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
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 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)
“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.”
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)
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.”
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
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing his photographs in magazine layouts
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
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.
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.
Curator Clément Chéroux
Press release from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation
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.”
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
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
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
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
“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.
“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 (German, b. 1951) James Hammett House
1982-1984
Silver gelatin print on baryte paper
66 x 80cm
Loan of the artist
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
“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.”
“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
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
“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
“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 by Christian Capurro
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
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.
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 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
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
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.
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.
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
“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.”
Exhibition dates: 13th October 2023 – 4th February 2024
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
Albumen silver photograph
20.2 × 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 × 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
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 × 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) (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 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
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, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830-1901) Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot
1859
Albumen silver photograph
24.3 × 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 (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 (installation views)
1977
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithography on concertina fold-out in cross formation, folded paper cover
9.8 × 14.0 × 1.8cm (closed) 70.0 × 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 (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 (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 (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) (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
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) (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 (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 (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) (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) 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 (installation view)
1999
From the Twilight series 1998-2002
Type C photograph
121.9 × 152.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Kaiser Bequest, 2000 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957) Sunday, 2:09pm
1995, printed 2019
From the Open House series 1995
Colour cibachrome transparency, light box
121.7 × 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) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Alex Prager (American, b. 1979) Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street)
2013
Inkjet print
149.7 × 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 (installation view)
2012
Digital type C print
102.8 × 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 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 × 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 × 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 × 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 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
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 (installation view)
2000
From The Seventh Wave series 1999-2000
Gelatin silver photograph
90.0 × 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 × 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 × 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 × 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 (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 × 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 (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 × 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.
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
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 × 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 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, b. 1959) 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; 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 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.
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
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 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 × 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 × 17.8cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1988
Public domain
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 × 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
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
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
Tina Modotti’s first contact with the performing arts came upon her arrival in San Francisco in 1913, at just 16 years old.
After performing theatre works, in 1920 she will participate in three films: The Tiger’s Coat (1920) by Roy Clements, in which she interpreted the role of the Mexican Jean Ogilvie; Riding with Death (1921) by Jacques Jaccard, in the personage of Rosa Carilla; and I Can Explain (1922) by George D. Baker, with Carmencita Gárdez.
The I of the world
Strong fierce compassionate women! Intelligent, class-conscious human beings who embrace social and political change, with photography being the agent for that change. I would embrace Tina Modotti as this type of artist – her photography a “reflection of her way of seeing life, social sensitivity and revolutionary fervour.”
She was a surrealist/feminist artist who represented the lives and “conditions of workers, women and their role within the community” through both the forms and symbols of working class emancipation and through “honest photography” – eloquent photographs of everyday Mexican life that have a biting directness linked to a surreal reality. Surrealism does not always involve the strange and absurd.
Much as Eugène Atget’s photography “which focussed on seemingly ordinary sights on the streets of Paris – a door knocker, a mannequin, a window rail – is seen as a forerunner of Surrealist and modern approaches to photography…”1 so both Atget and Modotti’s rejection of artistic self-consciousness and “artistic effects” in favour of in Atget’s case, “simple documents”, and in Modotti’s case, “honest photography”, lead to photographs that examine the fleeting nature of material objects and reality itself.
Modotti inserts her/self into these honest photographs through an embodiment of spirit. She brings to her photography how she feels about the world, what she feels passionately about in that world, what she cares deeply about… and in the process of “capturing time, light and memory shapes new states of beings and opens possibilities where by the improbable and the impossible are envisioned as an embodiment of the photographers past, present and future imaginings.”
Through a melding of the artist’s political, social, and aesthetic ideals and through her sur/reality, she becomes the I of the world.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ “Surrealism did not always involve the strange and absurd. For example, the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), which focussed on seemingly ordinary sights on the streets of Paris – a door knocker, a mannequin, a window rail – is seen as a forerunner of Surrealist and modern approaches to photography… Only a year before his death, in 1926, Atget was approached by Man Ray for approval to use his photograph, L’Eclipse – Avril 1912 for the front cover of the publication La Révolution Surréaliste. Despite protestations that, “these are simply documents I make,” Atget’s rejection of artistic self-consciousness combined with his pictures of an old, often hauntingly deserted Paris, appealed to Surrealists.”
Anonymous. “Surrealist photography,” on the V&A website [Online] Cited 07/08/2020
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“In reality, what I try to produce is not art, but honest photography, without tricks or manipulations, while most photographers still look for “artistic effects” or the imitation of other means of graphic expression, which results a hybrid product and one that fails to impart to the work that they produce the most valuable trait that it should have: PHOTOGRAPHIC QUALITY.”
Tina Modotti quoted in “On Photography,” Mexican Folkways, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1929, reprinted in Robert Miller, Tina Modotti, and Spencer Throckmorton, Tina Modotti : Photographs (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1997)
Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,
bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,
combined with steel and wire and
pollen to make up your firm
and delicate being.
Part of the epitaph for Tina Modotti on her tomb by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda
The life of Tina Modotti (Udine, Italy, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) was marked by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 1930s. Born in northern Italy, she soon emigrated to the United States, where she met Edward Weston in 1923, who will significantly influence her career. In that same year they moved together to Mexico where she developed photographic work for almost a decade that started from modernist aesthetics to immediately give way to a very personal look, a reflection of her way of seeing life. Her social sensitivity developed in parallel to her political militancy and her activism within the Communist Party, within which she will treat David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo. With her desire to awaken consciences, Modotti made images that denounce injustices and honour the dispossessed. Some of them, with a strong propaganda sense, were made for periodicals and magazines.
After intense research work due to the limited production of the photographer, this exhibition will bring together around 200 photographs, mostly vintage copies, and relevant documentary material. The show will also include works by photographers around her, such as Edward Weston, and one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website
The Tiger’s Coat movie poster
1920
From The Moving Picture World 1920
The Tiger’s Coat is a 1920 American silent drama film directed by Roy Clements and starring Lawson Butt, Tina Modotti and Myrtle Stedman.
Tina Modotti (Udine, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) lived in the eye of the storm throughout her life. Her interesting life and artistic career were framed by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 1930s and by her constant double commitment: artist-photographer and revolutionary-anti-fascist militant.
Born into a working-class family in Udine, in northern Italy, she emigrated and grew up in the United States, where she became a film actress in Hollywood in the 1920s and met Edward Weston, who introduced her to photography and with whom she moved to Mexico in 1923.
Almost all his photographic work was produced between that date and 1930. During these Mexican years, and following her apprenticeship with Weston, Modotti evolved from an interest in abstract forms to a gaze centred on the human being and on denouncing inequality and injustice. The precarious conditions of workers, urban poverty, and the role of women in the community became, among other similar issues, the main themes of a photography conceived as political propaganda.
This exhibition, Tina Modotti’s most extensive to date, is the result of extensive research, which has made it possible to bring together many vintage prints by Modotti. In addition to the nearly 250 photographs on display, grouped chronologically into four sections, the exhibition includes documentary material, one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood and some works by Edward Weston.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website
Tina Modotti
Tina Modotti’s life was marked by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 1930s. The nomadic life she led and the turbulent political militancy caused Modotti to suddenly leave many of the countries where she lived, which, as the curator of the exhibition, Isabel Tejeda points out, “decontextualizes and disarranges her production from the start, so that it is impossible to accurately date many of her images”, although it can be stated that almost all of his photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930.
During these Mexican years, and after his apprenticeship with Weston, the artist evolved from the perfection of formalism to a different and personal perspective conditioned by his way of seeing life, as an emigrant, woman and political activist in which his attraction to the human being and social injustices stands out.
He then portrayed the precarious conditions of workers, inequalities and misery in urban areas. It also focused on women and their role within the community, and on the forms and symbols of the emancipation of the working class. In his desire to raise awareness, Modotti made images that denounce injustices and honour the dispossessed, some of which were for propaganda purposes and intended to be printed in magazines and other publications.
The exhibition presented by Fundación MAPFRE is made up of approximately 240 photographs, mostly period copies, which are grouped into four sections: Early years: from Udine to Los Angeles, Mexico on the other side of the camera, Photography and political commitment and The move to political action: Spain at war.
In addition to emphasising her relationship with Spain, the exhibition reconstructs the figure of Modotti, both as an artist / photographer and as a revolutionary / anti-fascist militant. In addition, there is an extensive amount of documentary material and one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood. The tour is completed with works by photographers from his immediate surroundings, such as Edward Weston.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Circus tent
Mexico, 1924
Platinotype
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Acquisition
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Roses
Mexico, 1924
Paladiotype, period or vintage impression
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Roses, Mexico, is an extreme close-up of four roses. Cropped to fill the frame from edge to edge, this is not a traditional still-life photograph of roses arranged in a vase. Here, the roses lay prone and slightly wilted, just beyond their prime, thus reflecting the passage of time and the ephemerality of delicate blooms. Much like a traditional vanitas still life that asked the viewer to contemplate mortality by reflecting on the fleeting nature of material objects, Roses brings this subject to modern photography. As photography historian Carol Armstrong notes, Roses “calls on the line of figural abstraction identified, not with [Alfred] Stieglitz, [Paul] Strand and the ‘straight’ photograph, but with Georgia O’Keeffe and her blown-up genital flowers, which like [Edward] Weston’s single-object photographs reduced the flora still-life that had been the traditional purview of the female painter to one (or two or four) item(s), expanded to fill the entire field of the image.”
The theme of the still-life preoccupied Modotti throughout much of her brief photography career. A relative newcomer to photography, she made use of the still-life photograph as a means to work through various formal issues including composition, framing, light, pattern, and tone. At this time, she was working with a large-format camera, which was unwieldy, not easy to transport, and forced the photographer to carefully compose the image, rather than creating images on the move with a handheld camera. The still-life, which was easy to set up and did not alter, was the perfect vehicle for mastering the myriad technical complexities of a photograph.
Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023
Edward Weston (1886-1958) Portrait of Tina Modotti
1924
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Elisa
1924
Palladium print
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Donation of Edward Weston
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Telegraph cables
c. 1924-1925
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Post with Cables
Mexico City, c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
In this 1925 photograph of isolated telephone wires, Modotti shifts the perspective, removing any reference to the ground that holds the telephone poles in place. Instead, the carefully composed image focuses on the angles and patterns produced by the wires and clouds, to create a work that mingles modernism and social concerns. During this period Mexico was undergoing increased modernization and industrialization, which Modotti symbolizes in her photograph of telephone wires. Modotti thus presents an optimistic view of Mexico’s modernization and the promise of instant communication brought about by the installation of telephone systems that seemed to open up Mexico to the rest of the world.
Lauded by the Mexican avant-garde group, Estridentistas, who aligned their work with the Mexican Revolution and sought to modernize Mexico, Modotti’s photograph was included in their journal Horizonte because it represented dynamism, technology, and progress. The photograph’s framing and its use of oblique angles and unusual perspective, brought it into alignment with other modernist painters and photographers, including Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Charles Demuth, but also with European avant-garde photographers like László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Although the tendency to focus on the subject / object was characteristic of her former mentor Edward Weston’s work, Diego Rivera praised Modotti’s work as “more abstract, more ethereal, and even more intellectual” than Weston’s.
Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Zapotec peasant woman with a jug on her shoulder
1926
Platinotype
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Untitled (Indians carrying loads of corn husks for the making of “tamales”)
1926-1929
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Art Supporting Foundation donation, John “Launny” Steffens, Sandra Lloyd, Shawn and Brook Byers, Mr. and Mrs. George F. Jewett, Jr., and anonymous donors
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Untitled
c. 1926-1929
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Art Supporting Foundation donation, John “Launny” Steffens, Sandra Lloyd, Shawn and Brook Byers, Mr. and Mrs. George F. Jewett, Jr., and anonymous donors
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Tank Nr. 1
1927
Gelatin silver print
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Workers’ Parade
1926
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Workers Parade
A closely cropped image of a sea of sombreros, Workers Parade, much like her earlier photograph Roses, focuses in on the subject by eliminating all extraneous information. The politically charged subject matter, along with the unusual camera angle, attention to light and dark, and the texture and pattern produced by photographing the scene from above recalls the slightly later work of Alexander Rodchenko, and in particular, his Gathering for a Demonstration (1928). The ubiquitous sombrero would have been immediately recognizable to the Mexican viewer for its connection to the campesinos and trabajadores, the Mexican workers, who were gathered for the annual May Day parade in Mexico City. May Day, traditionally celebrated on the first of May, commemorates International Workers’ Day, often with large parades and gatherings as a demonstration of solidarity among workers. This was a calendar event that Modotti had been familiar with since childhood due to her father’s involvement in these very same parades.
Among Modotti’s earliest politically motivated photographs, Workers Parade brings together her formal concerns with her interest in using art to express her political beliefs and her desire to make her photography socially relevant. On a symbolic level, as noted by Sarah Lowe, Workers Parade conveys the power of unity by “suggesting that the source of power to make political changes lies with the peasants.” This photograph signaled a turning point in Modotti’s work toward a new modern form of photography that addressed contemporary issues and events in order to instigate and effect change.
Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Men reading “El Machete”
c. 1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
In this photograph of a peasant reading El Machete, the newspaper of the Mexican Communist Party, Modotti brings her careful attention surrounding composition, cropping, light and dark, and texture, to a subject with great social and political significance. Modotti had joined the Communist Party of Mexico this same year after learning that Italy had fallen to fascism. She brought her revolutionary zeal to her photographs of the late 1920s, many of which she published in Communist newspaper El Machete, a newspaper for workers and peasants. Whilst many photographers of this period, including Edward Weston and Paul Strand, were focused on a romanticized view of a timeless Mexico, Modotti turned to her camera to its people and to the real effects of its ongoing changes. She often collaborated with workers to produce photographs that were intended to raise class-consciousness and depict their daily lives.
At a moment when new governmental education reforms sought to educate the lower and working classes in Mexico, a seemingly straightforward image of a man reading a newspaper also had subversive undertones, particularly to the middle class. As Sarah Lowe notes: “The young obrero reading El Machete is a reminder that the Revolution’s promise of universal literacy would only be fulfilled by the activism of the people.” Although she viewed photography through the lens of modernism, she also believed that photography was a form of mass communication and an important means of enhancing visual literacy.
Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Bandolier, Corn, Sickle
1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
A carefully composed photograph of a bandolier, an ear of corn, and a sickle, married Modotti’s interest in the photographic still life with objects symbolic of Mexico and the revolution – the sickle, a popular Communist symbol, corn, a symbol of Mexico and its rural farmers, and the bandolier (a pocketed belt for holding ammunition), the symbol of the Mexican Revolution. Politically active after 1925, Modotti joined the Communist Party of Mexico (CPM) in 1927. Due to her Communist-inflected worldview, her photographs from the late 1920s took a decided turn toward Communist symbolism, in lieu of overt propaganda.
As Sarah Lowe has stated, “her eloquent arrangements – founded on a stringent formal control – relocates the commonplace into the realm of the symbolic. They become potent revolutionary icons, offering a metaphorical union of artista [artist], campesino [farm laborer], and soldado [soldier], thus functioning as both formal still life and propaganda.” Lowe further suggests that in so doing, Modotti created a new kind of political picture. In this respect, Modotti’s relationship with Frida Kahlo becomes more than a shared friendship, and also incorporates shared artistic practice. Kahlo also infused still-lives with political objects and slogans, and as such transforms a seemingly domestic process of making art into a highly charged political statement.
Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Canana, sickle and guitar
1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Hat, hammer and sickle
México 1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Committee of the Organisation of the Pioneers of the Communist Party of Mexico
Mexico City, 1928
Gelatin silver print
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Woman with flag
México City, c. 1928
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
The life of Tina Modotti (Udine, August 16th 1896 – Mexico City, January 5th 1942) was influenced by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 30s. A citizen of the world – as many have considered her – Modotti’s work and her life have been surrounded by uncertainties that have only been resolved after in depth study, although some gaps still remain.
Modotti lived in several countries, among them Spain, which coupled with her agitated political militancy led to the dispersion of her work. Consequently, as pointed out by the show’s curator Isabel Tejeda, this “decontextualizes and disorients her production, making it impossible to date many of her images with precision.” Nevertheless, one could argue that most of her photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930 while she was in Mexico. During those years, after her apprenticeship with Edward Weston, Modotti evolved from the perfection of abstract forms to a different and more personal gaze that was conditioned by her outlook on life and her notable attraction to human beings and social injustice. She went on to portray the precarious conditions of workers, inequalities, and misery in urban areas. Likewise, she focused on women and their role within the community as well as the forms and symbols of working class emancipation. In her eagerness to promote awareness, Modotti produced images denouncing injustice, while honouring the dispossessed; some had propagandistic purposes and were intended for publications and magazines.
The exhibition being presented at Fundación MAPFRE is the most comprehensive show dedicated to Tina Modotti to date. Thanks to the work of Isabel Tejeda, we are able to contemplate a large number of the artist’s originals that have been assembled through the curator’s research. Nearly 200 photographs (predominantly vintage prints) have been grouped chronologically into four sections. Furthermore, a wide range of documentary materials will be on display along with the projection of one of the Hollywood films Modotti featured in. The exhibition is completed with works by photographers that were closely related to her, such as Edward Weston. This exhibition reconstructs Modotti’s figure without fissures for the first time, both in terms of her facets as an artist / photographer and as a revolutionary / antifascist militant.
KEYS
Tina Modotti and film
Tina Modotti’s first contact with the performing arts took place in San Francisco, in 1913, when she was only 16 years old. In 1920, after participating in a few plays, she made her way into the world of film. At the time, actresses were sought out to embody heroines, adventurers, or femme fatales. With her dark hair and complexion, Tina seemed to fit the prototype of an exotic woman; a cliché that she would try to distance herself from shortly after. Modotti was cast in three films: Tiger’s Coat (1920) by Roy Clemens, in the role of Jean Ogilvie; Riding with Death (1921) by Jacques Jaccard, as Rosa Carilla; and I Can Explain (1922) by George D. Baker, as Carmencita Gárdez.
Ideal of beauty, social ideal, political ideal
After her instruction with Edward Weston (it should be noted that she did not receive a formal education in photography) Tina Modotti’s work developed within the group that dominated artistic life in Mexico in the 1920s. Between 1926 and 1929 Modotti dissected popular Mexican life; not only were individuals worthy of her attention, but also water tanks, houses, the corn peasants ate and the hats they wore, sickles symbolising communism, machetes, or the woman (appearing like a sculpture) who carried a flag and personified the commitment to the revolutionary struggle. All of her images possess great clarity and substance. They leave no room for rhetoric, while allowing for the artist’s political, social, and aesthetic ideals to fuse into one.
Mexican social landscape
Some authors have pointed to Tina Modotti’s proletariat origins as the basis for her way of confronting social motifs and human figures. If some have defined this part of her work as “reportage photography”, one must point out that the artist’s curiosity and will to capture a person’s life in one image separates her from simple illustrative intent. One could argue that her portrayals of indigenous Mexican people, women, babies, and children are ethnographic photographs, albeit produced in a spontaneous way without an anthropological purpose. Therefore, despite being her point of departure, Modotti distances herself from the travellers who ventured into Mexican lands with a manner of curiosity that lay between science and romanticism.
International Red Aid
The Spanish section of the MOPR (International Red Aid) was established clandestinely in 1923 with the objective of disseminating political propaganda amid the climate of Primo de Rivera’s (1923-1930) dictatorship and had as another of its objectives to defend the Spanish Republic and its anti-fascist ideals. The MOPR spread throughout the entire world after its founding in the Soviet Union in 1922. Politically, the organisation had to follow the directives of the Communist Party, but in its facet dedicated to solidarity it played a key role in humanitarian aid. In Spain, after the October Revolution in Asturias in 1934, it became the main organisation dedicated to helping and aiding political detainees and their families. However, during the Spanish Civil War, the MOPR would constitute the true basis for the medical system of the Republican military.
The exhibition
Tina Modotti’s life was marked by some of the most important historical events decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Citizen of the world, as many have considered her, both her life like her work are surrounded by gaps that only after an in-depth study have could be completed, although not entirely.
The nomadic life that she led and the agitated political militancy caused Modotti to leave with sudden departure from many of the countries where she lived, which, as the curator of the exhibition points out, Isabel Tejeda, “decontextualizes and messes up her production from the start, so it is impossible to accurately date many of her images”, although it can be said that almost all her photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930. During these Mexican years, and after her apprenticeship with Weston, the artist evolved from the perfection of the abstract forms to a different and personal perspective conditioned by her way of
seeing life, in which her attraction to human beings and social injustices stand out. She then portrayed the precarious conditions of workers, inequalities and misery in urban areas. She also focused on women and their role within the community, and on forms and symbols of the emancipation of the working class. In her eagerness to raise awareness, Modotti goes on to make images that denounce injustices and honour the dispossessed, some of which have a propaganda purpose and are intended to be printed in magazines and other publications.
The exhibition that Fundación MAPFRE is presenting is the most extensive that has been made of Tina Modotti until today. Thanks to the work of Isabel Tejeda, today we can see in our exhibition halls a great number of period prints (vintage copies) by the author, gathered after a deep work of research. There are about two hundred and forty photographs that are grouped together chronologically in four sections. In addition, an extensive amount of documentary material is shown and one of the films Modotti starred in in Hollywood. The selection is completed with works by photographers from her immediate environment, such as Edward Weston.
Text from Fundación MAPFRE
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Man with log
1928
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Woman’s hands washing clothes
1928
Gelatin silver print. Later print, printed by Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Baby Nursing
1926-1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Mujer con Jicara en la cabeza (Woman with Jicara on her head)
Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1929
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
In this iconic black and white photograph, a woman dominates the picture frame. Standing with arm raised holding a large gourd on her head, she gazes off to the right, somewhere out of the picture frame. She wears a circular pendant and earrings, and a traditional Tehuana dress with geometric patterns, the costume that has been so well made visible by the work of Modotti’s friend, Frida Kahlo. The careful framing, cropping, and pose emphasize the image’s angular forms. Shot from below to emphasize the woman’s noble and heroic stature, the photograph was taken during a trip to Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico. Unlike Modotti’s earlier photographs, the photographs taken in Tehuantepec were largely unposed, typically street photographs that captured the daily lives of the women that lived there.
Like other artists and writers in Mexico, Modotti was influenced by Mexicanidad, which embraced native cultures and indigenous subjects as part of the larger renewal in Mexican art and culture in the 1920s. This interest is evident in Woman from Tehuantepec. One of Modotti’s most iconic images, it became a potent symbol of Mexicanidad and an exercise in photographic modernism. As Sarah Lowe has noted, “the image function[s] like still life, precisely because Modotti chose not just any woman, but a well-known Mexican type – the Tehuana – to photograph. As pictured by Modotti, these women of Tehuantepec were an ideal subject, and provided her with an already-given meaning since Tehuantepec is a matriarchal society, there women have a significant voice in the running of the local economy and politics. Modotti uses the Tehuana to make a powerful political point: that women were capable of independent political action.”
Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Tehuantepec woman with jicalpextle
1929
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Tina Modotti (Udine, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) took part in some of the most relevant historical events of the first half of the 20th century, such as the economic migration of Europeans to America at the turn of the century, the birth of silent film in the West Coast of the United States, post-revolutionary agrarianism in Mexico, political muralism, the vindication of indigenous Mexican culture, the incorporation of women into the public sphere, the battle between Stalinists and Trotskyists after the revolution of 1917, International Red Aid, and the Spanish Civil War. To some degree, despite the abundance of biographies written about her, certain biographical gaps still exist that are slowly being filled. She was one of the pioneers of women’s photography during the 1920s and although nearly 400 images can be attributed to Modotti today, the number continues to rise with each new discovery; this exhibition being one example. Likewise, Tina Modotti exerted a great influence on later Mexican photography, from Manuel Álvarez Bravo to Graciela Iturbide.
Modotti took up photography through Edward Weston, although she exceeded the North American artist’s formalist teachings through the immediate construction of her own autonomous compositions that possess a unique and personal vision.
Modotti arrived in Mexico after spending her teenage years in San Francisco and Los Angeles and was part of the “Mexican Renaissance”; a time of post-revolutionary cultural splendour. Integrated within the circle of Mexican artists and muralists, her work incorporated a type of embodied photography into Weston’s formalism. Her gaze was influenced by her modest upbringing, being an economic immigrant and a woman, and by her sensibility toward social injustice. A member of the Mexican Communist Party since 1927, she denounced the situation of dispossessed people with her camera, focusing on the construction of a new imaginary for Mexican women.
After being expelled from Mexico in 1930 for being a communist, her photographic militancy soon became full-fledged activism. Apparently, Modotti abandoned photography in the 1930s to dedicate herself to political militancy. Mid-way through the decade, she was sent to Spain by the Communist Party where she would have a key role throughout the Civil War. Taking on the coordination of International Red Aid (MOPR), she organised the escape from Spain of the so-called “children of the war”, coordinated the management of military hospitals – where she also worked as a nurse – and carried out propagandistic and political tasks. At the end of the conflict she crossed the Pyrenees along with thousands of political exiles.
She died in Mexico City in 1942.
Early Years: From Udine to Los Angeles
Tina Modotti was born in 1896 into a modest family from Udine. In 1906 her father migrated to the United States in hopes of reuniting the family later. She arrived to San Francisco on her own in 1913, a city that was home to nearly twenty thousand Italians at the time. She worked in the textile industry, but also took part in the amateur theatre scene. In 1915 she met Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey (Robo) who she moved to Los Angeles with. There she met Edward Weston, modelling for him from 1920 onward. She also wrote and published her first poems and tried her luck in film, taking part in three movies. In The Tiger’s Coat, Modotti played the role of a Mexican Woman. Her physical appearance, dark hair, and Mediterranean skin typecast her into the stereotypical roles U.S. audiences associated with the exotic, romantic, and wicked myth of Latina women. Likewise, as can be observed in her family albums, she played with her ability to shift identities through clothing and costume (she posed dressed up as a ballerina in a pair of pants symbolising the empowerment of modern women and as a character from the Arabian Nights).
Mexico: On the Other Side of the Camera
In 1923 Tina Modotti moved to Mexico City with Edward Weston where they opened a portrait studio. The pair explored and took photographs of the country; this can be observed in Convent of Tepotzotlán and in Zuno’s house, the courtyard (whose exact authorship is unknown, as is the case with other photographs in this exhibition). At the time, the nation was experiencing what became known as the “Mexican Renaissance”. Modotti allowed herself to be influenced by this cultural splendour, soon becoming one of its prominent figures and transforming Mexican photography.
Her work evolved rapidly in Mexico. Modotti incorporated a personal gaze into the formalist perfection she learned from Weston that was influenced by her outlook on life and her attraction to human beings and the denouncement of social injustice (for example, in this section one can compare the photographers’ different approaches when depicting the circus tent or portraying the anthropologist Anita Brenner and the champion of the Náhuatl language Luz Jiménez).
During these early years Modotti worked on several still lives composed mainly of flowers, such as lilies, geraniums, roses, and cacti. Nevertheless, the artist also produced portraits in which she captured the powerful bond between a mother and her daughter (An aztec baby or Luz and baby) that went beyond the mere commodification of female bodies. Some of these images were later used in illustrated magazines of the time as examples of a Mexican identity whose origin was grounded in indigenous culture.
She also documented the work of Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, among others. Modotti’s photographs were featured in some of the most important publications of the time, including Idols Behind Altars by Anita Brenner and the monograph by Ernestine Evans on muralism in Mexican Folkways magazine.
In late 1926 Weston returned to the United States. Earlier that year Modotti had acquired a new Graflex camera in San Francisco that was lighter than the Corona she previously used. With renewed energy, she set off to photograph Mexico, which for her was embodied in its people.
Photography and Political Commitment. Mexico Is Its People
After becoming affiliated to the Communist Party in 1927, Modotti’s political commitment became more accentuated. She was part of International Red Aid and also collaborated as a translator and a photographer with the newspaper El Machete, whose audience was mainly peasants. Similarly, she attended and photographed demonstrations and participated in political associations such as Manos Fuera de Nicaragua (Hands Off Nicaragua).
She avoided poses and portrayed individuals in real situations, both in the city and in countryside villages; a line of citizens at Monte de Piedad Nacional to pawn their belongings, peasants at agrarian schools, tortilla, cabbage, and hat sellers, corn porters, washerwomen, mothers carrying their children, children at Colonia de la Bolsa living in poverty, popular festivities, etc. Some of them were published in newspapers, such as El Machete, and subsequently in foreign magazines, such as AIZ, Der Arbeiter-fotograf, New Masses, and Put’ Mopr.
Modotti contemplated the dilemma of representation. How to find a visual language that was accessible to the people without betraying her aesthetic principles? She found a formula in symbolic photography. For example, Woman with flag is not merely an image about communism; instead, it expresses the ability of human beings to become empowered through willpower and political ideals. Modotti also produced still lives whose juxtaposed elements represent basic abstract concepts that speak of the people as an emancipated entity and of a communist vision of the future born from the land itself (Sickle, canana and corn cob and Guitar neck, canana and corn cob). In her photographic manifesto of 1929, coinciding with her solo exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional, Modotti declared that she did not consider herself an “artist”, but rather a “photographer”; a trade she conceived as any other, in consonance with her proletariat ideas.
Toward Political Action: Spain at War
In 1930 Tina Modotti was expelled from Mexico and returned to Europe after having been falsely accused of taking part in an attack against Mexican president Pascual Ortiz Rubio. She spent a short time in Berlin, trying to continue her photographic pursuit unsuccessfully. However, Modotti would soon move to the Soviet Union where she focused on her activities as a member of International Red Aid (MOPR).
