglitz, in her portraits Kanaga experimented with poses, cropping, lighting, and printing in order to highlight the expressive capabilities of her images. Aside from flash, she used dark room techniques such as over-and underexposure, manipulating exposure times in specific parts of a photographic print to accentuate the contrast between light and shade, which generated a theatrical effect. The artist also frequently toned her prints with metals such as gold, adding pencil or graphite to highlight certain features.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Portrait of a Woman
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

North Americans Abroad

One of the fundamental experiences in Kanaga’s formative development was her time in Europe and northern Africa between 1927 and 1928, made possible through the financial support of the patron Albert M. Bender. Kanaga spent close to a year travelling through France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Tunisia, taking photographs and visiting museums, monuments, and churches. The artist also sought opportunities to learn modern photographic techniques. In Kairouan (Tunisia) she came into contact with a community of ex-pat artists and produced three photo albums portraying the city and its people, consolidating her interest in portraiture.

Consuelo Kanaga began to express her opinions on racism in the United States during these trips. A subject she would explore in more depth through photography during the 1930s. “I am sick of seeing colored men and women abused by stupid white people.”

Photography and the American Scene

Beyond portraiture, Kanaga practiced numerous genres and styles throughout her career. Like other North American artists, she was attracted to what she encountered in the “American Scene”; naturalist and descriptive representations of national and regional heritage and everyday life. Kanaga mostly focused on marginal day to day and political motifs, including workers, African Americans, objects, and buildings that were often in a state of disrepair.

Her first portraits of African Americans were aligned with the New Negro Movement that arose in the 1920s and 30s. Black intellectuals and artists tried to redefine and celebrate African American identities through cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive policies. Likewise, they advocated for the creation of inspiring images of their community and of negritude at a time when lynchings and racial terror were some of the most pressing legal and ethical issues. Within this context, Kanaga’s photographs can be considered a true statement of intent: Hands (1930 below) is the first preserved photograph that captures her anti-racist ideals. She also portrayed the singer Kenneth Spencer, the poet Langston Hughes, and the painter and ceramist Sargent Johnson, among others.

Along with her interest in African American communities, Kanaga became interested in worker’s rights and the worker movement that emerged in the Soviet Union and Germany during the 1920s. After moving to New York in 1935, she took photographs for leftist publications and became involved with the Photo League. At a time marked by the will to promote solidarity among workers beyond race and gender, Kanaga focused on the experiences of African Americans and Workers in particular.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Hands
1930
Gelatin silver print
23 1/16 x 29 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (58.6 x 73.8 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Portraits of Artists

Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Kanaga produced portraits of artists, writers, actors, and musicians. She met many of them thanks to her relationship with several photography clubs and collectives, as well as during her trips through the United States and Europe. Her images include portraits of the photographers Alfred Stieglitz and W. Eugene Smith, the painters Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, and of designers such as Wharton Esherick.

Conversely, Kanaga’s career was especially linked to a solid and broad circle of women photographers whose relationships she cultivated throughout her time as an artist. She was a great supporter and confidant for a series of photographers who often photographed each other, such as Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, Louse Dahl-Wolfe, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Tina Modotti, and Eiko Yamazawa.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Wharton Esherick
1940
Bromide print
20 1/16 x 15 1/16 x 1 1/2 in. (51 x 38.3 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Wharton Esherick (July 15, 1887 – May 6, 1970) was an American sculptor who worked primarily in wood, especially applying the principles of sculpture to common utilitarian objects. Consequently, he is best known for his sculptural furniture and furnishings. Esherick was recognised in his lifetime by his peers as the “dean of American craftsmen” for his leadership in developing nontraditional designs and for encouraging and inspiring artists and artisans by example. Esherick’s influence is evident in the work of contemporary artisans, particularly in the Studio Craft Movement. His home and studio in Malvern, Pennsylvania, are part of the Wharton Esherick Museum, which has been listed as a National Historic Landmark since 1993.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Trips to the Southern United States

Between the late 1940s and early 60s, Kanaga went on numerous trips through the southern United States where she continued to photograph black children and workers. While in Florida, she produced a series of photographs dedicated to black families and farmhands working in recovered swamp lands known as mucklands. During those trips, she took one of her most renowned photographs titled She is a Tree of Life (1950 below), which depicts a stoic mother with her son and daughter on either side. In 1950 she also photographed self-taught black artist William Edmondson next to his carved stone sculptures.

In 1964, amidst the struggle for freedom of Black Americans in the United States, the activist and writer Barbara Deming invited Kanaga to photograph the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Walk for Peace in protest of United States actions against Cuba. During the march, Deming and other activists were arrested for demanding that all demonstrators be allowed to walk together on a “white only” sidewalk. The book Prison Notes, published by Deming in 1966, includes photographs by Kanaga.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
She is a Tree of Life
1950
Gelatin silver print
22 13/16 x 16 13/16 x 1 1/2 in. (57.9 x 42.7 x 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Studies of Nature

In 1940 Kanaga and her husband, the painter Wallace Putnam, purchased a house outside the city, in Yorktown Heights, seventy kilometres north of Manhattan. They moved there permanently in 1950. Meanwhile, Kanaga continued taking photographs for household magazines in order to support herself and her husband financially. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why, after having her work exhibited in important exhibitions during the 1940s, Kanaga’s artistic output decreased during the following two decades. Nevertheless, she photographed the natural environment surrounding her house and in 1948 one of the pictures she took of the pond in their back yard was included in the exhibition In and Out of Focus: A Survey of Today’s Photography, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Catalogue

The catalogue that accompanies this exhibition has been published in English, Spanish, and Catalan by Fundación MAPFRE and the Brooklyn Museum. It features an essay by the show’s curator Drew Sawyer and texts by Shalon Parker, Ellen Macfarlane, and Shana Lopes. The publication includes a complete overview of the artist’s life and work.

Press release from the Fundación MAPFRE

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
[Untitled] (Landscape Near Taos, New Mexico)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
4 3/4 x 7 3/4 in. (12.1 x 19.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
[Untitled] (Landscape with Farmhouse)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
3 5/8 x 4 3/4 in. (9.2 x 12.1cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

KBr Photography Center
Avenida Litoral, 30 – 08005 Barcelona
Phone: +34 93 272 31 80

(Attention only during the opening hours of the exhibition hall)

Opening hours:
Mondays (except holidays): Closed
Tuesday to Sundays (and holidays): 11am – 8pm

Fundación MAPFRE website

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Photographs: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Dark Light’

“The spirit has left the earth, the body; something is not quite right; ambiguous forces of the (under) world are at play.” MB

from the series Travelling the wonderful loneliness 2019-2024

April 2024

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Two Towers' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *Two Towers*

This sequence (my favourite in my latest body of work), Dark Light, is one of the four sequences in the series collectively titled Travelling the wonderful loneliness (2019-2024). Traces of order / chaos seen clearly; previsualisation was strong.

My friend and mentor Ian Lobb said:

“It all works brilliantly, and they are all like that – there are subtle things that can’t be traced: i.e. are they the photographer: or are they the camera or are they just inevitable in this world? It is a type of anti-spirituality meets spirituality… and any number of other meeting points.”

My friend Elizabeth Gertsakis said:

“Spatial as well as surface tactile. Fascinated randomness. The human figure appears as a singular frozen device. Post-apocalyptic as well.”

I said:

“The spirit has left the earth, the body; something is not quite right; ambiguous forces of the (under) world are at play.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

50 images
© Marcus Bunyan

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Other sequences in the series include Material Witness; Tell Me Why; and (How I) Wish You Were Here (all 2019-2024).

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'The Great Wave (Gustave Le Gray)' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *The Great Wave (Gustave Le Gray)*

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Untitled' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Soul marker' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Soul marker

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'JCB' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — JCB

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Sacrifice, Bendlerblock, Berlin' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *Sacrifice, Bendlerblock, Berlin*

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Dark City I' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Dark City I

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Golden Tulip' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Golden Tulip

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Monolith' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Monolith

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Creature' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Creature

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Twenty / One' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Twenty / One

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Tendril' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Tendril

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Tribulation' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Tribulation

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Yellow' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Yellow

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Black Star' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Black Star

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Duct' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Duct

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Wraith' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Wraith

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Benediction' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Benediction

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Memorial, Berlin' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Memorial, Berlin

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Medusa, Yerebatan Sarnici, Istanbul' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *Medusa, Yerebatan Sarnici, Istanbul*

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Running Man' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *Running Man*

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Dark City II' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Dark City II

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'In the darkness of forests' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *In the darkness of forests*

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Peeling' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *Peeling*

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Lust' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Lust

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Pierce' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Pierce

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Conductor' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Conductor

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Despair' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Despair

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Below Above' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Below Above

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Parallel' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Parallel

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Enclosure' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Enclosure

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Block' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Block

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague*

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Chaos' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Chaos

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Approaching Thunderstorm' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *Approaching Thunderstorm*

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Entombment' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — Entombment

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Dark Light, Pavillon de Marsan, Paris' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *Dark Light, Pavillon de Marsan, Paris*

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light)' from the sequence 'Dark Light' 2019-2024 — *Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light)*

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ print costs $1,000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see the Store web page.

Marcus Bunyan website

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Review: ‘Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst’ at the RMIT Gallery, Melbourne

“The photographs tell a powerful story of Germany before and after the fall of communism whilst instilling in the viewer a wondering, an accumulation and visual nourishment for the senses.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 1st March – 20th April, 2024

Curator: Matthias Flügge

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'Dodendorfer Straße' 1998 From the series 'Morgenstraße. Magdeburg 1998-2000' from the exhibition 'Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst' at the RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, March - April, 2024

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Dodendorfer Straße
1998
Aus der Serie: Morgenstraße. Magdeburg 1998-2000
From the series: Morgenstraße. Magdeburg 1998-2000
B/w archival pigment print
18 x 27cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

Wondering through history

Wonder noun. a feeling of amazement and admiration, caused by something beautiful, remarkable, or unfamiliar.

As enunciated by Jake Wilson in The Age newspaper in a review of the film La Chimera, “ultimately, the problem dramatised here is the same one faced by any modern artist: how do you retain a meaningful link to your predecessors while shaping something new?”1

Further, my mentor and friend Ian Lobb would often challenge me to define what I was adding to the artistic dialogue of photography instead of repeating the language of a previous era, and I would spar with him asking him was it really necessary to constantly reinvent the wheel, was it not enough to see and feel with clarity and humour those precious moments that surround us, and insightfully photograph them. These are the questions that enliven life: is it always necessary to shape something new, or is it enough to be attentive to the moment – of your mind, heart and vision – to create spellbinding photographs that carry your own interpretation of a certain reality.

Such is the case with the stimulating, two-room exhibition of the German photographer Ulrich Wüst at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne.

Wüst’s photography shows great affinity with the work of Bernd and Hiller Becher and the Becher and Dusseldorf Schools of photography which would have been known in East Germany by the time Wüst shot the 1980s series Stadtbilder. 1979-1985 (Cityscapes. 1979-1985) that first brought Wüst to international attention (the border was very permeable to artistic ideas from the West reaching East Germany).2 Indeed, most of Wüst’s oeuvre has direct links to the aesthetic of the Bechers (with their attention to detail and “devotion to the 1920s German tradition of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity”) and photographers such as Thomas Ruff (with their surreal enlargement of scale and “fundamentally sceptical attitude towards photography’s claim to truth and documentation”).

I believe that referencing and riffing off that aesthetic as Wüst does is no bad thing … for it forms the basis for the photographer’s further take on reality. But there are plenty of other forces at play in his photographs. I observe traces of August Sander, Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank, Michael Schmidt and Eugène Atget among others, especially with the latter in the positioning of Wüst’s camera.

As he observes, “When shooting I often find that if I move just fraction away from the more customary perspective a subtle heightening of tension with take place within the image. It’s no accident that I and my camera frequently get suspicious looks when the angle of the lens shifts away from the perspective found in souvenirs and postcards.” (Wall text from the exhibition)

And this is exactly what Atget did, he moved his camera from the “normal” point of view ever so slightly so that there immediately becomes this tension within the image plane coupled to the possibility of a magical revelation of space, an ironic comment on construction, or a grotesque play of opposites. As Wüst says, his vision, his observation, contains “plenty that is comic, grotesque, ironic” which many people do not see.

If we think about the supposedly objective work of the Bechers, which they insisted was all about documenting the object and not about any type of emotion, we fail to consider, as Julia Curl opines, “that this “objectivity” is only surface-level – that the work is deeply personal, even if its apparent uniformity claims otherwise.”3 Personally, I have never bought into the cool objectification of the Becher’s work for the photographers made defined choices as to how they depicted their constructed realities, each iteration of a water tower, gravel plant or cooling tower different from the other (fragments of a whole). This was deeply personal vision of how the world is perceived.

The same can be said of the photographs of Ulrich Wüst. His photographs are entirely personal, fragmentary excavations of history. In Wüst’s works by series, his photographs – surreal, sculptural scenes absent of people, full of elemental beauty – are not just the flawed humanity of our creation / the creation of our flawed humanity … but the creation and imagination of the human mind captured by the eye of the camera. Wüst’s photographs challenge us to look closer at the reality around us not accepting the status quo, the postcard view, not walking the city as if unaware of the vistas around us, feeling the “traces, injuries, missing and empty spaces in the image, so that things begin to speak of themselves…”4

As the art historian Matthias Flügge states, Wüst’s photographs are “images of intellectual-spatial situations,” wholly a creation, an accretion, on existing forms of photography. Not something new, which is ultimately unnecessary, but a growth in “wondering” – not wandering – achieved through the gradual accumulation of additional layers of beauty, feeling, knowledge so that we are informed and fully aware of our (un)familiar surroundings.

The photographs tell a powerful story of Germany before and after the fall of communism whilst instilling in the viewer a wondering, an accumulation and visual nourishment for the senses.

Such is the photography of Ulrich Wüst.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. The only down side to this exhibition is that all the black and white photographs are modern archival ink jet prints. Call me old fashioned but these pigment prints have no real “presence”. It’s like the difference between an LP and a CD, or a movie in Technicolor or 5K. One has “atmosphere”, one has mood and aura and the other just sits there in all its perfection like a dog with a bone waiting for you to go “oooh, ahhh”. There are people that say you can’t tell the difference between the two. Rubbish. Give me gelatin silver prints any day of the week.

1/ Jake Wilson. “Lost and Found while digging up the cinematic past,” in The Age newspaper, 11 April 2024, p. 24.

2/”Huyssen reveals the complexity of artistic development on both sides of the Wall and notes that “the borders between East and West became porous during the 1970s as a result of treaties between the GDR and the FRG.” His focus in this regard, however, is on those artists who left the East for the West and made an impact there, such as Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter; he does not acknowledge the extent to which ideas and influences went in both directions. … While it is true that West German artists showed little interest in exhibiting in the East or in the art that was created there, East German artists tended to be well informed about Western artistic developments…” p. 598

April A. Eisman. “East German Art and the Permeability of the Berlin Wall,” in German Studies Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (October 2015), pp. 597-616. Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the German Studies Association

3/ Julia Curl. “Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Misunderstood Oeuvre,” on the Hyperallergic website November 2, 2022 [Online] Cited 11/04/2024

4/ Jacek Slaski. “Ulrich Wüst – Stadtbilder 1979–1985: Zwischen Kunst und Dokumentation,” on the tipBerlin website 03/02/2022 [Online] Cited 08/04/2024. Translated from the German by Google Translate

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

An exhibition by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V., Stuttgart – in partnership with the Goethe-Institut. This project is an official exhibition of PHOTO 2024 International Festival of Photography.

“Most viewers, unfortunately, are so dreadfully serious when they look at the pictures. I have to “hammer it home” incredibly hard before anyone will allow themselves to laugh. In my works there is simply – perhaps a bit hidden – plenty that is comic, grotesque, ironic.”

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

“I’m sure I do give those power symbols the aesthetic treatment, otherwise it’s unlikely that I would have any desire or energy to photograph them. But it would also be unfair to say that these objects do not hold their own innate aesthetic fascination. All I can do is try to describe how I am torn between spontaneous fascination and rational rejection, aiming to convey that experience and make it understandable. When shooting I often find that if I move just fraction away from the more customary perspective a subtle heightening of tension with take place within the image. It’s no accident that I and my camera frequently get suspicious looks when the angle of the lens shifts away from the perspective found in souvenirs and postcards. People are very attuned to that sort of shift.”

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Flatland. Schönhof, 2013 (centre), The Pomp of Power, 1983-1990 (left) and Red October, 2018 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work captures his wanderings through German history, portraying the social and urban transformations from the GDR and its disintegration, through the German reunification to the present day. Wüst revives the German history in a new static way, where the past and present clash in a dynamic and ever-changing environment.

Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst shows a selection of nine suites taken between 1978 and 2019. Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work can be contemplated from different perspectives. While the observations captured here are rooted in Germany’s division and its mending, at the same time they always relate to universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations. The seemingly terse images, extremely precise in their composition, are the fruits of lengthy visual wanderings through present sites of recent history.

Ulrich Wüst’s photographic œuvre, which explores Eastern Germany in the broader sense, is not confined to the sunken GDR. It might be described as a pictorial archaeology of our present day. These pictures reveal the finds from his “excavations” and are at the same time tools of their conservation. Wüst has an infallible feel for the graphic quality of everyday situations, objects and materials, but also for the deeper layers of significance associated with found images. Examples are the enlarged details from East German press products that demonstrate a manipulative use of photography.

Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work can be contemplated from different perspectives. While the observations captured here are essentially rooted in Germany’s division and its mending, at the same time they always relate to universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations. The seemingly terse images, extremely precise in their composition, are the fruits of lengthy visual wanderings through present sites of recent history.

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Flatland. Schönhof, 2013, from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Flatland. Schönhof' 2013 from the exhibition 'Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst' at the RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, March - April, 2024

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Flatland. Schönhof
From the series: Flatland. Schönhof
2013
Colour photograph, archival pigment print
57 x 38cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Flatland. Schönhof' 2013 (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Flatland. Schönhof
From the series: Flatland. Schönhof (installation views)
2013
Colour photograph, archival pigment print
57 x 38cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

“These photographs of newspapers and magazines were taken in the countryside, things that I found within a very small radius. Previously I had always done that urban stuff but then I would go looking for contrasts, because after a while your eye becomes tired.”

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Cityscapes 1979-1985 (left) and Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege 1991-1992 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst’s photos are “images of mental-spatial situations”

In every city there are places that have been photographed thousands of times. From tourists, amateurs and professionals. Always captured on paper or the digital matrix. Big Ben, Eiffel Tower, Alexanderplatz in the heart of Berlin. Thousands, even millions of looks at the striking symbols of a metropolis that want to capture the essence of the city. Ulrich Wüst was far away from such direct concepts. His view of Alexanderplatz is almost shy, more of a cautious approach, and yet he gets a grip on the place. But it’s not primarily about Berlin. Wüst’s city images are less studies of specific cities than “images of intellectual-spatial situations,” as the art historian and rector of the Dresden University of Fine Arts Matthias Flügge states in his insightful text for the photo book Ulrich Wüst – Stadtbilder 1979-1985 (Ulrich Wüst – City Images 1979-1985).

If you read Flügge’s text, it becomes clear once again that a picture is not just a picture and that it requires more than a fleeting observation, especially with a subject like the cityscape. Because you could easily come to the conclusion that you immediately understand the motif at hand, after all, you yourself are a city dweller and are aware of your habitat. But a photograph is also a starting point for deeper reflections. Wüst’s photographs of prefabricated buildings in East Berlin, vacancies in Magdeburg, and the central square in Karl-Marx-Stadt are not unseen motifs. Rather, they are all too well known. Such urban constellations should not be foreign to anyone who lived in the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s, or even those born later or socialised in the West. …

“Determining the status quo of the constructed, shaped, printed or otherwise produced objective world with all its traces, injuries, missing and empty spaces in the image, so that things begin to speak of themselves,” is what Wüst does, writes Flügge.

Jacek Slaski. “Ulrich Wüst – Stadtbilder 1979–1985: Zwischen Kunst und Dokumentation,” on the tipBerlin website 03/02/2022 [Online] Cited 08/04/2024. Translated from the German by Google Translate. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'Berlin' 1982 From the series 'Cityscapes. 1979-1985'

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Berlin
1982
Aus der Serie: Stadtbilder. 1979-1985
From the series: Cityscapes. 1979-1985
B/w archival pigment print
16 x 24cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

“For me it had always been about the built environment. […] And then I started on those rather dry Cityscapes, which always seems so objective, even though they never were and never tried to be. I wanted to take a concentrated, analytical look at the city. Back then I had a strong sense of mission; I really did want to achieve something. And the things I wanted to say about the city as space I also wanted to tell people who weren’t at all interested in photography or urban space. In some respects it was definitely intended to enlighten. Ultimately I wanted to provoke a debate about what we imagine a “city” to be and what this environment does to us.”

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Axel Hütte (b. 1951) 'James Hammett House' 1982-1984

Axel Hütte (German, b. 1951)
James Hammett House
1982-1984
Silver gelatin print on baryte paper
66 x 80cm
Loan of the artist

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Cityscapes. 1979-1985' (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Stadtbilder. 1979-1985
From the series: Cityscapes. 1979-1985 (installation views)
B/w archival pigment print
16 x 24cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

The work of Ulrich Wüst might best be described as a pictorial archaeology of recent German history. With an unsentimental precision these photographic ‘excavations’ pivot around moments of social change; those points in history when the old and the new collide, when the seemingly endless cycle of destruction and construction can so easily relegate the present to the oblivion of the past.

Initially photographing life in the former East Germany, Wüst’s oeuvre grew to include the documentation of everyday situations, objects and materials; expanding further with the addition of found images, cropped and rephotographed by Wüst to reveal alternative readings.

In his sparse black and white Cityscapes, the 1980s series that first brought Wust to international attention, we find images of East German cities and towns still carrying scars from the Second World War – an environment formed through the combination of unchecked decay and Soviet-era reconstruction. With an interest in the absurd – those visual anomalies that arrive through accident or misguided intent – Wüst has forged a unique, non-ideological representation of that time. In a similar manner but on a different scale, Wüst’s Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege (1991-1992) – a photo inventory of objects left behind by the former owner of his house – engages us with the incidental nature of history. Intimate and fragile, these ordinary objects are made monumental through Wüst’s lens, yet these discarded possessions have the same precariousness as the hastily built architecture of cities in perpetual change.

Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work exists as a registry of everyday images. It could be considered akin to the personal archive of a once divided country mending itself, wandering through time, settling upon moments and fragments that also speak to the wider, universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Cityscapes, 1979-1985 (right), Morgenstraße. Magdeburg, 1998-2000 (second right), Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (third right) and Red October, 2018 (left) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Morgenstraße. Magdeburg, 1998-2000 (right), Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (centre left) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Morgenstraße. Magdeburg' 1998-2000 (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Morgenstraße. Magdeburg 1998-2000
From the series: Morgenstraße. Magdeburg 1998-2000 (installation views)
B/w archival pigment print
18 x 27cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

“As soon as we see people in pictures, we focus on those people. We seem to be fixated on that somehow and we stare at the figures depicted, however small they may be. But as I wanted to steer attention to the built environment, to what we have built for ourselves, I quite simply decided to leave the people out. If there a no people in sight in the pictures, then for one thing nobody can look at them and for another the effect is disconcerting. Disconcertion is a good opening gambit.”

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8, Manhattan
March 20, 1936
Gelatin silver print

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'Kaffemühle' (Coffee grinder) From the series 'Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege 1991-1992'

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Kaffemühle (Coffee grinder)
Aus der Serie: Nachlass Wiegmann. Bülowssiege 1991-1992
From the series: Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege 1991-1992
Colour photograph, archival pigment print
105 cm x 70cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

“I make a point of calling myself a photographer, because then the art question usually no longer arises. But if others still want to see me as an artist, I can (happily) live with that. Personally I don’t want to think about that question. The only thing I do want to stress is that my work is not documentary. I use documentary technique as a form, as a means, and in certain works I am also looking for documentary precision.”

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege 1991-1992' (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Nachlass Wiegmann. Bülowssiege 1991-1992
From the series: Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege 1991-1992 (installation view)
Colour photograph, archival pigment print
105 cm x 70cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Cityscapes, 1979-1985 (left) and Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (left) and Notations 1984-1986 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'Berlin, Pappelallee' September 1984 From the series 'Notations. 1984-1986'

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Berlin, Pappelallee
September 1984
Aus der Serie: Notizen. 1984-1986
From the series: Notations. 1984-1986
B/w archival pigment print
14 x 21cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Notations. 1984-1986' (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Notizen. 1984-1986
From the series: Notations. 1984-1986 (installation views)
B/w archival pigment print
14 x 21cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

“While I was still busy fine-tuning my technical skills for Cityscapes, over in West Germany very small automatic rangefinders were coming onto the market. That was in the early 1980s. […] I got hold of one of those and suddenly I could carry a camera with me all the time, take it anywhere, and I started using it like an “extended eye”. The little camera allowed me to take more intimate, more “personal” works. For me that meant talking about my own life. That was the beginning of the series Notations, as I later called it. I focused on my circle of friends and my immediate environment. And so the Notations came about and that was what I wanted to achieve, as a conscious antithesis to other series like the Cityscapes.”

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Red October 2018, from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Roter Oktober (Red October)
2018
Leporello with 45 b/w and colour photographs mounted on cardboard
14.8 x 21.0 x 2.0cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

Michael Schmidt (German, 1945-2014)
Müller-Ecke Seestrasse, Berlin-Wedding (Berlin-Wedding)
1976-1978
© Michael Schmidt, Foundation for Photography and Media Art with the Michael Schmidt Archive

Tata Ronkholz (1940-1997) 'Dusseldorf, Sankt-Franziskusstraße 107' 1977

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Dusseldorf, Sankt-Franziskusstraße 107
1977
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
41.2 x 51.2cm
Courtesy The Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne / Permanent Loan of the Sparkasse KölnBonn

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'Roter Oktober' (Red October) 2018 (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Roter Oktober (Red October) (installation views)
2018
Leporello with 45 b/w and colour photographs mounted on cardboard
14.8 × 21.0 × 2.0cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

“Photographers love to complain about the chaos they work in and how that prevents them from keeping tabs on what they do. At some point I realised that the concertinas were a fantastic tool for tracing and recoding the progress of my work. Above all, they enabled me to locate my negatives, because I used very simple but precise captions with the place and date of the picture. I always liked the versatility of the concertina. Now, whenever I need to find a negative, I take one of these booklets of the shelf and look for the photograph. They have become a means to communicate with myself about my work and I miss them when they are being exhibition and I haven’t got them at home.”

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, The Pomp of Power. 1983-1990, from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'The Pomp of Power. 1983-1990'

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Die Pracht der Macht. 1983-1990
The Pomp of Power. 1983-1990
Leporello with 30 b/w photographs mounted on cardboard
14.8 x 21.0 x 1.5cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'The Pomp of Power. 1983-1990' (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Die Pracht der Macht. 1983-1990
The Pomp of Power. 1983-1990 (installation views)
Concertina booklet with 30 b/w photographs mounted on cardboard
14.8 x 21.0 x 1.5cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Clarity and compositional elegance

It may also have been his professional disposition that led him to pay particular attention to the GDR city. After all, he was an expert. Wüst was an expert in the field of urban development; he knew exactly what he was photographing. In the midst of the “leaden times” of the GDR, an era shortly before the collapse in which hardly anything seemed to be moving. Mid-1970s to mid-1980s. Urban and housing construction has long since said goodbye to the promising ideals of a better, because socialist, promise. The reality was pragmatic and merciless. Dilapidated old building and decaying substance on one side and serial prefabricated building on the other.

Wüst’s pictures, which sometimes develop a peculiar irony in their clarity and compositional elegance, can also be understood as political statements. “They searched for clues in a way that was unusual in the GDR as a way of ascertaining the real perceived state of the present,” writes Flügge about the photographer, who knew exactly what he wanted to find and capture. Even the depiction of reality could be considered subversive in the workers’ and farmers’ state. It wasn’t appropriate to show things as they were. Rather, you should show things as they should be. …

By “limiting the image section, he forces reality to formulate its own,” summarizes Flügge.

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark, 2014-2019 from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Book of the Years. 1978-2008 (right) and Mitte. Berlin, 1994-1997 (left) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'Schützenstraße / Jerusalemer Straße' 1996 From the series: 'Mitte. Berlin 1995-1997'

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Schützenstraße / Jerusalemer Straße
1996
Aus der Serie: Mitte. Berlin 1995-1997
From the series: Mitte. Berlin 1995-1997
B/w archival pigment print
18 x 27cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

The different historical eras come together in his pictures. Relics from the pre-war period, often ruins, alongside the proud examples of Eastern Modernism from the post-war period, and finally the cheap and quickly built architecture of the present day. These photos are still important today, and not just for architectural historians and photography connoisseurs. Wüst’s pictures of the GDR city are visual findings about the condition of its residents, even if the people in them are absent. In his text, Flügge quotes from Alexander Mitscherlich’s book Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte. Anstiftung zum Unfrieden (The inhospitability of our cities. Incitement to Discord), in which the doctor, psychoanalyst and writer examined the West German city as early as 1965: “This city shape is regressively shaping the character of its residents.” In his book, Mitscherlich hoped that the city would one day become a “biotope for free people”. It didn’t quite turn out that way, but in a certain sense Mitscherlich wasn’t entirely wrong either. The GDR would soon disappear and with it the GDR city.

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Mitte. Berlin 1995-1997' (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Mitte. Berlin 1995-1997
From the series: Mitte. Berlin 1995-1997 (installation views)
B/w archival pigment print
18 x 27cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

I am well aware of how ambivalent photography is. And just because photographs have a documentary air about them, I find it to some extent dubious to slap a documentary label on them. If, ten centimetres from the edge of my picture, the whole content is counteracted by something completely different, then I can no longer claim to be doing serious documentary work. Documentation as a form, in my view, is just a way to explore a theme – a means. I only want to photograph and not distort things. It’s true that there is a documentary background, but what I do with it is always something of my own and totally subjective.

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, 'Mitte. Berlin 1994-1997' (right) and 'Prentzlow. Prenzlau', 2018 (left) from the exhibition 'Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst', RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Mitte. Berlin 1994-1997 (right) and Prenzlau, 2018 (left) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Prenzlau, 2018, from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series ‘Prenzlau’ 2018

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Prenzlau
From the series: Prenzlau
2018
Colour photograph, archival pigment print
45 x 30cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Prenzlau' 2018 (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Prenzlau
From the series: Prenzlau (installation views)
2018
Colour photograph, archival pigment print
45 x 30cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (right) and Book of the Years. 1978-2008 (left), from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'Kreta' (Crete) 1997 From the series 'Book of the Years. 1978-2008'

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Kreta (Crete)
1997
Aus der Serie: Jahrebuch. 1978-2008
From the series: Book of the Years. 1978-2008
B/w archival pigment print
18 x 27cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Book of the Years. 1978-2008' (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Jahrebuch. 1978-2008
From the series: Book of the Years. 1978-2008 (installation views)
B/w archival pigment print
18 x 27cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019)
London
1951
Gelatin silver print

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Jahrebuch. 1978-2008
From the series: Book of the Years. 1978-2008 (installation view)
B/w archival pigment print
18 x 27cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Das Siebengebirge von der unteren Terrasse hin zur Löwenburg' 1922

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Das Siebengebirge von der unteren Terrasse hin zur Löwenburg
The Siebengebirge from the lower terrace towards the Löwenburg castle
1922
Gelatin silver print
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Sitftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Köln; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022

A collection/compilation. A great deal of chance and responding to mood. The urban excursions, by contrast, followed a strict pattern. There it was about the grey cityscapes, grey “Mitte” and grey “Morgenstraße”. And yet all of them were taken in bright sunlight! Without the weather forecast promising a safe sunny day, I would probably never have been brave enough to set out on wanderings that did not augur much solace.

Most of the pictures in the book of the Years, on the other hand, really were taken in grey weather. They were done over a period of thirty years, mostly without any particular intention, straight from the experience. Later I gathered them into a kind of melancholy section through times and places. The pictures say: I was here. And I was in this or that mood. They are mood! And sometimes they flirt with the mood as well. That can happen.

~ Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Mitte. Berlin 1994-1997 (right), Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark, 2014-2019 (left) and Prentzlow. Prenzlau, 2018 (centre) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work captures his wanderings through German history, portraying the social and urban transformations from the GDR and its disintegration, through the German reunification to the present day. Wüst revives the German history in a new static way, where the past and present clash in a dynamic and ever-changing environment.

Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst shows a selection of nine suites taken between 1978 and 2019. Ulrich Wüst’s photographic work can be contemplated from different perspectives. While the observations captured here are rooted in Germany’s division and its mending, at the same time they always relate to universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations. The seemingly terse images, extremely precise in their composition, are the fruits of lengthy visual wanderings through present sites of recent history.