The Communist Party sent Modotti to Spain during the Spanish Republic. When the Civil War broke out, she coordinated MOPR under different aliases, reorganizing the Cuatro Caminos Worker’s Hospital (whose purpose was tending to injured militants), supervising, reporting, and writing articles under the names María, Carmen Ruiz, and Vera Martini for MOPR’s newspaper Ayuda. Semanario de la solidaridad [Help. Weekly of Solidarity], and supervising propaganda (in other words, the dissemination of the organisation’s activities). Politically dependent on the Communist Party, MOPR played a major role in humanitarian aid during the war, becoming the main organisation geared toward helping and aiding political detainees and their families, as well as being an important part of the Republican military health system.
In 1937 Modotti participated in the organisation of the Second International Congress for the Defense of Culture in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona. Among the participants were André Malraux, Anna Seghers, Ernest Hemingway, Aleksey Tolstoy, Octavio Paz, Elena Garro, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Robert Capa, and Gerda Taro.
There is no trace of the photographs Modotti produced in Spain, although some authors suspect that three of the 17 images found in Viento del pueblo, poesía en la guerra [Wind of the People, Poetry in War] by Miguel Hernández might be hers. What seems to be clear is that the publication of the book of poems as a photobook was Modotti’s idea.
She returned to Mexico with Vittorio Vidali, her partner at the time, and died prematurely in 1942 due to a heart attack. After Modotti’s passing, her Mexican friends and Spanish republican exiles honoured her in Mexico City. The last photograph she produced, which will be on display for the first time in this exhibition, was of her dog Suzi.
Her work was progressively forgotten until the 1970s when it began to be exhibited and studied.
Text from Fundación MAPFRE
Anonymous photographer Italian photographer, actress and political activist Tina Modotti (1896-1942) at an exhibition of her work at the National Library in Mexico City in December 1929
1929
Gelatin silver print
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Portrait of a Pregnant Woman
Berlin, Germany, 1930
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City
Her extensive political activism and bohemian lifestyle earned her enemies. When on January 10, 1929, Julio Antonio Mella was assassinated, and shortly thereafter an assassination attempt was made on Mexican President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, the press suspected Modotti as the perpetrator. Called “the fierce and bloody Tina Modotti,” she was expelled from the country in 1930.
First, she moved to Weimar Berlin, then, after the rise to power of Hitler, she moved to Moscow, Warsaw, Paris, and Madrid, always finding friends in Communist circles. From 1936 she participated in the Spanish Civil War using the pseudonym Maria. She stayed in Spain until the collapse of the Republican government in 1939 when she returned to Mexico. In 1942 she died in a taxi from heart failure which many described as suspicious. Diego Rivera believed that it was her lover Vittorio Vidali who orchestrated her death because Tina Modotti “knew too much.”
Magda Michalska. “Tina Modotti: Photographer Made Revolutionary,” on the Daily Art website 2 October 2022 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023
Tina Modotti exhibition at Fundación MAPFRE catalogue cover
The Legacy of Tina Modotti
Her work was largely unknown until the 1990s, when a cache of her remarkable photographs was discovered in an Oregon farmhouse. Long overshadowed by her extraordinary life and her relationship with Edward Weston, she was viewed as his muse, rather than as a gifted photographer in her right. Despite a remarkably short career in photography – just seven years – she created a body of iconic images that confirmed her place in history. By fusing rigorous formalism with a desire to effect social change, she reconceived revolutionary photography through the language of modernism. Her work is now a touchstone in the history of photography, reflecting equally the tenets of modernist photography and the experience of post-revolutionary Mexico. Modotti’s photographs continue to inspire many, including many women and activists interested in making a socially and politically relevant art.
In the realms of Straight Photography, Modotti’s work is interesting to consider in comparison to that of Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham, three women known to have had a dialogue in 1925 when Modotti returned to San Francisco for a short while. Like Cunningham and Lange, Modotti excelled in formal technique and as such influenced the next generation of highly skilled photographers. In subject matter and energy however, there is also a strong Surrealist and feminist edge to the work of Modotti extending her field of influence even wider. She is one of many European artists, including Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, who found freedom of expression in Mexico City; in this respect Modotti’s oeuvre adds to the history of a place as cultural and artistic capital for a time.
Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023
KBr Fundación MAPFRE
Av. del Litoral, 30 08005 Barcelona
Phone: +34 932 723 180
Curator: Dr. Josie R. Johnson, Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Cypress Root and Rock, Seventeen Mile Drive
1929
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
On November 18, 1929, Edward Weston drove north from his home in Carmel to traverse the scenic coastal route of Seventeen Mile Drive. He made nine photographs of cypress roots and rocks that day, including this image. Less than three weeks earlier, the stock market had crashed, setting off a panic that plunged the United States into the Great Depression. Money troubles plagued Weston throughout his life, but on this November day, he was completely enthralled with the landscape. He wrote in his daybooks soon after that these photographs were “among the best seen and most brilliant technically I have yet done.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Transcending reality
While I admire the clever recontextualisation of the work of American photographers from the 1930s in this exhibition – into the sections Natural Wonders, Divine Figures, Everyday Splendors, Living Relics, The World of Tomorrow, Street Theater and Surreal Encounters – I am unsure that those photographers would ultimately see their work as a fusion of reality and dream, their documentary photographs “being both real and dream-like” that the concept of this exhibition proposes.
While all photographers use their imagination to visualise and take their photographs, to then extrapolate that these images are both reality-dream is, to my mind, a theoretical fancy that takes a kernel of the truth and views the images through a contemporary lens. Nothing wrong with that I hear you say and as the photographer Richard Misrach observes, “Photographs, when they’re made, can shift meaning with time, and often do.” And I agree that the meaning of photographs changes over time, is an ever fluid and shifting feast.
But can you imagine any of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers out in the field saying to themselves, “Oh! let’s take a dreamscape of these poor travelling people trying to survive the deprivations of hunger, poverty and joblessness”. It just wouldn’t happen. They didn’t think like that because it was a different era. They were concerned with representing with clarity and focus, with compassion and imagination not the melding of reality and dream, but the visceral feeling of the life being lived under the most trying of circumstances.
Following on from thoughts on the stunning landscape photographs of Ansel Adams in the last posting, one has to agree with Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne when she says that,
“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”1
All photographs are a mediated view of reality, captured through the imagination of the artist and (usually) the gaze of the camera lens… but that does not necessarily mean that they are a melding of reality and dream: of course they can be – but in the context of 1930s American photography what is more likely is that the artists where attempting to create something that transcends the moment. As that fantastic American landscape photographer Robert Adams observes,
“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect – a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”2
To my mind American photographers of the 1930s took photographs not only to document but also to honor what was greater and more interesting than they were. Not as a melding of reality-dream as this exhibition proposes, but as an exploration of what is possible through the interface of the image and imagination, the interface as Ansel Adams put it “between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself.”
Finally, the unknown to me photographs of Wright Morris are superb because of their very capricious fidelity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Isobel Crombie. Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15
2/ Robert Adams. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1994, p. 179
Many thankx to the Cantor Arts Center for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In the fall of 1930, Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, yet Bass-Becking penned this statement one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. This exhibition of over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks offers an alternative understanding of 1930s photography in the US by taking Bass-Becking’s phrase as its point of departure.
The work of five photographers featured in the Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at the Cantor Arts Center – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Woven into this display is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries that present new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, this exhibition contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination.
“If you have a conscious determination to see certain things in the world you are a potential propagandist; if you trust your intuition as the vital communicative spark between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself, what you tell in the super-reality of your art will have greater impact and verity. … without the elements of imaginative vision and taste the most perfect technical photograph is a vacuous shell.”
Ansel Adams. “Exhibition of Photographs” (1936), reproduced in Andrea Gray. Ansel Adams: An American Place, 1936. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1982, p. 38 quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 17.
The present exhibition [exhibition of contemporary photography in November 1930 at Harvard University] attempts to prove that the mechanism of the photograph is worthy and capable of producing creative work entirely outside the limits of reproduction or imitation. … Photography exists in the contemporary consciousness of time, surprising the passing moment out of its context in flux, and holding it up to be regarded in the magic of its arrest. It has the curious vividness and unreality of street accidents, things seen from a passing train, and personal situations overheard or seen by chance – as one looks from the window of one skyscraper into the lighted room of another forty stories high and only across the street.
Lincoln Kirstein, introductory note, Photography 1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1930, n.p. quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 26.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Migrant Mother, California
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
The Cantor Arts Center is pleased to present Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941, an exhibition featuring over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks. This material collectively pushes against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, and instead illustrates that artists of this era frequently used photography to ignite the imagination. The exhibition and the expansive art historical narratives it illuminates result from Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s study over the past three years of the Cantor’s Capital Group Foundation (CGF) Photography Collection – a major gift of over 1,000 twentieth-century American photographs.
Currently serving as the museum’s CGF Curatorial Fellow for Photography, Johnson comments: “The Cantor’s holdings of American photography from the 1930s are especially rich, and the generous terms of the Capital Group Foundation Fellowship enabled me to delve deeply into this fascinating chapter of photo history. Sifting through these prints allowed me to set aside what I thought I knew about this material and take a fresh look, giving me a new appreciation for the novel approaches these artists developed in the midst of a profoundly difficult historical moment.”
The work of five photographers from the CGF Collection – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Its conceit draws from a curious phrase by Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking about the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Though few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, Bass-Becking penned this statement in the fall of 1930, one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. Reality Makes Them Dream exemplifies the spirit of experimentation that Bass-Becking describes by highlighting an undercurrent of artistic practices in the United States that were sometimes more akin to those of Surrealism taking place concurrently in Europe.
To tease out these under-examined connections, and de-emphasise the association of American photography of the 1930s with the unbiased documentation of real people and events, works by the five core CGF artists are interwoven with a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, both iconic and overlooked, such as Walker Evans, Hiromu Kira, and Dorothea Lange. Edward Weston’s bold experimentation with forms both natural and man-made – exemplified by highly evocative works such as Pepper No. 35 (1930) and Egg Slicer (1930) that inspired Bass-Becking’s comment – blends harmoniously with contemporary prints from the community of Japanese-American photographers in Los Angeles that often supported Weston’s work. Examples of fashion and editorial photography, including colour images by Toni Frissell and Paul Outerbridge, draw connections across the galleries with photographs of airplanes, household items, and tourist sites made by seasoned artists and amateur hobbyists alike. Helen Levitt’s surreal tableaux on the streets of New York echo Berenice Abbott‘s studies of the metropolis with multiple layers of history jumbled into the same block. Ansel Adams’s pristine images of the Sierra Nevada hang alongside little-known photographs by Seema Weatherwax, his darkroom assistant in the late 1930s who was similarly enchanted with nature but developed a vision all her own. Despite gaining the respect of not only Adams, but also Weston, Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, Weatherwax shared her own work publicly for the first time in 2000 at the age of 95. Her photographs evidence her technical abilities and, not unlike her peers on view in this exhibition, find beauty in the everyday. Altogether, these photographs effectively illustrate Johnson’s three year exploration of the collection which revealed that despite the very real financial, political, and cultural challenges of the Great Depression, certain photographers chose not to focus on the camera’s cold mechanical precision, but rather used it as a medium to spark their imaginations – fusing reality and dream into one. …
The first exhibition curated by a CGF fellow, Reality Makes Them Dream is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. It features an essay by Johnson and contributions from the community of photography scholars at Stanford University – Kim Beil, associate director of the ITALIC arts program for undergraduates; Yechen Zhao (PhD in art history ’22); Anna Lee, photography curator for special collections at the Stanford Libraries; Rachel Heise Bolten (PhD in English ’22); Altair Brandon-Salmon (PhD candidate in art history); Marco Antonio Flores (PhD candidate in art history); and Maggie Dethloff, PhD, assistant curator of photography and new media at the Cantor.
Press release from the Cantor Arts Center
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Gano Grain Elevator, Western Kansas
1940, printed 1979-1981
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
In Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s exhibition … Johnson interweaves the Capital Group Foundation Collection images with additional works by other artists, building narratives that nuance our understanding of American photography in the 1930s. Her essay pushes against longstanding narratives that overemphasise the purity of straight photography and the veracity of documentary photography in this decade. Her research reveals instead that many artists used the medium of photography to fuse reality and dream into one.
Johnson divides Reality Makes Them Dream into seven sections exploring subjects commonly photographed in the 1930s as being both real and dream-like. Looking beyond well-traveled approaches to photographs captured in the decade defined by the Great Depression, “Natural Wonders” features awe inspiring organic forms from still life and nature photography. “Divine Figures” presents methods of elevating the human figure to the status of a god-like being in portraiture, nude studies, dance photography, and photographs of modern labourers. “Everyday Splendors” explores the transformation of commonplace scenes and objects into vibrant masses of shapes and textures. The portraits, architectural photographs, and still life images in “Living Relics” exemplify the tendency of these photographers to depict emblems of a purer and more noble past that they hoped to reclaim. “The World of Tomorrow” considers the opposite end of the temporal spectrum, where photographers captured glimpses of a futuristic, machine-driven utopia in urban or industrial scenes. “Street Theater” encompasses street photography and urban architectural studies that approach their subjects as if they are actors and stage sets in their own make-believe world. Finally, “Surreal Encounters” highlights Surrealist strands in the work of American photographers as they emphasised the uncanny and fantastical in the physical world around them.
Veronica Roberts, Director of the Cantor Arts Center
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Sculptor’s Tools, San Francisco, California
1930, printed c. 1974
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1930, a meeting with the photographer Paul Strand inspired Ansel Adams to abandon the use of soft-focus camera settings and textured printing papers in pursuit of “absolute realism.” However, Adams did not renounce the photograph’s capacity to convey an artist’s imaginative vision; instead, he launched a crusade for photography to be recognised as a “pure art form.” This image of the tools belonging to the San Francisco sculptor Ralph Stackpole stages Adams’s main argument at the time: Photography is no less a form of art than sculpture, so long as the artist’s tools (a camera or a hammer and chisel) are employed directly, without imitating another medium.
Wall label from the exhibition
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Sumner Healy Antique Shop
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Judge Leonard Edwards
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Woven into this exhibition is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, adding breadth to this survey of American photography of the 1930s and presenting new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. This project interprets the term “American” loosely, encompassing photographers who lived in the United States for extended periods but who did not necessarily hold citizenship, as well as locations including Alaska and Hawaii, which were then still US territories. Thirteen of the forty-two photographers featured in this catalogue were born outside the United States, reflecting diasporic patterns that brought Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s and European immigrants – especially Jews fleeing antisemitism – in the 1910s and mid-1930s.7 Many turned to photography as a way to earn a living, and their photographs often expressed their enchantment with the dramatic natural landscapes or unfamiliar cultural practices they encountered in their newly adopted nation.
Together, this material demonstrates that Bass-Becking’s idea [Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream”] offers an interpretive lens for a much wider swath of photography than either he or Weston might have realized. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary in style and purpose , this project contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination, even while pursuing an increasingly transparent approach that mirrored the world as they saw it. From the delicate curve of a seashell to the jostle of a crowded city street, reality made the photographers and their audiences dream.
Footnote 7. Another ten were second- and/or third-generation immigrants.
Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 11.
Natural Wonders
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Dogwood, Yosemite National Park, California
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams is best known today for the majestic landscape photographs he made throughout his life, but in the 1930s he gravitated toward tightly framed images of a more intimate scale. This photograph of dogwood blossoms exemplifies Adams’s close looking at nature from this period. Even among the grand vistas of Yosemite, he often turned his lens to humbler sights while retaining the same density of detail across the picture plane, illuminating multitudes in a patch of moss or a pile of pine needles. Adams explained at the time: “Honest simplicity and maximum emotional statement suggests the basis of a critical definition of photography as an Art Form – that is, as a means of more than factual statement.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Cedric Wright (American, 1889-1959) Wildflowers
1930s-1940s
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
George Cedric Wright (April 13, 1889 – 1959) was an American violinist and a wilderness photographer of the High Sierra. He was Ansel Adams’s mentor and best friend for decades, and accompanied Adams when three of his most famous photographs were taken. He was a longtime participant in the annual wilderness High Trips sponsored by the Sierra Club. …
In an article published in 1957, which included eight full-page photographs, Wright described his thoughts about how high mountain beauty resembles great music: “Beauty haunts the high country like a majestic hymn, sings in cold sunny air, the brilliant mountain air – makes of sunlight a living thing – floats in cloud forms – filters changing floods of light ever clothing the mountains anew. Beauty arrives in deep voice of river and wind through forest, swelling the chorus, giving sonority universal proportions.”[Wright, Cedric. “Trail Song: An Artist’s Profession of Faith” Sierra Club Bulletin. San Francisco: Sierra Club. 42 (6): 50-53]. He dedicated these words to Sierra Club leader William Edward Colby, and they became part of the introduction to Wright’s posthumous book, Words of the Earth.
Bradford Washburn (American, 1910-2007) Mount La Perouse
c. 1933
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Bradford Washburn became a well-known mountaineer and aerial photographer while still in college. In the early 1930s, he climbed and surveyed multiple peaks in the Fairweather Range of southeastern Alaska, including Mount La Perouse. Although Washburn’s photographs functioned as topographical records and route maps, he also displayed them in artistic contexts, where they elicited deeply poetic and emotional responses from viewers. In the 1940 issue of U.S. Camera Magazine, an editor wrote of Washburn’s Alaskan photography: “Sea and mountain and plain, join island and cape and bay in a beauty that is the true setting for the fantasy of northern lights and midnight sun. … Here is an America that is no more a last frontier or hinterland, but a fruitful part of America, present – a glowing promise to America, future.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Henry Bradford Washburn Jr. (June 7, 1910 – January 10, 2007) was an American explorer, mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer. He established the Boston Museum of Science, served as its director from 1939-1980, and from 1985 until his death served as its Honorary Director (a lifetime appointment). Bradford married Barbara Polk in 1940, they honeymooned in Alaska making the first ascent of Mount Bertha together.
Washburn is especially noted for exploits in four areas.
1/ He was one of the leading American mountaineers in the 1920s through the 1950s, putting up first ascents and new routes on many major Alaskan peaks, often with his wife, Barbara Washburn, one of the pioneers among female mountaineers and the first woman to summit Denali (Mount McKinley).
2/ He pioneered the use of aerial photography in the analysis of mountains and in planning mountaineering expeditions. His thousands of striking black-and-white photos, mostly of Alaskan peaks and glaciers, are known for their wealth of informative detail and their artistry. They are the reference standard for route photos of Alaskan climbs.
3/ He was responsible for creating maps of various mountain ranges, including Denali, Mount Everest, and the Presidential Range in New Hampshire.
4/ His stewardship of the Boston Museum of Science.
Hy Hirsh (American, 1911-1961) Untitled
Late 1930s
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Hyman Hirsh (October 11, 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – November 1961, Paris, France), was an American photographer and experimental filmmaker. He is regarded as a visual music filmmaker, as well as one of the first filmmakers to use electronic imagery (filmed oscilloscope patterns) in a film. …
Photography style
Hirsh’s early photographs were influenced by California photography movement Group f/64, who had first exhibited in 1932 at the de Young Museum where Hirsh later worked. In 1932. Hirsh’s photo work from that period used sharply focused black and white renderings and little manipulation in their process. Hirsh was then influenced by the social documentary of the Farm Security Administration [FSA] photographers who recorded the impact of the Great Depression on displaced workers and their families. Hirsh followed suit, exploring social issues through visages of vacant lots, rusted machinery, and other images of urban decay. Recognition for these photographs led to seven exhibitions in Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1935 to 1955. A 1936 group show entitled “Seven Photographers” at L.A.’s Stanley Rose Gallery put him alongside the leading figures of West Coast photography, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston. Hirsh also appeared in the publication U.S. Camera in 1936, 1937 and 1939.
In 1943 San Francisco Museum of Art featured Hirsh in a solo exhibition. By now Hirsh had moved away from the straight-ahead aesthetic of Ansel Adams and Group f64, and his artistic photography took more cues from the world of experimental film. He made surrealist self-portraits by superimposing negatives of himself with broken sheets of glass. Later in Paris, as a study for one of his films, he shot colour slides of old wall posters that were peeling, exposing layers of posters underneath.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Bananas
1930
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Despite his many accolades, Edward Weston struggled to support himself throughout his career as a photographer. He found an important group of patrons in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, where several artist groups sustained a lively community of photographers in the 1920s and ’30s. The play of light, movement, and space in Shinsaku Izumi’s The Shadow (below) exemplifies their experimental ethos. In this context, the photographer Toyo Miyatake (1895-1979) organised three exhibitions of Weston’s photography between 1925 and 1931. At the final exhibition, he purchased this print (above) from Weston, perhaps because he shared Weston’s excitement for the pictorial possibilities of the rhythms and textures in a bunch of bananas.
Wall label from the exhibition
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Cornshocks and fences on farm near Marion, Virginia
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (June 7, 1910 – November 24, 1990) was an American photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression documenting poverty, the Jim Crow South, and deprivation. …
Post trained as a teacher, and went to work in a small town in Massachusetts. Here she saw the reality of the Depression and the problems of the poor. When the school closed she went to Europe to study with her sister Helen. Helen was studying with Trude Fleischmann, a Viennese photographer. Marion Post showed Fleischmann some of her photographs and was told to stick to photography.
Career
While in Vienna she saw some of the Nazi attacks on the Jewish population and was horrified. Soon she and her sister had to return to America for safety. She went back to teaching but also continued her photography and became involved in the anti-fascist movement. At the New York Photo League she met Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand who encouraged her. When she found that the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin kept sending her to do “ladies’ stories”, Ralph Steiner took her portfolio to show Roy Stryker, head of the photography division of the Farm Security Administration, and Paul Strand wrote a letter of recommendation. Stryker was impressed by her work and hired her immediately.
Post’s photographs for the FSA often explore the political aspects of poverty and deprivation. They also often find humour in the situations she encountered.
In 1941 she met Leon Oliver Wolcott, deputy director of war relations for the U. S. Department of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt. They married, and Marion Post Wolcott continued her assignments for the FSA, but resigned shortly thereafter in February 1942. Wolcott found it difficult to fit in her photography around raising a family and a great deal of traveling and living overseas.
In the 1970s, a renewed interest in Post Wolcott’s images among scholars rekindled her own interest in photography. In 1978, Wolcott mounted her first solo exhibition in California, and by the 1980s the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art began to collect her photographs. The first monograph on Marion Post Wolcott’s work was published in 1983. Wolcott was an advocate for women’s rights; in 1986, Wolcott said: “Women have come a long way, but not far enough. … Speak with your images from your heart and soul” (Women in Photography Conference, Syracuse, N.Y.).
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Pepper No. 35
1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise, Kings Canyon National Park, California
c. 1935, printed 1979
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Divine Figures
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997) Overview of the City
1935
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Ayleen Ito Lee
Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1935, 25 of Stackpole’s bridge photographs were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Peter Stackpole (1913-1997) was an American photographer. Along with Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, and Thomas McAvoy, he was one of Life Magazine‘s first staff photographers and remained with the publication until 1960. He won a George Polk Award in 1954 for a photograph taken 100 feet underwater, and taught photography at the Academy of Art University. He also wrote a column in U.S. Camera for fifteen years. He was the son of sculptor Ralph Stackpole.
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997) Mother and Daughter
1934
Gelatin silver print
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Langston Hughes, Chicago, Illinois, 1941
1941, printed 2002-2003
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Martha Graham – Ekstasis (Torso)
1935
Gelatin silver print
Given in memory of Belva Kibler by Barbara Morgan
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan first attended a performance by Martha Graham’s modern dance company in 1935. The experience so deeply impressed her that she began photographing Graham and her fellow dancers regularly, becoming a recognised expert in the genre within a few years. Morgan typically captured a dancer’s entire body, but for Graham’s solo in Ekstasis, she explained: “When by moving a light which cast a certain shadow I suddenly felt a heroic scale evoked. … The torso expressed it all, and I felt as if I were on a lonely shore between Egypt and archaic Greece discovering a forgotten Venus.”
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Class, Olympic High Diving Champion, Marjorie Gestring
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marjorie Gestring, a future Stanford undergraduate from Los Angeles, won the 1936 Olympic gold medal in women’s springboard diving at age 13. John Gutmann photographed Gestring the following spring at a diving exhibition held as part of the weeklong festivities for the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. For Gutmann, the “rigid geometry” of her dives struck him as an “absolutely modern machine style.” More broadly, his image of Gestring soaring through the air captures the ethos of a moment when, having just completed the longest suspension bridge in the world, humans seemed capable of any accomplishment.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Nude (Charis) Floating
1939, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Herbert Matter (American born Switzerland, 1907-1984) Untitled
1940
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. Matter’s innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design. …
As a photographer, Matter won acclaim for his purely visual approach. A master technician, he used every method available to achieve his vision of light, form and texture. Manipulation of the negative, retouching, cropping, enlarging and light drawing are some of the techniques he used to achieve the fresh form he sought in his still lifes, landscapes, nudes and portraits. As a filmmaker, he directed two films on his friend Alexander Calder: “Sculptures and Constructions” in 1944 and “Works of Calder” (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
Russell Lee (American, 1903–1986) Jim Norris and wife, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico
1940
Dye transfer print
Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang (Chinese-American, 1910-1969) Chief Owasippe
1939
Gelatin silver print
The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition Fund and the Asian American Art Initiative Acquisitions Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang came to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago. He photographed in his spare time, regularly submitting prints like this one to the national circuit of photography salons. At first glance, this photograph might appear to be a portrait of the man named in the title. In fact, “Owasippe” references a legend about a Potawatomi chief who died waiting for his sons to return from a journey. The story originated in Michigan around the turn of the 20th century; by the 1930s, it had been popularised around the Midwest by the Boy Scouts of America. Yang likely heard the tale in Chicago and photographed a model whose true identity remains unknown. Although the headdress was familiar to settler audiences as a shorthand for “Native,” the one in this photograph references different cultural traditions than those of the Potawatomi. Reality thus became fodder for a fantasy that captured the interest of many viewers in the late 1930s, when Yang’s photograph won multiple awards from camera club juries across the country.
Wall label from the exhibition
Chao-Chen Yang (1910-1969) was a Chinese American photographer based in Seattle, Washington. Born Hangchow, China, Yang received degrees in foreign relations and art education from the University of Hwin-Hwa, Shanghai, and became the director of the Department of Art at the Government Institute in Nanking. Coming to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, he took night courses in art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1935 to 1939. He was transferred to Seattle as Deputy Consul and founded the Seattle Photographic Society in 1941. He served as director of the Northwest Institute of Photography and concentrated in colour photo printing processes.
Lit dramatically from above, the face of the “chief” emerges stoically from beneath a feathered headdress, the sartorial signifier of “Indianness” lifted by white Americans from the Oceti Sakowin Oyate of the Northern Plains (plate 27 [here above]). Concentrating on some distant point beyond the frame, he squints as if staring into the sun, but the nondescript background suggests that the photograph was likely made in a studio setting. All the better to decontextualize and generalize its subject, because the aim is not to reproduce the specificity of an Indigenous person, but to practice the visual shorthand popularized decades earlier by the photographer Edward S. Curtis and his North American Indian portfolios (fig. 2).1 The stereotyping function of this picture is reinforced by its title: “Chief Owasippe” is not Oceti Sakowin Oyate, but an invented leader of the Potawatomi, whose name continues to adorn the oldest Boy Scout camp in the United States, founded in 1911 in Michigan by a group of businessmen from Chicago.
Yet this reductive representation of the “vanishing Indian” – whose authenticity and natural purity came from his exteriority to the temporal and societal boundaries of modernity – was produced by a recent arrival to the United States with no personal connection to the politics of Indigenous assimilation, domination, and expropriation that underpinned this representational type. Chao-Chen Yang, employee at the Chinese consulate in Chicago, made this picture while enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. The photograph is his attempt to speak a foreign language: not English per se but the dialect of American identity, which is so filled with fantasy and contradiction that it feels right, with the theme of this exhibition in mind, to call it a language of dreams. What fluencies must the photographer possess to move freely within another person’s dream?
By the time Yang took this photograph, American artists’ fetishistic valorization of Indigenous culture had turned away from the Plains tribes from which the chief’s feather headdress originates and toward the southwestern tribes in New Mexico. In the 1920s, writers and artists including D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Sloan, and Marsden Hartley projected an “authenticity” onto Pueblo visual culture, which justified their appropriation of its subject matter and form to create a native modernist aesthetic.2 Many photographers did the same, including Ansel Adams and Wright Morris (plates 47 and 48). For its time, Yang’s photograph spoke a dated form of Indigenous appropriation, but the numerous exhibition stamps on the version of the print held by his estate reveal that this image was widely received by photography clubs across America – New York, Denver, all the way to Seattle, where Yang would become deputy consul in 1941.
Vexingly, the racist exoticization and flattening of Indigenous identity performed by the photograph also demonstrate its creator’s fluency with the visual language of artistic-minded amateur photographers in America…
Yechen Zhao. “Photographic Fluency (Its Pleasures and Pains): Kyo Koike and Chao-Chen Yang,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 55.