Text from the RMIT Gallery website

Installation view, Ulrich Wüst, Wiegmann Legacy. Bülowssiege, 1991-1992 (left) and Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark, 2014-2019 (right) from the exhibition Wanderings About History. The Photography of Ulrich Wüst, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2024
Photo: Christian Capurro

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) From the series 'Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark 2014-2019' (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Randlage. Die Gemeinde Nordwestuckermark 2014-2019
From the series: Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark 2014-2019 (installation view)
B/w archival pigment print
26 x 39cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'Parmen' 2016 From the series 'Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark 2014-2019'

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Parmen
2016
Aus der Serie: Randlage. Die Gemeinde Nordwestuckermark 2014-2019
From the series: Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark 2014-2019
B/w archival pigment print
26 x 39cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa

“In the last few years I started taking pictures in the countryside again. The idea was to have photographs of villages and landscapes that were just as “dry” as my cityscape series, like Berlin, or Magdeburg. The resulting work is far removed from any sort of rural idyll, but equally as far removed from the affection I have from these landscapes. I chose not to give too much away.”

Ulrich Wüst, wall text from the exhibition

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Aus der Serie: Randlage. Die Gemeinde Nordwestuckermark 2014-2019
From the series: Village Edge. The Municipality of Nordwestuckermark 2014-2019 (installation views)
B/w archival pigment print
26 x 39cm
© Ulrich Wüst; ifa
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

RMIT Gallery
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Photographs: Frederick Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)

“For many people, secure and stable public housing has been their safe space from the vicissitudes of the world. No longer.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

February 2024

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Interior, children’s bedroom
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
9.7 x 7.4cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

Communities dismantled

Dismantled: late 16th century (in the sense ‘destroy the defensive capability of a fortification’): from Old French desmanteler, from des- (expressing reversal) + manteler ‘fortify’ (from Latin mantellum ‘cloak’).

At any age in life, having a stable place to live is vitally important to your physical and mental health. This is especially true for lower socio-economic individuals and families, older human beings, and people with a physical and/or mental disability.

The photographs presented in this posting by active Methodist and photographer F. Oswald Barnett were used to encourage government to remove the ‘slum menace’ – that is, a person or thing that is likely to cause harm; a threat or danger – in inner city Melbourne during the late 1930s-1970s. “Captured by Methodist social reformer F. Oswald Barnett, these photographs served to power his campaign to abolish the city’s inner-city slums and provide a better quality of life for Melbournians.”

“Slum portrayals were sensationalist and voyeuristic. Photos from the slums featured alcoholic mothers with loose moral standards, ‘vermin-infested kitchens’, and children riddled with fleas and head lice.”1

Of course, it is photography’s “ability to police and regulate its subjects, especially those lacking social and political power: the poor, presumed “deviants” or “criminals,” and workers”2 that is at play here. Value judgements about people’s lives and homes were made by do gooders, those of moral fortitude and in positions of power and comfort, likely those very people who had never experienced what it is to be poor, homeless or suffer from a disability. Class would have come in to it as much as the self lubricating disciplinary systems of church, state, hospital, prison that enable and enact power and control over others (Foucault).

And yet, and yet, despite their obvious poverty and “slum” residency (a squalid and overcrowded urban street or district inhabited by very poor people), F. Oswald Barnett’s photographs also document proud people and communities.

Observe the key of the front door hanging outside a hole in the door in Fitzroy. The key of the front door of the apartment house (c. 1935, below) and note the inference that “easy means of access is the open door to immorality.” A true moralists deduction given the evidence… whereas I would have thought it was a testament to the honesty and integrity of the community, and the lack of crime, that the key to the house could be left freely accessible.

In Carlton. Slum pocket (c. 1930, below) two older women stand proudly in their front yards, positioned for and staring at the camera, a broom propped up against the picket fence where one of the woman has been sweeping down the cobbled street. In North Melbourne. Group of children in Erskine Place (c. 1935, below) eight children stand in a line for the camera, quizzical, sullen, smiling, barefoot. Collectively the possess a sense of camaraderie. Witness the two boys holding hands at the left of the image, probably brothers, the one brother looking with love at his brother who faces the camera. This sense of camaraderie, community and family is something all the modernisation in the world can’t buy.

The plan to excise the slums ‘for the common good’ and for immoral reasons, did not go according to plan.

“But abolishing the slums was proving to be difficult. The ‘demolitions program’ was beset with problems. By 1940, only 53 families had actually been moved into new houses. Synchronising demolition works with the building program was hard. The Commission did not have enough resources, and lacked the support of the labour movement.

The Housing Commission upped the ante. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Commission launched the most ambitious slum-clearance projects ever seen in Australia. Residents in Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond protested and refused to move. In 1969, the Carlton Association launched a PR campaign denouncing the schemes.

Finally, four years later, the Victorian government abandoned the slum clearance schemes, but by then, whole communities had been dismantled. The buildings that housed them had been demolished.”3

Whole communities had been dismantled for no apparent benefit. And this is exactly what is happening with the demolition of existing public housing in Melbourne at the moment, to be replaced by a mixture of social, affordable and private housing, often tripling the number of dwellings in redevelopments and totally destroying any sense of community that existed in that place, where people actively looked after each other.

Cait Kelly, in an article on the Guardian website in July 2023 on the proposed demolition of the Barak Beacon estate in Port Melbourne comments on Margaret Kelly, the last resident left living in the estate. “When Kelly moved in to Barak Beacon she was a 43-year-old single mum who had spent years in and out of different homes. The housing estate gave her stability. She raised her son, who now has an international career as a game developer, grew flowers in the garden and watched as her neighbour’s children grew up. She said she was “shattered” to be having to fight to stay in her home. “This was our safe home,” she said. “And that’s what it’s been for so many tenants.”4

For many people, secure and stable public housing has been their safe space from the vicissitudes of the world. No longer. Today in Victoria and across Australia, these havens of security and community are being dismantled to be replaced by public-private housing, shared spaces and high density living.

Which brings me to the Grosvenor Precinct (Brunning, Woodstock & Grosvenor Street residences) in Balaclava. HousingFirst, a not-for-profit community housing organisation (providing social housing to over 2000 people across Melbourne) – which purchased the precinct in 1989 “to build and construct accommodation for older persons” – hand delivered a letter at 5pm on the Friday of a long weekend, dropped into the letterbox of each resident.

The letter states, “At HousingFirst, we work hard to continually improve our housing because we want you to enjoy living in a home that meets contemporary standards, where you and your family can live your best life.

We’re pleased to announce the redevelopment of our Grosvenor Precinct (Brunning, Woodstock & Grosvenor Street residences) in Balaclava.

The redevelopment will provide 68 new architect designed environmentally sustainable homes with modern amenity and beautiful shared spaces for all to enjoy.

To accommodate the changes, you will need to move out of your current home into alternative accommodation that will be arranged by HousingFirst for the period of construction. However, you will have first right of return to the new developed homes once the new homes are complete, and we’re confident the enhanced amenity with be worth the inconvenience.”5

This letter arrived without warning to the residents of the precinct on a Friday night of a long weekend without any consultation, as a fait accompli.

It is believed that the redevelopment of 68 units (which more than triples the number of units on the precinct) will be a mixture of private and public housing although this knowledge has not been formally addressed to the current tenants in the form of a letter. The percentage of public and private housing is uncertain in this point in time. And, despite the protestations of the letter, there is no legal guarantee at the moment that any of the current tenants will be offered first preference in the new development and apartments upon completion.

The older, disabled people who live in this “precinct” sit on a valuable parcel of land (and therein lies one of the major problems). They enjoy units close to the shops, with single or double bedroom villas with their own very small courtyard garden. It is a quiet precinct with little noise and no violence or drug use and the villas are modern and well maintained. The residents are now being placed in multi-storey blocks of flats with noise at all hours of the night, nowhere to house their pets, drug users living down the corridor and litter everywhere. Residents who have already been forced to move have noted that their mental and physical health has deteriorated under the stress of these new living arrangements. HousingFirst is destroying a stable, loving community that cared about each other for the sake of modernisation and, let’s be honest, probably profit.

The whole community is up in arms, both the public housing residents who are left in the precinct together with the residents of privately owned homes in the surrounding area, who themselves have formed a committee to oppose the redevelopment.

This underhand development enacted under a “cloak” of secrecy (see the definition of “dismantling”) has been thrust on vulnerable, older, disabled people without consultation … and is typical of what is going on all over Victoria, as public housing is torn down across the state to be replaced by a mixture of mainly private housing with a bit of public housing thrown in for good measure. All in the name of high density inner city living and supposedly more “modern” amenities without any regard to culture, friendship or community.

It is therefore ironic that the HousingFirst website states that, in terms of building communities, it is their belief that “social and affordable housing is the foundation on which we build strong communities… The service we provide is more than just a safe, secure place to call home. We know that homes transform the lives of our residents. HousingFirst helps our residents put down roots which means home becomes community.”6

Home becomes community! What a load of lip service…

In terms of their residents they state, “Everyday we work with our residents and stakeholders, developing relationships built on our values of integrity, respect, inclusiveness, collaboration and accountability.”7

In all of these areas, these values, their supposed values, have truly been washed down the drain.

As with the ‘excising’ of slum pockets for the ‘common good’ in the late 1930s onwards in Melbourne – an exercise of futility if ever there was one – so the destruction of perfectly modern villa units with their own garden, a small community of older and disabled people who look after each other, and their spreading to the uncertain winds of poorer physical and mental health (I already have reports that where people have been moved they are suffering with both) is outright social vandalism.

Talk about trashing your brand. Well done HousingFirst you have achieved that admirably!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Sarah Matthews. “Slums of Melbourne,” on the State Library of Victoria Blog website August 6, 2015 [Online] Cited 12/02/2024

2/ Joseph Entin. “Milton Rogovin’s Approach: Photography, Class, and the Aesthetics of Making Space (2008),” on the ASX website July 12, 2010 [Online] Cited 12/05/2018

3/ Sarah Matthews, Op cit.,

4/ Cait Kelly. “Last resident of Port Melbourne housing estate vows to fight for her home after eviction notice,” on the Guardian website Thursday 20 July 2023 [Online] Cited 23/02/2024

5/ Letter to the residents from HousingFirst 3 November 2023

6/ Anonymous. “Building Communities: Creating Inclusive & Diverse Communities,” on the HousingFirst webiste Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2024

7/ Ibid.,

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All F. Oswald Barnett photographs are public domain on the State Library of Victoria website. They have been digitally cleaned and balanced by Marcus Bunyan.

Building Communities

Our Belief

We believe social and affordable housing is the foundation on which we build strong communities. Securing housing first allows us to then support the well-being and full participation of low income, disadvantaged Victorians.

The service we provide is more than just a safe, secure place to call home.

We know that homes transform the lives of our residents.

HousingFirst helps our residents put down roots which means home becomes community.

Our Residents

Everyday we work with our residents and stakeholders, developing relationships built on our values of integrity, respect, inclusiveness, collaboration and accountability.

Anonymous. “Building Communities,” on the HousingFirst website June 2020 [Online] Cited 12/02/2024

The land at Grosvenor, Brunning and Woodstock Streets Balaclava was purchased in 1989 to build and construct accommodation for older persons. Construction commenced in 1992 with final completion in 1994.

The property comprises:

10 x 1BR units (2 in Brunning St, 2 in Grosvenor St, 6 in Woodstock St)
8 x 2BR units (4 in Brunning St, 4 in Grosvenor St)
2 x 3BR units (Grosvenor St)
4 parking spaces at Woodstock with street parking and resident permits available
all units are wheelchair accessible.

DHS holds nomination rights over 2 units in each Brunning and Grosvenor, as well as for 4 units at Woodstock.

Text from the HousingFirst website

Map of Woodstock, Brunning and Grosvenor Streets, Balaclava, Melbourne

Photograph of the units in Woodstock Street, Balaclava

The Great Depression saw Australia’s unemployment rate rise to 32% by 1932, is seen through the eyes of photographer F. Oswald Barnett in his powerful images of poverty-stricken inner Melbourne suburbs such as Fitzroy, Collingwood and Carlton.

From the vault: Melbourne slums of the 1930s

The first video in our brand new series, From the Vault, provides a rare glimpse into the slums of Melbourne 100 years ago.

Captured by Methodist social reformer F. Oswald Barnett, these photographs served to power his campaign to abolish the city’s inner-city slums and provide a better quality of life for Melbournians.

This collection also tells a fascinating story about the history of Melbourne’s housing reform movement more broadly. Barnett himself was instrumental in helping to lay the foundations for what would become the Housing Commission of Victoria – although as you’ll discover in this film, its remit to excise the slums ‘for the common good’ did not go according to plan.

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Bathroom interior
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
24.1 x 19.1cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

Collingwood

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Collingwood. Glasshouse Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
5.4 x 8cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

View of road paved with bluestone disappearing between corrugated iron fence on left hand side and paling fence on the right. Weatherboard house behind paling fence. Large brick building bearing the words, “Foy & Gibson” visible in the background.

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Collingwood. Little Oxford Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
5.4 x 8.1cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

View of street with single storey brick/weatherboard/stone houses along the right hand side and other houses visible in the background. Girl standing on footpath outside one-roomed house. Two boys standing in the middle of the road and a car parked on the left hand side.

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Collingwood. Victoria Place.
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
5.4 x 8cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Collingwood. Plan of house, No. 12 Hood Street.
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print, hand-coloured
10.5 x 6.8cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Collingwood. Hood Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
5.4 x 8cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

Map of contemporary Melbourne showing two of the locations pictured in F. Oswald Barnett’s photographs of Collingwood

Frederick Oswald Barnett (1883-1972) was an active Methodist. In 1923 a visit to an inner-city slum shocked him deeply and, concerned for the welfare of the children in particular, he enlisted the aid of young Methodists in a campaign which led to the establishment of the Methodist Babies’ Home in South Yarra in 1929. At the same time he was studying part time at the University of Melbourne (B. Com., 1928); his master’s thesis of 1931, based on the result of 150 questionnaires, was published in 1933 as The Unsuspected Slums.

Barnett set up a study-group of forty people drawn from various community organisations, who met weekly in his office to discuss problems of housing reform. His group soon widened its activities to form the nucleus of the slum-abolition movement of the early 1930s. In his public campaign Barnett used a combination of scientifically gathered data and sometimes emotional presentation; he urged his audiences to write to the premier (Sir) Albert Dunstan, who finally agreed to inspect the slums for himself. In 1936 the premier appointed a Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board, of which Barnett was a member: it recommended establishment of a housing scheme run by a commission of experts, a policy which his group had long advocated. When the Housing Commission of Victoria was set up in 1938 Barnett became vice-chairman until 1948, when he declined reappointment.

Barnett frequently contributed to public discussion of housing, poverty and related issues through newspaper articles, public addresses and pamphlets, which included, with W. O. Burt, Housing the Australian Nation (1942) and, with Burt and F. Heath, We Must Go On: A Study in Planned Reconstruction and Housing (1944). In 1941-49 he was a director of the City Mutual Life Assurance Society Ltd and chairman from 1946 of its Victorian board, but he was asked to resign when it was known that he was auditor to Australia-Soviet House, Melbourne. In 1952 his was virtually a lone voice attacking proposals for multi-storey flats as public housing, in an address from his familiar platform, the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon at Wesley Church.

E. W. Russell. “Frederick Oswald Barnett (1883-1972),” on the Australian Dictionary of Biography website 2006 first published in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 7, 1979 [Online] Cited 11/02/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Fitzroy

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. The Bungalows
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.5 x 10.0cm mounted on card
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. A group of four cottages
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.7 x 10.0cm mounted on card
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. The key of the front door of the apartment house
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
9.4 x 7.1cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'Fitzroy. The key of the front door of the apartment house' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. The key of the front door of the apartment house (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
9.4 x 7.1cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. View from the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.6 x 9.4cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. Rear view of house
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy Town Hall
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
8.0 x 5.3cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. Tin house, Ward’s Lane
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.2 x 9.6cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

View down lane paved with bluestone. Paling fence on right hand side, single storey brick houses on the left, one appearing to have a tin structure attached. Double storey houses visible in the background.

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. Argyle Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.4 x 9.5cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. Martin i.e. Market Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.0 x 9.4cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

As far back as the 1850s, slums existed in inner city Melbourne. Slum dwellers lived a squalid existence. Often, they had no bathrooms, or sewerage. They lived in ramshackle housing, with leaky roofs and holes in the walls.

In 1923, active Methodist and social reformer F. Oswald Barnett visited an inner city slum. He was so shocked that he was moved to write the following lament:

WHAT CAN I DO?

Oh God.
What shall I do about these little ones,
These children of the slums,
These helpless, unwashed babies of the slums,
Who crawl along on bare and filthy floors,
Who feed with sticky flies,
Who play in evil-smelling lanes,
Whose mothers cannot keep them clean,
In body or in soul?1

Enlisting the help of other young Methodists, Barnett began a campaign for social change. Together, they successfully advocated for the establishment of the Methodist Babies’ House in South Yarra in 1929.