Everyday Splendors
Shinsaku Izumi (Japanese-American, 1880-1941) The Shadow
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
In The Shadow (c. 1931, above), Izumi plays with the late-afternoon light, picturing a man riding a bike. In the upper-right-hand corner of the image, we see part of the front wheel; the entire rear wheel; the bicycle seat; and the cyclist’s feet, perfectly balanced and planted on pedals, riding past our line of vision. The rest of the image shows the bike traveling past a rectangular manhole cover, on the left side; and, on the right, the front wheel appears prominently as it casts a long shadow, with the individual spokes disappearing with each rotation. Against the brushed surface of the street, hard and soft patterns of gray emerge diagonally across the image…
The Shadow [is] a study of motion, light, and shadow, and, on another level, a metaphysical commentary on “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life.”
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) One of the Wilkins family making biscuits for dinner on cornshucking day at Mrs. Fred Wilkins’ home near Tallyho, Granville County. North Carolina
1939
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Judith Hochberg and Michael Mattis
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Sonya Noskowiak (American, 1900-1975) Washing, San Francisco, California
1937
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The United States General Services Administration, formerly Federal Works Agency, Works Projects Administration (WPA), allocation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sonya Noskowiak (25 November 1900 – 28 April 1975) was a 20th-century German-American photographer and member of the San Francisco photography collective Group f/64 that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She is considered an important figure in one of the great photographic movements of the twentieth century. Throughout her career, Noskowiak photographed landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Her most well-known, though unacknowledged, portraits are of the author John Steinbeck. In 1936, Noskowiak was awarded a prize at the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She was also represented in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Scenes from San Francisco” exhibit in 1939. Ten years before her death, Noskowiak’s work was included in a WPA exhibition at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California.
Photography
Noskowiak primarily focused on landscapes and portraits between the 1930s and 1940s. Noskowiak embraced straight photography and used it as a tool to give newer meaning to her photographs. She emphasized the forms, patterns, and textures of her subject, to enrich the documentation of it.
Her earliest works reflect the work of photographers of her period and their thoughts on Pictorialism. In her earliest works, such as City Rooftops, Mountains in Distance (the 1930s), there is a graphic quality to how she abstracted the piece. There is the dark, strong industrial structure that contrasts with the light sky. There are almost no logs seen on the buildings, as if they are they are blurred beyond readability. This is an example of the ‘New Objectivity’ movement, which focused on a harder, documentary approach to photography.
Noskowiak often composed her photographs to intersect her subjects, which gave a more dynamic feel to her photographs. Examples of these are provided by her works Kelp (1930) and Calla Lily (1932). The composition crops the boundaries of the kelp plant and flower and draws the viewer’s eye to the texture of the plants. The kelp is so abstracted that if not for the title it would be unrecognisable. In Calla Lily, her use of chiaroscuro gives a luminous, almost floating feeling to the photograph.
Her photograph Agave (1933) is an intimate viewing of the cactus plant – another example of a composition separating the object from what is made visible shown and emphasising the plant’s beautiful pattern.
Noskowiak utilised the same technique of straight photography in her pictorial portraits and commercial works. The same intimacy shown in Agave can be seen in portrait works such as John Steinbeck (1935) and Barbara (1941). In both, she creates an intimate atmosphere, in which the viewer feels as though they are there interacting with the subjects. Even in her more commercial works, Noskowiak’s style and technique still remained important. In her untitled 1930s photograph, you have a model with a broad-brimmed hat that conceals her face. The composition of the piece relieves viewers from thinking about the photograph as an advertisement. The cropping and position of the model offers closeness, and viewers get the feeling of being in the moment with the model more than simply responding to the photo as an advertisement.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Cement Worker’s Glove
1936, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Junk
1934
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Florence Alston Swift
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Henry Swift Collection
Seema Weatherwax (Jewish-American, 1905-2006) Yosemite
1940
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Seema Aissen Weatherwax was a photographer and social activist who was part of the Film and Photo League, worked with Ansel Adams in Yosemite, and shot Woody Guthrie and migrant workers at a California FSA camp. …
Emigrating from Tsarist Russia with her parents in 1913 to escape persecution and the conscription act, Seema Aissen graduated from high school and began studying science courses in Leeds, England. A few years after her father’s death, her mother took the three daughters to Boston to join relatives, and Seema became involved in photography. She moved to Southern California in 1929, lived in Tahiti for a year, and upon returning to Los Angeles joined the Film and Photo League in 1934. Ansel Adams asked her to run his darkroom in Yosemite in 1938. The following year she assisted Adams with the first Camera Workshop in Yosemite. In 1941 Seema met the writer Jack Weatherwax, and together with folk singer Woody Guthrie visited the Shafter Farm Security Administration Camp, managed by noted civil rights advocate Fred Ross. At Shafter she photographed Dust Bowl refugees and their surroundings. The Weatherwaxes moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1984. Following the death of her husband, Seema continued her activism, including working with the NAACP and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and at the age of 95 organized the first exhibition of her work. She passed away in 2006, two months shy of her 101st birthday.
Text from the Online Archive of California website
Prints made by Seema at Yosemite reveal a photographer whose confidence in her technical abilities allows her to pursue photography in daunting weather conditions7 and to render transcendent beauty through everyday forms, both natural and man-made. Her work from this period focuses not only on postcard-ready vistas but also on the physical structures that locate and organise human experiences within these natural surroundings: like a slush-covered road impressed by tire tracks, or a fawn viewed through a gridded windowpane. 8 In one winter scene from 1940, titled simply Yosemite, tall wooden utility poles with triple cross-arms anchor a dozen snow-coated cables (plate 38 [above]). Set amidst dark tree trunks laced with white boughs, these power lines are resplendent in the snow. They stream down the vertical axis of the scene, indelible reminders of a Yosemite modernised for tourism – reminders that Adams typically left out of his artistic work. Seema’s prints from the 1940s are variously signed “Seema,” “Seema Aissen,” and later “Seema Weatherwax,” reflecting the surname she adopts upon marrying writer and political activist Jack Weatherwax in 1942.
Anna Lee. “Seema (Sophie) Aissen Weatherwax: Photographer,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 72.
Living Relics
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Meeting House, Southbury, Connecticut
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris developed a personal practice of pairing his photographs with texts, publishing the first of many of these combination projects in 1940. The page-long text paired with a variation of this photograph does not describe an observed scene but rather a scene imagined by the narrator, who sits “like a man caught in a spell” seeing “what nobody’d seen before.” By presenting this text with his photograph of an unidentified, weather-worn wooden building, Morris vaguely evokes a moment from the past, but leaves its meaning open to interpretation. As with memories and daydreams, the viewer’s impressions are subjective and imprecise, if not total figments of the imagination.
Wall label from the exhibition
Wright Morris (1910-1998) was a renowned writer and affective photographer. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers. Devoid of figures, his photographs depict everyday objects and atmosphere. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style.
Born in Nebraska, Morris attended Pomona College in Claremont, California. After graduation he traveled throughout Europe, purchasing his first camera in Vienna. Morris returned to California in 1934 determined to become a writer, but also continued to photograph. In 1935, he bought a Rolleiflex camera and began photographing extensively. Morris first exhibited his photo-texts in 1940, at the New School for Social Research in New York. This same year the Museum of Modern Art purchased prints for their collection and New Directions published images that would become his first book.
In 1942, Morris received the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships, funding the completion of The Inhabitants. Published by Scribners, The Inhabitants (1946) documented domestic scenes of the South, Midwest, and Southwest and although visually influential enjoyed little financial success. His second photo-text book, The Home Place (1948) was a visual novel, with short fictional prose accompanying each photograph. Although groundbreaking, it remained unmarketable and after its publication Morris invested in his more successful career as a writer. In 1956, Morris won the National Book Award for his tenth book, the unillustrated A Field of Vision. Morris continued to write and publish while teaching English and creative writing from 1962-1974 at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California. Morris’s acclaimed novel, Plains Song won American Book Award for Fiction 1981.
The Museum of Modern Art proved supportive of Morris throughout his career, both exhibiting and purchasing his work. MoMA curator John Szarkowski prompted a reconsideration of Wright Morris with the publication of God’s Country and My People (1968), widely considered Morris’s most successful photo-text book. Morris’s exhibition career burgeoned in his later years with many shows including Wright Morris: Origin of a Species, a 1992 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and following his death, Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris at Stanford’s Cantor Center of Art in 2002.
Anonymous. “Wright Morris,” on the Center for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 04/07/2023
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) House in Winter, near Lincoln, Nebraska
1941, printed 1979-1981
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Wedding Cake House, Kennebunkport, Maine
1941, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Eroded Plank from Barley Sifter
1931, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Alma Lavenson (American, 1897-1989) Eucalyptus Leaves
1933
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
The next year Lavenson made her own picture specimen, titled Eucalyptus Leaves, a forking branch against white ground (plate 49 [above]). The leaves are rounded, almost gingko-like, the stems slender and bending, a young plant or newer shoot, likely blue or silver dollar gum. It is hard to make sense of the light, which comes from the left, above, and the right – which is to say that there is an unnatural quality to the photograph. This looks like a studio picture, though Lavenson rarely worked indoors. But there are ways the photograph is in conversation with others made during this period, after she met Weston in 1930. It is a graceful picture, attentive to form and surface. Almost a decade later Lavenson would write, “In all my work – whether shacks or flowers or landscapes – I aim for perfection of texture and fineness of detail.”2 Up close the silver gelatin print has a lithographic quality, in its etched shadows and shining branch, the velvet opacity of the leaves.
Footnote 2. Alma R. Lavenson. “Virginia City: Photographing a ‘Ghost Town,'” in U.S. Camera Magazine 10 (June-July 1940), 66, quoted in Audrey Goodman. A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women’s Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021, p. 75.
Rachel Heise Bolten. “Eucalyptus Leaves,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 87.
The World of Tomorrow
Akira Furukawa (American born Japan, 1890-1968) Cargo
1929
Bromoil
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Egg Slicer
1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ruth Bernhard (American born Germany, 1905-2006) Kitchen Music
1930-1933
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Hiromu Kira (American, 1898-1991) The Thinker
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Drilling Rig, The Texas Co.
1937
Gelatin silver print
Elizabeth K. Raymond Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen (American, 1917-1991) Times Square in the Rain
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen began photographing Times Square when he first moved to New York City at age 21. Decades later, he still recalled the day he made this photograph, when he rode an elevator to the top of the Times Building, then waited to snap the shutter until the rain “turned the great X of Broadway and Seventh Avenue into silvery rivers.” Stoumen continued photographing this famed stretch of the city for nearly half a century, but he remembered the years around 1940 as special: “Those days Manhattan was the center of the world, and Times Square was its heart.”
Wall label from the exhibition
It was raining in New York. Streets slick as oil, people hurrying past the trams and buses in Times Square with their umbrellas up. September 1940: the penultimate year of peace for America. An ocean away, bombs were falling on London, nightly. But here, for now, people could still think of it as a European war.
Some of the crowds in Lou Stoumen’s photograph Times Square (plate 59 [above]) might have come to catch Gone with the Wind, Wallace Beery’s new western Wyoming, or Busby Berkeley’s latest musical spectacular Strike Up the Band, starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Times Square: Here are the cinemas and the burning neon lights and the billboards for cigarettes and automobiles and cold, fizzy drinks. All the things you can buy and see during an autumn in New York.
Lou Stoumen was 23 when he made the photograph: The elevator at 1475 Broadway took him up the first 19 stories and then he took the stairs up the final six flights, to the top, and walked out onto the roof ledge.1 From there he pointed his camera out at 46th Street and Broadway capturing the TIMES sign from behind. The building had once been the home of the New York Times, but the newspaper had departed in 1913 and now the sign stood as an announcement of a location, a cry too, an exclamation of the times. …
Margaret Bourke-White photographed Drilling Rig, The Texas Co. (1937) (plate 56) within the oil well’s tower, looking up at the vertiginous pipes that pumped petroleum from beneath the ground. The cutting shadows cast by the latticework of the rig patterns the image with a rigorous geometry, all forms reduced to a series of rectangles and triangles. Humanity has disappeared from view, to be replaced by science and engineering, unchallengeable, mathematically correct.
Bourke-White had begun working for the newly established Life magazine a year earlier, already one of America’s most prominent news photographers.5 Yet she had been fascinated with shooting machinery since the late 1920s, claiming that “the beauty of industry lies in its truth and simplicity; every line is essential therefore beautiful.”6 The drilling rig is undoubtedly elegant; shorn of context, it becomes impossible to establish its scale or relationship to its environment. It stands as an autonomous creation, a pure distillation of form as function. Irresistibly, its towering pipes and metal superstructure, disappearing into the distance at the top of the photograph, recall the skyscrapers of Stoumen’s New York. Their symbiosis is more than coincidence: It is the drilling rig that enables the tower block. This is the stuff that the World of Tomorrow is built upon.
1/ William A. Ewing. Ordinary Miracles: The Photography of Lou Stoumen. Los Angeles: Hand Press, 1981, p. 22.
5/ Stephen Bennett Phillips. Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, in association with Rizzoli, New York, 2002, p. 83.
6/ Margaret Bourke-White in 1930, quoted in Theodore M. Brown. Margaret Bourke-White: Photojournalist. Ithaca, NY: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1972, p. 31.
Altair Brandon-Salmon. “Sign of the Times,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, pp. 101-102.
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) “Switch to Dodge,” An American Altar, Detroit
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Street Theater
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Corrugated Tin Façade
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Warehouse, Water and Dock Streets
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Daniel Mattis
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Powerhouse and Palm Tree, near Lordsburg, New Mexico
1940, printed 1979-1981
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Center of town. Woodstock, Vermont. “Snowy night”
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott made this photograph halfway through her three-year appointment as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. Though most of her work (and that of the FSA overall) was understood at the time as “documentary” or factual in nature, this is one of several photographs by Post that tended to stir the imagination. For instance, Sherwood Anderson reproduced this photograph in his 1940 book on rural America, Home Town, to illustrate his metaphor for New England winters as times of peaceful slumber.
Wall label from the exhibition
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Untitled from St. Joseph’s House
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
Vincent Bressi Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Robert Disraeli (American born Germany, 1905-1988) Sunday – After Church
1933
Gelatin silver print
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Untitled
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt avoided the descriptive or symbolic titles favoured by the previous generation of photographers, preferring instead to leave her photographs untethered to specific people or locations within New York. The viewer is thus given free rein to make associations or compose narratives from the streetscapes in each photograph, just as the shoe shiner in this image may have conjured his own daydream from the action unfolding on the street.
Wall label from the exhibition
Surreal Encounters
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Monster on Broadway, New York City
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
John Vachon (American, 1914–1975) Girl on Lobster, Washington, D.C.
1938
Gelatin silver print
Gift of R. Joseph and Elaine R. Monsen
Cantor Arts Center Collection
By the early 1930s, discussions about Surrealism had spread from the art world into the mainstream, even if few Americans subscribed to, or even understood, its main tenets. Not long after, Americans began to use the words “surreal” and “surrealistic” to describe anything bizarre or dreamlike. Each of these three photographs could have fit this unofficial classification; by locating the extraordinary among the ordinary – a monster in the city, a woman riding a lobster, and another woman enacting the text on the magazine in her hands – each image is thoroughly uncanny.
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Monument to the Chicken Center of the World, Petaluma, California
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
After photographing the town of Petaluma, north of San Francisco, John Gutmann sent dozens of prints to his agent in New York. He explained: “This little town of 9,000 inhabitants and its surrounding ranches is today one of the greatest, if not the greatest poultry center in the world. … Thousands and thousands of little chicken houses, covering the country, the low built hatcheries, the many signs and symbols, trucks fully loaded with poultry or eggs give a very unique character to this district.” Gutmann photographed this roadside monument several times, likely noticing the traces of past vandalism visible in this image.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Hot Coffee, Mojave Desert
1937, printed 1977 by Cole Weston
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Although Edward Weston regarded his photography with the utmost seriousness, his writings and accounts from friends reveal a spirited sense of humour. This photograph offers a rare example of this playful side. According to Charis Wilson, Weston’s travel companion at the time, they were struck by the absurdity of the hot coffee advertisement in the middle of the desert; the fact that the location bore the name “Siberia” added a second layer of irony.
Wall label from the exhibition
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) The Repulsive Bed
1941
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
In the summer of 1941, Edward Weston visited Louisiana with Clarence John Laughlin as his guide. Before driving to the same building that Walker Evans had photographed six years earlier, they visited another antebellum plantation house where Laughlin photographed a friend among the ruins. Weston shared Laughlin’s fascination with the ornate architecture, laden with history as it slowly deteriorated back into swampy earth. Yet Laughlin understood these forces as an embodiment of Surrealism. For him, New Orleans was a place “unparalleled in its violence of decay” but also where “the human spirit reached a singular flowering” in the face of this destruction.
Wall label from the exhibition
Dubbed “The Father of American Surrealism,” Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) was the most important Southern photographer of his time and a singular figure within the burgeoning American school of photography. Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from his peers who championed realism and social documentary.
Referring to his own fraught relationships with women, Laughlin described this ethereal photograph of a woman lounging atop a collapsed, tattered bed in a decaying house as an “Image of those who endure marriage, without love, because of convention. [The] marriage bed becomes repulsive, and part of it turns into a monster head.” The veil across the woman’s face gives her a haunting look, as if she is fading away along with the house around her. The cracks in the wall reinforce the idea of a fractured, failing marriage, while the shadows envelop her in darkness.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, White Chapel, Louisiana
1935, printed 1974
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Walker Evans admired the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a French photographer whose images of Paris caught the interest of a new generation of photographers shortly before his death. Though neither photographer self-affiliated with Surrealism, Evans recognised that “in some of his work [Atget] places himself in a position to be pounced upon by the most orthodox of surrealists.” Evans occasionally emulated Atget’s style, as in this image of an empty Louisiana plantation house, leading some American critics to describe Evans’s photography in a manner befitting a Surrealist. One 1938 review stated, “In some miraculous way [Evans’s] objects or persons acquire a super-reality, the implications of which echo across the years to startle and haunt, to jolt and to enchant.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1997) Uncommon Man
1936, printed 1983
From Nathan Lerner – Fifteen Photographs: 1935-1978
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the Mattis Family
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999) Jack Rabbit
1939
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Lisa and John Pritzker
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sommer’s Jack Rabbit (1939) was one of the first 100 negatives the artist made with his new 8 x 10 inch view camera recommended by his friend Edward Weston.1 Living in the arid climate of Arizona to protect his lungs against the recurrence of tuberculosis, the casualties of the desert – rabbits, horses, coyotes – became some of Sommer’s signature photographic subjects.2 Weston, too, had a penchant for photographing dead things. Weston’s preference was for the corpses of birds, often those of shore birds near his coastal California home.3 Photo historian Robin Kelsey has made an excellent comparison of the two artists’ “rival” treatments of deceased animals, grounded in their diametrically opposed aesthetic concerns. As in Jack Rabbit, Sommer used evenly dispersed light to create a visual field that privileged no one thing above the rest,4 reflecting both an aesthetic and a philosophical orientation concerned with the essential oneness of the world.5 On the other hand, Weston treated his dead birds in the same manner as his nudes or his peppers, expressing what he termed “the universality of basic form.”6 Using light to emphatically trace the contours of the birds’ forms, Weston visually separated them from their backgrounds and transformed them into abstract objects. Aligned with their concerns, the two artists typically chose different moments of death and decay to capture: For Sommer it was desiccated or decaying bodies and for Weston it was stripped bones or newly deceased bodies.
Although Weston’s Dead Man, Colorado Desert (1937) similarly focuses on the clearly defined form of a newly deceased body,7 there are crucial distinctions in its composition. Whereas Weston’s birds are photographed from above, aiding in their abstraction, the dead man is photographed from an angle to the side, which emphasizes both his human features and the bramble-filled space that he occupies (plate 83 [below]). His waist, legs, and one arm continue outside the frame to the top right. This makes Dead Man fundamentally different from Weston’s birds, because the man exists not as an abstract form, but as a body in space, a space that we can imagine Weston and his wife and collaborator Charis Wilson sharing and a space that we can imagine inhabiting ourselves.
Maggie Dethloff. “Violable Edges: Frederick Sommer’s and Edward Weston’s Photographs of Death in the Desert,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 131.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dead Vulture, Mojave Desert
1937
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dead Man, Colorado Desert
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
While traveling through the Colorado Desert on a photography excursion for his Guggenheim Fellowship, Edward Weston came across the corpse of a recently deceased man. He had apparently become ill and stranded while traversing the harsh landscape. Despite the unexpected, and certainly disturbing, nature of this encounter, Weston seamlessly fit the subject into his photography practice. He made two photographs, one of which Life magazine published alongside a short narrative by Weston titled “Desert Tragedy.” In the text Weston explained: “He must have died that day. But whatever aid he got came too late, hunger and privation had wasted his body and the merciless sun had dried him up. But he was quite beautiful in death.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Cantor Arts Center
328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way
Stanford, CA Phone: 650-723-4177
Exhibition dates: 7th October, 2022 – 21st May, 2023
Head Curator: Karolina Kühn Curators: Juliane Bischoff, Angela Hermann, Sebastian Huber, Anna Straetmans, Ulla-Britta Vollhardt
Wer’e here, we’re queer, we’re not going anywhere.
Despite years of persecution, death and inequality, the presence of queer identity, diversity and creativity remains undimmed.
There are some fabulous, groundbreaking human beings who are “being seen” in this posting. Equally, there are some fabulous art works that illuminate the(ir) human condition.
Let’s celebrate their existence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
About the exhibition
TO BE SEEN is an exhibition devoted to the stories of LGBTQI+ in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Through historical testimony and artistic positions from then and now, it traces queer lives and networks, the areas of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+, and the persecution they suffered.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at a variety of genders, bodies, and identities. It shows how queer life became ever more visible during the 1920s, giving rise to a more open treatment of role models and of desire. During this period, homosexual, trans, and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance. They organised, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity, and carved out their own spaces.
But as recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics, and society increased, so did resistance. After the Nazis came to power, the LGBTQI+ subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945, their stories and fates were scarcely archived or remembered.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism website
“When a right is withheld from you, you must fight and not give in; that is a moral duty.”
Joseph Schedel opened the first meeting of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee of Munich on September 24, 1902
Exterior view of the NS Documentation Center in Munich showing a work in the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 – Maximiliane Baumgartner’s “You look at us – we look at you”: Rubbing against the architecture of the executive gaze (Based on a paper by Anita Augspurg ‘Mißgriffe der Polizei’ / ‘Abuses by the Police’, 1902) 2021 Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
TO BE SEEN | Trailer
The exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 is dedicated to the stories of LGBTIQ* in Germany in the first half of the 20th century from October 7th, 2022 to May 21st, 2023 at the Munich Documentation Center. With historical testimonies and artistic positions from then to the present, the exhibition traces queer life plans and networks, freedom and persecution.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at diverse genders, bodies and identities. It shows how queer life became more and more visible in the 1920s and how role models and desires were dealt with more openly. Homosexual, trans* and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance: they organised themselves, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity and conquered their own spaces.
In addition to recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics and society, resistance also increased. After the National Socialists came to power, the LGBTIQ* subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945 their stories and fates were hardly archived or remembered.
Unknown photographer Lili, Paris
1926
From N. Hoyer (ed.). Man into Woman. An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). London: Jarrolds, 1933, 1926, opp. p. 40.
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Lili Elbe, a transgender woman who underwent sex reassignment surgery in Berlin in the 1930s.
Around 1900, queer people in Germany began gaining more and more visibility in public life – in art, culture, science, and politics. Existing role models for men and women were being questioned. Homosexual women and men as well as trans* and non-binary people achieved initial successes in their struggle for equal rights and acceptance: they organised and fought for scientific and legal recognition of their sexual and gender identity.
They met in public places, founded clubs and associations, and started magazines. New terms were coined to describe their identities and create a sense of belonging. Urning, lesbian, girlfriend, Bubi, homosexual: more than a hundred years ago there were already many expressions for what we call queer today. But as their visibility grew, so did the social and political backlash. The Nazi takeover in 1933 was a defining moment for queer people – their subculture was largely destroyed. In the postwar years, discrimination continued.
Even decades later, LGBTQI+ history is still hardly remembered or preserved in archives. Through historical testimonies and artistic positions from then and now, TO BE SEEN traces queer lives and networks, the spaces of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+ people, and the persecution they suffered.
Police photo of Liddy Bacroff, taken after an arrest, 1933. Barcoff described themself as a “homosexual transvestite”, lived from sex work, and was convicted several times. In 1943, they was murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Liddy Bacroff, a transgender woman initially from Ludwigshafen, who moved to Hamburg and lived for the majority of her life publicly presenting herself as a woman. She did not perceive herself to be a man (and, indeed, in papers she left after having been imprisoned, she determined what her name would be while also conspicuously referring to herself as “Liddy Bacroff, Transvestit”). But this was effectively her own form of self-ID. Certainly the authorities didn’t see her as such — her records remain filed under her deadname and identify her as a homosexual man – and, though she’d have been given a Transvestitenschein in Berlin, she wasn’t IN Berlin. Having not visited Hirschfeld and his Institut, it’s a marvel she uses the term “Transvestit”; elsewhere she does refer to herself as a “Mann-Weib” (a “male woman”), and frequently as a girl or a woman. The authorities, again, call her a man or, occasionally, a “Zwitter.” (NB. “Zwitter” means “hermaphrodite” and is here not meant literally but rather as an epithet recorded in the official files – an insult to her.) So the language that is used to describe trans people is inconsistent and, often, absent (depending on the sources). Reading between the lines is necessary, especially in the official records, which view trans women (regardless their lived circumstances or their appearance) only as homosexual men, and charge them as such. And while Hirschfeld was conscientious, the police were… not. This is especially true as the 1930s unfolded and the country Nazified. I wrote a very long thread a while back about “Heinrich Bode”, who was assigned male at birth but frequently presented as a woman. I used that thread to highlight difficulties of definition because Bode denounced their appearance as a woman in court filings and personal testimony, but at the same time also hinted that there was something much deeper than “just” dressing as a woman. But as they were subjected to prosecution by the Nazified judiciary and security state, they were under duress. So, do we assume that Bode was trans, and denied it because of the threat of punishment? Or was their presentation simply playing with the conventions of gender?
Dr. Bodie A. Ashton Historiker, Universität Erfurt. Text from his Twitter account
The androgynous dancer created new body images and developed the swapping of clothes into a stage genre of its own.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Queer
“Queer” originally referred to anything that did not fit into the usual categories. In English the word queer (meaning strange, other, suspicious), was used earlier as a derogative term for homosexuals. Since the 1990s, however, the term has been adopted by many non heterosexual and non-binary people as a positive self-designation. Within the exhibition, queer is used as a catch-all term for a variety of sexual and gender identities and practices that deviate from heterosexual ideas. The term primarily, but not only, refers to LGBTQI+ – in other words lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersexual persons. Furthermore, “queering” can be understood as a practice of combating various forms of discrimination and exclusion. Applied to gender, sexuality, and identity issues, it means casting a critical gaze at the worldview that regards a heterosexual relationship between two persons as the social norm. The rigid binary division of gender into man and woman and the associated role models are thrown into question. In the exhibition, historical self-designations are used where they can be traced through sources.
Self empowerment
In the German Empire, politics, the economy, and society were dominated by men. The gender order, which was maintained over centuries by state and church, was strictly divided into two parts: men and women were assigned clear roles within which they must operate. People who did not conform to these role models and lived gender and sexual identities outside the normative order were ostracised. They were considered immoral, criminal, or ill. According to Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Criminal Code of 1871, sexual acts between men were forbidden and punishable by imprisonment. In Austria, sex between women was also punishable.
But there were individuals who rebelled against the prevailing gender order and fought for a more open society. They opposed the outlawing of homosexuality and transsexuality, advocated a change in criminal law, and assertively engaged in the recognition of their identities. New alliances and self-images emerged. Many of these pioneers paid a high price for their rebellion: they lost their jobs, their families, and their friendships, and were socially isolated.
In TO BE SEEN #QueerLives we present individuals and movements who rebelled against the gender order that prevailed around 1900 and advocated a more open society. In their fight for equal rights and acceptance, they showed solidarity with each other, organised themselves in clubs, founded magazines, coined new terms and met in bars and clubs.
One of them was the chansonnière and cabaret artist Claire Waldoff (1884-1957). Born as Clara Wortmann in Gelsenkirchen, she is a central figure in the Berlin cultural scene of the 1920s. Her songs are known throughout Germany. She lives openly with her partner Olga (Olly) von Roeder and shapes the city’s lesbian scene.
Emil Orlik (21 July 1870 – 28 September 1932) was a painter, etcher and lithographer. He was born in Prague, which was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and lived and worked in Prague, Austria and Germany.
Emil Orlik was born the son of a tailor on July 21, 1870, in Prague, then the capital of a province within the Austro-Hungarian empire. He first studied art at the private art school of Heinrich Knirr, where one of his fellow pupils was Paul Klee. Other friends at this time included Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Starting in 1891, Orlik studied at the Munich Academy under Wilhelm Lindenschmit. He later learned engraving from Johann Leonhard Raab and proceeded to experiment with various printmaking processes, including woodcut, which he and his friend, Bernard Pankok, experimented with in 1896.
Orlik left the Academy in 1893. He performed his military service for a year before returning to Prague in 1894. He relocated to Munich in 1896, where he worked for the magazine Jugend (Youth). He spent most of 1898 travelling through Europe, visiting the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, and Paris.
Emil Orlik’s prints and techniques went through extensive changes as he traveled internationally, learning new methods wherever he went. Known for his portraits of a wide variety of well-known individuals including Josephine Baker, Albert Einstein, and Marc Chagall, Orlik was an artistic chameleon, never sticking to one genre or style but studying many. His prints catalog his travels, creating a kind of pictorial diary of the years 1892 to 1900 in particular. Many of his works, often produced in color, appeared in the European periodical PAN, along with the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, Kathe Kollwitz, and Max Klinger.