Barnett went further. Along with several other photographers, he began taking photos of the slums, using them as fuel in his push for social reform. The pictures, combined with emotive language, simultaneously shocked and captivated the public.

Melbourne historian, Dr Andrew Brown-May, observes that from the 1850s onwards: ‘Slum depictions, fashioned in words and illustration, endured as a powerful genre in Melbourne’s cultural landscape.’2

Slum portrayals were sensationalist and voyeuristic. Photos from the slums featured alcoholic mothers with loose moral standards, ‘vermin-infested kitchens’, and children riddled with fleas and head lice.

The campaign to rid Melbourne of its slums steadily gained momentum over the next century. In 1937 the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board produced a damning report on the ‘slum menace’:

‘The Board records its horror and amazement at the deplorable conditions … Hidden behind wide, spacious streets there are slum pockets which are hotbeds of depravity and disease’.3

The Board recommended urgent measures to combat the problem, including the rehousing of slum dwellers and reclamation of slum areas. Its report led to the creation of the Housing Commission of Victoria.

In 1938, the Victorian government passed legislation to facilitate a ‘war on slums.’ The Housing Commission was tasked with ‘excising’ slum pockets for the ‘common good’.4 The Commission built flats to rehouse the slum dwellers. At the same time, it went about acquiring cheap land in suburbs such as Coburg, Brunswick, Northcote, Fitzroy and Richmond.

But abolishing the slums was proving to be difficult. The ‘demolitions program’ was beset with problems. By 1940, only 53 families had actually been moved into new houses. Synchronising demolition works with the building program was hard. The Commission did not have enough resources, and lacked the support of the labour movement.5

Finally, four years later, the Victorian government abandoned the slum clearance schemes, but by then, whole communities had been dismantled. The buildings that housed them had been demolished.

Society moved on to other concerns. But the slum stereotype lives on in our records. It is the only version of the truth that remains.

You can view the entire F. Oswald Barnett Collection online.

References

1/ Barnett, F.O. [1945?], I hear the tramp of millions, Rawson’s Book Shop, Melbourne
2/ ‘Slums’, Encyclopedia of Melbourne
3/ Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board, 1937, First (progress) report, with appendices and supplements [microform] : slum reclamation: housing for the lower-paid worker; short term programme, H.J. Green, Government Printer, Melbourne
4/ Freestone, R., 2010, Urban nation: Australia’s planning heritage, CSIRO Publishing in assoc. with the Dept. of Environment, Water, Heritage and Arts, & the Australian Heritage Council. p. 217
5/ Howe, R. (ed.), 1988, New houses for old: fifty years of public housing in Victoria 1938-1988, Ministry of Housing & Construction, Melbourne, p. 41

Sarah Matthews. “Slums of Melbourne,” on the State Library of Victoria Blog website August 6, 2015 [Online] Cited 12/02/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Carlton

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. David Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.3 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

View down paved street. Two storey brick houses on either side. Child leaning over front fence on left hand side. Two dogs, child and other single storey houses visible at end of street.

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Two mothers
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
9.5 x 6.5cm mounted on card 15.2 x 10.1cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'Carlton. Two mothers' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Two mothers (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
9.5 x 6.5cm mounted on card 15.2 x 10.1cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Carlton Place
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.1 x 9.5cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Entrance to a slum pocket
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
6.4 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Slum pocket
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
7.3 x 9.8 cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Little Barkly Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.4 x 9.6cm mounted on card
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'Carlton. Little Barkly Street' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Little Barkly Street (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.4 x 9.6cm mounted on card
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Kitchen interior with woman and three children
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.2 x 9.9cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

Interior view of kitchen with open fireplace. Containers and utensils on mantelpiece above fireplace. Woman and three children seated around a wooden table in front of fireplace.

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Wash-house and bath-room, 48 Palmerston Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.4 x 9.6cm mounted on card
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'Carlton. Wash-house and bath-room, 48 Palmerston Street' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Wash-house and bath-room, 48 Palmerston Street (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.4 x 9.6cm mounted on card
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

Contemporary photograph of 48 Palmerston Street, Carlton

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Airedale Place
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.2 x 9.8cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Somerset Place
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
6.0 x 9.8cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'Carlton. Somerset Place' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Somerset Place (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
6.0 x 9.8cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Carlton. Ormond Place
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
6.1 x 9.5cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

Map of contemporary Melbourne showing five of the locations pictured in F. Oswald Barnett’s photographs of Carlton

One of the most visible and lasting effects of the Great Depression was the housing crisis in the poor working class areas of Melbourne and Sydney. Many of the nineteenth-century houses had fallen into disrepair, overcrowding was endemic and a great number of families lived in squalid and unhealthy conditions. Throughout the decade ‘slum’ abolition movements in Melbourne and Sydney ran public campaigns to place public housing on the political agenda, leading to the creation of the first state Housing Commissions.

In Melbourne, Methodist layman F. Oswald Barnett led a campaign calling for slum demolition and the rehousing of residents in government-financed housing. He took hundreds of photographs that were used in public lectures and to illustrate the 1937 report of the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board. This led to the creation of the Housing Commission of Victoria in 1938, with its first major project being the Garden City estate at Fishermans Bend. In Sydney a similar campaign led to the Housing Improvement Act of 1936 and the construction of the first fifty-six home units at Erskineville.

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria

The photographs in the F. Oswald Barnett Collection were taken by Barnett and other unidentified photographers in the 1930s. Many of them were used to illustrate a government report on slum housing and/or made into lantern slides for lectures in a public campaign. F. Oswald Barnett was born in Brunswick, Victoria. A committed Methodist and housing reformer, he led a crusade against Melbourne’s inner city slums. In 1936 he was appointed to the Slum Abolition Board and from 1938-1948 he was the vice-chair of the Housing Commission. In this position he attempted to shape compassionate public housing policy. He later protested vigorously against proposed high-rise housing.

Text from the Monash Biographical Dictionary of 20th century Australia

West Melbourne and North Melbourne

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
West Melbourne. The lavatory to a Dudley Mansion
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
7.4 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

View of a poorly constructed lavatory building on the edge of a stretch of water. Construction material is mainly corrugated iron. Rail freight car and industrial landscape in the background.

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'West Melbourne. The lavatory to a Dudley Mansion' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
West Melbourne. The lavatory to a Dudley Mansion (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
7.4 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
West Melbourne. A Dudley Mansion
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.5 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'West Melbourne. A Dudley Mansion' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
West Melbourne. A Dudley Mansion (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.5 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
West Melbourne. A group of Dudley Mansions
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.4 x 9.8cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

View across hillside and stretch of water to a group of shanties. Industrial landscape in the background.

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
West Melbourne. One of the Dudley Mansions
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.4 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'West Melbourne. One of the Dudley Mansions' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
West Melbourne. One of the Dudley Mansions (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.4 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
North Melbourne. Row of four houses
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
7.3 x 9.6cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
North Melbourne. Group of children in Erskine Place
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
10.0 x 7.5cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'North Melbourne. Group of children in Erskine Place' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
North Melbourne. Group of children in Erskine Place (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
10.0 x 7.5cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
North Melbourne. Hardwicke Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
7.2 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972) 'North Melbourne. Hardwicke Street' c. 1935 (detail)

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
North Melbourne. Hardwicke Street (detail)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver
7.2 x 9.7cm
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
North Melbourne. No. 19 Byron Street
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
F. Oswald Barnett Collection
State Library of Victoria
Public domain

Contemporary photograph of Byron Street, North Melbourne with number 19 half way along on the left. All apartment complexes now…

F. Oswald Barnett. "An Apology to the Slum Dweller" 1945?

F. Oswald Barnett. “An Apology to the Slum Dweller,” in F. Oswald Barnett. I hear the tramp of millions. Melbourne: Printers Pty Ltd, 1945? pp. 12-13. 36 p.: ill.; 21cm.

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Exhibition: ‘Photography: Real & Imagined’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne Part 1

Exhibition dates: 13th October 2023 – 4th February 2024

Curator: Susan van Wyk, Senior Curator of Photography at the NGV

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

O. G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) No title (The Virgin in prayer) c. 1858-1860 from the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, October 2023 - February 2024

O. G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
No title (The Virgin in prayer)
c. 1858-1860
Albumen silver photograph
20.2 x 15.4cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2002
Public domain

This is an ambitious, complex but flawed exhibition of photographic works from the NGV Collection. Further comment in Part 2 of the posting…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the NGV for allowing me to publish the media images in the posting. Other photographs in the posting are public domain. All installation images are by Marcus Bunyan.

Photography: Real and Imagined examines two perspectives on photography; photography grounded in the real world, as a record, a document, a reflection of the world around us; and photography as the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion. On occasion, photography operates in both realms of the real and the imagined.

Highlighting major photographic works from the NGV Collection, including recent acquisitions on display for the very first time, Photography: Real and Imagined examines the complex, engaging and sometimes contradictory nature, of all things photographic. The NGV’s largest survey of the photography collection, the exhibition includes more than 300 works by Australian and international photographers and artists working with photo-media from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Text from the NGV website

Installation view of the entrance to the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne with introduction wall text to the right
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Introduction

Photography was once described by writer and critic Lucy Lippard as having ‘a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude’. Photographs, Lippard posits, may be a close – rather than exact – reflection of truth. This proposition raises a raft of questions. Is reality so uncomfortable that we only engage with it partially, or out of necessity? Can a photograph show the truth, and if it does, whose truth is it showing – the photographer’s, the subject’s or the viewer’s? If truth is the end game, what does this mean for creative practice and other types of photography? The suggestion that photography is only partially, and somewhat uncomfortably, engaged with the notion of truth highlights the complexity encountered when trying to nearly encapsulate any selection of photographs.

Through works from the NGV Collection, Photography: Real and Imagined teases out connections between iconic and lesser known photographs, putting them in a dialogue with one another that both explores and transcends the time in which they were made. It dos not set out to be a history of photography, but historical context does inform the content, leading to nuanced discussions of past and present, real and imagined.

Introductory wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Mike and Doug Starn’s Invictus (1992); and at left works by John Kauffmann, Norman Deck and Edward Steichen (see below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The sun was the light source that enabled the earliest photographs to be made in the 1830s. More than 150 years later the sun is the subject of this photographic sculpture by Mike and Doug Starn that embraces the possibilities of light and its potential effects on photography, in terms of both producing an image and as a force contributing to its irreparable damage. In the centre of their installation, the circular form of a sun seems to pulse and leach out of the layers of exposed orthographic film, which is stretched and layered across steel beams and held with pipe clamps and tape.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, John Kauffmann’s The Cloud (c. 1905, below); at bottom left, Kauffmann’s The grey veil c. 1919; at top right, Norman Deck’s Sunset, Parramatta River (1909); and a bottom right, Edward Steichen’s Moonrise (1904)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864-1942)
The cloud
c. 1905
Gelatin silver photograph
28.2 x 37.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mr John Bilney, 1976
Public domain

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864–1942) 'The grey veil' c. 1919 from the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, October 2023 - February 2024

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864-1942)
The grey veil
c. 1919
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1990
Public domain

The Yarra River, the Princes Bridge and the Melbourne city skyline beyond shimmer in this photograph by John Kauffmann. And yet, they are not the image’s subject. Using a highly refined Pictorialist treatment, a reduced tonal range and luminous mid tones, the artist has manipulated light to the extent that the feeling and atmospheric qualities become the focus of the image – it is the impression that is paramount. With the choice of title, too, the photograph moves away from a specific documentation of place or time.

Wall text from the exhibition

Norman Deck (Australian 1882-1980)
Sunset, Parramatta River
1909
Gelatin silver photograph
30.5 x 24.9cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Joyce Evans, 1993
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at centre, David Thomas’ The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London) (2010-2011), with at right works by David Noonan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, László Moholy-Nagy and Susan Fereday (see below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Thomas (British, b. 1951, Australia 1958- ) 'The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London)' 2010-2011 (installation view)

David Thomas (British, b. 1951, Australia 1958- )
The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London) (installation view)
2010-2011
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of an anonymous donor through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2015
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

“It was made during a residency at the Centre for Drawing Research at Wimbledon School of Art University of the Arts London… and plays on Paul Klee’s definition of drawing as taking a line for a walk on a page… this is taking a monochrome for a walk in the world where the monochrome becomes a key for seeing other colours… an interval in the world. It also suggests the ideas of movement in time and feelings of impermanence.”

~ David Thomas

Installation view of the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing works by David Noonan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Susan Fereday

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top right, David Noonan’s Untitled (1992); at bottom left, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Winnetka Drive-In, Paramount (1993); at top right, László Moholy-Nagy’s Fotogram, 1925 (1925); and at bottom right, Susan Fereday’s Untitled (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Light and time are both the means and subject of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Drive-In Theaters series. To produce the images, the artist directs his camera at the movie screen. Once the film starts, Sugimoto opens the lens shutter of his large-format camera and shuts it the moment the movie ends. The result is a visual condensation of the moving images and projected light of the film for its duration into a vivid, hovering rectangle of virtually pulsating light and, in the case of this drive-in cinema, the surrounding human-made and astronomical light, too.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Noonan’s Untitled (1992)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian 1895-1946, Germany 1920-1934, England 1935-1937, United States 1937-1946)
Fotogram, 1925
1925
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Society of Victoria, 1985
Public domain

From 1922 to 1943 László Moholy-Nagy experimented extensively with the photogram process – he was passionate about the optical effects and inherent properties of these camera-less images freed from a purely representational mode. In this work a pale shape, an organic swathe, streams across a page while curved shapes dance at the base. A halo above emits small geometric patterns. The work is a celebration of abstraction of the image – of the effects of playing with light, objects and photographic paper in a darkroom.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Barbara Kasten’s Composition 8T (2018, below); and at right, Lydia Wegner’s Purple square (2017, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936)
Composition 8T
2018
Digital type C print
160.0 x 121.9cm (image and sheet)
ed. 1/1
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
© Barbara Kasten, courtesy Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf

This photograph from Barbara Kasten’s Collisions/Compositions series continues her practice of creating architectural spaces in the studio using a range of materials, such as plexiglas and mirrors, which she lights and photographs at close range. Influenced by Constructivism and the teachings of the Bauhaus, specifically the work of László Moholy-Nagy, Kasten has experimented with the parameters of abstract photography for around five decades. She has written of her ongoing fascination with light in the creation and conceptual development of her photographs, saying, ‘The interdependency of shadow and light is the essence of photographic exploration and an inescapable part of the photographic process’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lydia Wegner’s Purple square (2017)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Todd McMillan’s Equivalent VIII (2014); and at right, Sue Pedley’s Sound of lotus 1 (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait (V. Liebermann D) (1999); and at back second left, Ruff’s Portrait (A. Koschkarow) (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait (V. Liebermann D) (1999); and at right, Ruff’s Portrait (A. Koschkarow) (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The earnest gazes of the man and woman in these two monumental photographs by Thomas Ruff are so calm and serene that they bely the intense experience of viewing their enlarged faces. Applying a standardised approach – similar to a generic passport photograph – these portraits have a timeless quality that invites you to attempt to ‘read’ their faces and to search for clues as to the inner state of the person. Ruff, however, lets nothing slip. The faces are known to the artist but remain anonymous to the viewer.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Robert Rooney’s AM-PM: 2 Dec 1973-28 Feb 1974 (1973-1974) (detail)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Featuring some of the most iconic photographs ever created alongside contemporary approaches to the photographic medium, Photography: Real & Imagined is the largest survey of the NGV’s Photography collection in the institution’s history and features more than 270 photographs by Australian and international practitioners.

Four years in the making, this landmark exhibition features photographs from across the 200-year period since the invention of photography in the 19th century, including work by leading international photographers including Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gilbert & George and Nan Goldin, alongside Australian photographers Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Mervyn Bishop, Polly Borland, Destiny Deacon and Darren Sylvester.

Through twenty-one thematic sections, this large-scale exhibition explores the proposition that a photograph can be grounded in the real world, recording, documenting and reflecting the world around us; or be the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion; and on occasion operate in both realms. The thematic sections explore subject matter such as light, place and environment, consumption, conflict, community, and death.

Exhibition highlights include Mervyn Bishop’s important photograph of former Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, pouring sand into the open palm of Gurindji Elder Vincent Lingiari. The 1975 image captures the historic meeting between these two figures where Lingiari received the crown lease of his ancestral lands. Also on display is Joe Rosenthal’s World War II photograph Raising the flag on Iwo Jima, 1945, in which American marines raise their country’s flag over the Japanese Island. Both Bishop and Rosenthal’s photographs were staged, or re-constructed for better pictorial effect, illustrating the fluid space between the real and imagined.