Japanese art and culture fascinated Orlik. He was aware of the impact Japanese art was having on European art and decided to visit Japan. In 1900, he traveled to Japan and spent a year studying Japanese woodblock cutting and printing. His studies of the Japanese culture led him to the art of Utamaro and Hiroshige. Orlik studied the language before his departure and within four months of his arrival he was proficient enough in Japanese to converse with the artisans whose work he admired and under whom he studied.
Orlik never limited himself to popular subject matter. He studied any scene that inspired him, major events or everyday life. He produced fourteen lithographs of the trial of Arthur Schnitzler and his fellow actors; reenactment of the banned play, “Aus dem Reigin,” for which Orlik was a defence witness. After the trial, Orlik began working for the theatre as a designer of costumes, stage sets, and posters.
He kept all his early woodblocks and, in 1920, he published his celebrated portfolio Kleine Holzschnitte (Small woodcuts) in an edition of 100, which also contained the text of his descriptions of each of the prints. The portfolio contained thirty-four woodcuts, eighteen of which were printed in colours. The complete portfolio is now very rarely found. It included such delightful items as Aus London and the superb colour woodcut Schneiderwerkstatt bei Orlik in Prag (the Orlik tailoring workshop in Prague), which depicts his father and colleague’s busy sewing.
Orlik was also commissioned to design colour posters for the Best-Litovsk Peace Conference at which Russia and Germany ended their conflict. He produced seventy-two lithographs, including a number portraits of Leon Trotsky. Around this time he also began to study photography, and by the mid-1920s was photographing celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich and Albert Eintstein.
Emil Orlik died of a heart attack on September 28, 1932. His brother Hugo was willed the estate, and with it the numerous works of art Orlik had collected throughout the years. Hugo Orlik and his family perished in WWII at the hands of the Nazis, and the only survivor was an aunt who regained what little was left of Emil’s effects. To this day Orlik’s work is still exhibited throughout the world.
Anonymous. “Emil Orlik Biography” on The Annex Galleries website Nd [Online] Cited 17/04/2023
Installation views of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Bars and clubs, magazines, organisations, private or public places: queer subcultures and networks emerged in Germany beginning at the turn of the century and especially in the 1920s. Political goals were formulated together. People communicated using their own codes, ciphers, and symbols.
The public sphere continued to be reserved primarily for men – heterosexual, white, and Christian men. But the experience of conquering one’s own spaces against all social opposition, of joining forces and stepping into the public sphere together, led to a growing self-confidence in the queer scenes. In the process, they not only fought for their own interests; political bonds were forged and coalitions formed that bridged differences.
Visions for a society with equal rights for all people were drafted, and existing structures of power were questioned. But internal conflicts emerged as well, and not all queer groups pulled together.
§ 175 des Reichsstrafgesetzbuchs
Trancript: “Paragraph 175: Perverse fornication committed between persons of the male sex or by persons with animals is punishable by imprisonment; loss of civil rights may also be imposed.”
According to Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Criminal Code, sexual intercourse between men was punishable. This provision originated in the Prussian Criminal Code and was introduced throughout Germany with the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Prior to this, homosexuality was exempt from punishment in some German states, such as Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, following the example of France. The paragraph was controversial from the beginning: ecclesiastical conservatives and extreme right-wing parties demanded it be made more severe; liberals, social democrats, and communists called for its abolition.
Organisations and the conquest of public space
At the end of the nineteenth century, gay men joined forces to fight against persecution based on Paragraph 175. They founded clubs and associations and sought supporters to achieve their vision of a more open society. Berlin became the hub of this movement and developed into a leading centre of attraction for queer people. It was in Berlin that, in 1897, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded, which aimed to achieve legal and social equality for homosexual and trans* people.
Some activists from the women’s movements joined this struggle, especially when the extension of Paragraph 175 to encompass women was debated in 1909. Their goal was far-reaching sexual and social reform: a woman’s right to sexual self-determination, abortion, extramarital relations, and independence from her husband. Some leading women’s rights activists lived with another woman, but only few openly identified as lesbian.
Queer subcultures flourished in the Weimar Republic. A diverse landscape of organisations emerged that represented the interests of gays, lesbians, and trans* persons. However, the struggle against Paragraph 175 was not always synonymous with advocacy for an open society. Among gay activists there were also those who paid homage to a homoerotic male cult. They excluded – in addition to women – all those who did not conform to their heroic, in some cases also racist ideas of masculinity.
Adolf Brand (publisher) Der Eigene (The Unique)
1926
Founded in 1896 by Adolf Brand, “Der Eigene” was the longest-running homosexual journal. With its literary-artistic contributions it evoked the image of heroic masculinity.
Struggle against Paragraph 175: the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
The physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) came from a liberal Jewish family and began actively campaigning for the abolition of Paragraph 175 at the end of the nineteenth century. His actions were motivated by the persecution to which gay men were subjected. As a sexual reformer and founder of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, he fought against the prevailing rigid sexual morality and contributed significantly to the visibility of queer people.
Magnus Hirschfeld utilised modern means in his educational activities. The silent film drama was shot in 1919 with his active participation. It is considered the first film to deal openly with Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) the subject of homosexuality. Heavily attacked by conservative and right-wing extremists, and by some with anti-Semitic motives, the film was used as an opportunity to curtail the artistic freedom introduced after the 1918 revolution. After being screened publicly for a full year, the film was banned by censors in 1920 and almost all copies were destroyed.
“Anders als die Andern” is about a homosexual musician who is subject to blackmail. When he no longer knows what to do and files charges, not only is the blackmailer convicted, but he himself is also sentenced – for violating Paragraph 175. He is shattered by the verdict and takes his own life.
Excerpts from Different From the Others (Anders als die Andern) (Germany, 1919), which was preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive as part of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project. Funding provided by The Andrew J. Kuehn Jr. Foundation and the members of Outfest.
Synopsis
The concert violinist Paul Koerner takes a student under his wing, much to the worry of the boy’s parents. Koerner is meanwhile being blackmailed by a former lover, since in Germany any homosexual relations at that time were punishable under the law, codified in Article 175, which was not removed from the books until the 1960s. The German film, Different From the Others is, as far as we know, the first fiction feature film to address a specifically gay audience. Fortunately, even though more than 90% of all German silent films have disappeared, this film exists today in at least half its original length. When the film was first shown in 1919, gay and lesbian audiences must have been amazed that a mainstream fiction feature film would portray their situation as a fact of nature, rather than a perversion. Today, this film celebrates the brief opening of that door, before it slammed shut for another 50 years.
The film was produced and directed by Richard Oswald, at that time one of Germany’s most prolific independents, who made films cheaply and premiered them in a Berlin cinema he owned, where his wife would often handle the office box. Oswald had earned a fortune in 1917 / 1918 with a number of “educational” feature films about sexually transmitted diseases, which were approved by the censorship authorities, simply because syphilis was rampant in the trenches. Oswald would continue to produce controversial films, like his acknowledged masterpiece, The Captain from Koepenick (1931) based on Carl Zuckmayer’s anti-authoritarian play. The Nazis never forgave Oswald for Anders als die Andern or Koepenick, forcing Oswald into exile and eventually to Hollywood, where he directed several films and televisions shows. Although long under appreciated in Germany, recent critical reappraisals have valued his in-your-face aesthetic and modern subject matter.
Only a severely truncated version of the film has survived, with Ukrainian titles, as Gosfilmofond in Russia. It was restored previously to a semblance of the original 1919 release by the Munich Film Museum. The UCLA restoration is based on that Munich reconstruction, with some changes and additions made.
Credits
Richard-Oswald-Produktion. Screenwriters: Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald. Cinematographer: Max Fassbender. With: Conrad Veidt, Leo Connard, Ilse von Tasso-Lind, Alexandra Willegh, Ernst Pittschau, Fritz Schulz.
Different From Others: A Legacy Preserved (2012)
Featurette about the restoration of German silent film Different From Others (1919). Produced for the Outfest Legacy Project and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
On October 6 the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer lives 1900-1950 opens at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. TO BE SEEN is devoted to the stories of LGBTQI+ in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. Through historical testimony and artistic positions from then and now, it traces queer lives and networks, the areas of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+, and the persecution they suffered.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at a variety of genders, bodies, and identities. It shows how queer life became ever more visible during the 1920s, giving rise to a more open treatment of role models and of desire. During this period, homosexual, trans, and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance. They organised, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity, and carved out their own spaces.
But as recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics, and society increased, so did resistance. After the Nazis came to power, the LGBTQI+ subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945, their stories and fates were scarcely archived or remembered.
Participating artists
Katharina Aigner, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Claude Cahun, Zackary Drucker & Marval Rex, Nicholas Grafia, Philipp Gufler, Richard Grune, Lena Rosa Händle, Hannah Höch, Paul Hoecker, Nina Jirsíková, Germaine Krull, Elisar von Kupffer, Zoltán Lesi & Ricardo Portilho, Herbert List, Heinz Loew, Jeanne Mammen, Michaela Melián, Henrik Olesen, Emil Orlik, Max Peiffer Watenphul, Jonathan Penca, Lil Picard, Karol Radziszewski, Alexander Sacharoff, Gertrude Sandmann, Christian Schad, Renée Sintenis, Mikołaj Sobczak, Wolfgang Tillmans and others.
TO BE SEEN will be accompanied by an extensive program of events and outreach on topics such as the persecution of LGBTQI+ persons under National Socialism, the queer history of Munich, intersectionality and drag, as well as queer identity in literature and film. All information and updates can be found at nsdoku.de/tobeseen.
The accompanying publication features a collection of texts and artworks from the exhibition as well as essays by key voices that shed light on past and present queer lives from an academic and social perspective. The book in German and English will be published in December 2022 by Hirmer Verlag. It features contributions by, among others, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Michaela Dudley, Sander L. Gilman, Dagmar Herzog, Ulrike Klöppel, Ben Miller, Cara Schweitzer, Sebastien Tremblay.
TO BE SEEN: Queer lives 1900-1950 takes place under the patronage of Claudia Roth, Minister of State for Culture and Media. The exhibition was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Director: Mirjam Zadoff Head Curator: Karolina Kühn Curators: Juliane Bischoff, Angela Hermann, Sebastian Huber, Anna Straetmans, Ulla-Britta Vollhardt Project Management: Karolina Kühn, Anna Straetmans, Sebastian Huber
Press release from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
In April 1933, the film “The Mystery of the Gender” ran in Viennese cinemas for about two weeks before it was banned. The film is a mixture of romance and medical educational film, including close-ups of the women’s genitals. Among the protagonists are – without mentioning their names – Toni Ebel, Charlotte Charlaque and Dora Richter. You can find an excerpt of the film in our storytelling http://www.tobeseen.nsdoku.de
Toni Ebel converted to Judaism in early 1933, but reversed the conversion as the pressure of persecution increased. After 1945 she was recognised in the GDR as a victim of fascism. Ebel was able to start a new life as a painter.
Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel remained in correspondence after their forced separation in 1942. In 1946 Charlaque told her friend about her loneliness, her arrival as a refugee in New York and the difficulties in getting her female name recognised.
Dora Richter became known as one of the first trans* women to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Since it was difficult for trans* people to find work, she took a job as a housemaid at the Institute for Sexology, which was looted by National Socialist groups in 1933. Nothing is known of Richter’s fate after 1933.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing at rear, an enlargement of an image by an unknown photographer of the Eldorado in the Motzstrasse (1932, below); and at left centre in the display cabinet, an image by an unknown photographer Trans* people in the Eldorado in Berlin (1926, above) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
The Eldorado on Lutherstraße was one of the city’s infamous cabaret bars.
The Eldorado was the name of multiple nightclubs and performance venues in Berlin before the Nazi Era and World War II. The name of the cabaret Eldorado has become an integral part of the popular iconography of what has come to be seen as the culture of the period in German history often referred to as the “Weimar Republic”. …
Eldorado was a gay cabaret in that along with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans* patrons, a heterosexual-identifying audience (artists, authors, celebrities, tourists) would have been present as well. “Cross-dressing” was tolerated on the premises, though for the most part legally prohibited and / or sharply regulated in public (and to an extent in private) at the time. This exception to everyday life attracted not only male patrons who wished to dress in the “clothing of the opposite sex”, and their admirers, but also to no small extent women who wished to do the same, and their admirers. Wealthy lookers-on were encouraged to come and drink and watch as so-called “Zechenmacher” (tab payers). The practice was particularly common in so-called “Lesbian bars” or at so-called “Lesbian balls” in the neighbourhood at the time and up the 1960s in places like the Nationalhof at nearby Bülowstraße 37. As women’s incomes were on average much lower than men’s then as now, male spectators with money to spend were explicitly welcome, and it was not uncommon that there were sex-workers present to offer their services. Eldorado also included what have come to be called drag shows as a regular part of the cabaret performances.
The Eldorado, which opened in 1926 on Lutherstrasse in Berlin-Schoeneberg, was – along with its counterpart, the “new Eldorado” on Motzstrasse – one of the internationally most well-known trendy bars of its time. Magnus Hirschfeld, Claire Waldoff, Anita Berber and Marlene Dietrich often and happily visited the Eldorado, as did the prominent National Socialist Ernst Röhm. With its shows, it attracted a wealthy audience, which soon consisted not only of homosexuals and trans* people, but above all of onlookers heterosexuals. Guests could purchase tokens that could be exchanged for a dance with the Eldorado’s “transvestite” staff.
A popular accessory for lesbian women in the 1920s was the “dance monocle”
Short hair, ties, tails, and top hats were other identifying marks within part of the lesbian scene – and soon to be common among modern heterosexual women as well. The “New Woman” of the 1920s broke away from traditional gender images and appropriated new things and spaces that had previously been occupied by men.
In the Berlin scene, but also in other cities, numerous gay and lesbian clubs that rented premises, called for social activities, but also explicitly pursued political and emancipatory goals. One of the largest “women’s clubs” was the Violetta Ladies’ Club, founded in Berlin in 1926.
The founder of the women’s club Violetta was the lesbian activist Lotte Hahm (1890-1967), who also wrote for “The Girlfriend”. Together with her Jewish partner Käthe Fleischmann (1899-1967) she ran the lesbian bar Monokel-Diele in Berlin. After 1933, both initially tried to maintain lesbian networks and meeting places under cover names. Fleischmann, persecuted as a Jew, survived the Nazi era in various hiding places.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
A lively scene for homosexuals and trans* persons emerged in Germany during the 1920s. Especially in major cities, a number of clubhouses, bars, and clubs functioned as meeting places. The undisputed centre of queer life was Berlin. Police authorities there followed a more liberal course than elsewhere after the end of the nineteenth century. Nearly two hundred subcultural venues are documented in the imperial capital between 1919 and 1933, about eighty of them for lesbian women.
In conservative Munich, as in smaller cities and rural areas, fewer venues existed. Homosexual men had to resort to informal meeting places, due to the ongoing criminal persecution. They used public parks and toilets as “pick-up spots” to socialise or have sex. In doing so, they always ran the risk of being denounced or stopped by the police.
Magazines and informal networks
Magazines were an important means of communication for queer subcultures. They listed relevant clubs and bars, bookstores, and associations, and served as contact exchanges. These references and opportunities were essential particularly for queer people in rural areas, where there were no functioning networks. However, the publishers had to reckon with the banning of their print products at any time. It was not uncommon for entire print runs or volumes to be labeled as “trash texts” and confiscated.
In order to avoid police persecution and social exclusion, the scene employed its own linguistic codes. Camouflage terms such as “friend”, “girlfriend”, “ideal friendship”, “friendly exchange of ideas”, or “ideal-minded” were used to refer to lesbian and gay connections. Lonely hearts ads in relevant magazines were often the only way to find like-minded people, especially in smaller towns and in the countryside.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing historical magazines
In TO BE SEEN you can leaf through historical magazines. They were an important means of communication for queer subcultures.
Magazines such as “Die Freundsblatt”, “DasFreundschaftsblatt” or “Frauenliebe” referred to relevant pubs, bookstores and associations and served as contact exchanges. Especially for queer people in rural areas, where there were no functioning networks, these tips and opportunities were essential. However, the publishers had to expect their printed products to be banned at any time. It is not uncommon for entire editions or volumes to be marked as “trash and dirty writing” and confiscated.
“The Girlfriend” (subtitle “The Ideal Friendship Journal”, later “Weekly Journal for Ideal Female Friendship”) was a magazine for lesbian women from 1924 to 1933 in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. It is considered the first lesbian magazine and was first published monthly, then every two weeks, and later even weekly.
The editor was Friedrich Radzuweit (1876-1932), chairman of the Federation for Human Rights. The content focuses on information on lesbian life and meeting places for lesbians, political topics, short stories, serialised novels and classifieds. Although “The Girlfriend” was primarily aimed at a lesbian readership, there are also numerous articles that deal with topics such as ‘transvestism’ or transgender. It was discontinued a few weeks after the National Socialists seized power in January 1933: the last issue appeared on March 15, 1933, a week before the Enabling Act was passed.
Covers from Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), September 1932, and Liebende Frauen (Women in Love), 1929
The “Zwischenstufenwand” (sexual transitions wall) in the Institute for Sexology illustrated Hirschfeld’s theory that all people have male and female qualities in them.
The famous picture wall, illustrating Hirschfeld’s sex and gender theories. It was first exhibited in Leipzig (1922) on occasion of the German Natural Scientists’ and Physicians’ centenary and then in Vienna (1930) at the World League for Sexual Reform’s congress. The picture wall (2×1 m by 4×5 m) always had a prominent place in the Institute and was used to explain sexual theories to visitors.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
Knowledge, diagnosis, control
Scientific interest in sexuality and gender was expanding around the turn of the century. The amount of sexological research and number of publications increased. Most writings described homosexuality or trans* identities as “pathological” conditions. This assumption has since been scientifically refuted. At the same time, groundbreaking theories emerged, for example Magnus Hirschfeld’s model of “sexual intermediates.” In it, the sexologist anticipated the later realisation that numerous other gender identities besides man and woman exist.
Yet, then as now, knowledge also meant power and control. People were examined, described, classified, and judged as patients. Some sexologists incorporated ideas in their research that drew on biologism and eugenics. These were spread throughout society and later played a central role for the Nazis: their conception of so-called “racial hygiene” distinguished between “valuable” and “unworthy” life.
The driving forces in the German-speaking world from the 1860s on were the lawyer and physician Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Ulrichs in particular fought for the decriminalisation and recognition of homosexuality. His insights into the diversity of sexuality and gender are still essential today. Other scientists understood the “third sex” as a pathological phenomenon and wanted to effect the “re-education” and “healing” of their patients with methods that were sometimes questionable. The result was often physical or psychological trauma.
The Institute for Sexology and its patients
Magnus Hirschfeld was the best-known representative of sexology in the German-speaking world. He combined a pursuit for emancipation and a scientific perspective, was a champion of decriminalisation and a physician at the same time. His Institute for Sexology, founded in Berlin in 1919, became the centre of the liberal-leftist sexual reform movement of the Weimar Republic. In addition to research and medical consulting, the institute operated a library, an archive, and a museum. Unlike conservative sexologists, Hirschfeld and his staff worked towards the self-acceptance of homosexuals and trans* persons.
This “adaptation therapy” or “milieu therapy” aimed to help people adapt to the queer milieu that suited them, instead of repressing their identity. Many important people from the gay community, such as Lili Elbe, were treated here. Homosexual writers such as André Gide and Christopher Isherwood visited the institute. People who today would be considered intersex were also counselled. From the beginning, the Nazis were disturbed by liberal sexology, Hirschfeld, and his institute. Many of the institute’s employees were, like Hirschfeld himself, Jewish. In 1933, Nazi students and SA members demolished the institute; Hirschfeld was on a world tour at the time and remained in exile in France.
The institute grew to become a refuge for “transvestites”. This is how people who we understand today as trans* persons were called at the time. Some of them lived in the institute and earned their living there. They were particularly dependent on it. Despite the institute’s great merits, the relationship between doctors and “patients” was not unproblematic from today’s point of view.
By mediating between queer people and state power, Hirschfeld and his colleagues were able to protect their patients and fight for more rights and freedom for them. But in order to do so, they cooperated with the police and the courts, thus providing the state institutions with access and control. Then as now, intersex and trans* people were rarely perceived as experts on themselves, making them dependent on the recognition bestowed by medicine and the justice system. This was accompanied by a scientific and state-regulatory view of their bodies that pushed them into the role of patients, externally controlled subjects, instead of granting them autonomy over their bodies as well as their own voice.
Hirschfeld’s medical practices are controversial today
However, Magnus Hirschfeld also referred those male homosexuals who, based on his biological research, assumed that homosexuality could also be treated, to other doctors. They castrated the patients and implanted heterosexual testicles in them.
Not only Magnus Hirschfeld’s medical practices, but also his scientific approach is controversial today. His absolute belief in biology leaned towards social Darwinism and eugenics. He founded a “Medical Society for Sexology and Eugenics”. He thus promoted “sexual selection” in order to improve the “mental fitness of the offspring”. He was thus at the same time far away and entirely in line with the National Socialists.
The National Socialists saw Hirschfeld as a security risk, a threat to the population growth of the “Aryan race” and not only in him. Tens of thousands of gay men are sentenced to prison, jail, and concentration camps, the gay civil rights movement is crushed, gay hangouts are closed, magazines are banned, and then, on May 6, 1933, the Institute for Sex Research is looted and its library burned.
Session of the “International Conference for Sex Reform on a Sexological Basis”, organised by Hirschfeld 1921 in Berlin at the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus. (Hirschfeld, leaning forward, is seated just beneath the lectern.) This was the first sexological congress held anywhere, and it laid the groundwork for the Copenhagen congress of 1928.
Titled “Transvestites in Front of the Institute of Sexology” this photograph was taken on the occasion of the First International Congress for Sexual Reform on the Basis of Sexology in Berlin, 1921.
Willy Römer (December 31 , 1887 in Berlin – October 26, 1979 in West Berlin ) was a press photographer. His picture agency was one of the ten most important of the Weimar period. The pictures mainly illustrate life in Berlin from 1905 to 1935. It is thanks to a rare stroke of luck that his extensive picture archive survived the Second World War almost unscathed.
Starting in 1900, “Transvestite Certificates” were issued by a doctor, that officially certified that a person was known to be “wearing men’s clothing” or “wearing women’s clothing”.
In TO BE SEEN #QueerLives we also show Gerd Katter’s “Transvestite License”. From 1900, “transvestite certificates” were issued in some cities. It is a medically certified official confirmation that a person is known as “wearing men’s clothing” or “wearing women’s clothing”. The authorities refrain from making an arrest if you show them during checks. However, those affected are thus registered with the police and can be monitored more easily.
Gerd Katter (1910-1995) came to the Institute for Sexology at the age of 16 – at that time still with a female birth name. Barred from having his breasts amputated because of his youth, Katter tries to operate on himself, which requires an emergency amputation. Katter is one of many people who receive concrete, albeit unconventional, help at the institute. So he is prescribed to visit bars where “transvestites” meet. According to the adaptation therapy pursued at the institute, those seeking advice should be brought into contact with like-minded people. This is how they should learn to accept themselves.
Magnus Hirschfeld repeatedly invited Gerd Katter to the institute to show his guests a medical case study – a practice of displaying people and their bodies that was common at the time, but which is problematic from today’s medical-ethical point of view. Gerd Katter later completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and lived in the GDR.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Female homosexuality and bisexuality received little attention in the male-dominated field of sexology. An exception was the research of Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986). The physician situated precisely these topics at the centre of her work. After 1933, left-wing, Jewish, and openly lesbian women in Germany were increasingly targeted by the Nazis. Being Jewish, she emigrated to Paris in 1933, and to London in 1936. Her research on lesbian sexuality and bisexuality earned her international recognition beginning in the 1960s.
Feeling Bodies, Seeing Images
At the same time as the advancements in sexology, new notions of the body, gender, and intimacy were finding expression in art and culture. Literature, theatre, film, and the visual arts offered an opportunity to question gender stereotypes and to create new roles and body images. These served as the basis for imagining freer ways of living and to lay the foundation for what we perceive today as queer aesthetics.
While Article 142 of the Weimar Constitution promised extensive artistic freedom, censorship was simultaneously introduced for the new medium of film. Munich in particular had numerous bans on film and theatre performances deemed offensive.
The bisexual dancer Anita Berber (1899-1928) confronted audiences with homoeroticism, nudity, and drug use, addressing issues that were taboo in the public eye.
The pejorative connotations of decadence as a moral failing or degenerate or degenerative state have often played into the pathologisation and criminalisation of specific bodies and practices. This is especially the case when these bodies and practices come to be seen as a threat to the health and integrity of a nation. Some of the most interesting examples can be found in Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar Republic, when the city itself was subject to charges of miasmic contagion. ‘Even the alkaline air around the Prussian capital (Berliner Luft)’, writes performance scholar Mel Gordon in characteristically hyperbolic style, ‘was said to contain a toxic ether that attacked the central nervous system, stimulating long suppressed passions as it animated all the external tics of sexual perversity’.[1]
Dance was regarded as a vector of transmission in spreading this toxic ether. Social dancing (Tanztaumel) swept Berlin in the year following the armistice, offering writers and cultural commentators a rich repository of tropes and metaphors for describing a social, economic and political situation that appeared to be spinning out of control. …
For dance and theater scholar Karl Toepfer, Berber’s aestheticization of her addictions to a plethora of narcotics presented ‘an almost satiric critique of the pretensions to a healthy, modern identity’.[11] Sickness formed the basis of a carefully stage-managed persona in the public eye that was to manifest in equally carefully choreographed routines. For instance, in one of the better-known dances from the Tänze des Lasters series, Kokain (Cocaine, 1922), Berber stages an embattled, spasmodic body torn between a will to live and the delirious effects of a narcotic. One reviewer described the dance as ‘a product of decay’ and a ‘style of degeneracy’,[12] suggesting that her embodiment of Berlin’s ‘toxic ether’ landed with her audiences (ether was also one of Berber’s drugs of choice, particularly once mixed with chloroform and white rose petals). That this piece was set to Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre (1874) makes it tempting to position it as the epitome of Berlin’s own ‘dance of death’ in which death and sexuality perform a pas de deux across Berber’s performing body – a body that was to succumb to tuberculosis aged only twenty-nine.
Berber’s dances have been read as ‘jejune’ and derivative;[13] however, this does a disservice to what Susan Laikin Funkenstein describes as ‘a more profound understanding of her contributions’ to modern dance history that were ahead of their time.[14] Although Funkenstein is looking to put some distance between Berber’s perception as a ‘depraved vamp’ and her innovativeness as a dancer, I argue that these are mutually enriching considerations in the development of her decadent choreographies. Berber’s ‘sickness’ as an addict, her perceived corruption as a sexual libertine, and (later) her physical sickness after contracting tuberculosis were not adjacent to her work as a dancer. She danced as she lived – which is to say, decadently – just as her bohemian aestheticism makes it difficult to distinguish where her choreographies begin and end.
In the first half of the twentieth century, artists experimented with new representations of the human body. They conceived of a wide spectrum of possible identities and sexualities situated outside the dominant categories. Artists subverted binary notions of gender, whether through ambiguities, gender-neutral codes, or playing with androgynous body images.
In 1933, the Nazis put an end to this diversity. Avant-garde works by artists such as Hannah Höch or Jeanne Mammen were denounced as “degenerate” and confiscated, banned, or destroyed. The regime instead honoured artists such as Arno Breker, Leni Riefenstahl, and Josef Thorak, who immortalised traditional gender images in monumental depictions. Such images supported the Nazi regime’s racial ideals, and endured well into the postwar period.
Hannah Höch worked with clichés and role models in her art and was a significant influence on the Dada movement.
Hannah Höch (German: [hœç]; 1 November 1889 – 31 May 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage, or fotomontage, is a type of collage in which the pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions pulled from the press and other widely produced media.
Höch’s work was intended to dismantle the fable and dichotomy that existed in the concept of the “New Woman”: an energetic, professional, and androgynous woman, who is ready to take her place as man’s equal. Her interest in the topic was in how the dichotomy was structured, as well as in who structures social roles.
Other key themes in Höch’s works were androgyny, political discourse, and shifting gender roles. These themes all interacted to create a feminist discourse surrounding Höch’s works, which encouraged the liberation and agency of women during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and continuing through to today.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Lovers
The works gathered here show homosexual couples and their intimate relationship with each other. At a time when gay and lesbian love could almost solely take place in secret, capturing queer intimacy within art became a political statement. The images represent an act of self-assertion within a discriminatory environment. They propose utopias and alternative realities that make togetherness possible – partly with recourse to antiquity, partly with a visionary view of future forms of loving and being.
Gertrude Sandmann (16 November 1893 – 6 January 1981) was a German artist and Holocaust survivor. Born into a wealthy German-Jewish family, Sandmann studied at the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen and had private tutelage from Käthe Kollwitz. In 1935 she was banned from practicing her profession due to the Nuremberg Laws. Given a deportation order in 1942, she ignored it, faked her own suicide, and hid with friends in Berlin until the end of the war. She lived in an apartment in Berlin-Schöneberg until the end of her life. She was a lesbian and, after the war, worked to improve the rights and visibility of LGBT people. Much of her oeuvre is held by the Potsdam Museum.