The exhibition also presents fashion and advertising photography, including key examples by Lilian Bassman, Athol Smith, Horst P. Horst and Dora Maar. These images showcase a world of designer fashion and high-end products, which set a standard in advertising that continues today. Ilse Bing’s Surrealist inspired photograph commissioned by Elsa Schiaparelli to launch her new perfume Salut in 1934 is a highlight of the exhibition.

Highlighting an area of focused collecting for the NGV, the exhibition recognises the work of women practicing in the early 20th century, including Barbara Morgan whose acclaimed photo montage City shell, 1938, shows an unexpected view of the then recently completed Empire State Building.

Through to the current day, Photography: Real & Imagined presents contemporary photographers of the 21st century including Zanele Muholi, Richard Mosse and Alex Prager. Highlights include Cindy Sherman’s celebrated self-portrait in the guise of Renaissance aristocrat. Also on display will be the oldest photographic work in the NGV Collection, an early 19th century portrait by Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of the medium, as well as examples of daguerreotypes, unique images on silver plated copper sheets that are amongst the earliest forms of photography.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication – the most ambitious book published on the NGV Photography Collection, generously supported by the Bowness Family Foundation. The publication comprises essays from NGV Senior Curator of Photography, Susan van Wyk, Susan Bright and David Campany; alongside texts by Curator of Photography, Maggie Finch and external authors from Australia, Europe, North America and Southeast Asia.

Regular introductory talks for students are held on weekdays during term times, and free drop-by guided tours each Thursday and Sunday at 10.30am during the exhibition period.

Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV, said: ‘This exhibition celebrates the collections and achievements of the NGV’s photography department, which has presented more than 180 exhibitions in its 55-year history. The exhibition is a testament to the strength of the NGV Collection, with so many key examples of the history of photography represented, from the earliest examples from the 19th century, through to contemporary images being produced right now in the twenty-first century. We are grateful for the support of the many donors and philanthropists, such as the Bowness Family Foundation, who have helped to grow and strengthen the NGV’s photography collection.’

Press release from the NGV

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne at top left, O. G. Rejlander’s The Virgin in prayer (c. 1858-1860, below); at bottom left, Henry Peach Robinson’s Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot (1859); at centre, Ruth Hollick’s Thought (1921); and at right Cindy Sherman’s Untitled (1988) from the History Portraits series 1988-1990
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Describing the complex conundrum presented by Cindy Sherman in this photograph, photographer and curator Patrick Pound once wrote: ‘Fake chested and with a face like a mask, here Cindy Sherman is costumed to the max. She stares out like a disapproving Renaissance figure who has just walked off set from a Peter Greenaway extravaganza. Here we have a photographer looking like a painting that walked out of a film. Sherman’s photographs speak of the fragilities of the visage in an image-saturated world where information and construction slip into foreplay. In Sherman’s photographic world gender and identity is a compilation album. There is a toughness to the excess that is all her own’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing O. G. Rejlander’s The Virgin in prayer (c. 1858-1860, above)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830-1901)
Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot
1859
Albumen silver photograph
24.3 x 19.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1988
Public domain

In the 1850s Henry Peach Robinson was renowned for producing elaborately staged narrative images based on scenes from popular literary sources. He was particularly interested in Arthurian legends and drew upon these stories as inspiration for some of his most admired photographs. Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot is based on Alfred Tennyson’s version of the story of Lancelot and Elaine. Peach Robinson has recreated the scene in which the lovelorn Elaine gazes dreamily at the shield of Lancelot. She is shown as a woman who has shunned reason and propriety and abandoned herself to the intensity of her emotions, making this photograph both a tragic love story and a cautionary narrative.

Wall text from the exhibition

Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977)
Thought
1921
Gelatin silver photograph
37.4 25.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania 1975 from the Artists and Photographs folio 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1959, German-born artists Bernd and Hilla Becher began travelling throughout Europe to create photographic typologies of vanishing industrial architecture (a practice they continued for more than four decades). While predominantly documenting German structures and landscapes, they occasionally worked overseas. This image, four views of a coal tipple, was taken on their first trip to North America in the mid 1970s. The Bechers constructed a system for comparing structures: photographed from a consistent angle, with virtually identical lighting conditions, printed at the same size and often displayed in grids.

Wall text from the exhibition

Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937) 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations' 1963, published 1967 (installation view)

Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Twentysix Gasoline Stations (installation view)
1963, published 1967
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 48 pages, printed cover, glued binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Robert Rooney through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

With the first publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and his subsequent artist books, Edward Ruscha’s work was influential in initiating the widespread interest in photographic book publishing that continues today. Ruscha’s use of photographs as a means of recording – a seemingly unemotional, detached cataloguing of the world – and simply as a ‘device to complete the idea’ influenced the interest in serial imaging adopted by many conceptual artists. Ruscha’s use of the book format was also crucial, providing a transportable way of presenting art in varied contexts that existed as a type of ‘map’ to be read and interpreted, with the subject matter becoming less important than the documentation as a whole.

Wall text from the exhibition

John Baldessari (American 1931-2020) ‘Fable: A Sentence of Thirteen Parts (with Twelve Alternate Verbs) Ending in a Fable’ 1977 (installation view)

John Baldessari (American 1931-2020)
Fable: A Sentence of Thirteen Parts (with Twelve Alternate Verbs) Ending in a Fable (installation views)
1977
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithography on concertina fold-out in cross formation, folded paper cover
9.8 x 14.0 x 1.8cm (closed) 70.0 x 126.5cm approx. (overall, opened)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Friends of the Gallery Library, 2017
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Conceptual artist John Baldessari, is renowned for his often-playful investigations into ideas of language, image and authenticity, once said: ‘I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? … And then I also had a parallel interest in photography … I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both’. Taking art off the walls and requiring someone to unfold and activate it is a central idea of this artist’s book. A visual puzzle, it invites an interaction between looking and reading, creating your own fables as you jump from image to word to image again.

Wall text from the exhibition

Eve Sonneman (American, b. 1946) 'Real time' 1968-1974 (installation view)

Eve Sonneman (American, b. 1946)
Real time (installation view)
1968-1974, published 1976
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 46 folios, printed paper cover, glued binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Supporters of Photography, 2021
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Eve Sonneman’s photobook Real time includes paired photographs, each separated by a black line border. The diptychs allow for the occurrence of movement and gestures and changes between the artist’s camera clicks. The ordered presentation, however, takes the images away from a straight documentary reading and to a consideration of their ‘objectness’. After first showing the photographs at MoMA, New York, then photography curator, John Szarkowski, set up a mentorship for Sonneman with the photographer Diane Arbus. As Sonneman recalled: ‘[Arbus] loved my pictures and we got along great. For two years she helped me edit’. Sonneman then published the images through the newly established Printed Matter in New York in 1976.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Carol Jerrems and Virginia Fraser’s book A Book About Australian Women (published 1974); at top centre, Nan Goldin’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (published 1986); and at bottom left, Tracey Emin’s Exploration of the Soul (published 1994)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at bottom left, Harold Cazneaux’s book The Bridge Book (published 1930); and at top right, Lee Friedlander’s book The American Monument (published 1976)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) 'The American Monument' Published by The Eakins Press Foundation, New York, 1976 (installation view)

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
The American Monument (installation view)
Published by The Eakins Press Foundation, New York, 1976
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American 1898-1991, worked in France 1921-1929) 'Changing New York' Published by E. P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1939 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American 1898-1991, worked in France 1921-1929)
Changing New York (installation view)
Published by E. P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1939
Half-tone plate and letterpress text
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934); at bottom left, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s book Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (published 1930); at top right, Bill Brandt’s book Perspective of Nudes (published 1961); and at bottom right, Germaine Krull’s book Nude studies (Études de nu) (published 1930)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Photographs today are often viewed in galleries in frames, hung on walls. Many photographs, however, were originally created for display in combination with text and graphic design; to be laid out on a page and reproduced in different formats; to be held, worn on the body, published, and shared.

With recognition of these expanded histories of photography, and the contemporary resurgence in publishing, this exhibition includes artist books, magazines and photobooks that use the photographic image in print, publishing and design. These two cases include examples that show the influence of Surrealism, the New Objectivity and Constructivist graphic design in dynamic modern publications.

Artist and author Martin Parr has described the photobook as the ‘supreme platform’ for photographers to share the work with a broad audience. The 1920s to the 1970s were arguably the most important period for the publication of photobooks. These two cases include examples that show the influence of modernist, humanist and documentary photography traditions in innovative publications from this time. These include exhibition catalogues, examples of first edition books, publications published in larger un-editioned print runs and coveted collectable limited-edition books and portfolios.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934) with at right, Man Ray’s Anatomies (1930, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
Anatomies
1930
Gelatin silver photograph

Please note: this photograph is not in the exhibition

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) 'Aveux non Avenus' (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, 1930 (installation view)

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972)
Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (installation view)
Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, 1930
Illustrated book: photogravure, letterpress text, 237 pages, 10 leaves of plates, paper cover, stitched binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Aveux non Avenus, by the celebrated poet, writer, sculptor and photographer Claude Cahun, was published in 1930 by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, in an edition of five hundred. The book comprises a series of texts in French: poems, literary aphorisms, recollections of dream sequences and philosophical thoughts, ideas and meanderings. Pierre Mac Orlan, a French novelist who wrote the preface to the book, described Mademoiselle Claude Cahun’s text as ‘de poèmes-essais et d’essais-poèmes’, or ‘poem-essays and essay-poems’, and said that overall ‘the book is virtually entirely dedicated to the word adventure’

The alliterative title presents a conundrum for English translation – ‘aveux’ meaning ‘avowals’ or ‘confessions’, and ‘non avenus’ meaning ‘voided’ – and is variously translated as Disavowals, Denials, and Unavowed confessions, among other things. Curator Jennifer Mundy has written that the title suggests ‘an affirmative expression immediately followed by some form of negation or retraction’.

Ambiguities around the title aside, there is a strong visual aspect to the book too. The texts are each demarcated with a complex and fantastical photogravure created by Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore. These photogravure (where an image from the negative of a photograph is etched into a metal plate, similar to printmaking) are collages made up of photographic images of, and by, Cahun. Throughout the book, graphic devices of stars, eyes and lips are also used to separate sections of text. Aveux non Avenus, which has been described as an anti-realist or surrealist-autobiography of the multi-disciplinary Cahun, exists as a potential critique of the autobiography format altogether, is wonderfully irreducible.

Maggie Finch and Isobel Crombie. “Claude Cahun,” in the 2019 July/August edition of NGV Magazine on the NGV website 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 28/01/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972)
Untitled
1930
In Aveux non avenus 1930
Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris
Illustrated book: heliographs
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017

Germaine Krull (German, 1897-1985) 'Nude Studies' (Études de Nu) Published by Librarie des arts décoratifs, Paris, 1930 (installation view)

Germaine Krull (German, 1897-1985)
Nude Studies (Études de Nu) (installation view)
Published by Librarie des arts décoratifs, Paris, 1930
24 photogravures, letterpress on paper, white cloth-backed orange paper-covered board portfolio with ribbons
National Gallery of Victoria
Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Bill Brandt (English born Germany, 1904-1983) 'Perspective of Nudes' Published Bodley Head, London, 1961 (installation view)

Bill Brandt (English born Germany, 1904-1983)
Perspective of Nudes (installation view)
Published Bodley Head, London, 1961
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Art Forms in Nature: Examples from the Plant World Photographed Direct from Nature' Published by A. Zwemmer, London, 1929 (installation view)

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Art Forms in Nature: Examples from the Plant World Photographed Direct from Nature (installation view)
Published by A. Zwemmer, London, 1929
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Karel Teige typographer (Czechoslovakia 1900-1951) Karel Paspa photographer (Czechoslovakia 1862-1936) 'ABECEDA (Alphabet)' Published by J. Otto, Prague, 1926 (installation view)

Karel Teige typographer (Czechoslovakia 1900-1951)
Karel Paspa photographer (Czechoslovakia 1862-1936)
ABECEDA (Alphabet) (installation view)
Published by J. Otto, Prague, 1926
Photomontage
National Gallery of Victoria
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1958) Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958) 'USSR in Construction, no. 12 (Parachute issue)' (URSS en Construction) 1935

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1958) and Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958)
USSR in Construction, no. 12 (Parachute issue) (URSS en Construction) (installation view)
1935
Illustrated journal: colour rotogravure, 22 pages with fold-out inserts, lithographic cover
National Gallery of Victoria
Purchased, NGV Supporters of Prints and Drawings, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Eliza Hutchinson’s No. 9 (2010); at bottom left, Ewa Narkiewicz’s Copper flax #4 (1999); at centre top, Harry Nankin’s The first wave: fragment 2 (1996); at centre bottom, Peter Peryer’s Seeing (1989); and at right, Aaron Siskind’s New York (1950)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In much the same way that tactile writing systems such as braille are impenetrable to those with vision, a photograph printed in two dimensions can be incomprehensible for people with vision impairment. Each system presents a conversion – of letters, texts and illustration – into raised dots on a page; of visible wavelengths of light into an image on a light-sensitive surface. Each relies on an irreversible alteration of the surface. Seeing, the title of this Peter Peryer photograph, infers an action – seeing something. Yet the conversion into a photographic image draws attention to the impenetrability of both acts.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (1999) from the Twilight series (1998-2002); at centre, Malerie Marder’s Untitled (2001); and at right, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled' 1999 (installation view)

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled (installation view)
1999
From the Twilight series 1998-2002
Type C photograph
121.9 x 152.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Kaiser Bequest, 2000
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957) 'Sunday, 2:09pm' 1995, printed 2019 (installation view)

Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957)
Sunday, 2:09pm
1995, printed 2019
From the Open House series 1995
Colour cibachrome transparency, light box
121.7 x 161.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Polly Borland’s Untitled (2018); and at right, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at rear from left to right, Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (1999) from the Twilight series (1998-2002); at second left, Malerie Marder’s Untitled (2001); and centre, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995); and at right, Alex Prager’s Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street) (2013, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Alex Prager’s Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street) (2013, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alex Prager (American, b. 1979)
Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street)
2013
Inkjet print
149.7 x 142.0cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Contemporary Photography, 2014

Alex Prager’s staged photographs openly reference the aesthetics of mid-twentieth century American cinema, fashion photography and the photographs of Cindy Sherman. Her images resemble film stills and are packed with emotion and human melodrama. Working with actors, directing their placement and interaction to create a hyperreal dramatisation of crowd behaviour, Prager’s narrative tableaux pair the banal and fantastic, the everyday and the theatrical, real life and cinematic representation. In this image we have a bird’s eye view of a mass of people crossing the road. We can see the patterns of movement, contact and avoidance and a suggestion of the narrative possibilities of the interacting crowd.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at second right, Pat Brassington’s Rosa (2014); and at right, Yvonne Todd’s Werta (2005)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989) 'Fonteyn' 2012 (installation view)

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Fonteyn (installation view)
2012
Digital type C print
102.8 x 99.9cm
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2013
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Loretta Lux’s The Drummer (2004, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Loretta Lux (German, b. 1969)
The drummer
2004
Cibachrome photograph
45.0 x 37.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2006
© Loretta Lux. VG Bild-Kunst/Copyright Agency, 2023

Loretta Lux is known for her eerie, hyperreal photographs of children. The luminous pallor of the boy’s skin and the subtle tonal range throughout the photograph is achieved through Lux’s delicate use of digital manipulation to reduce the palette in her image. Lux’s history as a painter informs photographs such as this, which seem to owe as much of a debt to Old Master paintings as modern technology. Her skilful combination of photographic reality and painterly effect gives the image a profoundly disconcerting quality that is reminiscent of the fantastical (and disturbing) character of Oskar, the little drummer boy, in the Günter Grass novel The Tin Drum (1959).

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at bottom left, Raoul Ubac’s Penthésilée (c. 1938, below); at top centre, André Kertész’s Satiric Dancer, Paris (1926, below); and at right, Max Dupain’s Impassioned clay (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Raoul Ubac (Belgian, 1909-1985)
Penthésilée
c. 1938
Gelatin silver photograph
31.0 x 41.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013

From the mid 1930s onwards Surrealist photographer Raoul Ubac experimented with collage, photomontage and solarisation. These processes disrupted the surface of his photographs, enabling him to create new and fantastic realities and introducing an element of chance into his image making. Penthésilée is from his most important series of photographs. The image is based on the story of Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, who was killed by Achilles while fighting alongside the Trojans. To represent this mythic battle Ubac created this complex photomontage by cutting up, collaging, rephotographing and solarising photographs of nude female figures. The resulting image has an uncanny sense of movement suggesting the height of battle.