Gertrude Sandmann (1893-1981), who trained in Berlin and Munich, took private lessons from Käthe Kollwitz in the 1920s. She and the older artist remained lifelong friends. Unlike Kollwitz, however, Sandmann was less focused on social critique. A committed feminist, women were her favourite theme, as they were for her colleague Jeanne Mammen, who was about the same age.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing at centre, Dora Kallmus’ photograph The trapeze artist Barbette (Nd, below) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
The stage as site of utopias
In the Weimar Republic, vaudevilles, theatres, and nightclubs emerged in many major cities, on whose stages a freer treatment of sexuality and gender identities was allowed. Stage celebrities became role models for alternative gender roles, with drag performances developing into a genre in its own right.
The 1920s, often referred to as “golden” years, were by no means characterised by prosperity for most citizens, even though more and more people gained access to entertainment culture. War trauma and economic hardship stimulated the need to escape the worries of everyday life.
For many people, the bars and clubs of this period were places where they came into contact with alternative gender images and homosexuality, as well as where social debates were sparked.
The trapeze artist Barbette (real name Vander Clyde, 1899-1973) celebrated great success in Europe from the mid-1920s. Barbette performed, among other things, in the Berlin Varieté Wintergarten. The sensational productions of the “female impersonators” became increasingly known to a mass audience – and thus also helped the male and female impersonators of the Berlin scene to gain acceptance.
Dora Philippine Kallmus (20 March 1881 – 28 October 1963), also known as Madame D’Ora or Madame d’Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer.
Early life
Dora Philippine Kallmus was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1881 to a Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer. Her sister, Anna, was born in 1878 and deported in 1941 during the Holocaust. Although her mother, Malvine (née Sonnenberg), died when she was young, her family remained an important source of emotional and financial support throughout her career.
She and her sister, Anna, were both “well-educated,” spoke English and French, and played the piano. They had also traveled throughout Europe.
She became interested in the photography field while assisting the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute). That same year she became a member of the Association of Austrian photographers. At that time she was also the first woman allowed to study theory at the Graphischen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, which in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography.
Career
In 1907, she established her own studio with Arthur Benda in Vienna called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D’Ora-Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym “Madame d’Ora”, which she used professionally. D’ora and Benda operated a summer studio from 1921 to 1926 in Karlsbad, Germany, and opened another gallery in Paris in 1925. The Karlsbad gallery allowed D’Ora to cater to the “international elite vacationers.” These same clients later convinced her to open her Paris studio.
Between 1917 and 1927, D’Ora’s studio “produced” photographs for Ludwig Zwieback & Bruder, a Viennese department store. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) and it was her intervention that saved the agency’s owner after his arrest by the Nazis, enabling him to flee to Paris from Vienna.
Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.
Unknown photographer Dance study of Alexander Sakharoff
1912
Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration: illustr. Monatshefte für moderne Malerei, Plastik, Architektur, Wohnungskunst u. künstlerisches Frauen-Arbeiten – 30.1912
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Life under dictatorship
After the Nazis took power in 1933, every form of queer life was threatened and continued to exist only in private spaces or secret locations. Hopes for a tacit tolerance of homosexuality by the Nazis were finally dashed after the murder of Ernst Röhm, chief of- staff of the SA (Storm Troopers). The period of open persecution had begun.
During the first major Nazi raids against homosexuals on October 20, 1934, 145 men were arrested in Munich alone. Paragraph 175 of the penal code was made more severe in June 1935: any act between men bearing sexual suggestion was now punishable.
About 57,000 homosexual men were sentenced to prison, and between 6,000 and 10,000 of them were deported to concentration camps, of whom at least half were murdered.
Female homosexuality was not prosecuted in the dictatorship, but was socially ostracised. If lesbian women and persons who did not conform to their gender were denounced, they were threatened with police investigations, house searches, and interrogations. If political opposition, social deviance, or racial persecution additionally occurred, they faced repression or even internment in a concentration camp.
The graphic artist Richard Grune (1903-1983) was imprisoned almost continuously from 1934 to 1945 because of his homosexuality. After his liberation from the concentration camp, he processed what he had experienced through art.
“Solidarity,” a lithograph of one prisoner supporting another, by German artist Richard Grune, who spent eight years in Nazi concentration camps after being convicted for homosexuality.
Trained as an artist and graphic designer, 29-year-old Richard Grune moved to Berlin the same month that the police began forcing these establishments to shut down. Although prominent nightclubs like the Eldorado faced closure, members of these communities still found ways to continue gathering more privately. For example, Grune hosted two parties for friends in his studio in fall 1934. He was denounced afterward – along with dozens of others – by a private citizen who often passed information to police. Grune was then arrested for alleged violations of Paragraph 175, the statute of the German criminal code that criminalised sexual relations between men. He was imprisoned for several months before being convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.
After serving his sentence, Grune was arrested again by the Gestapo and held indefinitely in what was misleadingly referred to as “protective custody” (“Schutzhaft”) – an experience shared by many convicted of violating Paragraph 175 under the Nazi regime.5 Grune spent the next decade in concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. He escaped from Flossenbürg in April 1945 as American forces approached and camp authorities evacuated the prisoners.
Grune created the featured lithograph6 – “Solidarity: Prisoner Supports His Exhausted Comrade” – in 1945 as part of a series of images inspired by his experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi camp system. These lithographs were reproduced in two published portfolios in 1947.7 Grune’s artwork reflects many of his own experiences, but it does not reference his persecution as a gay man in any specific way. Instead, his lithographs seem to suggest the idea of shared suffering among all concentration camp prisoners. Because sexual relations between men remained criminalised for decades in Germany after the end of World War II, many people convicted under Paragraph 175 chose to conceal the details of their past persecution under the Nazi regime.8
After the war, Grune chose to portray himself as a political prisoner of Nazism, but he was not able to obtain official recognition or compensation for his suffering. Although his lithographs are among the most important artistic representations of concentration camp experiences created immediately after the war, Grune could not support himself as an artist. He did occasionally find design and illustration work, but he made his living by working as a bricklayer. Grune died in obscurity in Kiel, Germany in 1983.
“This is how the Führer cleaned up!”
Front page of the extra issue of the Völkischer Beobachter, June 30, 1934, Berlin edition
Public domain
Homosexuality in Nazi organisations and in the military
The proscription of homosexuality was used by various sides in the political struggle. In 1931 / 1932, the Social Democrats utilised Ernst Röhm’s homosexuality to harm the Nazi Party. The Röhm case served the notion of “gay Nazis” gathering together in male associations, a phenomenon that did exist. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime increasingly cracked down on homosexual activity in the army, police, and Nazi associations. Intimacy between men was now punished particularly severely in party organisations and the police. Nazi propaganda labeled homosexual men as “enemies of the state” to legitimise this persecution. Nevertheless, clandestine homosexual encounters continued to occur.
Adapting to survive
After the dismantling of gay and lesbian subcultures across the entire state and the harshening of criminal law, homosexual contact took place almost exclusively in private spaces. Fear of denunciation and persecution drove most homosexuals to hide their sexuality and conform.
This also applied to lesbian women and trans* persons, who were not prosecuted per se. They could remain unhampered as long as they did not attract attention. Marriages of convenience were one of many survival strategies. Certain prominent artists were tolerated by the Nazi regime despite their widely known homosexuality. The regime, which needed these stars for its propaganda, held off on persecution, and demanded that they conform in their way of living.
Persecution and imprisonment
The Nazi regime’s treatment of homosexuals and trans* persons was not uniform. Initially, most of the men convicted under Paragraph 175 were released after serving their prison sentences. Especially since 1940 many were transferred to concentration camps. Lesbian women and trans* persons were sometimes charged with other crimes, such as prostitution or indecent behaviour. Others were persecuted for political, social, or racist reasons.
The Nazi regime’s treatment of homosexuals and trans* persons was not uniform. Initially, most of the men convicted under Paragraph 175 were released after serving their prison sentences. Especially since 1940 many were transferred to concentration camps. Lesbian women and trans* persons were sometimes charged with other crimes, such as prostitution or indecent behaviour. Others were persecuted for political, social, or racist reasons.
Part of the diary entry by Elisabeth (Lilly) Wust on the deportation of her Jewish partner Felice Schragenheim to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, August 21, 1944
Elisabeth (Lilly) Wust (1913-2006) and Felice Schragenheim (1922-1945) met in Berlin in 1942, shortly after Schragenheim went into hiding as a Jew. They moved in together a little later and promised to marry in June 1944. On August 21, 1944, Felice Schragenheim was discovered and taken to a Berlin collection point for Jews. Lilly Wust visited her there several times before the deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto. In the hope of being able to help her beloved, Lilly Wust travelled to Theresienstadt herself in the fall of 1944.
Felice was deported to Auschwitz a little later. She died in early 1945, probably in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Lilly Wust searched for her for years.
The love story of Lily Wust and Felice Schragenheim gained notoriety in the 1990s through the book “Aimée & Jaguar” and the feature film of the same name. However, there is another version of the story: Elenai Predski-Kramer, a former girlfriend of Felice Schragenheim, tells her perspective on the love story after the book was published and expresses the suspicion that Lilly Wust herself might have betrayed Felice Schragenheim. However, there is no evidence for this.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Only a few homosexual and trans* people succeeded in escaping Nazi persecution through emigration. This option was usually only open to the wealthy or those who had international contacts and could find work abroad thanks to their education and language skills. Leaving Nazi Germany was made more difficult by the measures against capital transfer, which were tightened in 1934. The “Reich Flight Tax” reduced assets by 25 percent upon departure, the export of foreign currency was prohibited, and the transfer of bank or securities assets was made almost impossible.
Individual homosexual or transgender people decided to actively resist the Nazi regime, also in the territories occupied by Germany. They documented the crimes of the Nazi regime, called for resistance, carried out sabotage, committed attacks, or fought as partisans or members of foreign troops against Hitler’s Germany.
Jewish-French author and photographer Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and her partner Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) put up resistance against the Nazi regime.
After four years of subversive activity, the pair were arrested by the Germans in 1944. Initially, the Nazi authorities couldn’t believe that the women carried it out by themselves. “They believed that there must be somebody else involved, there must be a man involved,” says Downie.
While waiting to be questioned, Cahun and Moore attempted suicide. They both took pills – barbiturates – which put them into a coma. Once they were well enough, they were sentenced to death for undermining the German forces. But the Bailiff of Jersey and the French Consul pleaded on their behalf – by that time, the Normandy landings had happened and Saint-Malo (the main connecting port) had been liberated, so they could no longer be deported to camps in Europe – and their sentence was commuted.
Although their lives had been saved, Moore and Cahun were not pleased. “They wanted to be martyrs for their cause,” says Downie. “To them, that would’ve been the realisation of their life of resistance, to be a martyr for freedom.”
At 3.40pm on May 9, 1945, the swastika was lowered from Fort Regent, a 19th-century fortification in St Helier, and the Union Jack was hoisted, signalling the official end of the occupation. Then the celebrations began. Cahun joined the crowds in Royal Square cheering, flag-waving, and holding a sailor aloft. Despite ill health from their time in prison, they kept on creating work after the war. In the same month, a photograph shows them gripping a Nazi eagle badge brazenly between their teeth, a silk scarf tied around their head, their hands dug into their coat pockets, their eyes staring defiantly at the camera.
Queer history was hardly remembered or archived after 1945. To this day, we know only some of the pioneers of the queer emancipation movement. We know even less about the life of those who were persecuted, driven into exile, murdered – or simply remained invisible.
After the end of the war, queer people continued to be marginalised. Gay men in particular continued to suffer in large numbers under Paragraph 175, many of whom did not go free but were transferred from concentration camps directly to prisons.
The ongoing discrimination by state and society changed only slowly. In 1969, Paragraph 175 was reformed and criminal law liberalised. Beginning in the 1970s, new social movements emerged, including a homosexual emancipation movement. Various groups reclaimed the “pink triangle” as a symbol to stand up for the rights of queer people.
Lesbian and feminist groups also gained popularity during the 1970s. Although lesbian sexuality was not directly persecuted by the state, many suffered from the misogynistic legal situation. The legal preferential treatment of men made it difficult to live out lesbian relationships, due to discrimination in labor and marriage laws.
The emergence of HIV in the 1980s affected many gay men and trans* people: thousands became infected, developed AIDS, and died. The state did not help, but instead relied on stigmatising measures and an aggressive rhetoric of exclusion, especially in Bavaria. For those affected, this recalled the previous period of open persecution.
Thanks to the efforts of activists, the health, political, and social situation of LGBTQI+ persons has improved since the 1990s. Today, queer people in Germany can celebrate some achievements and are also represented in politics. However, much remains to be done for LGBTQI+ equality. In many places around the world the situation is increasingly deteriorating. Trans* people in particular continue to face great discrimination.
Therefore, the commitment to queer self-determination is not over, but more relevant than ever. Because in the end, it not only ensures the preservation of LGBTIQ* human rights, but creates a more just society for all.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing in the bottom image at left on the wall, Paul Hoecker’s painting Head of a youth / Portrait of a boy (1901); and at right on the wall, Paul Hoecker’s painting Pierrot (Nd) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Paul Hoecker (German, 1854-1910) Young Man’s Head
Cover of Jugend magazine, volume 44, 1901
Public domain
A chapter of TO BE SEEN #QueerLives is dedicated to the artist Paul Hoecker (1854-1910). It was created in collaboration with @forummuenchenev, which researches Hoecker’s story to honor and commemorate his life and work.
Paul Hoecker shaped the Munich art scene in the late 19th century. After his homosexuality became known, the artist was excluded and fell into oblivion. As a professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, Hoecker had a great deal of influence during his lifetime: almost all the painters in the artist group “Die Scholle” and many illustrators for the magazines “Simplicissimus” and “Die Jugend” were among his students. The co-founder of the Munich Secession also received great recognition for his artistic work.
Hoecker privately exchanged views with the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld about the fact that he has “contrasexual tendencies”, i.e. is gay. When a sex worker was recognised in the model of his acclaimed work “Ave Maria”, he was involuntarily outed. Paul Hoecker forestalled a scandal by resigning from his professorship. In this way he was able to avoid having to take a public position on his sexuality. He withdrew first to Italy and later to his home in Silesia, Oberlangenau.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Paul Hoecker (11 August 1854, Oberlangenau – 13 January 1910, Munich) was a German painter of the Munich School and founding member of the Munich Secession…
The Munich Academy
In 1891, at the young age of 36, he was appointed to the Munich Academy, where he replaced Friedrich August von Kaulbach, who had resigned suddenly. He was the first teacher at the academy to take his students on field trips, which often lasted two weeks. He was also one of the first “modern” teachers there, exposing his students to impressionism and the latest developments from the Barbizon School. His studio was often referred to as the “Geniekasten” (Genius Box).
Due to the pervasive influence of Franz von Lenbach, very little exhibition space was available for any art that was considered modern. In 1892, shortly after being appointed a professor, this problem motivated Hoecker to become one of the founding members of the Munich Secession, acting as its secretary. The Secession ultimately inspired similar movements in Berlin and other cities.
Scandal
In 1897, a scandal broke out when it was rumoured that Hoecker had used a male prostitute as a model for a painting of the Madonna. Eventually, the scandal became more personal in nature, and he chose to resign from the academy. He then travelled to Capri, where he stayed at the Villa Lysis, home of industrialist and poet Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, who had left Paris in the wake of his own scandal. While there, Hoecker painted several portraits of Fersen’s lover, Nino Cesarini, a professional model. Though the Jugend magazine published one of his Nino portraits in 1904 – a fully clothed version. By 1901 he returned to Oberlangenau. In 1910, he died of what was diagnosed as “Roman Malaria”.
Posthumous recognition
Despite his important role for the Munich art scene of the late 19th century, Paul Hoecker is hardly known today. This is probably due to the fact that he left the professorship in connection with his homosexuality. In October 2019 a research group was formed at the Forum Queeres Archiv München to investigate the life and work of the painter. Part of the family owned estate of Paul Hoecker has found its way into the archive of the Forum Queeres Archiv München and was digitalised.
Elisàr August Emanuel von Kupffer (20 February 1872 – 31 October 1942) was a Baltic German artist, anthologist, poet, historian, translator, and playwright. He used the pseudonym “Elisarion” for most of his writings…
Career
In 1895 he published Leben und Liebe (Life and Love), a book of poetry. In autumn of that year he moved to Berlin to study at the Berlin Art Academy and moved in with Von Mayer. The following year, he left Agnes and wrote the dramas Der Herr der Welt (Master of the World), and Irrlichter (Wisps) as well as three one-act plays. In 1897 he published the anthology Ehrlos (Infamous, or Dishonorable).
Von Mayer graduated in 1897 and they travelled throughout Italy, Sicily, Southern France and Geneva before returning to Berlin. They spent the summer in Thuringia and Heiligendamm and went back to Italy in 1899. Early next year, Adolf Brand published Von Kupffer’s influential anthology of homoerotic literature, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (roughly, “Love of Favourites and Love Between Friends in World Literature”. Lieblingminne is a neologism created by Von Kupffer). The anthology was researched and created, in part, as a protest against the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in England. It was reprinted in 1995.
In 1908 he published a book on Il Sodoma, the Renaissance artist. In 1911, he and Von Mayer founded the publishing house Klaristische Verlag Akropolis in Munich and Von Kupffer published three major works: a play, Aino und Tio, Hymnen der heiligen Burg (Hymns of the Holy Castle) and Ein neuer Flug und eine heilige Burg (A New Flight and a Holy Castle). His work was also published and reviewed in the gay magazine Akademos, published by Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. That same year, he and Von Meyer announced the creation of a “new religion”, Klarismus (Clarity), and established a community in Weimar. The following year he published a book on Klarismus called Der unbekannte Gott (The Unknown God). In 1913, the Brogi Gallery in Florence hosted his first art exhibition. Later that year, a Klarist community was established in Zürich.
Later life and death
In 1915, with World War I in progress and growing animosity towards Germans, they left Italy and moved to Ticino, where Von Kupffer established himself as a painter and muralist in Locarno, Switzerland. They were granted Swiss citizenship in 1922. From 1925 to 1929 they transformed their villa in Minusio, near Lake Maggiore, into an opulent collection of art, the “Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion”. He was also a photographer, making photographic studies of boys for use in the creation of his paintings, but most of his works featured a youthful version of himself. The Klarist “Elisarion Community” was founded at Minusio in 1926. During the 1930s, the number of visitors increased, then sharply decreased; stopping altogether just before the onset of World War II.
As his health declined, he became reclusive and died on 31 October 1942. Since 1981 the “Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion” has been a Museum dedicated to Von Kupffer’s work. The villa was willed to the municipality of Minusio, and his ashes are interred inside, together with Von Meyer’s. The Elisarion Community was satirically referenced as the “Polysadrion” (roughly; Place of Many Idiots), in the 1931 novel Schloss Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky.
Germaine Luise Krull (20 November 1897 – 31 July 1985) was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner. Her nationality has been categorised as German, French, and Dutch, but she spent years in Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Thailand, and India. Described as “an especially outspoken example” of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who “could lead lives free from convention”, she is best known for photographically illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio Métal.
Max Peiffer Watenphul (German, 1896-1976) Stillleben mit Mimosen (Still Life with Mimosas)
1932
Max Peiffer Watenphul (1896 – 13 July 1976) was a German artist. Described as a “lyric poet of painting”, he belongs to a “tradition of German painters for whom the Italian landscape represented Arcadia.” In addition to Mediterranean scenes, he regularly depicted Salzburg and painted many still lifes of flowers. As well as oil paintings, his extensive body of work encompasses watercolours, drawings, enamel, textiles, graphic art, and photographs.
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) Lili with a Feather Fan
1920
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) Lili Elbe
c. 1928
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) At the mirror
1931-1936
On December 31, 1932 … this advertisement for Hella Knabe’s tailoring studio appeared in “Die Freund”. In the 1920s, a separate infrastructure was also created for “transvestites” – people who preferred the clothing of the opposite sex, including trans* people. Hella Knabe’s made-to-measure studio became a nationwide attraction. The hairdresser and seamstress, whose husband was a “transvestite” himself, advertised not only in scene magazines, but also in national magazines such as Jugend and Simplicissimus.
Hella Knabe made women’s underwear, artificial busts, corsets and chastity belts for her customers and ran a mail order business. In addition, she received boarders, clothed them, applied make-up and enabled them to live in the opposite sex for a short time. She continued to offer her services after 1933 and kept in touch with her clients through her own magazine with subcultural content. In 1938 she was therefore fined for distributing “lewd literature”.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Damenbar (Lesbian Bar)
c. 1930-1932
Lithograph
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Siesta
c. 1930-1932
Jeanne Mammen (21 November 1890 – 22 April 1976) was a German painter and illustrator of the Weimar period. Her work is associated with the New Objectivity and Symbolism movements. She is best known for her depictions of strong, sensual women and Berlin city life.
Jeanne Mammen was born in Berlin, the daughter of a successful German merchant. She and her family moved to Paris when she was five years old. She studied art in Paris, Brussels and Rome from 1906-1911. Her early work, influenced by Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the Decadent movement, was exhibited in Brussels and Paris in 1912 and 1913.
In 1916 Mammen and her family fled Paris to avoid internment during World War I. While her parents moved to Amsterdam, Mammen chose instead to return to Berlin. She was now financially on her own for the first time, as the French government had confiscated all of her family’s property. For several years Mammen struggled to make ends meet, taking any work she could find, and spending time with people from different class backgrounds. These experiences and newfound sympathies are reflected in her artwork from the period.
In time Mammen was able to find work as a commercial artist, producing fashion plates, movie posters, and caricatures for satirical journals such as Simplicissimus, Ulk, and Jugend. In the mid-1920s she became known for her illustrations evoking the urban atmosphere of Berlin. Much of her artwork depicted women. These women subjects often included haughty socialites, fashionable middle-class shop girls, street singers, and prostitutes. Her drawings were often compared to those of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s she worked mainly in pencil with watercolour washes, and in pen and ink.
In 1921, Mammen moved into an apartment with her sister in Berlin. This apartment was a former photographer’s studio which she lived in until her death. Aside from Art throughout her life Mammen also was interested in science. She was close friends with Max Delbrück who left Europe and took some of her artwork with him and exhibited them in California. In addition to bringing these art works to be exhibited he also sent Mammen care packages from the United States with art supplies.
In 1930 she had a major exhibition in the Fritz Gurlitt gallery. Over the next two years, at Gurlitt’s suggestion, she created one of her most important works: a series of eight lithographs illustrating Les Chansons de Bilitis, a collection of lesbian love poems by Pierre Louÿs.
In 1933, following Mammen’s inclusion in an exhibition of female artists in Berlin, the Nazi authorities denounced her motifs and subjects as “Jewish”, and banned her lithographs for Les Chansons de Bilitis. The Nazis were also opposed to her blatant disregard to for apparent ‘appropriate’ female submissiveness in her expressions of her subjects. Much of her work also includes imagery of lesbians. The Nazis shut down most of the journals she had worked for, and she refused to work for those that complied with their cultural policies. Until the end of the war she practiced a kind of “inner emigration”. She stopped exhibiting her work and focused on advertising. For a time she also peddled second-hand books from a handcart.
In the 1940s, in a show of solidarity, Mammen began experimenting with Cubism and expressionism, a risky move given the Nazis’ condemnation of abstract art as “degenerate”. After the war she took to collecting wires, string, and other materials from the streets of bombed-out Berlin to create reliefs. In the late 1940s she began exhibiting her work again, as well as designing sets for the Die Badewanne cabaret. She created abstract collages from various materials, including candy wrappers. In the 1950s she adopted a new style, combining thick layers of oil paint with a few fine marks on the surface.
In the 1970s there was a resurgence of interest in Mammen’s early work as German art historians, as well as art historians of the women’s movement, rediscovered her paintings and illustrations from the Weimar period. In 2013 her later, more abstract work was featured in “Painting Forever!”, a large-scale exhibition held during Berlin Art Week. In 2017-2018, the Berlinische Galerie mounted a major exhibition of Mammen’s work, titled, “Jeanne Mammen: Die Beobachterin: Retrospektive 1910-1975” (Jeanne Mammen: The Observer: Retrospective 1910-1975), which included more than 170 works in various media, covering the period from the 1920s to her late work in the 1960s and beyond. The show was conceived as an update to a show mounted by the Galerie at the Martin Gropius Bau in 1997, which featured primarily works from the 1920s. In 2010 the Des Moines Art Center exhibited 13 water colour paintings done by Mammen which were inspired by Berlin in the Weimer era.
Renée Sintenis, née Renate Alice Sintenis (20 March 1888 – 22 April 1965), also known as Frau Emil R. Weiss, was a German sculptor, medallist, and graphic artist who worked in Berlin. She created mainly small-sized animal sculptures, female nudes, portraits, and sports statuettes. She is especially known for her Berlin Bear sculptures, which was used as the design for the Berlinale’s top film award, the Golden Bear…
Career
When Renée Sintenis (as she called herself from then on) met the sculptor Georg Kolbe in 1910, she became his model. She modelled for a now lost life-sized statue.
Inspired by this activity, she began creating in sculpture female nudes, expressive heads like those of André Gide and Joachim Ringelnatz, athletes like the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, and self-portraits in drawings, sculptures (in terracotta) and etchings.
After 1915, the concise animal figures emerged, which became the subject of her artistic life. Since she rejected monumentality in sculpture, she mainly created small-format sculptures. These small works of art such as horses, deers, donkeys and dogs, enjoyed great popularity with the public because they were cheaper, suitable as gifts and could be placed in small rooms.
From attending Kolbe’s studio, a long-term friendship developed, which he accompanied artistically. In the 1913 Berlin autumn exhibition, the first major exhibition of the Free Secession, Sintenis took part (as in the following years) with small-format plaster sculptures.
From 1913 on, she had her works cast in the Hermann Noack fine art foundry, which she attended artistically for decades.
In 1917 she married the type artist, book designer, painter and illustrator Emil Rudolf Weiß, whom she had met years earlier as her teacher and was also and then as a fatherly friend. He supported her and introduced her to numerous other artists. Their collaboration was limited to a few joint projects, of which the edition of the 22 Songs of the poems by Sappho, for which she created the etchings and Weiß made the font designs, achieved particular fame.
From 1913 she exhibited her sculptures regularly and was highly valued by her colleagues from the Free Secession, the most important Berlin artists’ association, among others, by Max Liebermann, Max Beckmann, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The opening of a gallery in Berlin in 1922 made her the most important protagonist of the well-known Flechtheim art circle in those years. The art-interested public was infatuated with her athletic figures, portraits of friends and the small-format self-portraits.
In addition, due to her body size, slim figure, charisma, her self-confident, fashionable demeanor and androgynous beauty, she was often portrayed by artists like her husband, Emil Rudolf Weiß and Georg Kolbe, and by photographers, like Hugo Erfurth, Fritz Eschen and Frieda Riess. She embodied perfectly the type of the ‘new woman’ of the 1920s, even if she appeared rather reserved.
During the Weimar Republic, Renée Sintenis became an internationally recognised artist, with exhibitions in the Berlin Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, in Paris, the Tate Gallery, in London, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, Glasgow and Rotterdam. Her small-sized depictions of athletes (boxers, footballers, runners) and portrait busts of their circle of friends were found in public and private collections around the world.
In 1928 Sintenis won the bronze medal in the sculpture section of the art competition for the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, for her “Footballeur”. She is thought to be the first LGBTQ+ Olympic medallist. Renée Sintenis took part in the 1929 exhibition of the German Association of Artists in the Cologne State House, with five small-format animal sculptures. In 1930 she met the French sculptor Aristide Maillol in Berlin. In 1931 she was appointed as the first sculptor, and second woman after Käthe Kollwitz, together with 13 other artists, to join the Berlin Academy of the Arts – Fine Arts section, although the National Socialists forced her to leave in 1934.
In 1932, she created a statue of the Berlin Bear, a bear standing on its hind legs with its arms raised, based on the Coat of arms of Berlin. The design was popular, and she sold many 15 cm (5.9 in) statues of the bear, which brought wealth and was taken up again in later life.
Third Reich
Emil Rudolf Weiß was dismissed from his university post on 1 April 1933, because of an angry statement against the Nazi regime and the law to reintroduce the civil service. Sintenis herself was excluded from the Academy of the Arts in 1934 because of her Jewish origins – her maternal grandmother was Jewish before her conversion. Nevertheless, she was able to stay in the Reich Chamber of Culture, even if her works were removed from public collections by the National Socialists.
During the Third Reich, Renée Sintenis and her husband Emil Rudolf Weiß lived with considerable restrictions. She continued to exhibit, although one of her self-portraits was shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1934. Since she was not banned from exhibiting, she was represented in Düsseldorf by the art dealer Alex Vömel, Flechtheim’s successor. In contrast to the 1920s, she was not doing well financially, which was reinforced by the bronze casting ban of 1941.
Until the forced dissolution of the Deutscher Künstlerbund in 1936, Sintenis remained a member of the German Association of Artists. That she was sponsored by the NSDAP propagandist Hans Hinkel, as it was later claimed, has not been proven and is highly unlikely.
Her husband died unexpectedly on 7 November 1942 in Meersburg on the Lake Constance. His death plunged Sintenis into a deep crisis. As a result, she took over his studio in the Künstlerhaus on Kurfürstenstrasse, where Max Pechstein also worked. His family took temporarily on her when her studio house was destroyed by arson and several Allied bombings in 1945. Sintenis lost almost all of her possessions; all papers and parts of her work were lost. While most of the cast models were preserved, the plaster frames of most of the portrait heads were also destroyed. In a self-portrait mask from 1944, the hardships of the war years are visible in her features.
Post-war career
After the war, Sintenis and her partner Magdalena Goldmann moved into an apartment on Innsbrucker Strasse in 1945, where they both lived until their deaths. In 1948, Sintenis received the art prize of the city of Berlin and was appointed by Karl Hofer to the Berlin University of Fine Arts. She was appointed full professor in 1955, although she gave up teaching the same year. She was also appointed to the newly founded Academy of the Arts of Berlin (West) in 1955.
In the 1950s, she became very successful once again. She stayed true to her artistic focus and motifs, which she called “making animals”.
Lena Rosa Händle (German, b. 1976) Girl Under Trees
2016
Courtesy the artist Photo: @frau_orla
In “These hands – a world without equal” (2022, below), the artist Lena Rosa Händle explores the continuation of hidden lesbian codes from the 1920s to the present day. Händle refers to the dancer Tilly Losch, the painter Mariette Lydis and the artist Claude Cahun and focuses on the motif of the hands as a gesture and code of lesbian people. In her photographs, @lenarosahaendle, together with DJane and curator @tonicahunter, reinterprets traditional gestures and is reminiscent of the first female photo studios of the 1920s.
For her work “Girls under Trees” (2016, above), Händle draws on the motif of a tapestry that schoolgirls painstakingly embroidered in 1941 in needlework classes, which were compulsory for girls at the time. Händle adds two personal ads from the newsreel published in Vienna in 1942 to the motif: “Miss is looking for correspondence with a girlfriend under modern” and “Lady wants a girlfriend for the purpose of cinema and theatre”. Advertisements like these are testimonies to the few coded signs of lesbian subculture during the Nazi era. Terms such as “Miss”, “Girlfriend” and “Lady” served as lesbian identification codes, as did the colours lilac and violet. In doing so, the artist sensitively refers to issues such as political power structures, socially enforced expectations and the resulting subtlety of lesbian aesthetics.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Lena Rosa Händle (German, b. 1976) These hands – a world without equal
2022
Courtesy the artist
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing Wolfgang Tillmans’s photograph The Cock (Kiss) (2002, below) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) The Cock (Kiss)
2002
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz
In their audiovisual piece Schreber is a Woman, the Barcelona-based artists’ collective El Palomar delves into the mind of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German lawyer (1842-1911) who became famous for his reports from a psychiatric clinic that later inspired Freud. In his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness from 1903 Schreber recounts feeling like a woman, among other experiences. The book influenced Sigmund Freud to elaborate his theories on paranoia and schizophrenia. Relevant to Schreber’s story is the fact that his father, Dr. Moritz Schreber, authored several books that proposed strict authoritarian models for the physical and moral education of children, which were very popular in Germany and other parts of Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.
El Palomar uncover and reinterpret the writings of Schreber from a transfeminist perspective to deconstruct the Freudian link between Schreber and schizoprenic paranoia trough a queer viewpoint. Focusing on the images and sounds that Schreber describes in his memoirs, the film offers a rereading of the case as rooted in a period when gender identities were restricted to classical binary archetypes. Schreber is a Woman subverts the original circumstances of queer lineage, recontextualizing gender and pleasure in the present.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing work from Philipp Gufler’s series Quilts, in the bottom image Quilt #43 (Sophia Goudstikker) (2021) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Philipp Gufler (German, b. 1989) Quilt #50 (Lil Picard)
2022
Screenprint on fabric
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Françoise Heitsch Photo: @frau_orla
In his quilts Philipp Gufler references queer artists, scholars, and places of queer life that have found little or no place in written memories and the historical canon. The series thus becomes an alternative archive that generates a form of intergenerational memory through the technique of “quilting.” In this technique the textiles left behind by deceased people are reassembled and contextualised. The fine materiality of the fabrics stands in direct contrast to the often massive, solid stone monuments of Western historiography. By reusing a variety of historical relics, he creates diverse personal and ancestral forms of memory of different origins. The choice of materials in the works is just as important as the choice of motifs and the associated stories that are told.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) In Frauenkleidung (In Women’s Clothing)
2019
Courtesy the artists and Edition Mosaik Salzburg Foto: @frau_orla
The poetry collection “In Frauenkleidung” (In Women’s Clothing, above) is a joint work by the lyricist Zoltán Lesi and the designer Ricardo Portilho and is dedicated to the lives of intergender athletes in the early 1930s. In their book, both artists combine documentary language with historical photographs and newspaper clippings drawn from Lesi’s image archive, which has been in the making since 2017. The resulting surrealistic collage uses historical distance to question facts, construction, and truth in a humorous yet sensitive way.
Parallel to the publication, they have created the audio installation “Ein Sprung und der Hummer” (A Jump and the Lobster, below) which, in the form of a Dadaist assemblage inspired by Joseph Cornell, blurs the line between fiction and the documentation of the biographies of the athletes, contributing another layer to the narrative level of the book of poems.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) Ein Sprung und der Hummer (A Jump and the Lobster) (installation view)
2018/2022
Courtesy the artists Foto: @frau_orla
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) Ein Sprung und der Hummer (A Jump and The Lobster) (installation view)
2018/2022
Courtesy the artists Foto: @frau_orla
Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
Max-Mannheimer-Platz 1
80333 Munich Phone: +49 (0)89 233-67000
Exhibition dates: 29th November 2022 – 30th April 2023
Curators: Konstantin Akinsha, Katia Denysova and Olena Kashuba-Volvach
Davyd Burliuk (Ukrainian, 1882-1967) Landscape
1912
Oil on canvas
33 x 46, 3cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Revelation and resistance
This exhibition presents ground-breaking art produced in Ukraine in the first decades of the 20th century… in an act of ‘revelatio’, or pulling aside of the curtain to reveal what has been hidden from view in Europe for too many years.
The brief flowering of modern Ukrainian art that took place from roughly 1910s to 1933 was savagely cut short by Stalin’s purges of artists and intellectuals “in the length and breadth of the USSR, but in Ukraine repression started earlier and had a character all its own. In Russia at large, repressed artists and writers were classified as ‘enemies of people’, a broad and generic term. In Ukraine, they were accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, an altogether more emotive and destructive appellation. The scene was set, and the destruction of Ukrainian literature and art from 1931 onwards amounted to nothing less than mass cultural genocide.”
Many artists were either sent to the Gulag (labour camps), executed (such as the followers of Mykhalio Boichuk known as Boichukists with most of their public art subsequently destroyed) or had to adapt and tow the party line, their artistic activity cut short by a radical change in the political climate. “Art was increasingly viewed through a prism of ‘class consciousness’ and Soviet subject matter came to dominate all spheres of artistic output. In 1932, Socialist Realism was introduced as the only official artistic style to be practiced in the Soviet Union, with more value subsequently placed on the rally-like qualities in art rather than the merits of modernist experimentation.”
But as history shows us, dictatorships don’t last. As much as Stalin wanted to destroy the expression of a nascent Ukrainian modernism, a true renaissance of creative experimentation, he failed… for Stalin died and the USSR crumbled. This magnificent art remains.
And so a modern day dictator who has invaded a free Ukraine, who suppresses all opposition in his own country so ruthlessly and cruelly, will be washed with the tide of history. His secular power is vain compared to the desire for freedom… and the creativity and imagination needed to express that freedom.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“We wanted to do something in terms of showing Ukrainian art, but also taking Ukrainian art out of Ukraine and bringing it to Europe and to safety.”
Katia Denysova (curator)
Cubo-Futurism
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at right, Davyd Burliuk’s Ukrainian Peasant Woman 1910-1911
Davyd Burliuk (Ukrainian, 1882-1967) Ukrainian Peasant Woman
1910-1911
Oil on canvas
132 x 70cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at left, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné’s Adam and Eve 1912; and at second right, El Lissitzky’s Composition 1918-1920s
Installation views of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing in the top image, three paintings by Alexandra Exter including at left, Three Female Figures (1910) and at right Still Life (1915); and at centre in the bottom image, El Lissitzky’s Composition 1918-1920s
Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné (Ukrainian, 1888-1944) Adam and Eve
1912
Oil on canvas
155 x 219.7cm
Colección Carmen Thyssen
Vladimir Davidovich Baranov-Rossiné (Ukrainian: Володимир Давидович Баранов-Росіне, Russian: Владимир Давидович Баранов-Россине) (13 January 1888, Velyka Lepetykha – 1944, Auschwitz) was a Ukrainian painter and sculptor active in France. Baranov-Rossiné was of Jewish origin. His work belonged to the avant-garde movement of Cubo-Futurism. He was also an inventor.
Born in Kherson, Ukraine, in 1888, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné spent his life and career between imperial Russia and Paris. After studying in Odesa and St Petersburg, he exhibited in early avant-garde exhibitions held in Moscow and St Petersburg, alongside Mijaíl Lariónov, Natalia Goncharova, Alexandra Exter and the Burliuk brothers, among others. He also participated in an important exhibition in Kyiv in 1908 devoted to the synthesis between painting, sculpture, poetry and music. An intense interest in the idea of a synthesis of the arts, a legacy of Russian Symbolism, would remain with Baranoff-Rossiné all his life.
In 1910, he left for Paris where, aside from frequenting the circles of artists from the Russian empire, he was particularly friendly with Hans Arp and Robert and Sonia Delaunay. His colourful paintings of the period show an assimilation of Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, and he exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants. At the same time, he experimented with sculpture, executing two large openwork assemblage sculptures created from fragments of painted metal, wood and found objects. One of these sculptures, exhibited at the 1914 Salon des Indépendants, provoked such consternation and ridicule that he later threw it into the Seine. Only the French critic Guillaume Apollinaire understood its radical and prescient expressive idiom, comparable to the early ‘sculpto-paintings’ produced by fellow Ukrainian Alexander Archipenko.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Baranoff-Rossiné moved to Norway, where he would remain until 1917, when he went back to Russia. Between 1917 and 1925, his production was prolific; he exhibited alongside Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, Yurii Annenkov and other representatives of the Soviet avant-garde, and taught painting. At the same time, he explored his earlier interest in a synthesis of the arts, inventing a ‘colour-clavier’ and presenting ‘optophonic’ concerts in Moscow theatres, in which, as the piano’s keys were played, the music was ‘translated’ by coloured disks projected on a screen.
Baranoff-Rossiné returned to settle in Paris in 1925. He continued to paint in a more Surrealist manner, made a few sculptures, and experimented with materials, colours and sounds, exhibiting regularly in the Parisian Salons. His works may be found in many public collections, including those of the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1943 he was arrested in France by the Gestapo and deported. He died in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Poland) in 1944.
Margit Rowell. “Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné,” on the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza website Nd [Online] Cited 23/03/2023
Oleksandr Bohomazov (Ukrainian, 1880-1930) Landscape, Locomotive
1914-1915
Oil on canvas
33 x 41cm
European private collection
Alexander Bogomazov or Oleksandr Bohomazov (Ukrainian: Олександр Костянтинович Богомазов; March 27, 1880 – June 3, 1930) was a Ukrainian painter, cubo-futurist, modern art theoretician and is recognised as one of the key figures of the Ukrainian avant-garde scene. In 1914, Oleksandr wrote his treatise The Art of Painting and the Elements. In it he analyzed the interaction between Object, Artist, Picture, and Spectator and sets the theoretical foundation of modern art. During his artistic life Oleksandr Bohomazov mastered several art styles. The most known are Cubo-Futurism (1913-1917) and Spectralism (1920-1930). …
Cubo-Futurism Period, 1913-1915
Years of 1913-14 became a time of the artist’s intense search for ways to develop “new art”. In September 1914, Bohomazov finished the theoretical work “Painting and Its Elements”, which summarised his reflections on the nature of creativity and its components. The works belonging to the year 1913 were created by Bohomazov, when the main provisions included in his theoretical work had not yet been thought out and formulated, but the style and form-creating elements of these works testify that the master was already familiar with various artistic directions of avant-garde art, in particular and with the futuristic concept of displaying the state of the environment through the demonstration of the movement of the objects that made it.
In the works of this time, he intuitively, rather than consciously, uses a number of techniques that enhance the feeling of movement and convey the dynamism of the depicted object. So, for example, he actively uses a bundle of straight lines that converge and, in turn, form certain ray- and fan-like forms that create a powerful effect of movement. At the same time, the artist often uses such a technique as extending straight lines along their entire length and turning them into needle-like guides, as, for example, in the work “Train”.
The alternation of saturated sharp spots with unfilled empty spaces became for him another means of enriching the artistic language of the works. In a number of works, the artist arranges the forms he uses diagonally and at an angle to the borders of the picture plane. This technique is clearly visible in his painting “Train. Boyarka”. This method of constructing the picture plane makes it possible to create the impression of intense dynamic tension and convey the feeling of movement, regardless of whether it is connected to a specific object or insinuates itself. In the works of 1913, the artist pays a lot of attention to a straight line or a group of straight lines, which together create irregular dynamic impulses.
1914 can be considered a turning point in the artist’s work. And not only because the artist finally formulated his ideas about the art of the “New Age” in a theoretical treatise, but also because this year he established himself as an original artist. In 1914, Bohomazov began to consciously use all techniques in the reproduction of nature and its state, which had intuitively matured in previous works. He actively implements the new principles declared in ‘Painting and Its Elements’.
In the works of this year, we observe the artist’s interest in combining simple flat forms into more complex spatial objects. Bohomazov begins to understand: the planes and straight lines that form them limit the possibility of conveying the dynamism of the object – and he introduces new elements into his artistic lexicon, including various arc-shaped lines.
He also resorts to another new technique – mosaic toning of individual components, that is, fragmentary strengthening of forms, and this gives them a stronger sense of dynamism. At the same time, the structure of the picture alternates with forms with a mass of different saturation. Here we can note that this technique reflects the concept of interval formulated by the artist.
In 1914, he organised the exhibition Kiltse (“The Ring”) in Kyiv, where the works of 21 artists were exposed, among others Oleksandra Ekster, Eugène Konopatzky among others. For Bohomazov, this was the first significant exhibition, 88 of his works, mostly graphics, were presented there. Like Kandinsky during the second “Salon”, Bohomazov presented his theoretical work “The Essence of Four Elements”, in which he explained the principle of the new Cubo-Futurist art: the combination of line, colour, form and plane of the picture.
Kiltse was supposed to be the first in a series of exhibitions, but this did not go according to plan. Reviews in the press were positive (indicating the general acceptance of the “new art” in critical circles), but few. In fact, the exhibition was hardly noticed. After the failure of the “Ring”, significant avant-garde exhibitions were no longer held in Kyiv until the 20s.
Her painting studio in the attic at 27 Funduklievskaya Street, now Khmelnytsky Street, was a rallying stage for Kiev’s intellectual elite. In the attic in her studio there worked future luminaries of world decorative art Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytsky and P. Tchelitchew. There she was visited by poets and writers, such as Anna Akhmatova, Ilia Ehrenburg, and Osip Mandelstam, choreographer Bronislava Nijinska and dancer Elsa Kruger, as well as many artists Alexander Bogomazov, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, and students, such as Grigori Kozintsev, Sergei Yutkevich, Aleksei Kapler and Abraham Mintchine among many others. In 1908, she participated in an exhibition together with members of the group Zveno (Link) organized by David Burliuk, Vladimir Burliuk and others in Kiev.
Paris
In Paris, Aleksandra Ekster became personally acquainted with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who introduced her to Gertrude Stein.
Under the name Alexandra d’Exter she exhibited six works at the Salon de la Section d’Or, Galerie La Boétie, Paris, October 1912, with Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and others.
In 1914, Exter participated in the Salon des Indépendants exhibitions in Paris, together with Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Archipenko, Vadym Meller, Sonia Delaunay-Terk and other French and Russian artists. In that same year, she participated with the “Russians” Archipenko, Koulbine and Rozanova in the International Futurist Exhibition in Rome. In 1915, she joined the group of avant-garde artists Supremus. Her friend introduced her to the poet Apollinaire, who took her to Picasso’s workshop. According to Moscow Chamber Theatre actress Alice Coonen, “In [Ekster’s] Parisian household there was a conspicuous peculiar combination of European culture with Ukrainian life. On the walls between Picasso and Braque paintings, there was Ukrainian embroidery; on the floor was a Ukrainian carpet, at the table they served clay pots, colorful majolica plates of dumplings.”
Russian avant-garde
Under the avant-garde umbrella, Ekster has been noted to be a suprematist and constructivist painter as well as a major influencer of the Art Deco movement.
While not confined within a particular movement, Ekster was one of the most experimental women of the avant-garde. Ekster absorbed from many sources and cultures in order to develop her own original style. In 1915-1916, she worked in the peasant craft cooperatives in the villages Skoptsi and Verbovka along with Kazimir Malevich, Yevgenia Pribylskaya, Natalia Davidova, Nina Genke, Liubov Popova, Ivan Puni, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova and others. Ekster later founded a teaching and production workshop (MDI) in Kiev (1918-1920). Alexander Tyshler, Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytsky, Kliment Red’ko, Tchelitchew, Shifrin, Nikritin worked there. Also during this period she was one of the leading stage designers of Alexander Tairov’s Chamber Theatre.
In 1919, together with other avant-garde artists Kliment Red’ko and Nina Genke-Meller, she decorated the streets and squares of Kiev and Odessa in abstract style for Revolution Festivities. She worked with Vadym Meller as a costume designer in a ballet studio of the dancer Bronislava Nijinska.
In 1921, she became a director of the elementary course Color at the Higher Artistic-Technical Workshop (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow, a position she held until 1924. Her work was displayed alongside that of other Constructivist artists at the 5×5=25 exhibition held in Moscow in 1921.
In the spring of 1924, Alexandra Exter travelled to Venice to take part in organising the 14th Venice Biennale. Most of the Ekster’s works were not exposed, but were part of the exhiibition catalogue. Yet, she also created a special painting inspired by Venice at the entrance hall on the second floor of the Soviet Pavilion. Several researches for this painting are now in international and private collections.
Revolutionising costume design
In line with her eclectic avant-garde-like style, Ekster’s early paintings strongly influenced her costume design as well as her book illustrations, which are scarcely noted. All of Ekster’s works, no matter the medium, stick to her distinct style. Her works are vibrant, playful, dramatic, and theatrical in composition, subject matter, and color. Ekster constantly stayed true to her composition aesthetic across all mediums. Furthermore, each medium only enhanced and influenced her work in other mediums.
With her assimilation of many different genres her essential futurist and cubist ideas was always in tandem with her attention to colour and rhythm. Ekster uses many elements of geometric compositions, which reinforce the core intentions of dynamism, vibrant contrasts, and free brushwork. Ekster stretched the dynamic intentions of her work across all mediums. Ekster’s theatrical works such as sculptures, costume design, set design, and decorations for the revolutionary festivals, strongly reflect her work with geometric elements and vibrant intentions.
Through her costume work, she experimented with the transparency, movement, and vibrancy of fabrics. Ekster’s movement of her brushstroke in her artwork is reflected in the movement of the fabric in her costumes. Ekster’s theatrical sets used multi-coloured dimensions and experimented with spatial structures. She continued with these experimental tendencies in her later puppet designs. With her experimentation across many mediums, Ekster started to take the concept of her costume designing and integrate it into everyday life. In 1921, Ekster’s work in fashion design began. Though her mass production designs were wearable, most of her fashion design was highly decorative and innovative, usually falling under the category of haute couture.
In 1923, she continued her work in many media in addition to collaborating with Vera Mukhina and Boris Gladkov in Moscow on the decor of the All Russian Exhibition pavilions.
Ukrainian folk influences
Thanks to the connections of her husband, Mykola Ekster, Aleksandra met Natalia Davydova, who had an estate with craftsmanship in Verbivtsi near Cherkasy. It was there that the artist, who is now considered a representative of European Cubism, Futurism, Ukrainian avant-garde, one of the founders of the Art Deco style, discovered Ukrainian folk art, that was one of the influences in her works. According to Georgy Kovalenko, a researcher of Aleksandra Ekster’s work, the time in Verbivka was the determining factor in the artist’s painting, her colourful poem and became a source of imagery: “She conducted real scientific expeditions in search of ancient peasant embroideries, liturgical sewing, and weaving items,” Kovalenko wrote in his monograph.
Ekster and Davydova with other researchers searched for folk motifs, reinterpreted them, modernized them and, together with Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Puni, Ksenia Boguslavska, drew supremacist designs for embroideries on bags, pillows, carpets, and belts. Later, they created the Kiev handicraft society, and also presented embroideries from Verbivtsi at exhibitions in Kiev and European countries. In 1917, more than 400 works were exhibited in Moscow, from where they never returned.
El Lissitzky (Russian born Ukraine, 1890-1941) Composition
1918-1920s
Oil on canvas
71 x 58 cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
Theatre Design
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing the work of Vadym Meller
Vadym Meller (Ukrainian, 1884-1962) Sketch for choreographic movement “Masks” for Bronislava Nijinska’s School of Movements, Kyiv
1919
Watercolour on cardboard
60 x 43cm
Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine
Vadym Meller or Vadim Meller, (Russian: Вадим Георгиевич Меллер; Ukrainian: Вадим Георгійович Меллер, 1884-1962) was a Ukrainian Soviet painter, avant-garde Cubist, Constructivist and Expressionist artist, theatrical designer, book illustrator, and architect. In 1925 he was awarded a gold medal for the scenic design of the Berezil’ theater in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Art Deco) in Paris. …
V. Meller became the leader of the Constructivism movement in Ukrainian theatre design. He worked in the National theatre as a chief artist until 1945. From 1925 onward, he also taught at the Kyiv Art Institute (KKHI) together with Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Bogomazov. Also in 1925, V. Meller became a member of the artists union Association of the Revolutionary Masters of Ukraine together with David Burliuk (co-founder), Alexander Bogomazov (co-founder), Vasiliy Yermilov, Victor Palmov, and Khvostenko-Khvostov.
The exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s presents the ground-breaking art produced in Ukraine in the first decades of the 20th century, showcasing trends that range from figurative art to futurism and constructivism. The development of Ukrainian modernism took place against a complicated socio-political backdrop of collapsing empires, the First World War, the revolutions of 1917 with the ensuing Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1921), and the eventual creation of Soviet Ukraine. The ruthless Stalinist repressions against Ukrainian intelligentsia led to the execution of dozens of writers, theatre directors and artists, while the Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932-1933, killed millions of Ukrainians.
Despite these tragic circumstances, Ukrainian art of the period lived through a true renaissance of creative experimentation. In the Eye of the Storm reclaims this essential – though little-known in the West – chapter of European modernism, displaying around 70 works in a full range of media, from oil paintings and sketches to collages and theatre designs. Following a strict chronological order, the show presents works by masters of Ukrainian modernism, such as Oleksandr Bohomazov, Vasyl Yermilov, Viktor Palmov, and Anatol Petrytskyi. Exploring the polyphony of styles and identities, the exhibition includes neo-Byzantine paintings by the followers of Mykhailo Boichuk and experimental works by members of the Kultur Lige, who sought to promote their vision of contemporary Ukrainian and Yiddish art, respectively. It features pieces by Kazymyr Malevych and El Lissitzky, quintessential artists of the international avant-garde who worked in Ukraine and left a significant imprint on the development of the national art scene. The exhibition also showcases artworks of internationally renowned artists who were born and started their careers in Ukraine but became famous abroad, among them Alexandra Exter, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, and Sonia Delaunay.
In the most comprehensive survey of Ukrainian modern art to date, with many works on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the State Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza celebrates the dynamism and diversity of the artistic scene in Ukraine, while safeguarding the country’s heritage during the inadmissible, present-day occupation of its territory by Russia. After its presentation in Madrid, the exhibition will travel to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
Acknowledgements
This exhibition has been made possible by the support of President Zelensky and the Office of the President of Ukraine. Also key is Oleksandr Tkachenko, the Ukrainian Minister of Culture, whose collaboration has enabled us to secure the exceptional loan of these works from a war-torn country.
We extend our gratitude to the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine for their generous loans, as well as to the private collectors who have collaborated.
Special thanks are due to Baroness Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, who has passionately and courageously promoted the project from the outset and facilitated the complex negotiations to bring these works to Spain.
The support of the PinchukArtCentre has also been notable.
Mention should likewise be made of the work and dedication of the curators Konstantin Akinsha, Katia Denysova and Olena Kashuba-Volvach and their revealing essays that appear, together with those of other research scholars, in the magnificent edition published by Thames & Hudson.
This exhibition has been made a reality thanks to the support of Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, Museums for Ukraine, the Deputy Directorate-General for State Museums of the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage and Fine Arts (Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport), Mastercard, Omega Capital, SITspain and Hammam Al-Andalus, among others.
Text from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum website
Spotify playlist In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s
Katia Denysova, curator of the exhibition, selects a list of recent hits, contemporary classics and the carol “Carol of the Bells”, inspired by a Ukrainian folk song.
Davyd Burliuk (Ukrainian, 1882-1967) Carousel
1921
Oil on canvas
33 x 45.5cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
David Burliuk devoted his artistic practice – which spanned painting, poetry, drawing, and engraving – to the pursuit of the modern. Using bold typefaces, vibrant colors, and energetic brush strokes, Burliuk turned against the artistic conventions of the past, capturing Russian Futurism’s ideas of dynamism, innovation, and revolution, declared in the 1912 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Burliuk and his Futurist compatriots challenged audiences to question the accepted ideals of aesthetics and beauty in the hope of developing a new and more forward-thinking world.1
Artists, like Burliuk, associated with Russian Futurism sought to both question and analyze – what they called “deconstruct” – established principles of art, including a classical attention to realism, balance, and natural subject matter. Explaining his methods, Burliuk wrote:
“deconstruction is the opposite of construction.
a canon can be constructive.
a canon can be deconstructive.
construction can be shifted or displaced.”2
David Burliuk was born on January 21, 1882, in the Village of Riabushky in the Russian Empire, in what is now Ukraine. He exhibited an early affinity for creative art, beginning independent painting studies at the age of 10. By the end of the 19th century, Burliuk had enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, the first of four formal arts programs he would attend throughout his life. It was at the Moscow Academy of Fine Art, an institution in which Burliuk enrolled in 1910, that he began participating in exhibitions and collectives that questioned the conventional standards of beauty in art. During a time of significant industrialization and political change, movements such as the famed Der Blaue Reiter, a group Burliuk associated with in 1912, while he was in Munich, emphasized a shift away from the classical styles of the past, prioritizing the innovations of the future.
Between 1910 and 1913, Burliuk began to assemble artists and poets – including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Benedict Livshits, and Velimir Khlebnikov – to form a group that would become known as Gileia. Initially formed as a modern literary collective and founded on the principles proposed by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti‘s “Manifesto of Futurism,” Gileia and its members would quickly metamorphose into the Cubo-Futurists. Marked by graphic handling of subjects and unconventional editorial displays, the Cubo-Futurists were unwavering in pushing the boundaries of accepted aesthetics.
The Cubo-Futurist movement carved out a space for artists to explore the creative possibilities of the modern future that lay ahead. Unfortunately, by 1916 the First World War had taken its toll on the creative communities of Eastern Europe, and the group dissolved. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, political conflict forced many to search for safer havens, and in 1922 Burliuk settled in the United States. He continued creating works consistent with the style of Cubo-Futurism, now informed by the trauma and displacement of war.
Distressed by the turmoil in his homeland, Burliuk joined other displaced artists, including Alexander Bogomazov and Vadym Meller, in creating the New York-based Association of Revolutionary Masters of Ukraine in 1925. While continuing his artistic practice, he would spend much of his later life attempting to revisit his homeland, a pursuit that proved successful in 1956, when his petition to visit was granted by the Soviet government. David Burliuk passed away on January 15, 1967. His art is a testament to constant innovation and, as he wrote in a 1912 manifesto, “the new impending beauty of the self-valuable (self-creating) word.”
1/ Margit Rowell, Deborah Wye, and Jared Ash. The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002), p. 25.
2/ David Burliuk, “Cubism,” in John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 76.
Mykhailo Boichuk (Ukrainian, 1882-1937) Dairy Maid
1922-1923
Tempera on canvas
95 x 45cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
Born in the region of Ternopil in Western Ukraine, Boichuk was educated in Krakiv, Munich, and Paris. It was in Paris that he established his first art school and where his “Neo-Byzantine” style gained critical acclaim. Later, Boichuk became a leading artist and art educator in 1920s Ukraine. However, he and his followers, called “Boichukists,” were brutally persecuted by the Soviet regime. Many of them, including Boichuk himself, were executed by the Soviet police in the 1930s, and most of their artworks were destroyed. In spite of this, the style of Boichukism became very influential in the twentieth-century Ukrainian art.
Boychuk was born in Romanivka, then in Austria-Hungary, and currently in Ternopil Oblast of Ukraine. He studied painting under Yulian Pankevych in Lviv, and subsequently in Kraków, where he graduated from the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts in 1905. He also studied at fine arts academies in Vienna and Munich. In 1905, he had his work exhibited at the Latour Gallery in Lviv and in 1907, his work was exhibited in Munich. Between 1907 and 1910 he lived in Paris where, in 1909, he founded his own studio-school. In this period, he worked with and was influenced by Félix Vallotton, Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis. He held an exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910, featuring his and his students’ works on the revival of Byzantine art. The group of Ukrainian artists who studied and worked with him was known as the Boychukists. In 1910, Boychuk returned to Lviv, where he worked as a conservator at the National Museum. In 1911, he travelled to the Russian Empire, but, after World War I started, he was interned there as an Austrian citizen. After the war, Boychuk remained in Kyiv.