Wall text from the exhibition

André Kertész (Hungarian 1894-1985, France 1925-1936, United States 1936-1985)
Satiric Dancer, Paris
1926, printed c. 1972
Gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1973

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Max Dupain’s Impassioned clay (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Max Dupain (Australian 1911-1992)
Impassioned clay
1936
Gelatin silver photograph
50.4 x 36.7cm irreg.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
William Kimpton Bequest, 2016
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Pat Brassington’s Rosa (2014); and at right, Yvonne Todd’s Werta (2005)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Yvonne Todd selects her subjects, most often young women, from ‘call outs’ seeking certain types, people encountered on the street, or modelling agencies where she invariably chooses those with little or no industry experience. In her studio Todd uses costumes, heavy make-up and wigs to style her models. Costuming is an important aspect of Todd’s practice; her interest lies in in what she describes as, ‘the way they carry character and narrative connotations’. Todd’s finished photographs are heavily reworked using Photoshop so that they appear obviously artificial. This overt use of artifice shifts her images from simply being nostalgic recreations to being strangely familiar and undeniably creepy.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Robyn Stacey’s Nothing to see here (2019) and at back centre, Polly Borland’s Untitled (2018)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Robyn Stacey (Australian, b. 1952)
Nothing to see here
2019
From the Nothing to See Here series 2019
Lenticular image
155.5 x 119cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2020

This large-scale lenticular photograph shows the face of a woman projected onto a curtain. The curtain suggests a hidden cinema screen; however, Robyn Stacey’s curtains cannot be pulled back. From one viewpoint a beautiful face with eyes softly closed as if in sleep appears, but as you move past the image you can only see the curtain. The curtain becomes what the artist described as ‘a membrane between reality and allegory’ and acts as the screen as the portrait appears and disappears.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Polly Borland's lenticular photograph 'Untitled' (2018)

Installation views of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Polly Borland’s lenticular photograph Untitled (2018) from the MORPH series
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Polly Borland (Australia, b. 1959)
Untitled
2018
From MORPH series 2018
Inkjet print on rice paper on lenticular cardboard
216.0 x 172.7 x 13.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019
© Polly Borland

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000); and at centre right, Selina Ou’s Convenience (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Narelle Autio (Australian, b. 1969) 'Untitled' 2000 (installation view)

Narelle Autio (Australian, b. 1969)
Untitled (installation view)
2000
From The Seventh Wave series 1999-2000
Gelatin silver photograph
90.0 x 134.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2001
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back centre, Selina Ou’s Convenience (2001); and at right, Rosemary Laing’s welcome to Australia (2004)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Ben Shahn’s Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for coloured children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking 1935; and back right, Lewis Hine’s Finishing garments, 10 Hanover Ave., Boston, Massachusetts 1912; and at right in the cabinet, Kusakabe Kimbei’s album (Landscape and portraits) (1880s-1910s)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ben Shahn (Lithuanian 1898-1969, United States c. 1925-1969)
Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for coloured children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking (installation view)
1935, printed c. 1975
Gelatin silver photograph
21.7 x 32.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Finishing garments, 10 Hanover Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
1912
Gelatin silver photograph
11.4 x 16.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1980
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Kusakabe Kimbei’s album (Landscape and portraits) (1880s-1910s)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, John Thomson’s The crawlers (1876-1877, below); at top right, Heather George’s Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952); and at bottom right, Fred Kruger’s Group of Aborigines in hop gardens, Coranderrk (1876, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Thomson’s The crawlers (1876-1877, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

John Thomson (Scottish 1837-1921)
The crawlers
1876-1877
From the Street Life in London series 1877
Woodbury type
11.5 x 8.7cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1977
Public Domain

Heather George (Australian 1907-1983) 'Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory' 1952, printed 1978 (installation view)

Heather George (Australian 1907-1983)
Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (installation view)
1952, printed 1978
From the Northern Territory series 1952
Gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1952 the Australian magazine Walkabout included a series of images made by photojournalist Heather George at Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory. The vast pastoral lease on the lands of the dispossessed Gurindji people would later become famous as a turning point in the recognition of land rights for Australia’s First Nations peoples, but when George visited, it was a place of entrenched, officially sanctioned discrimination. In George’s photograph, the Gurindji stockmen appear overshadowed by the stockyards in the foreground, perhaps reflecting the attitude of pastoralists who, having been granted leases, took advantage of people living on Country, exploiting them as an unpaid workforce.

Wall text from the exhibition

Fred Kruger (German 1831-1888, Australia 1860-1888)
Group of Aborigines in hop gardens, Coranderrk
1876
Albumen silver photograph
13.3 x 20.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs Beryl M. Curl, 1979
Public domain

In 1876 Fred Kruger was commissioned to produce two series of photographs at Coranderrk, a settlement and working farm established to rehouse dispossessed people of the Kulin Nation. One of the many subjects he photographed was the productive farmland and the activities of the community working the land. Kruger’s photograph shows a multigenerational group of people in the lush Arcadian setting of the hop garden, but what it obscures is the reality of exploitation and poverty that afflicted First Nations people in this place. Kruger’s photographs met a brief to promote the so-called ‘civilising’ work of colonial authorities but in doing so represented a largely imagined reality and created an effective form of propaganda.

Wall text from the exhibition

Selina Ou (Australian, b. 1977) 'Convenience' 2001 (installation view)

Selina Ou (Australian, b. 1977)
Convenience (installation view)
2001
From the Serving You Better series 2001
Type C photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Kusakabe Kimbei’s Vegetable peddler (1880s, below); at bottom left, David Wadelton’s Richmond hairdresser (1979, below); at top centre, Rennie Ellis’ Between strips, Kings Cross (1970-1971, below); at bottom centre, Brassai’s Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix (La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet)) (1932, below); and at right, Wolfgang Sievers’ Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne (1949, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)
Vegetable peddler
1880s
Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes
20.6 x 26.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gerstl Bequest, 2000
Public domain

Japanese photographer Kusakabe Kimbei established his studio in 1881, making photographs for the domestic and tourist markets. Most of the photographs in this elaborate album are conventional, staged domestic scenes; picturesque views of popular tourist attractions; and street scenes. This image, however, stands alone in the album as an unusual view of contemporary life. Despite the women weavers wearing traditional dress and working hand-operated looms, the factory in which they are working is lit by electric lights and they are supervised by men wearing European-style dress. Unlike its companion works in Kimbei’s album, this photograph speaks to the industrialisation that was part of the Meiji-era modernisation in Japan.

Wall text from the exhibition

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)

Kusakabe Kimbei (日下部金兵衛; 1841-1934) was a Japanese photographer. He usually went by his given name, Kimbei, because his clientele, mostly non-Japanese-speaking foreign residents and visitors, found it easier to pronounce than his family name

Kusakabe Kimbei worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant. In 1881, Kimbei opened his own workshop in Yokohama, in the Benten-dōri quarter. From 1889, the studio operated in the Honmachi quarter. By 1893, his was one of the leading Japanese studios supplying art to Western customers. Many of the photographs in the studio’s catalogue featured depictions of Japanese women, which were popular with tourists of the time. Kimbei preferred to portray female subjects in a traditional bijinga style, and hired geisha to pose for the photographs. Many of his albums are mounted in accordion fashion.

Around 1885, Kimbei acquired the negatives of Felice Beato and of Stillfried, as well as those of Uchida Kuichi. Kusakabe also acquired some of Ueno Hikoma’s negatives of Nagasaki. Kimbei retired as a photographer in 1914.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Wadelton’s Richmond hairdresser (1979, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955)
Richmond hairdresser
1979
Gelatin silver photograph
13.4 x 20.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of David Wadelton through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015
© David Wadelton

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003)
Between strips, Kings Cross
1970-1971; 2000 {printed}
From the Kings Cross series 1971
Gelatin silver photograph
37.1 x 24.1 cm (image)
40.3 x 30.4 cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2005
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Brassaï’s Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix (La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet)) (1932, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix
(La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet))
1932; printed c. 1979
From The secret of Paris in the 30s series 1931–1935
Gelatin silver photograph
20.5 x 29.2cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1980
Public Domain

In the 1930s Brassaï became well-known for his photographs of the nightlife of Paris, but it was the sex workers, along with other characters of the city’s underbelly, who excited his imagination. Reflecting on this time, he wrote, ‘Rightly or wrongly, I felt at that time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved, from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its remote past’. This photograph presents a matter-of-fact view – there is nothing exotic or erotic about the woman washing herself as her client ties his shoes and prepares to leave.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Wolfgang Sievers’ Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne (1949, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne
1949; printed 1986
Gelatin silver photograph
49.4 x 40.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1986
© National Library of Australia

Wolfgang Sievers arrived in Australia in 1938, bringing photographic equipment, rigorous training in modernist photography, a firmly held belief in the union of art and industry, left-leaning political views, and the self-declared desire to ‘assist this country through my knowledge as thanks for the freedom I can enjoy here’. The human face of industrial Australia is captured in Sievers’s celebrated photograph of the change of shift at a Melbourne engineering works, showing a sea of men and women surging into work. The upturned, smiling faces of the masses speaking to Sievers’s firmly held belief in the dignity of work.

Wall text from the exhibition

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) 'welcome to Australia' 2004 (installation view)

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024)
welcome to Australia (installation view)
2004
Type C photograph
110.8 × 224.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds from the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This photograph by Rosemary Laing makes an obviously ironic statement, as curator Kyla MacFarlane notes: ‘The title and compositional beauty of this photograph … purposefully jar against its subject matter – the remote Woomera Immigration Detention and Processing Centre in South Australia. Photographing the site while the sun sits low in the sky, Laing observes the Centre’s mechanisms of containment and surveillance – a violent presence on the red dirt and gravel road, and sun-tinged, cloudless sky of its remote location’. The photograph’s formal emptiness reflects the lack of freedom imposed on those seeking asylum and the loss of their civil liberties once detained.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Rosemary Laing’s welcome to Australia (2004, above); and at right, four photographs from Michael Cook’s Civilised series (2012)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Dorothea Lange’s Towards Los Angeles, California (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Dorothea Lange (United States 1895-1965) 'Towards Los Angeles, California' 1936, printed c. 1975

Dorothea Lange (United States 1895-1965)
Towards Los Angeles, California
1936; c. 1975 {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
39.6 x 39.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975

In this photograph Dorothea Lange has ironically juxtaposed the aspiration of clean, comfortable train travel with the exhausting reality of the unemployed traversing America in search of work in the 1930s. Renowned for making photographs that combine empathy and clear-eyed observation, Lange also believed that photographs and text should be presented together to amplify the messages carried in both mediums. She understood that captions ‘fortified’ her photographs and that they should ‘not only (carry) factual information, but also add clues to attitudes, relationships and meanings’. Although it doesn’t have a caption, the opportunistic combination of image and text in this image highlights the gulf between the haves and have nots.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Alfred Stiegliz’s The steerage (1907, below); at bottom left, David Moore’s Migrants arriving in Sydney (1966, below); at centre, Charles Nettleton’s Hobsons Bay railway pier (1870s, below); at top right, Maggie Diaz’s The Canberra, Port Melbourne (1961-1967); and at bottom right, Paul Haviland’s Passing steamer (1910)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alfred Stiegitz (American, 1864-1946) 'The Steerage' 1907

Alfred Stieglitz (American 1864-1946, Germany 1881-1990)
The steerage
1907, printed 1911
Photogravure
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
Public domain

Alfred Stieglitz was a pioneering photographer, publisher and gallery director. The steerage, arguably his most important photograph, is regarded as his first great modernist work. The composition, with its compressed space, apparent lack of horizon and striking diagonal lines, is suggestive of avant-garde painting of the time. Showing the densely packed lower decks of the of the transatlantic steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II, Stieglitz’s oblique reference to the return movement of unsuccessful immigrants to America offers an insight into the social outcomes and complexities of mass global migration in the early twentieth century.

Wall text from the exhibition

David Moore (Australia, 1927-2003)
Migrants arriving in Sydney
1966
Gelatin silver photograph
26.7 x 40.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1991
© Estate of David Moore

David Moore was Australia’s pre-eminent photojournalist of the 1960s. His work was regularly seen in leading local and international magazines. Moore’s Migrants arriving in Sydney, was commissioned and published by National Geographic in 1966. This now iconic image shows the climactic moment when a ship carrying migrants to Australia docks at Sydney harbour. The tightly framed photograph reveals a range of emotions on the faces of a group of people about to disembark and begin a new life. “We must do more than record the sensational, the bizarre, and the tragic. The lens of the camera must probe, with absolute sincerity, deep into the lives of ordinary men and women and show how we work and play.” David Moore, 1953

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website

THIS IS NOT CORRECT NGV!

In 2015, Judy Annear [Head of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales] said of this famous photograph: “It’s great to consider that it’s not actually what it seems.” Years after the photo was published, it emerged that four of the passengers in it were not migrants but Sydneysiders returning home from holiday.

Charles Nettleton (English 1825-1902, Australia 1854-1902)
Hobsons Bay railway pier
1870s
Albumen silver photograph
12.8 × 19.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1992
Public domain

Maggie Diaz (American, 1925-2016, Australia 1961-2016)
The Canberra, Port Melbourne
1961-1967, printed 2014
Pigment print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2015

As a young woman, Maggie Diaz had been fascinated by the work of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Her photographs are a ‘slice of life’ offering similar insights into the everyday experiences of people wherever she encountered them. The ship she photographed at Melbourne’s Station Pier in the 1960s was The Canberra, the largest of the passenger ships sailing between Britain and Australia at that time. Often bringing British migrants on assisted passages, the ship also held personal significance for Diaz: as a migrant from the United States, she travelled one-way from the US to Australia on The Canberra’s maiden voyage in 1961.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing four photographs from Michael Cook’s Civilised series (2012)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Michael Cook (Australian / Bidjara, b. 1968)
Civilised #11
2012
From the Civilised series 2012
Inkjet print
100.0 x 87.5cm
ed. 3/8
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013
© Michael Cook and Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin

Bidjara artist Michael Cook poses a question in his Civilised series: ‘What makes a person civilised?’ In these photographs he represents the ways Europeans – English, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonists – responded to First Nations people when they arrived on these shores. The artist asserts that his Civilised series ‘suggests how different history might have been if those Europeans had realised that the Aborigines were indeed civilised’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at third left bottom, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the banks of the Marne (1938, below); at fourth left top, Gabriel de Rumine’s Caryatid porch of Erechtheum, Acropolis, Athens (1859, below); at fourth left bottom, Lee Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore (1969, below); at centre top, John Williams’ Clovelly Beach, Sydney (1969, below); at top right, Eugène Atget’s The roller coaster, Invalides funfair (Montagnes russes, fête des Invalides) (1898, below); and at bottom right, Roger Scott’s Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show (1972? 1975? below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Goldblatt’s The playing fields of Tladi, Soweto, Johannesburg, August 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Harold Cazneaux (Australian born New Zealand, 1878-1953)
Fairy Lane steps
1910
Bromoil print
24.8 x 18.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© The Cazneaux family

Harold Cazneaux was one of the most important and influential Australian photographers of the early twentieth century. He had a great love of the natural world but early in his career also found a rich subject in the inner-city streets of Sydney. Cazneaux made photographs that appear lively and spontaneous, although given the limitations of the equipment at the time they are almost certain to have been staged to a degree. His charming studies of children at play in city streets transformed the bleak, impoverished urban environments of inner-city Sydney into a wonderful playground.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Helen Levitt’s New York (Boys fighting on a pediment) c. 1940
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York (Boys fighting on a pediment)
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
31.8 x 21.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Public domain

Francis Bedford (attributed to) (English, 1815-1894)
Fairy Glen, Betws-y-Coed
(Ffos Noddyn, Betws-y-Coed)
c. 1860
From the No title (Stephen Thompson album) (1859 – c. 1868)
Albumen silver photograph
13.7 x 17.8cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1988
Public domain

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Sunday on the banks of the Marne, Juvisy, France
1938; (1990s) {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
29.1 x 43.9 cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2015
© Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

In 1938 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed a group of people picnicking on the banks of the river Marne. It is a celebratory image showing a quintessential aspect of everyday life in France: long Sunday lunches. But it also reveals something of the revolutionary politics of the period and their profound influence on Cartier-Bresson in the 1930s. In 1938 the left-wing Popular Front swept into power in France and the newly elected government mandated two weeks paid leave for all workers. At the time, Cartier-Bresson worked for the Paris-based communist press and was commissioned by Regards magazine to photograph an extended series that looked at the social impact of this initiative.