In 1917, he became one of the founders of the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, where he taught fresco and mosaic, and in 1920 was a rector. In 1925, he co-founded the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine. At the time, he already performed a number of high-profile monumental works, and formed a school of monumental painters which existed until his death. The school included renowned artists such as his brother Tymofiy Boychuk and Ivan Padalka.
Due to the Great Purge, the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine was disestablished, and Boychuk was executed. His wife, Sofiia Nalepinska, also an artist, was executed several months after Boychuk.
Many of the works by Boychuk, which mainly involved frescoes and mosaics, were destroyed after he was executed. Even his paintings which were kept in museums of Lviv, were destroyed after World War II. The main projects carried out or coordinated by Boychuk and his school – which included his brother Tymofii Boichuk, Ivan Padalka, Vasyl Sedliar, Sofiia Nalepinska, Mykola Kasperovych, Oksana Pavlenko, Antonina Ivanova, Mykola Rokytsky, Kateryna Borodina, Oleksandr Myzin, Kyrylo Hvozdyk, Pavlo Ivanchenko, Serhii Kolos, Okhrym Kravchenko, Hryhorii Dovzhenko, Onufrii Biziukov, Mariia Kotliarevska, Ivan Lypkivsky, Vira Bura-Matsapura, Yaroslava Muzyka, Oleksandr Ruban, Olena Sakhnovska, Manuil Shekhtman, Mariia Trubetska, Kostiantyn Yeleva, and Mariia Yunak – are an important contribution to Ukrainian and world art.
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at right, the work of Anatol Petrytskyi including the painting Disabled (1924, below)
Ukrainian artists at the Venice Biennale
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at left, Anatol Petrytskyi’s Disabled (1924, below)
Anatol Petrytskyi (Ukrainian, 1895-1964) Disabled
1924
Oil on canvas
A native of Halychyna in western Ukraine, Mykhalio Boichuk completed his education in art academies of Vienna, Krakow, Munich and Paris. In late 1917, he established a fresco, mosaics and tempera studio at the newly founded Ukrainian Academy of Arts in Kyiv. Advocating for arts as a national treasure and not a mere commodity, Boichuk arrived at a synthesis of styles, drawing on Byzantine art, Italian pre-Renaissance frescoes and Ukrainian folk art. In the earl Soviety period, his studio emerged as a school of monumental art, with its students, henceforth known as Boichukists, completing numerous state commissions for public spaces and buildings. The collaboration proved short-lived, however: labelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’, Boichuk and a close circle of his associates were executed during the Stalinist purge of the 1930s, with most of their public art subsequently destroyed.
Exhibition wall text
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at centre in the top image and at right in the bottom image, Manuil Shekhtman’s Jewish Pogrom 1926 (below)
Manuil Shekhtman (Ukrainian, 1900-1941) Jewish Pogrom
1926
Tempera on canvas
198 x 160cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
The artist Emmanul Shekhtman was born in 1900 in the village of Lipniki in the Volyn Province (now Zhitomir Region, Ukraine). Manuil spent his childhood with his grandfather in the town of Norinsk, where he studied at a heder (traditional Jewish elementary school). The children of the family grew up in an artistic atmosphere. His sister Malka was a poet who wrote in Hebrew under the pseudonym M. Bat-Khama (“Daughter of the Sun”). She would later work as assistant director at the Kiev State Jewish (i.e. Yiddish) Theater.
In 1913, Shekhtman entered the Kiev Art School, finishing it in 1920. In his youth, Emmanuel was an ardent Zionist and member of a youth movement. During that period, he collaborated with the Kiev branch of the Tarbut organization, while working on stage sets at the Hebrew-language Omanut theater studio. In 1922, Shekhtman entered the Kiev Art Institute to study under the primary ideologue of Ukrainian national art, Mikhail Boichuk. After graduating from the Institute in 1926, Shekhtman continued to actively cooperate with Jewish cultural organisations. From 1925 to 1927, he taught drawing at a Jewish orphanage in Kiev. In 1928, he served as head of the theatrical production of the Kiev State Jewish Theater. In the following year, Shekhtman became head of the artistic division of the Odessa Museum of Jewish Culture. In the early 1930s, there was a campaign of repression against Ukrainian avant-garde artists, which singled out Mikhail Boichuk and his present and past students – including Shekhtman, who was fired from all posts. Those years saw a shift in the country’s official policy, with the authorities beginning to cultivate a sense of Soviet patriotism, with an emphasis of the Russian historical past. In 1934, Shekhtman moved to Moscow. At first, he could find no employment, and was aided by former students who secured one-time commissions for him. Later, he was able to find work at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), for which he organized celebrations and served as a landscape architect. Subsequently, he was accepted as a member into the Moscow division of the Union of Soviet Artists.
Jewish themes were central to Shekhtman’s art. Two of his main works, “Those Who Suffered from Pogroms” (1926) and “The Resettlers” (1929), were part of a series entitled “My Biographical Particulars”. Another series of graphics by him, titled “Exile” or “Exodus” (1939-1941), exudes a sense of impending catastrophe for his people.
Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in late June 1941, Emmanuil Shekhtman was assigned to camouflaging military targets in Moscow. He later volunteered for frontline duty. In August 1941, he fought with a division of the Moscow People’s Militia. Subsequently, he was transferred to a separate battalion of sappers. In November 1941, he went missing in action in the area of Dmitrov (Moscow Region).
Anonymous. “Emmanul Shekhtman,” on the Yad Vashem website Nd [Online] Cited 24/03/2023
Ivan Padalka (Ukrainian, 1894-1937) Photographer
1927
Tempera on paper
33.5 x 45cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
Ivan Padalka (1894-1937) was a Ukrainian painter, art professor and author who was shot during the Great Terror. Representative of the generation of the Executed Renaissance and the Boychukism movement (a cultural and artistic phenomenon in the history of Ukrainian art between the 1910s and 1930s, distinguished by its artistic monumental-synthetic style. It was an original school of Ukrainian art, formed by a synthesis of Ukrainian folk art and the church art of Byzantium, Proto-Renaissance and Ukraine. The name comes from the name of the founder of the movement: Mykhailo Boychuk.
Ivan Ivanovych Padalka (Ukrainian: Івaн Івaнович Пaдалка: 15 November 1894, Zhornoklyovy, currently Cherkasy Raion – 13 July 1937, Kiev) was a Ukrainian painter, art professor and author who was shot during the Great Terror. …
He was one of eight children born to a farming family of modest means. He began his education at the local parish school, where he first displayed a talent for art. His abilities were noticed by a local nobleman, who helped him to finance studies at the State Ceramics Vocational School in Myrhorod with Opanas Slastion. His work was often held up as a model for the class. He worked there until 1913, when he was excluded for organising revolutionary activities.
He then went to Poltava and found a position at the Ethnographic Museum [uk], where they made copies of Ukrainian carpet designs for a weaving workshop in Kiev owned by Bogdan Khanenko, who was a major patron of the arts. His earnings enabled him to enrol at the short-lived Kiev Art School. His works were regularly exhibited there, and he began to illustrate children’s books.
In 1917, after finishing his studies there, he transferred to the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, where he became a student in the workshop of Mykhailo Boychuk. While there, he was largely involved in decorative work for buildings, designing posters and creating various revolutionary materials for public display. He also received a commission from the State Publishing House to illustrate a collection of children’s stories called Барвінок (Periwinkles). He worked on that project together with Boychuk’s younger brother Tymofiy.
After graduating in 1920, he returned to Myrhorod and became a teacher at his former ceramics school. Later, he taught the same subject at a technical school in Kiev. His proficiency in his chosen specialty was widely recognised, so he was able to secure a position at the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute [uk], where he worked from 1925 to 1934. That year, he returned to Kiev to accept an appointment as a Professor at the State Academy.
In 1936, he was arrested and tortured by the NKVD on charges of counterrevolutionary activities, related to his Ukrainian nationalism. In July, the following year, he was executed by firing squad, together with his former mentor and friend, Boychuk, and the painter Vasily Sedlyar. He was posthomously “rehabilitated” in 1958.
Vasyl Yermilov (Ukrainian, 1894-1967) Nove Mystetstvo ([New Art], magazine cover design)
c. 1927
Indian ink and gouache on paper
36 x 23.9cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
Yermilov, Vasyl [Єрмілов, Василь; Jermilov, Vasyl’] (Ermilov, Vasilii), b 22 March 1894 in Kharkiv, d 4 December 1967 in Kharkiv. Painter and graphic designer. He studied at the Art Trade School Workshop of Decorative Painting in Kharkiv (1905-1909), the Kharkiv Art School (1910-1911), and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1912-1913). In 1918 he joined the avant-garde Union of Seven group in Kharkiv and designed the script for its album Sem’ plius tri (Seven Plus Three, 1918). Under Soviet rule Yermilov designed posters, ‘agit-trains’, street decorations, billboards, the interiors of public buildings (eg, the murals in the foyer of the Kharkiv Circus and the Red Army Club in Kharkiv), theatrical sets, displays, packaging, and journal and book covers; he also directed the art department of the All-Ukrainian Bureau of the Russian Telegraph Agency (1920-1921) and taught at the Kharkiv Art Tekhnikum (1921-1922) and Kharkiv Art Institute (1922-1935). He received several international prizes for his graphic designs, including a gold medal at the 1922 Leipzig International Graphics Exhibition and an award at the 1928 Köln International Press Exhibition. While a member of the Avanhard (Avant-garde) group (1926-1929) he was graphic designer of its newspaper Doba konstruktsiï, its journal Mystets’ki materiialy Avanhardu, and, with Valeriian Polishchuk, the three issues of Biuleten’ Avanhardu. From 1927 he was also a member of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine. Yermilov’s synthesis of formalist esthetics, folk designs, and traditional painting methods (including egg tempera) was an important contribution to the development of Ukrainian design of the 1920s. His distinctive style of constructivist collage and typographic design, called constructive-dynamism or spiralism, developed distinctly and in parallel with Russian constructivism. Because of his formalist interests Yermilov was forced out of the Soviet art arena in the late 1930s. In the last years of his life he taught at the Kharkiv Industrial Design Institute (1963-1937). A book about him by Z. Fogel was published in Moscow in 1975. A retrospective exhibition of Yermilov’s works was organised in Kyiv in 2011 and a monograph about his life and art, Vasyl Yermilov zhde vesnu (Vasyl Yermilov Awaits the Coming of Spring), by Tetiana Pavlova was published in Kyiv in 2012.
Anonymous. “Yermilov, Vasyl,” on the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine website Nd [Online] Cited 24/03/2023
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at right, Oleksandr Bohomazov’s Sharpening the Saws 1927 (below)
Oleksandr Bohomazov (Ukrainian, 1880-1930) Sharpening the Saws
1927
Oil on canvas
138 x 155cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
In the summer of 1930, Bohomazov’s painting The Woodcutters was exhibited in the Soviet pavilion of the 17th Venice Biennale. At that time, the USSR’s participation in the biennale had become quite politicized: Russian ideologists viewed exhibitions as a vector of propaganda activities. However, young Soviet art was still relatively free from state censorship. So, together with Bohomazov other Ukrainian avant-garde artists saw their artwork make it to Venice – artists like Anatole Petrytsky, Ivan Padalka, Vasyl Sedlyar, and Sofia Nalepynska-Boychuk. The latter three would be executed seven years later under the trumped up charges of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism and leading a national-fascist terrorist organization.”
At the time, Bohomazov had already been working as a professor of easel painting at Kyiv Art Institute for eight years (founded as the Ukrainian Academy of Arts in 1917), and participation in the biennale meant his recognition as an artist and a theoretician. Unfortunately, Bohomazov did not live until the biennale opening which had been delayed for five weeks: he died in Kyiv just before it opened.
He created The Work of Woodcutters in 1927-1930 in Boyarka, a dacha condominium. “The clearing was strewn with fresh sawdust, the logs almost rang in the sun, resinous and glistening. The figures of workers on the scaffolding seemed huge against the background of bright blue sky. The high sound of the saw resonated in the air,” remembered Yaroslava, Bohomazov’s daughter. The Work of Woodcutters triptych includes two paintings: The Woodcutters (1929) and Sharpening Saws (1927); the third one to be titled Rolling Logs remained only an idea, reproduced in many sketches and watercolours.
Bohomazov resumed easel painting after a long pause due brought on by his grave emotional state following the death of his father-in-law, revolutionary perturbations, and tuberculosis. Obviously feeling that the end was near, Bohomazov put all his effort into the development of the triptych defined by its dynamic rhythms and gleaming colours (corresponding to his theoretical concept of the artist engaging with four elements of art). “I have joy from work, sun, warmth, and energy. In my painting, I don’t want to show the necessity, complicated nature and adaptation, but the joy and energy, the call – so that the audience is compelled to work, to feel like a organised part of the whole,” Bohomazov wrote in his notes.
The Woodcutters, a mature masterpiece by Oleksandr Bohomazov, continues to wow audiences all over the world. In 1931, the painting was exhibited in Zurich, and in 1932, in Japan (researchers have yet to uncover in which city the exhibition took place.) The painting was returned to Kyiv damaged. For about 90 years it remained in this state in a closed museum “special fund” where works were sent in late 1930s to be destroyed. At that time, during the fight for pure Soviet art, the avant-garde art was declared to be “formalist”, and work by these artists were banned. Only in 2019 was The Woodcutters exhibited in the National Art Museum of Ukraine – the first time in years at the exhibition “Oleksandr Bohomazov: the creative lab”. Restorers had worked on the painting for three years before releasing it for the exhibit.
For decades it was forbidden to mention the work of world-renowned cubo-futurist artists. Only in late 1960s did Bohomazov’s name resurface from its enforced oblivion. Modest exhibitions were held in Kyiv, and European avant-garde researchers, namely Jean-Claude Marcadé, Jean Chauvelin and Andrei Nakov – turned their attention to Bohomazov. His works became fashionable additions to collections ranging far beyond the Soviet Union. Bohomazov’s works are currently exhibited in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, Ludwig Museums (Germany) as well as in numerous private avant-garde collections.
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing the work of Anatol Petrytskyi
Anatol Petrytskyi (Ukrainian, 1895-1964) Costume designs for Minister Pinh in the opera ‘Turandot’ at the State Opera Theatre, Kharkiv
1928
Gouache and Indian ink on paper
72 x 54cm
Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine
Anatol Petrytsky (1895-1964) was a Ukrainian painter, stage and book designer. The fate of Anatol Petrytsky (1895-1965), a first-rank artist of the Ukrainian avant-garde of the first third of the twentieth century, reflects the many twists and turns in twentieth-century Ukrainian art as part of the history of Ukraine, its struggle for independence, its defeats and victories. Like his older predecessors who were born in Ukraine at the end of the nineteenth century (Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandra Exter), he sought to develop his talent in foreign capitals and art centers. He was drawn to the Higher Art and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow, where he studied in 1922-1924, and the Bauhaus, whose entrance examination he passed in 1933 but was prevented from attending by the fateful changes in the sociopolitical life of Germany.
However, Petrytsky was already formed as an artist by the 1910s on the solid basis of the then already transformed Kyiv school of painting: the Kyiv Art School, the studios of Aleksandra Exter and Oleksandr Murashko, Mykhailo Boichuk’s monumental painting workshop at the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts, and the strong influence of Vasyl Krychevsky and Danylo Shcherbakivsky. He took part in the process of reviving Ukrainian art from his early years. Together with Mykhailo Semenko he blazed the trail for Futurism. Together with Les Kurbas he reformed Ukrainian stage design: he began working on musical productions (Mykola Lysenko’s Taras Bulba, Aleksandr Borodin’s Prince Igor), exploring new avant-garde forms fused into a single undivided whole with the artistic traditions of the professional and folk art of Ukraine. In the 1920s, Petrytsky gained fame at home and abroad primarily as a brilliant avant-garde scenographer. His high status as an artist was confirmed by his highly successful participation in the 17th Venice Biennale (1930), where his large canvas Disabled (1924, above) became the “highlight of the exhibition,” according to art historian Mykhailo Drahan.
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at right Viktor Palmov’s The 1st of May 1929 (below)
Kyiv Art Institute
The development of the visual arts in Ukraine in the 1920s-1930s was intimately linked to the Kyiv Art Institute – the successor to the Ukrainian Academy of Art. It was the first institution of higher art education in Ukraine, founded when the country proclaimed independence in 1917. In 1924, in consonance with the ideological tasks of the Soviet regime, the Academy was transformed into an Institute in order to bring educational methods in line with such trends in contemporary art as production design. To create more dynamic curriculum, the Institute signed on new instructors from across the Soviet Union with many prominent avant-garde artists, such as Kazymyr Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, joining the Faculty.
Exhibition wall text
Viktor Palmov (Ukrainian born Russia, 1888-1929) The 1st of May
1929
Oil on canvas
161 x 161cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Victor Nikolaevich Palmov (Ukrainian: Віктор Никандрович Пальмов) (10 October 1888 – 7 June 1929) was a Ukrainian painter of Russian origin and avant-garde artist (Futurist and Neo-primitivist) from the David Burliuk circle.
A famous artist (painter and graphic artist), art theorist, talented teacher, a prominent figure in the cultural process of the first quarter of the 20th century. Viktor Palmov is rightly considered a classic of the Ukrainian avant-garde. The artist developed his theory of “colorization” and was the author of several articles on the problems of the theory of new painting, published in the magazine “New Generation”. The master’s works were among those “arrested” and were banned from showing at galleries and museums on a par with the canvases of A. Bogomazov, D. Burliuk, A. Exter, and “Boychukists”.
Anatol Petrytskyi (Ukrainian, 1895-1964) Portrait of Mykhailo Semenko
1929
Watercolour, lead pencil and ink on paper
61.5 x 47.5cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
Mykhail Semenko or Mykhailo Vasyliovich Semenko (Ukrainian, 1892-1937) was a Ukrainian poet, and a prominent representative of Ukrainian futurist poetry of the 1920s. He is considered to be one of the lead figures of the Executed Renaissance.
Kazymyr Malevych (Russian, 1879-1935) Sketch of the painting for the conference hall of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kyiv
1930
Pastel and gouache on paper
44 x 31cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
Kazimir Malevich, in full Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, (born February 23 [February 11, Old Style], 1878, near Kyiv, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine] – died May 15, 1935, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]), avant-garde painter who was the founder of the Suprematist school of abstract painting.
Malevich, who was born to parents of Polish origin, studied drawing in Kyiv and then attended the Stroganov School in Moscow and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. In his early work he followed Impressionism as well as Symbolism and Fauvism, and, after a trip to Paris in 1912, he was influenced by Pablo Picasso and Cubism. As a member of the Jack of Diamonds group, he led the Russian Cubist movement.
In 1913 Malevich began to create abstract geometric patterns in a manner he called Suprematism, a term expressing the notion that colour, line, and shape should reign supreme over subject matter or narrative in art. During this period, he painted a few of his most influential works, including Black Square (1915) and Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918). From 1919 to 1921 he taught painting in Moscow and Petrograd (renamed Leningrad in 1924), where he lived the rest of his life. On a 1927 visit to the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, he met Wassily Kandinsky and published a book on his theory under the title Die gegenstandslose Welt (The Non-objective World). Later, when Soviet politicians decided against modern art, Malevich and his art fell out of favour. During his last years, his works show a return to figuration. Malevich died from cancer in poverty and oblivion.
Malevich was the first to exhibit paintings composed of abstract geometric elements. He constantly strove to produce pure cerebral compositions, repudiating all sensuality and representation in art. White on White carries his Suprematist theories to their logical conclusion.
The last generation of Ukrainian modernists matured in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Mainly graduates of the Kyiv Art Institute, these artists were fascinated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and Novecento Italiano international movements, but their artistic activity was cut short by a radical change in the political climate. Art was increasingly viewed through a prism of ‘class consciousness’ and Soviet subject matter came to dominate all spheres of artistic output. In 1932, Socialist Realism was introduced as the only official artistic style to be practiced in the Soviet Union, with more value subsequently placed on the rally-like qualities in art rather than the merits of modernist experimentation.
Installation view of the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid showing at left, Kostiantyn Yeleva’s Portrait Late 1920s – early 1930s (below); and at right, Semen Yoffe’s In the Shooting Gallery 1932 (below)
Kostiantyn Yeleva (Ukrainian, 1897-1950) Portrait
Late 1920s – early 1930s
Oil on canvas
145 x 100cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
Drawing, theatrical-decorative painting, and studio artist and teacher. Attended KKhll (1912-1918) and Ukrainian State Academy under Mykhailo Boychuk (1918-1922). Contributed to exhibitions (1917 onwards). Member of ARMU. During the Civil War (1919-1921) and World War II (1943 -1944) worked on political posters. Designer for the First Shevchenko Drama Theater of the Ukrainian SSR, Lesia Ukrainka Theater, the Odesa Ukrainian Drama Theater, and village and army clubs (1919-1926). Taught at KKhU (1926), chaired the Department of Theatrical-Decorative Art and served as Assistant Professor (1930-1932), before becoming Professor in the Drawing Department (1949). Designed patriotic posters for the TASS Windows (1943-1944). Late 1940s onwards also taught graduate courses in drawing at the Academy of Architecture of the Ukrainian SSR. Participated in the Venice Biennale (1928). One-man exhibitions in Kyiv (1940, 1945, 1950).
Semen Yoffe (Ukranian, 1909-1991) In the Shooting Gallery
1932
Oil on canvas
200 x 150cm
National Art Museum of Ukraine
Stage designer. Graduated from Kharkiv Art Institute, where he studied under Vasyl Yermylov and Ivan Padalka (1926-1929); collaborated on the journal Nova generatsiia [New Generation], which reproduced some of his surrealistic drawings (1930). Active as an exhibition installationist and stage designer (1940s onwards).
How does artistic life flourish during revolution and conflict? Ukraine in the early 1900s endured unimaginable political upheaval, yet this became a period of true renaissance in Ukrainian art, literature, theatre and cinema.
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s presents the ground-breaking art produced in Ukraine in the early 20th century, focusing on the three key cultural centres of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa. Against a complicated socio-political backdrop of collapsing empires, World War I, the revolutions of 1917 with the ensuing Ukrainian War of Independence, and the eventual creation of Soviet Ukraine, several strands of distinctly Ukrainian art emerged.
While émigrés such as Sonia Delaunay and Alexander Archipenko found fame outside their homeland, the followers of Mykhailo Boichuk focused on Byzantine revivalism, and the artists of the Kultur Lige sought to promote the development of contemporary Yiddish culture. The first avant-garde exhibitions in Ukraine featured the radical art of Davyd Burliuk and Alexandra Exter, and the dynamic canvases of the Kyiv-based Cubo-Futurist Oleksandr Bohomazov. In Kharkiv, Vasyl Yermilov championed the industrial art of Constructivism, while Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytskyi, Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov and Borys Kosarev revolutionized theatre design. The attempt to build a national identity in Ukraine resulted in a polyphony of styles and artistic developments across a full range of media – from oil paintings, sketches and sculpture to collages, cinema posters and theatre designs.
Twelve internationally renowned scholars, including curators from the National Art Museum of Ukraine, bring to life this astonishing period of creativity in Ukraine and all the movements it encompassed.
This volume is dedicated to the dramatic story of Ukrainian modernism. The radical Ukrainian art formed in the last decade of the Russian Empire was a seismographic indicator of the tectonic changes to come, against the background of the upcoming revolution and subsequent attempts to establish an independent state. The Ukrainian modernists actively participated in nation-building, trying to create a recognizable national style. This is their story.
After nearly five years of the bloody War of Independence (1917-21), the Bolsheviks defeated nationalist Ukrainian forces and established the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (UkrSSR). However, the initial period of Communist rule created a mere illusion of Soviet-controlled cultural autonomy. The policy of ‘Ukrainization’, initially supported by Moscow for tactical reasons, facilitated the rapid development of a national culture that very much proclaimed its own home-grown identity. The 1920s became a time of bold artistic and literary experimentation, a period of true renaissance in Ukrainian art, literature, theatre and cinema. This cultural autonomy helped Ukraine prolong its period of aesthetic experimentation in comparison with other republics in the Soviet Union. Such pivotal figures of the avantgarde art as Kazymyr Malevych (Russian: Kazimir Malevich, Polish: Kazimierz Malewicz, 1879-1935) and Volodymyr Tatlin (Russian: Vladimir Tatlin, 1885-1953), blacklisted early on in Russia as dangerous ‘formalists’, nonetheless found refuge in Kyiv. In Ukraine, as late as 1930, they still could teach, exhibit and publish freely. However, this was just a short period of calm before the inevitable storm. The policy of Ukrainization was abruptly curtailed in 1931, and there were immediate and ruthless purges of the Ukrainian intellectual elite. Numerous poets, writers and theatre directors, along with many artists, faced summary execution or imprisonment in the Gulag. Manuscripts, books and artworks were incinerated. Murals were overpainted or scraped off walls. Later, the martyrs of Ukrainian culture were referred to as the ‘Executed Renaissance’. After severe waves of repression, Ukrainian modernism was doomed to oblivion. Artworks that were not destroyed were sent to secret, purpose-built repositories.
The Great Purges culled artists and intellectuals in the length and breadth of the USSR, but in Ukraine repression started earlier and had a character all its own. In Russia at large, repressed artists and writers were classified as ‘enemies of people’, a broad and generic term. In Ukraine, they were accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, an altogether more emotive and destructive appellation. The scene was set, and the destruction of Ukrainian literature and art from 1931 onwards amounted to nothing less than mass cultural genocide. The period 1932-33 saw a broader form of genocide – the Holodomor, often called the Terror-Famine, an artificially induced famine unleashed on Ukraine by the Soviet regime, which took millions of lives. The double catastrophe had far-reaching effects that still resonate to this day, greatly amplified by the most recent invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
During Khrushchev’s abortive de-Stalinization period, interest in Ukrainian modernism started to renew. Some ‘formalist’ works, taboo for so long, were even reinstated in national museums. However, the process was painful and patchy – and behind it lay the ever-present accusation of ‘nationalism’ that had made the rehabilitation of so many Ukrainian artists nearly impossible. At the same time, though, the West had rediscovered the revolutionary avant-garde art of the early Soviet period. The fashion for ‘the Great Experiment of Russian Art’ led to the appropriation of Ukrainian artists, as they conveniently fell under the umbrella term ‘Russian avant-garde’, adroitly coined by the Western art market. By this market-driven alchemy, artists who had spent all their lives in Ukraine, and whose artistic experimentation was integral to the development of Ukrainian art, unexpectedly became ‘Russian’. Western art dealers and museum curators alike followed the old Russian imperialist agenda. Few, if any, attempts were made to clarify the difference between Russian and Ukrainian culture of the period within the art market. In broader terms, we know that the word ‘Russia’ was (and is) frequently used to describe the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the contemporary Russian Federation – a dangerously misleading if understandable Western generalization.
The real rediscovery of Ukrainian modernism started only after the fall of the Soviet Union and the declaration of Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Despite the publication of important research and the staging of breakthrough exhibitions, the process was not free from mythologizing. To reclaim the legacy of national art, Ukrainian art historians coined the definition ‘Ukrainian avant-garde’. Such a doppelganger of the generalized label, used for marking radical art from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, often with complete disregard for its geographic provenance, proved to be no less misleading in the Ukrainian case. Ukrainian artists, like their Russian counterparts of the first half of the 20th century, did not use the word ‘avant-garde’ to describe themselves, preferring instead the labels of different ‘isms’ – Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, etc. In the case of Ukrainian art, an attempt at a ‘one size fits all’ approach proved to be especially controversial. A good example is the Boichukist school, the only truly monolithic art group in the history of Ukrainian modernism. It was united by the artistic method and ideology of Byzantine revivalism and a pronounced orientation towards folk culture, so it was retrospective in essence and had nothing in common with radical experimentation. Attempts to classify it as avant-garde seem at best naive. Apart from Mykhailo Boichuk (1882-1937) and his followers, Ukrainian art did not produce any other movements united by a definite aesthetic preference. Polyphony dominated the landscape of national modernism, with artists creating their own personal ‘isms’, such as the ‘colourism’ of Viktor Palmov (1888-1929). Others developed their versions of international trends, often quite different from the source of inspiration, a principal example being the Cubo-Futurism of Oleksandr Bohomazov (1880-1930) or the ‘Constructivism’ propagated by Vasyl Yermilov (1894–1968).
Many representatives of Ukrainian modernism escape straightforward stylistic classification. A case in point is Anatol Petrytskyi (1895–1964), who was influenced by different international movements from Cubism to Constructivism, adopting them in his work in a highly individualized manner. The polyphony of identities supplemented the polyphony of styles, so that many artists born in Ukraine continued their careers in Russia or in other foreign countries but left a strong imprint on the development of Ukrainian art. One considers the mark left by Davyd Burliuk (Russian: David Burliuk, 1882-1967) and Alexandra Exter (Ukrainian: Oleksandra Ekster, 1882-1949) on the development of the local version of Cubo-Futurism, or the influence of Kazymyr Malevych, an ethnic Pole born in Kyiv, on Ukrainian artists. A further voice in this complex polyphony was Viktor Palmov, a Russian who relocated to Kyiv at the beginning of the 1920s and became one of the most active participants in the country’s artistic processes. Bearing all these complexities in mind, one might reasonably conclude that ethnic labelling within the modernist movement in Ukraine, during the time of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, can hardly help create an appropriately nuanced and realistic picture of the development of Ukrainian art.