Wall text from the exhibition

Gabriel de Rumine (European, 1841-1871)
No title (Caryatid porch of Erechtheum, Acropolis, Athens)
1859
Albumen silver photograph
25.7 x 35.8cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1995
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lee Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore (1969, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lee Friedlander (United States, b. 1934)
Mount Rushmore
1969; printed c. 1977
Gelatin silver print
18.3 x 27.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1977
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Installation view of the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Williams' 'Clovelly Beach, Sydney' (1969)

Installation views of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Williams’ Clovelly Beach, Sydney (1969, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

John Williams (1933- 2016) 'Clovelly Beach' 1964

John Williams (Australian, 1933-2016)
Clovelly Beach, Sydney
1969; printed 1988
Gelatin silver photograph
25.6 x 25.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1989
© John Williams

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
The roller coaster, Invalides funfair (Montagnes russes, fête des Invalides)
1898
From the Festivals and Fairs series in the Art in Old Paris series 1898-1927
Albumen silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Patrick Pound through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2020
Public domain

Roger Scott. 'Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show' 1972? 1975?

Roger Scott (Australian, b. 1944)
Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show
1972? 1975?
Gelatin silver print
30.4 x 45.6cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mr James Mollison, 1994
© Roger Scott

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Exhibition: ‘Noir & Blanc: une esthétique de la photographie’ at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), François-Mitterrand, Paris

Exhibition dates: 17th October, 2023 – 21st January, 2024

Curated by a team of photography specialists from the institution’s Department of Prints and Photography (see below)

Benjamin Brecknell Turner (English, 1815-1894) 'North Side of Quadrangle, Arundel Castle' 1852-1854 from the exhibition 'Noir & Blanc: une esthétique de la photographie' at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), François-Mitterrand, Paris, October 2023 - January 2024

Benjamin Brecknell Turner (English, 1815-1894)
North Side of Quadrangle, Arundel Castle
1852-1854
Negative photograph on paper
29.7 x 39.6cm
BnF, department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO EI-6-BOITE FOL B (n° 3)
Gift of André and Marie-Thérèse Jammes, 1960

What a lovely exhibition to start the year 2024 on Art Blart.

My favourite photographs in the posting: three beautiful fashion photographs by Frères Séeberger; a stunning late Atget Parc de Sceaux, Duchess Alley (between 1925 and 1927, below) in which you can feel the crispness in the air of the early winter morning; and the glorious seascapes of Gustave Le Gray, probably the best (and most atmospheric) photographer of the sea in all time.

In this posting we observe how black and white photographs are never just black and white but full of different hues and colours. These colour variations tell us a lot about the perception of the image.

As the exhibition text notes: “The strength of the blacks and whites, the variations of hues influence our perception of the image: the more contrasted it is, the more readable it is for our eye saturated with absolute blacks and whites; the more nuanced it is, the more sensitive the distance of time becomes.”

As we enter a new year, another year further away from the origin of the light captured in these photographs, the sensitivity of early photographers and their ability to displace time continues to entrance the viewer.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Noir & Blanc: Une esthétique de la photographie

Black and white is inseparable from the history of photography: its developments, from the end of the 19th century to today, have revealed its plastic force. While the use of colour intensified from the 1970s, black and white reinvented itself as a means of assertive aesthetic expression emphasising graphics and material. Black and white photography remains less expensive and simpler, but its persistence to this day can be explained above all by the fact that it has come to embody the very essence of photography. It appears to carry a universal, timeless, even memorial dimension, where colour would be the sole translation of the contemporary world.

The National Library of France holds one of the richest photographic collections in the world with some six million prints, these are particularly representative of this abundant history of black and white photography.

Benjamin Brecknell Turner (English, 1815-1894)
Arbre le long d’une clotûre (Tree along a fence)
1852-1854
Negative photograph on paper
23.5 x 27.3cm
BnF, department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO EI-6-BOITE FOL B (n° 3)
Gift of André and Marie-Thérèse Jammes, 1960

Photography on paper, with its speed and precision, revolutionised image production in the mid-19th century. The prerequisite is the production of a negative then of the same size as the print. The first negatives are on paper. Reversing the values of blacks and whites, they offer an unknown vision of the world. These oppositions, inverted or not, are the basis of the aesthetics of photography.

One of the earliest British amateur photographers, Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-1894) was experimenting with photography barely ten years after the invention of the medium. He exhibited widely during his lifetime and is best known for his beautiful photographs of 19th-century England, picturesque ruins and rural scenes.

A founder member of the Photographic Society of London, Turner contributed to the rapid technical and aesthetic development of photography in the 1850s. Our collection includes a unique album compiled by Turner, ‘Photographic Views from Nature’, containing some of the earliest photographs made in and around the counties of Worcestershire, Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Yorkshire, alongside the radical modern architecture of the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park.

Text from the V&A website

The origins of black and white

Before the invention of colour photography by the Lumière brothers in 1903, one might believe that all photography was black and white. The reality is more complex: the early days were more those of a varied range of values where pure blacks and whites were the exception and so-called sepia tones were the most common. The negative / positive process patented by the Englishman Fox Talbot in 1841 makes it possible to multiply the prints on paper and therefore to vary the shades.

Certain subjects play on oppositions: the mountain views of the Bisson brothers, the Great Wave by Gustave Le Gray, the portraits of the prolific amateur Blancard.

Désiré Charnay (French, 1828-1915)
Chichen Itza: Bas-relief des Tigres, Palais du Cirque (Chichen Itza: Bas-relief of the Tigers, Circus Palace)
1859-1861
Print on gold-toned albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO VZ-940-FT4

In 1861, Charnay gave Napoleon III a copy of the album American Ruins composed for the Emperor of expensive proofs on albumen paper toned with gold, in an exceptional format, the miraculous result of his Mexican epic. The shift to gold accentuates the vigour of the contrasts and brings a cold tone to the blacks.

Désiré Charnay (French, 1828-1915)
Uxmal: détail de la façade dite de la couleuvre (Uxmal: detail of the so-called snake facade)
1859-1861
From the album American Ruins
Print on gold-toned albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
59 x 78.2cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO VZ-940-FT4

The forty-nine views of the ruins of Yucatan, Chiapas, Tabasco and the province of Oaxaca constitute the first set of photographs entered into the collections of the Geographical Society, in 1861. During the general assembly of November 29 , Charnay presents his collection of photographs exhibited in the meeting room. The same day, at the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, Jomard returns to the quality of Charnay’s photographs, which allow us to conclude that American art – the Egyptologist’s supreme tribute – “deserves a place alongside Assyrian art, and even alongside the art of the Egyptians.”

Bisson frères. Louis-Auguste (French, 1814-1876) and Auguste-Rosalie (French, 1826-1900)
La crevasse (départ) sur le chemin du grand plateau, ascension du Mont-Blanc
(The crevasse (departure) on the way to the grand plateau, ascent of Mont-Blanc)
1862
Print on albumen paper from a wet collodion glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-14 (3)-FOL

In 1861, the Bisson brothers managed to hoist their photographic equipment to the summit of Mont Blanc. Mountaineering feat, photographic feat: in these extreme conditions, the plate must be sensitised just before use and developed as soon as possible. The violence of the contrasts, when the brightness of the snow juxtaposes the black of the rocks, redoubles this technical challenge. This conquest of the limit is crowned by the harmony of the print, carried by a site with spectacular aesthetic qualities.

This exhibition brings together black and white masterpieces from the photographic collections of the National Library of France. Nadar, Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Willy Ronis, Helmut Newton, Diane Arbus, Mario Giacomelli, Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, Valérie Belin…: the big names in French and international photography are brought together in a journey which presents approximately 300 prints and embraces 150 years of history of black and white photography, from its origins in the 19th century to contemporary creation.

The exhibition in brief

The exhibition addresses the question of black and white from an aesthetic, formal and sensitive angle, emphasising the modes of image creation: plastic and graphic effects of contrasts, play of shadows and lights, rendering of materials in all the palette of values from black to white. The emphasis was placed on photographers who concentrated and systematised their artistic creation in black and white, experimented with its possibilities and limits or made it the very subject of their photography such as Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Ralph Gibson, Mario Giacomelli or Valérie Belin. Particular attention was paid to the quality of the prints, the variety of techniques and photographic papers, but also to the printing of black and white, books and magazines having long been the main relay to the public for photographic creation .

The exhibition thus shows the richness and extent of the BnF’s photographic collections. Among the richest in the world with some six million prints, these are particularly representative of this abundant history of black and white photography.

Exhibition co-organised with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais

Commissariat

Sylvie Aubenas, director of the Prints and Photography department, BnF
Héloïse Conésa, head of the photography department, responsible for contemporary photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF
Flora Triebel, curator in charge of 19th century photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF
Dominique Versavel, curator in charge of modern photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF

Text from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)

Hippolyte Blancard (French, 1843-1924)
Mademoiselle L. Vulliemin, à mi-corps, la tête couverte d’un chapeau (Miss L. Vulliemin, half-length, head covered with a hat)
1889
Platinum print from a gelatin-silver bromide glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-508-PET FOL
Gift of print dealer Maurice Rousseau, 1944

Amateur photographer, wealthy pharmacist enriched by the sale of digestive pills, Blancard creates a prolific and picturesque work in a superb contrast of black and white thanks to the use of platinum. This expensive process, patented in 1873, ensures stable prints with marked contrasts which do not stifle the rendering of halftones.

Émile Zola (French, 1840-1902) 'Denise et Jacques, les enfants d'Émile Zola' (Denise and Jacques, the children of Émile Zola) 1898 or 1899 from the exhibition 'Noir & Blanc: une esthétique de la photographie' at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), François-Mitterrand, Paris, October 2023 - January 2024

Émile Zola (French, 1840-1902)
Denise et Jacques, les enfants d’Émile Zola (Denise and Jacques, the children of Émile Zola)
1898 or 1899
Gelatin aristotype, gelatin aristotype on matte velvety paper with toning, cyanotype, silver print, gelatin aristotype toned with gold, collodion aristotype with toning
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, NZ-214-8
Purchase at public sale, 2017

From 1894, the novelist devoted himself with passion to photography, in an intimate vein. Here he tests the effects of his shooting by varying the papers, the processes, the tones based on the same negative on a glass plate. We see that black and white is a monochromy among others (brown, orange, blue). Very few of these test prints created in the privacy of the photographer’s laboratory have reached us; the collection of these six prints is exceptional.

Frères Séeberger. Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger (French, 1872-1932; 1874-1946; 1876-1956)
Untitled
1909-1912
Silver print on baryta paper
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, OA-38 (1)-BOITE FOL
Acquisition-donation from the family, 1976

For almost half a century, the Séeberger brothers, specialising in fashion reporting, captured elegant women in their natural settings, racecourses, palaces, upscale beaches. The print on baryta paper, used here, marks a technical breakthrough. A layer of pure white barium sulfate is now interposed between the print support and the binder layer, where the image is formed. Manufactured industrially from the 1890s, chemically developed baryta papers and their characteristic cold tone would dominate silver production until the 1970s.

Frères Séeberger. Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger (French, 1872-1932; 1874-1946; 1876-1956)
Untitled
1909-1912
Silver print on baryta paper
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, OA-38 (1)-BOITE FOL
Acquisition-donation from the family, 1976

In Black and White

Entirely designed from the Library’s rich collections, Black & White: An aesthetic of photography presents more than 300 works from the 19th century to the present day which bear witness to the use black and white from more than 200 photographers from around the world.

Considering black and white photographic creation from the 19th century to the most contemporary works, the exhibition presented at the François-Mitterrand affirms an ambition commensurate with the historical and geographical scope of the BnF’s collections and their immense variety technical and stylistic. The Department of Prints and photography has been a high place of conservation and emulation for monochrome photographic expression, under the impetus in particular of Jean-Claude Lemagny. Recently deceased, this very first curator of photography contemporary, in office from 1968 to 1996, was a fervent defender of black and white aesthetics.

In the 19th century, the powerlessness of photography to reproduce colours do not reduce it only to black and white and the tonal variations (blue, sepia, etc.) are in fact multiple. The exhibition opens with a spectacular monochrome of prints by Émile Zola, alongside luxurious prints by Gustave Le Gray, by Désiré Charnay and the Bisson brothers. It is at the turn of the 20th century that black and white became the tonality of photography par excellence, with the generalisation of the gelatin-silver bromide process.

An artistic and aesthetic approach

The rest of the journey deliberately interweaves creations of the 20th and 21st centuries, without chronological consideration. According to a primarily artistic and aesthetic approach to black and white, works of authors, decades, styles, schools and various origins interact, in order to highlight visual constants and graphics observable in use by black and white by photographers from 37 countries. That the photographers either suffered lack of colour or – from the 1950s-1970s – preferred to it, black and white is appreciated by artists for its numerous graphic, material and symbolic, which allow them to obtain certain effects features.

Write in black and white

These are these different ways of writing in black and white that the exhibition shows, starting with the contrasts: prints by Imogen Cunningham and André Kertész at the sculptural portraits of black women by Valérie Belin, in passing through the photograms of Man Ray, the books of William Klein or the fashion photographs of Helmut Newton, the contrast is deliberately sought by certain artists. By accentuating blacks and whites, or even making them disappear to any intermediate shade of grey, they bring out the essential lines of their subjects, retrace the design of the world,
gain visual and graphic expressiveness.

The play of shadows and light, at the origins of the photographic act, forms another part of the exhibition highlights. Bringing together the works of photographers as varied as Brassaï, Alexandre Rodtchenko, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Flor Garduño, Daido Moriyama, Arthur Tress or Ann Mandelbaum, this part emphasises the dazzling effects or shadows cast, explored by these artists in their portrait practice, of the street snapshot, of the nocturnal shooting or in their laboratory experiments.

The exhibition continues with a chart of tests deployed in ribbon, from the blackest to the whitest. These prints signed Jun Shiraoka, Emmanuel Sougez, Edward Weston, Barbara Crane or Israel Ariño recall the ability of black and white to render effects of matter by its infinite variations of grey or, conversely, suggest the overflow or disappearance of all matter.

A sensory experience

The journey ends with a paradox with the works of photographers who, like Patrick Tosani, Marina Gadonneix or Laurent Cammal, disturbing the visitor’s perception by using colour processes to represent a black and white subject – an ultimate game with codes inherited from their art. Designed to show the historical depth and the richness of the BnF collections, this exhibition is intended to be educational and sensitive: emphasising certain technical aspects linked to printing practices, while insisting also on the irreducible material part of this art. By the high quality of prints presented, the exhibition offers to the public a sensory experience that will make them perceive the nuances hidden behind this apparently monolithic notion black and white.

Flora Triebel and Dominique Versavel. “En Noir et Blanc,” in Une saison en photographie, Chroniques No. 98, BnF, September – December 2023

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Parc de Sceaux, Duchess Alley
Between 1925 and 1927
Print on matte albumen paper from gelatin-bromide glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-109 (16)-BOITE FOL B

Eugène Atget claimed a humble, artisanal practice of photography. He used the same old camera and printing paper for decades. Only the disappearance of his usual supplies forced him to change. There is therefore no aesthetic research, yet these colour variations tell us a lot about the perception of the image.

The photographer artist can choose the colours of his prints by playing on the chemistry of the fixing baths or on the nature of the papers.

Gold toning, known since the 1850s, produces deep blacks but is very expensive. Baryta or platinum papers appeared at the end of the century and made it possible to further accentuate contrasts.

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Plage de Sainte-Adresse avec les bains Dumont (Sainte-Adresse beach with Dumont baths)
1856
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
31.3 x 41.3cm
Former Alfred Armand collection
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

The strength of the blacks and whites, the variations of hues influence our perception of the image: the more contrasted it is, the more readable it is for our eye saturated with absolute blacks and whites; the more nuanced it is, the more sensitive the distance of time becomes.

Provenance

This article was designed as part of the exhibition “Black & White – An aesthetic of photography” presented at the BnF from October 17, 2023 to January 21, 2024.

The marines of Le Gray

Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) is a central figure in 19th century photography. A contemporary of photographers like Nadar, Charles Nègre and Henri Le Secq, he began his career by training as a painter. With great mastery of photographic technique, he developed two major inventions, the collodion glass negative in 1850 and the dry wax paper negative in 1851.

Le Gray’s seascapes mark not only a milestone in the history of photography, but also its true intrusion into a pictorial genre characteristic of the English school. Fixing the movement of the waves while the snapshot is still stammering, combining two negatives, one for the sky and one for the sea, Le Gray plays like a virtuoso with a complex technique in the service of a lyrical vision, which prefigures marine studies by Courbet in the 1860s-1870s. The success was immense in France and England: these “enchanted paintings” were acquired by crowned heads, aristocrats, artists and art collectors.

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Vapeur (Steam)
1856-1857
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
31.3 x 37.2cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, ESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Groupe de navires – Sète – Méditerranée – No. 10 (Group of ships – Sète – Mediterranean – No. 10)
1857
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
29.9 x 41.2cm
Former Alfred Armand collection
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
La Vague brisée. Mer Méditerranée No. 15 (The Broken Wave. Mediterranean Sea No. 15)
1857
Photograph, albumen paper, collodion glass negative
41.7 x 32.5cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
La Grande vague – Sète – N° 17 (The Great Wave)
1857
Photograph, albumen paper, collodion glass negative
35.7 x 41.9 cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Flotte franco-anglaise en rade de Cherbourg (Franco-English fleet in Cherbourg harbour)
August 4-8, 1858
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
31 x 39.8cm
Former Alfred Armand collection
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910)
La Princesse Marie Cantacuzène (The Princesse Marie Cantacuzène)
around 1855-1860
Varnished salted paper print from a collodion glass negative
20.8 × 15.3cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (2)-PET FOL

Nadar created two portraits of this classically beautiful young woman. It indicates on the back of one of the proofs that it is the Romanian princess, Marie Cantacuzène.

The portrait by Félix Nadar

Until the beginning of the 1880s, Félix Nadar’s portraits were distinguished by their neutral backgrounds.

The merit of Mr. Nadar’s portraits does not consist only in the skill of the pose, which is entirely artistic, there is a learned and reasoned arrangement of the light, which attenuates or increases the daylight depending on the character of the head. and the operator’s instinct. We also find in the printing of the proofs a delicate search for harmony and slightly faded tones which soften the edges of the contours with their darkness.

Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910)
Bakounine
About 1862
Silver print from the original negative on collodion glass
27.1 × 20.6cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (4)-FOL

The revolutionary, philosopher and theoretician of socialism Mikhail Bakunin is one of the immense personalities that Nadar photographed during his career and offered to clients in his constantly enriched portrait gallery. We see here a print from 1862, contemporary with the shooting, but there is also a print made twenty years later and finally a print around 1900, brought up to date after heavy retouching. Thus until the end of the activity of the Nadar workshop, the oldest portraits of celebrities were always offered to customers.

Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910)
Jean Journet (1799-1861)
1857
Salted paper print from collodion glass negative
27.4 x 21.8cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (9)-PET FOL

Jean Journet, nicknamed the Apostle, was a picturesque and eccentric Parisian figure, often ridiculed by his contemporaries. Former carbonaro, pharmacist in Limoux, he discovered the philosophy of Fourier and decided to spread his doctrine by abandoning his family and taking his pilgrim’s staff. His humanitarian evangelism, advocating fraternity and association, led him to write numerous pamphlets which he distributed in an untimely manner: by throwing them from “paradise” into theatres or by laying siege to famous writers and editorial offices. Interned several times in Bicêtre, Journet found upon his death a defender in Nadar who published an article in Le Figaro on October 27, 1861, concluding: “Ah my dear fools! that I love you much better than all these wise men.”

Nadar draws inspiration from Spanish painting from the Golden Age to render “this dazzling head of Saint Peter”.

Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910)
Charles Asselineau (1820-1874)
Between 1854 and 1870
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
23.8 x 18.1cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (1)-PET FOL

Charles Asselineau is one of Nadar’s oldest friends. They became friends at the Collège Bourbon and were both close friends of Baudelaire. A fine scholar and supernumerary librarian at Mazarine, Charles Asselineau, author of, among other things, Paradis des gens de lettres and L’Enfer du Bibliophile, was close to the publisher Poulet-Malassis, nicknamed by Baudelaire “Coco-mal-perché”. He collaborated with Nadar on two short stories published in April and August 1846: “The Healed Dead” and “The Found Paradise”, reprinted in When I Was a Student. He belonged to the small circle of editors who documented the Pantheon-Nadar to which biographies of each character were originally to be annexed.

He was Nadar’s best man at his wedding… warned, however, two weeks after the ceremony. The groom explained this in a letter: “It’s quite funny that my first witness learned of my marriage 15 days after the consummation and through an announcement letter. This, my good friend, will be explained to you by me on our first trip. I will limit myself to telling you for the present that I went to your house the day before, a Sunday and that on Monday morning at noon time fixed for the ceremony I did not know at 11 o’clock if I was getting married.” (NAF 25007, fol. 8).

Alexandre Rodtchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Jeune fille au Leica (Young girl with Leica)
1934
BnF, prints and photography

Piergiorgio Branzi (Italian, 1928-2022)
Bar sur la plage, Adriatique (Beach bar, Adriatic)
1957
BnF, prints and photography

Willy Ronis (French, 1910-2009)
Venise (Venice)
1959
BnF, prints and photography

Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014)
Kayak, Frankfurt
1961, printed around 1970
Silver gelatin print
20 x 25.1cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EP-91 (1)-FOL
Purchase from the author, 1970
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker

A student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Metzker sublimates the formal particularities of this school through exceptional mastery black and white: he excels at stylising reality by constructing his images in direct opposition to dark and light flat areas.

Mario Giacomelli (Italian, 1925-2000)
Je n’ai pas de main qui me caresse le visage (I have no Hands caress my face)
1961-1963
BnF, prints and photography

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Portrait d’acteur (Actor portrait)
1968
From the series Japanese theatre
BnF, prints and photography

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
1er janvier 1972 à la Martinique (January 1, 1972 in Martinique)
1972
BnF, prints and photography

Bernard Plossu (French, b. 1945)
Paris
1973
BnF, prints and photography

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Immigrants, Istanbul, Turkey
c. 1977
BnF, prints and photography

Koichi Kurita (Japanese, b. 1962)
Melting Snow on a Rock, Nagano, Japan
1988
BnF, prints and photography

Flor Garduño (Mexican, b. 1957)
Canasta de Luz (Corbeille de lumière)(Basket of Light)
1989
BnF, prints and photography

Laurence Leblanc (French, b. 1967)
Chéa, Cambodge (Chéa, Cambodia)
2000
From the series Rithy Chéa Kim Sour and the others
BnF, prints and photography

Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand
Quai François Mauriac, 75706 Paris Cedex 13
Phone: +33(0)1 53 79 59 59

Opening hours:
Monday: 2pm – 8pm
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday: 9am – 8pm
Sunday: 1pm – 7pm

Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand website

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Exhibition: ‘Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939’ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 19th September, 2023 – 14th January, 2024

Curator: Clément Chéroux, director, Fondation HCB

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985) 'My shadow down the hill' San Francisco, 1938 from the exhibition 'Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939' at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, Sept 2023 - Jan 2024

What a joy it is to see a young seventeen-year-old artist spreading their wings and taking such accomplished photographs. “Her photographs of street scenes, of buildings cut by subtle lighting effects, her poetic and touching images” are remarkable for their pictorial construction – framing, understanding and use of light and shadow, perspective – and how they tell the story in a single, beautiful image.

Of particular interest are

1/ How Orkin uses the bicycle and its shadow to frame subject matter, showing an implicit understanding of modernist photography. Images such as Thru the wheels of Commerce, Frisco dockyards on the photo album page San Francisco 1939 (below) are almost Duchampian in their conceptualisation. The artist’s use of near / far, high / low and the reverse of that perspective is exceptional.

2/ How Orkin constructs the pages of the photo album, neatly gridded in either horizontal or vertical photographs (never mixed). Through collective images and text this girded visualisation formalises the journey in her mind, illuminating what a transformative experience it must have been – a rite of passage between youth and adulthood (I have no details on when or why the photo album was constructed). What adventures she must have had, shooting-the-streets at 6am in the morning before going to an Italian grocery store for breakfast!

Further, in the photo album page San Francisco 1939 No’s 33-39 (below) we can observe in the young artist an understanding of how to sequence photographs in their ebb and flow: the bicycle framing the vanishing point in 33 leads to its inversion in Orkin’s shadow in 34; this shadow is echoed in the positive in the sculpture of Voleenteer Firemen (complete with misspelling) in 35 which then leads into the thrusting Italian Church of 36 … but here it is the hanging vegetation which is of import, for the vertical drapery is then inverted in the perspective of the ground shadow in 37 Weeping willows; the opening of the light in that image is echoed in the vista between the bicycle frame in 38 Bay from Cort Tower, this negative space then itself inverted in the self-portrait in 39.

3/ How the addition of text can provide a different interpretation to the images for the viewer. The media images were shorn of the text from the photo album pages (being cropped without text) – lack of con/text which to my eyes denudes them of Orkin’s interpretation and feelings about her images.

For example, the photograph captioned in the press images These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office, Boston, 1939 (below) – reminiscent of Atget’s photograph Pendant l’éclipse (During the eclipse) 1912 (below) – is actually inscribed, These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office. Sept 1.

Some may wonder why the deletion of “Sept 1” is so important… until you realise that Sept 1, 1939 was the day that Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland leading to the official start of World War 2 (although war had been raging in Manchuria between China and Japan since 1931). Without that word and number all we have in that photograph is a varied group of people looking up at news bulletins. But with their addition, and Orkin knew this only too well, the photograph assimilates the significance of world events into its very being … and then reflects back to the viewer an understanding of how those events will subsequently affect every person in that photograph. If that word and number is not there (as in the press images title) we would have never known the import of the moment that Orkin captured.

Finally, I would acknowledge the precocious talent of Ruth Orkin and her perspicacious (from Latin perspicax, perspicac– ‘seeing clearly’) nature. On this road trip she was young and full of joys of taking photographs, perceptive and aware of the world around her. For me these photographs are more than sketches that map out the beginnings of her photographic style – they are her style, fully formed and eloquent in their subtle, formal beauty.

What an accomplishment for any artist no matter their age.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

L’exposition Ruth Orkin – Bike Trip, USA, 1939

Curator: Clément Chéroux

In 1939, at the age of 17, Ruth Orkin crossed the United States alone with her bike, her camera and only $25 in her pocket. This “bike trip” across the United States took her from Los Angeles to New York, where she planned to visit the World’s Fair. Her journey and her audacity, exceptional for the time, aroused the curiosity of the local press, which devoted numerous reports to her while she was there. It was during this epic bicycle trip that Ruth Orkin sketched out the beginnings of her photographic style. Her photographs of street scenes, of buildings cut by subtle lighting effects, her poetic and touching images, in which she doesn’t hesitate to stage her metal steed, will be shown for the first time in France at an exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. In 1951, having become a professional photographer (after working as a courier for MGM studios), Ruth Orkin produced her most famous image, American Girl in Italy, showing a woman travelling alone, under the gaze of the men who surround her and occupy public space, as a nod to her personal experience.

Text from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985) 'Bay from Coit Tower, Treasure Island at left' San Francisco, 1938 from the exhibition 'Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939' at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, Sept 2023 - Jan 2024

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Bay from Coit Tower, Treasure Island at left
San Francisco, 1938
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985) 'San Francisco 1939' 1939 from the exhibition 'Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939' at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, Sept 2023 - Jan 2024

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
San Francisco 1939
1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Pendant l'éclipse' 1912

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Pendant l’éclipse (During the eclipse)
1912
Albumen print

Although the moon is not visible in this photograph by Eugène Atget, its presence and appeal are implied. The crowd gathered in Paris’s Place de la Bastille on April 17, 1912, was observing a solar eclipse through viewing apparatuses. Atget, rather than recording the astronomical event itself, turned his attention to its spectators. Though Atget made more than 8,500 pictures of Paris and its environs in a career that spanned over thirty years – most documenting the built environment – this photograph is an unusual example that focuses on a crowd of people.

Text from the MoMA website

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office
Boston, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office. Sept 1.
Boston, 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Chicago 1939
1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
U.S. Continent and Chicago 1939
1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Exhibition

For the first time in France, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents a solo exhibition on American photographer Ruth Orkin (1921-1985), internationally known for her photograph American Girl in Italy (1951), an iconic image of a women travelling alone. While still a teenager, Orkin undertook a pioneering journey across the United States from West to East.

In 1939, at 17 and still living with her parents in Los Angeles, Ruth Orkin decided to cross the United States solo, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. She travelled less by bicycle than with a bicycle, crossing long distances by car, train, and bus, using her bicycle to explore big cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Boston and San Francisco.

Over a four-month period, she took 350 photographs: urban scenes, numerous self-portraits and striking compositions framed by her bicycle. In each city she visited, local newspapers covered her story, interviewing and photographing her. With the unexpected publicity, she was invited everywhere, given tickets to shows, and even received a new two-wheeler.

Orkin’s stated aim upon departure was to visit the New York World’s Fair, but the transcontinental adventure proved far more decisive. It was a defining moment in her personal and artistic development, confirming the old adage: it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

The exhibition brings together around forty photographs and archival documents, including Ruth Orkin’s manuscript on this adventure.

Biography

Born in Boston in 1921, Ruth Orkin grew up in Hollywood. At the age of 10, she received her first camera and began photographing her friends and teachers at school. In 1938, at 17 years old, she took a monumental bicycle trip across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City to see the 1939 World’s Fair, and she photographed along the way.

In 1943, the photographer moved to New York where worked for all the major magazines, including LIFE, which sent her to Israel in 1951. She then went to Italy, where she met Jinx Allen, an art student and fellow American, who became the subject of American Girl in Italy. The photograph was part of a series titled When You Travel Alone, about what they encountered as women traveling alone in Europe after the war.

On her return to New York, Orkin married the photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel. Together they produced two feature films, including Little Fugitive, which was nominated at the Oscar in 1953. From their New York apartment overlooking Central Park, Orkin photographed numerous events (marathons, parades, concerts) and the beauty of the changing seasons. Ruth Orkin passed away in 1985.

Text from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Conn & the Sound. Nearly lost my camera taking these because of wind
New England, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Conn & the Sound. Nearly lost my camera taking these because of wind
New England, 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Long Island Sound is a marine sound and tidal estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. It lies predominantly between the U.S. state of Connecticut to the north and Long Island in New York to the south. From west to east, the sound stretches 110 mi (180 km) from the East River in New York City, along the North Shore of Long Island, to Block Island Sound. A mix of freshwater from tributaries, and saltwater from the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island Sound is 21 mi (34 km) at its widest point and varies in depth from 65 to 230 feet (20 to 70 m).

Text from the Wikipedia website

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Washington 1939
1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Washington Monument as seen from the Lincoln Memorial & reflected in the Mall
Washington D.C., 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Washington Monument as seen from the Lincoln Memorial & reflected in the Mall
Washington D.C., 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
“Through the Wheels of Justice” The Supreme Court across from Capitol Hill
Washington D.C., 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
“Through the Wheels of Justice” The Supreme Court across from Capitol Hill
Washington D.C., 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
“EI” running over a slum street. Municipal building in background
New York, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
“EI” running over a slum street. Municipal building in background
New York, 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Sunset over lower Manhattan
New York, 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
17-Year-Old Girl Pedals Bicycle From Los Angeles to Boston, newspaper clipping from Boston
August 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Map describing the route taken by car 1939

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985) 'An American Girl in Italy' Florence, 1951

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 7pm
Closed on Mondays

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

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Exhibition dates: 9th April – 7th July, 2024

Introduction

Introduction

Identity

Identity

CAUGHT BY A FINGER PRINT

Time

Time

Spirit

Spirit

Landscape

Landscape

Circulation

Circulation

Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants

Exhibition dates: 23rd February – 7th June 2024

Exhibition dates: 30th January – 19th May, 2024

To see ourselves as others see us

Weegee Tells How

Exhibition

Biography

Weegee spoofsthenew spring hats

Exhibition dates: 15th February – 12th May, 2024

What have you got to say?

Louise Dahl-Wolfe (American, 1895-1989)

A Pioneer of Realism

Angelo Herndon (American, 1913-1997)

The exhibition

Keys

New Negro Movement

Kanaga Photojournalist

Kanaga and Women Photographers

Biography

Barbara Deming (American, 1917-1984)

Photojournalism and the City

Portrait Gallery

North Americans Abroad

Photography and the American Scene

Portraits of Artists

Trips to the Southern United States

Studies of Nature

Catalogue

from the series Travelling the wonderful loneliness 2019-2024

April 2024

Exhibition dates: 1st March – 20th April, 2024

Wondering through history

Ulrich Wüst’s photos are “images of mental-spatial situations”

Clarity and compositional elegance

February 2024

Communities dismantled

Building Communities

Our Belief

Our Residents

From the vault: Melbourne slums of the 1930s

Collingwood

Fitzroy

References

Carlton

West Melbourne and North Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 13th October 2023 – 4th February 2024

Introduction

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)

Exhibition dates: 17th October, 2023 – 21st January, 2024

Noir & Blanc: Une esthétique de la photographie

The origins of black and white

The exhibition in brief

Commissariat

In Black and White

An artistic and aesthetic approach

Write in black and white

A sensory experience

The marines of Le Gray

The portrait by Félix Nadar

Exhibition dates: 19th September, 2023 – 14th January, 2024

L’exposition Ruth Orkin – Bike Trip, USA, 1939

Exhibition

Biography

Weegee spoofs
the
new spring hats