Oleh Ilnytzkyj, the pioneer of research on Ukrainian literary Futurism, wrote about the reassessment of the history of the movement during the period of the Russian Empire: ‘The goal is not to place a new “Ukrainian” straitjacket on cultural activities in the empire, but to find way to do justice to the variety of sources and the myriad of cultural influences that flowed from so many directions. The recognition of Burliuk, Ekster and Malevich as Ukrainians does not diminish their relevance for either the imperial (transnational) avant-garde or for strictly Russian culture, where their impact is undeniable.’ Such an approach is also applicable to many artists of the Soviet period, from Klyment Redko (Russian: Kliment Redko, 1897-1956) to Oleksandr Tyshler (Russian: Aleksandr Thyshler, 1898-1980).
One of the main tasks for Ukrainian artists at the beginning of the 20th century was to create a national style. They were not alone. The age of nationalism, on the rise in Europe since the Napoleonic wars, provoked the nation-building earthquake following the collapse of the empires in 1917-18. Art played an essential role in the seismic shift. Art Nouveau, defined in Germany and Austria as Secession, in Italy as Liberty, and in Russia as Modern, became the last international style to produce a dominant visual language. The paradox was that similar stylistic features were used to visualize different national mythologies from Paris and Berlin to Helsinki and Kyiv. The Ukrainian version of Art Nouveau was no less of an attempt to find a national artistic form of self-expression. The cosmopolitan style of Oleksandr Murashko (1875-1919) was challenged by Mykhailo Zhuk (1883-1964), and especially by the Krychevski brothers, who opted for national topicality and found inspiration in Ukrainian folk art. In addition to folk art, there were other and no less important primary sources of inspiration for the Ukrainian Art Nouveau practitioners. Early medieval mosaics and frescoes, created under strong Byzantine influence, was one such. The Ukrainian Baroque of the 17th and early 18th centuries was another. It is not surprising, given the vigour and eclecticism of the movement, that the visual identity of the short-lived independent Ukrainian state of 1917–20, including the coat of arms and banknotes, created by Heorhii Narbut (1886–1920), was an exquisite example of the national version of Art Nouveau.
Ukrainian advocates of radical modernism were also very interested in co-opting the folk traditions. Ukrainian naïve pictures, embroideries, ornaments and painted eggs all fascinated Exter and Davyd Burliuk, both members of the Kyiv Cubo-Futurist scene. They were the pioneers of the transformation of the folklore elements into ‘radical chic’. The passion for folk art and ornament became an inherent part of ‘Ukrainian-ness’ in the country’s modernism, extending to such unexpected territory as the constructivist designs of Vasyl Yermilov. Despite this happy and inventive immersion in folklore, it is important to remember that the Ukrainian artists’ preoccupation with tradition was very different from that of their Russian counterparts, whose approach to folk art broadly proceeded in two directions. On the one hand, the Russians embraced naive village art, or the kitsch aspects of urban sub-culture, as a kind of shock tactic, a means to épater le bourgeois by glorifying ‘lower’ rather than ‘higher’ elements of culture. On the other, native folklore and folk art were often seen as a viable homegrown alternative to exotic, foreign imports from France and elsewhere – the perfect means by which Russian modernists might take a stance against Western decadence. Such calculated feelings were utterly foreign to Ukrainian artists, whose studious attention to folk art and ornamentation was quite devoid of irony or strategy. However radical Ukrainian modernists were, they felt they had inherited the task of establishing a national visual language from their predecessors, and took it very seriously. Unfortunately, Ukrainian modernism in all its aspects, aside from folklore influences, has been historically analysed predominantly through the lens of comparison with Russian art. Perhaps now is the time to look at it in the context of the development of modernist traditions in such Central European countries as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, where the local schools who sought a national art style were no less influenced by folk tradition than those in Ukraine.
If the Ukrainian art of the 1910s-20s has already been reasonably researched and analysed, the enforced transition to Socialist Realism still requires profound conceptualization. The attempts of leading modernists like Oleksandr Bohomazov and Viktor Palmov to find their place in the new, politically imposed frame of reference, resulted in masterpieces characterized by a new and sometimes uncomfortable hybridity of styles that certainly requires further investigation. In the same vein, the efforts of Boichukists to adjust their art to the changing demands of the time also requires fresh analysis. Their status as martyrs of Ukrainian art often precludes a dispassionate discourse on the transformation of their style, and their participation in the development of Stalinist propaganda and iconography. Whether such a shift was the result of a Faustian pact or sincere political belief remains to be answered, case by case. Fresh territory for research and discussion in Ukrainian art history is being mapped out year after year. The ground-breaking exhibition ‘Spetsfond’ (Special Secret Holding), organized by the National Art Museum of Ukraine in 2015, resulted in the rediscovery of Ukrainian art of the early 1930s. For the first time, numerous paintings, hidden for more than half a century for political reasons, were returned to public display. The show restored to Ukrainian art history the names and reputations of such painters as Kostiantyn Yeleva (1897-1950), Semen Yoffe (1909-1991) and Yurii Sadylenko (1903-1967). This was just a start, and so much more is yet to be done. For example, the influence of such trends as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and Il Novecento Italiano on Ukrainian artists still requires fundamental investigation – and while research into Ukrainian cinema has been greatly stimulated though the activity of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre, the history of Ukrainian photography from the 1920s and early 1930s remains largely terra incognita. This volume and the exhibition that accompanies it constitute an attempt to introduce the international public to the complicated history of Ukrainian modernism, an essential but little-known part of European culture.
As DeSana developed his Suburban series in the early 1980s, gender and sexuality became increasingly ambiguous in his images. Here, photographed from behind, the body is a headless, unidentifiable creature composed of shapes. The marker cones evoke a similar indeterminacy: they are socially gendered “feminine” as makeshift stilettos and “masculine” as signifiers of roadside construction or sports, perhaps pointing to DeSana’s own experiences or ideas about the disciplining of bodies. A glittering field of bright-green artificial grass adds to this surreal composition, evoking the Astroturf surface of a football field.
Exhibition label
FORGET ME NOT
I have to be honest and say that before I started constructing this posting I had never heard of the artist Jimmy DeSana. You can’t know everything.
But now, having spent many hours reading about his life and his art, now I am at least a little more informed… and stand in awe and wonder at what this artist achieved before he died. It has been a real privilege and honour to imbibe at the fountain of DeSana.
I am still processing the work and what I have learnt about it but it would seem to me that what DeSana left behind is a body of work that is challenging, vital, full of ideas, paradoxes and questions about the human condition. Not who are we, but who can we be if we follow the path of our imagination and our soul.
Written by many other commentators, I have distilled their thoughts about his life, work, subject matter and the concepts he investigated into a few words:
1/ To play and dream
2/ punk rebel, the queer visionary, the wry interpreter of consumerism and media cultures, and the sometime transgressor of “good taste” in photography
3/ masquerades =
4/ the body as object
5/ peeled back the veneer of suburban life
6/ discrepancy between the public and private lives of post-war Americans
7/ queer and radical
8/ surrealistic, S/M-tinged, staged photos
9/ absurdist and unsettling
10/ vagaries of the human heart and the human psyche
11/ his central subject was always himself, and especially his sexual and emotional identity
12/ address the basic enigmas of identity
13/ Punk Provocateur
14/ Fierce
15/ Downtown /East Village scene
16/ post-punk New York
17/ fetishistic work about human bodies, very poetic
18/ mail art
19/ negative prints, double exposures and luridly coloured lighting
20/ psychological portraits, sexually charged tableaux and still lifes
21/ the body as a playground, gender as an ongoing invention, and domestic interiors as surreal constructions
22/ potential to push boundaries
23/ autoerotic asphyxiation
24/ visceral, more lo-fi, and more voyeuristic
25/ Transgressive Vision of Life and Desire
26/ Surrealism, Fluxus, punk and pure Pop
27 queer visibility
28/ strangeness
29/ suburban life
30/ Stonewall
31/ Gay Liberation
32/ interconnectedness of art and life
33/ Pictures Generation
34/ sexual, political, degenerated, ungendered
35/ sexual and emotional identity
36/ AIDS, sexuality and death
But these words tell what the work is about, they don’t tell you how the art makes you feel!
The art makes me feel dis/embodied and at the same time emboldened and strong. It makes me feel queer (in its original sense, when it was primarily used to mean strange, odd, peculiar or eccentric). Personally, it opens up a new vision for exploring my ordered place in the world, pushing boundaries of who I am and who I could be. Never settling for something that you don’t want to be. I love the “queerness” of the art (in the recent use of the word, used to describe a broad spectrum of non-normative sexual or gender identities and politics). I love its panache and bravado, its sensitivity and camp, it raunchiness and colour. The colour of life. Being different.
Sadly, we lost so many people, so many artists during the first wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, supremely talented artists such as Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Stephen Varble, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jimmy DeSana. I would like to have met Jimmy, to have talked to him about his passion, his love, his vision of the world that surrounded him. From a distance in time and space he seems to have a certain magic energy within him.
In the vitality of the work lies his im/mortality. And it is because of this energy that we will never lose the remembrance of Jimmy DeSana. Forget him not.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“My dear, it’s all so Christian and medieval and gloomy. Precisely. Jimmy DeSana, your intrepid photographer, has witnessed and preserved for posterity the unspeakable rights of these benighted natives, rites as clearly derived from Christianity as a black mass”
William Burroughs, 1979
“DeSana’s camera was as dear to him as his sexual life; the two were mutually constitutive, and his engagement with the BDSM subculture provided boundless inspiration to him, both as an artist and as a gay man.”
“As a gay man, a photographer, an artist of the AIDS era, a lover, a son, and a friend, DeSana is as beautifully complex as his work. After he died of AIDS in 1990, DeSana left his estate to his best friend and muse, the artist Laurie Simmons. Simmons told me, “I gave myself twenty years to sort out a lifetime’s worth of breathtaking material. I also felt certain that the work would look as fresh twenty years later as it did at the time of its making.” The resurgence of DeSana’s revolutionary career could not come at a more opportune moment; his oeuvre is exemplary of new outlets for reconstituting the Pictures Generation with queer modes of vision and critique.”
William J. Simmons. “Surreal Sexuality,” in Aperture Issue 218, “Queer” on the Aperture website January 18, 2017 [Online] Cited 20/03/2023
Installation views of the exhibition Jimmy DeSana: Submission at the Brooklyn Museum, New York
The first comprehensive exhibition and book on the surreal, queer and humorous photographic art of Jimmy DeSana, a central figure in New York’s art and music scenes of the 1970s and ’80s
This is the first overview of the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering yet under recognised figure in New York’s downtown art, music and film scenes during the 1970s and 1980s. The book situates DeSana’s work and life within the countercultural and queer contexts in the American South as well as New York, through his involvement in mail art, punk and No Wave music and film, and artist collectives and publications.
DeSana’s first major project was 101 Nudes, made in Atlanta during the city’s gay liberation movement. After moving to New York in 1973, DeSana became immersed in queer networks, collaborating with General Idea and Ray Johnson on zines and mail art, and documenting the genderqueer street performances of Stephen Varble.
By the mid-1970s, DeSana was a fixture in New York’s No Wave music and film scenes, serving as portraitist for much of the period’s central figures and producing album covers for Talking Heads, James Chance and others. His book Submission, made with William S. Burroughs, humorously staged scenes out of a S&M manual that explored the body as object and the performance of desire. DeSana was also an early adopter of colour photography, creating his best-known series, Suburban, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This body of work explores relationships between gender, sexuality and consumer capitalism in often humorous, surreal ways. After DeSana became sick as a result of contracting HIV, he turned to abstraction, using experimental photographic techniques to continue to push against photographic norms.
Text from the Amazon website Nd [Online] Cited 15/03/2023
Introduction
James, Jim, Jimmy; de Sana, deSana, De Sana, DeSana. Just as Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) consistently altered his name, he refused to pin down his approach to two main artistic interests: photography and desire. From the 1960s until his death from AIDS-related illness, DeSana created experimental, subversive photographs that upended traditional approaches and viewpoints. He produced and shared these provocative works by participating in a range of avant-garde movements – from queer mail art networks to Fluxus [a loose international group of rebellious artists, poets, and musicians with a shared impulse to integrate art and life] to punk music and cinema, to the “Pictures Generation” and its image-based play with mass culture.
Jimmy DeSana: Submission, the first retrospective on this pioneering yet under recognised figure, unites these bodies of work to demonstrate how DeSana emphasised and expanded photography as a contemporary form. The first section considers his early years in Atlanta and New York (1968-1976), where he began exchanging artworks through the mail and playing with sexuality and identity. The next section follows DeSana’s entree into New York’s dynamic countercultural art, music, film, and club scenes (1976-1984). The final section delves into the artist’s darkroom experiments during his last years (1984-1990), after he was diagnosed with HIV. At a time when his own desires were considered deviant and even criminal, DeSana continually embraced transgression as a path toward both artistic and personal freedom.
DeSana was born in Detroit in 1949 to middle-class suburbanites, who raised him and his brother in Atlanta. His mother was a strict Methodist; his father abandoned the family as DeSana entered adulthood. While studying art at Georgia State University, DeSana began making precocious, conceptual photography of suburban houses, generally banal, and of his friends, often naked. But his final thesis, 101 Nudes (1972), is a landmark. Likely taken with a Leica IIIf and lit by a flash, as Sawyer notes in his catalog essay, the portraits form a kind of fanzine of queer friends. DeSana shows off their muscles like he’s making Physique Pictorial, or crouches and crops their bodies like a funnier Man Ray. A drag queen looks right into the camera, bold; a man shoves his face into a pillow, ass beckoning. Bodies are unstable, and DeSana captures how funny, and how frightening, that can be, and how those two emotions comprise desire. Sawyer hangs these prints on the wall like Teen Beat posters in a teenage bedroom. It’s hard not to be a fan. …
Photographer Jimmy De Sana was part of the countercultural “punk” community of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village in the 1970s and ’80s. Among his best-known works are portraits of important figures from that scene, including Debbie Harry and Billy Idol, though these constitute only a small part of his practice. With work that is personal, surrealistic, and often shocking in its treatment of sexuality, De Sana helped raise the standing of photography in the art world and increased critical respect for the medium.
101 Nudes comprises 56 halftone black-and-white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posing inside or just outside homes. The artist was 20 years old and attending college in Atlanta when he first printed the series in 1972. The figures, which include De Sana’s friends as well as himself, are photographed from a variety of viewpoints. Although the series shows the influence of “grainy” pornography from the 1950s, the postures of the figures do not seem to suggest or invite sexual engagement; the artist noted that they are “without eroticism.” Sometimes the photographs feature only a fragment of the body, such as the pelvic area or buttocks. De Sana’s engagement with the history of surrealism has been noted, and these partial views in particular recall the surrealist photography of artists such as Man Ray, who in the 1920s photographed the body parts of friends and lovers in ways that removed them from their context and made them into almost abstract images.
Anonymous. “101 Nudes,” on the ICA website Nd [Online] Cited 20/03/2023
When De Sana (1950-1990) shot and self-published the 56 halftone images that would make up the “101 Nudes” series, he was just 20 years old and still a college student in Atlanta. Using his friends as models, he constructed each photograph as an insight into the possibilities of form, capturing with his flash-camera something both artful and sincere. His subjects (nearly all of them naked) were “without eroticism” as De Sana has said, the series as much about isolation as it is sexuality. The careful, strange postures of his figures, collapsed across a couch or balanced on a dining-room table, often had a touch of the surreal. His later work, in particular the S&M series that came to comprise his 1980 book “Submission” (also on display), explored sexuality and digression front-on in the spirit of William Burroughs, whose writing was a significant influence on the artist from a young age. De Sana created these images – which pre-dated Mapplethorpe’s fetish work – with an even stronger sense for composition, all the while seeking the boundaries of comfort through the bizarrely positioned, leather-bound figures.
One year later, on June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, sparking an uprising that would launch the modern gay liberation movement. This spark of rebellion and hope made its way to Atlanta’s Ansley Mall Mini Cinema, where Andy Warhol’s homoerotic underground film, “Lonesome Cowboys,” was showing. Fifteen minutes into the film’s only screening, police officers raided the cinema and confiscated the reels. Many of the audience members were harassed, photographed and arrested.
DeSana may or may not have been in the audience that night, but he was certainly aware that his classmates and professors experienced censorship from school officials and the city. In the catalog accompanying the Brooklyn exhibition, curator Sawyer writes that in 1972, DeSana’s teacher, photographer John McWilliams, organized Atlanta’s annual arts festival where he displayed nudes made by his students and invited the highly regarded photographer Frederick Sommer to judge the exhibition.
“Sommer awarded prizes to several of the students, but within days there were letters and reviews in Atlanta’s daily papers complaining of the exhibition’s pornography,” writes Sawyer.
Against this backdrop of censorship and taboos, DeSana turned his perceptions of suburbia into his final thesis project, “101 Nudes,” spoofing the title of Walt Disney’s “101 Dalmations.”
The 56 humorous black-and-white images in “101 Nudes” are all fairly innocent scenes carefully posed in middle-class American homes. It’s kink for beginners: a nude perches on the edge of an overstuffed sofa; another plunges face-first into cushions; a goofy-looking naked boy stands on one leg on a dining room table. There are even close-up shots of buttocks, breasts and genitals, yet, as DeSana himself noted, they are “without eroticism,” adding, “that is the way the suburbs are, in a sense.”
As Jean Cocteau said of a Jean Genet poem, “His obscenity is never obscene.”
Against a backdrop of gay liberation and censorship in early 1970s Atlanta, DeSana combined his explorations of suburban culture and nude figures into a final thesis project. In 1970-1972, DeSana staged photographs of his mostly queer friends, including the notorious drag performer Diamond Lil, nude in suburban environments. While other Conceptual artists were focused on the architectural homogeneity of suburbia, in 101 Nudes DeSana penetrated the veneer of seriality and conformity.
According to DeSana, both his subjects’ poses and his halftone reproduction techniques mimicked images from mass-market, soft-core pornographic magazines that emerged during his youth. The title sends up that of the wholesome 1961 Disney animated film 101 Dalmatians, which was rereleased in 1972. DeSana would continue to draw from and parody popular cultural forms into the early 1980s.
Against a backdrop of policing, censorship, and gay liberation in early 1970s Atlanta, DeSana staged photographs of his mostly queer friends, including the notorious drag performer Diamond Lil, nude in suburban environments. While other Conceptual artists using photography like Dan Graham were focused on the architectural homogeneity of suburbia, in “101 Nudes,” a portfolio of 56 photolithographic prints, DeSana penetrated the veneer of seriality and conformity.
Both his subjects’ poses and his halftone reproduction techniques mimicked images from mass-market, soft-core pornographic magazines that emerged during the artist’s youth. The title sends up that of the wholesome 1961 Disney animated film 101 Dalmatians, which was rereleased in 1972.
DeSana eventually sent copies of the portfolio through the mail, which served as an alternative channel for sharing Conceptual art and challenging the privileged spaces of museums and commercial galleries during these years. He embraced “correspondence art” in part to connect with other gay artists and construct identities that defied mainstream standards of “respectability” for gay people.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
John Jack Baylin Fanzini Goes to the Movies
1974
Periodical; offset print
11 × 8 1/2 in. (27.9 × 21.6cm)
Courtesy of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
Publisher: General Idea, Canadian, 1969-1994 File, vol. 3, no. 1, “Glamour” issue
Autumn 1975
Periodical; off-set print, staple bound, illustrated wrappers
14 × 10 11/16 in. (35.6 × 27.1cm)
Collection of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
Publisher: General Idea, Canadian, 1969-1994 File, vol. 2, no. 4, “Mondo Nudo” issue
December 1973
Periodical; offset print, staple bound, illustrated wrappers
14 × 10 3/4 in. (35.6 × 27.3cm)
Collection of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
Publisher: General Idea, Canadian, 1969-1994 File, vol. 2, no. 3, “Paris” issue
September 1973
Periodical; offset print, staple bound, illustrated wrappers
14 × 11 in. (35.6 × 27.9cm)
Collection of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
During the golden age of downtown performance art in the 1970s, Jimmy DeSana documented the work of numerous artists, sometimes for income.
In 1975, he photographed public interventions by Stephen Varble, an artist who performed his “Gutter Art” in the streets of Soho and Midtown, while wearing his signature gender-bending ensembles. As the critic Gregory Battcock put it, Varble came to be “considered by some the embarrassment of SoHo, and by others the only touch of real genius south of Houston Street.” DeSana’s photographs of Varble appeared in publications during this time, including General Idea’s FILE Megazine.
DeSana’s photographs are invaluable records of an ephemeral practice, which has only recently been given its proper due thanks in part to the work of art historian David Getsy.
Throughout the 1970s, Jimmy DeSana created campy portraits of his extended circle of friends and collaborators in New York, which included musicians, filmmakers, writers, artists, critics, and curators.
Performance artist and fixture of New York City’s downtown scene Stephen Varble, shown here, was one of DeSana’s repeat subjects. DeSana captured many of the performances staged by Varble whose guerilla practices served as commentary on gender identity, class, and capitalism. These performance-based and ephemeral events would continue to inform DeSana’s work in photography throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Stephen Varble
1975
Gelatin silver print
8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Jack Smith
c. 1976
Gelatin silver print
7 × 6 in. (17.8 × 15.2 cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Gregory Battcock Trylon and Perisphere, No. 1
December 1977
Periodical, offset print, saddle stitched, illustrated wrappers
10 × 7 in. (25.4 × 17.8cm)
Courtesy of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Eric Mitchell
1977
Gelatin silver print
15 3/4 × 11 1/2 in. (40 × 29.2cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Throughout the 1970s, Jimmy DeSana created theatrical, often comic photographs related to his sexual S-M experiences.
Like other artists in his circle, such as Laurie Simmons and AA Bronson, he parodied advertising and fashion photography, as well as the disciplinary nature of heteronormativity and consumerism in the United States. He eventually published some of these photographs in his first book, Submission (1980), which included an introduction by the punk icon William Burroughs.
The photographs in this series typically feature nude, masked individuals eccentrically interacting with domestic interiors and objects. DeSana staged most images in his studio or the homes of friends and family. He used his signature lighting to create a heightened sense of drama and horror, calling attention to the images’ artifice. DeSana later observed: “I was trying to push sexuality to the limit. As long as I could come up with an idea that related to bizarre sexuality and still make an interesting statement about a product, the photo was successful for me.”
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Auto
1978
Gelatin silver print
6 3/4 × 9 9/16 in. (17.1 × 24.3cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Television
1977-1978
Gelatin silver print
12 1/4 × 8 1/4 in. (31.1 × 21cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Masking Tape
1977-1978
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (24.1 × 16.5cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Pliers
1977-1978
Gelatin silver print
6 3/4 × 9 1/4 in. (17.1 × 23.5cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
DeSana’s photographs and Terence Sellers’s writings engage with a variety of often erotic practices known then as S-M (sadomasochism) and more commonly now as BDSM (bondage, dominance, and submission / sadomasochism). The term “sadomasochism” is derived from the names of two European authors: the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), who wrote about his exploits and fantasies of deriving pleasure from inflicting pain, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), who wrote of the erotic enjoyment he experienced while being dominated and punished.
In the 1970s, DeSana and Sellers were among a growing group of practitioners, writers, artists, and activists attempting to redefine “acceptable” behaviour and desires, as well as sexual and gender identities. In exploring S-M through an aesthetic lens, Sellers and DeSana also joined a long lineage of artists and thinkers who had engaged with these practices to encourage debate on freedom of expression and power.
It was not until 2010 that the American Psychiatric Association announced it would no longer diagnose consenting adults practicing BDSM as mentally ill, which had perpetuated stigmatisation that could lead to legal and social repercussions. More recently, studies have suggested that BDSM can provide therapeutic tools to investigate control and release, and to reclaim one’s sexuality after traumatic experiences.
“The very word ‘submission’ contains the paradox of wanting and not wanting,” William S. Burroughs wrote in the introduction of Jimmy DeSana’s 1980 book Submission.
For the photogragraphic series featured in the publication, made between 1977 and 1978, DeSana built on 101 Nudes (1972) and his work for File Megazine by creating theatrical and often comic photographs that push the limits of respectability and explore domestic confinement, consumer affluence, and social conformity. He was also mocking the recent trend of S-M scenarios in fashion photography and advertisements.
He titled many of the images after the objects depicted in them – Toilet, Coffee Table, Television, Shoes, Shower – rather than sex acts or the names of the individuals shown, who are always anonymous and often wearing masks. This strategy not only protected the identity of his models, many of whom were friends, but also contrasted with his better-known portrait work during this period, which he did to make money. Many of the photographs comically equate practices of everyday life and consumerism (washing dishes, taking a shower, driving a car) with forms of bondage and discipline.
In exploring S-M through an aesthetic and performative lens, DeSana joined a long history of twentieth-century avant-gardes that engaged with these practices in order to compel debate on freedom of expression and power.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
Terence Sellers (American, 1952-2016) The Correct Sadist: The Memoirs of Angel Stern
1983
Book
8 1/2 × 5 9/16 in. (21.6 × 14.1 cm)
Private collection
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled
1978
From the Dungeon series
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 × 6 5/8 in. (24.1 × 16.8cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled
1978
From the Dungeon series
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 × 6 5/8 in. (24.1 × 16.8cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Contact Sheet of Portraits of Jimmy DeSana and Laurie Simmons
c. 1978
New York University, Fales Library, Jimmy DeSana Papers, MSS.202, Box 66 Photo: Courtesy of Fales Library at NYU
In 1973, shortly after moving to New York, Jimmy DeSana met fellow artist Laurie Simmons while riding the A train to Far Rockaway.
The two soon shared a SoHo loft with twin photographic darkrooms. Simmons has often acknowledged that DeSana, who received a BFA in photography, taught her most of what she knows about the medium, acting as a friend, mentor, and interlocutor until his death in 1990. Simmons also became a model and muse for DeSana’s work.
Now the executor of the Jimmy DeSana Trust for several decades, Simmons writes, “I am immensely grateful for every moment Jimmy and I spent together, for every freezing second I floated naked in a pool or held an awkward pose for way too long, for this was my graduate program in photography – this is really where I learned to make a picture… standing within Jimmy’s quiet but determined force field, emulating his laser-like focus and his ultimate belief that making art was a space to play and dream.”
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Betsy Sussler
1978
Gelatin silver print
15 7/8 × 11 in. (40.3 × 27.9cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
The Brooklyn Museum Presents Jimmy DeSana: Submission, the First Museum Survey of Work by the Pioneering Queer, Punk Photographer. The exhibition features more than two hundred works, which trace a career that bridged mail art networks, New York’s 1970s punk and No Wave subcultures, the illuminating image-play of the “Pictures Generation,” and the various artistic and affective responses to the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Jimmy DeSana: Submission is the first museum survey of work by a major yet overlooked figure in the histories of photography, LGBTQ artists, and New York City. Among his many significant contributions, Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) reintroduced the body and sexuality into the conceptual photographic practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s, helping to elevate the medium within the contemporary art world. The exhibition traces the artist’s brief but prolific career through more than two hundred works on display (some for the first time), created during a time of profound cultural and political transformation in the United States. From his early days photographing suburban landscapes in Atlanta, Georgia, to his time as a key figure in the New York art and music scenes of the 1970s and 1980s, DeSana conveyed the radical spirit of his era and a pointed, ironic critique of the American Dream and its images. Jimmy DeSana: Submission opens November 11, 2022, and is organised by Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum.
“This retrospective, the first since DeSana’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, will enable so many to view for the first time the full breadth of his iconoclastic artistic output, positioning his more well-known series within his interdisciplinary and collaborative practice in mail art, zines, performance, and film,” says Sawyer. “DeSana drew upon punk, Camp, sadomasochism, dreamworlds, performance art, experimental film, club culture, and the legacy of twentieth-century avant-gardes in ways that make his work unique among his peers. Jimmy DeSana: Submission brings together these multiple themes to show why his work is so relevant to artistic practices today.”
Along with his friends and peers, Jimmy DeSana sought to forge arts communities outside of traditional institutions (and the concurrent gentrification that displaced artists from Lower Manhattan). Instead, he chose to display his work via collectives, artist-run spaces, and the informal groupings of the underground nightclub scene, as well as the more democratised dissemination systems of mail art networks. Submission prominently features examples of DeSana’s contributions to early queer zines throughout the 1970s – from General Idea’s File magazine to John Jack Baylin and John Dowd’s Fanzini to Gregory Battcock’s Trylon & Perisphere – as well as his first major series, 101 Nudes (1972), which was circulated through mail art networks. DeSana published this portfolio of photolithographic prints, portraying his friends posing nude in the bland interiors of Atlanta’s postwar houses, at the height of the Gay Liberation Movement and the city’s reactive censorship. These formative images employ a distinctly queer approach to domesticity and invite viewers to look beneath the veneer of suburban propriety, a concept that would capture the artist’s creative attention for the rest of his career.
The exhibition also contains selections from Submission (1980), DeSana’s book of BDSM-related photographs that play with liberation and conformity, and ideological power alongside the myths of postwar capitalism. This section also includes related photographs from a collaboration with writer and sex worker Terence Sellers (American, 1952-2016) that were intended for her first book, The Correct Sadist (1983). Most of these photographs have not been previously displayed or published.
Continuing the survey is DeSana’s series Suburban (1979-1984), perhaps the artist’s best-known photographs and his first in colour. Building off of 101 Nudes, DeSana used a cast of friends and collaborators to explore the queerness of postwar suburban culture by placing nude bodies, often abstracted and contorted, in suburban backyards, wood-panelled living rooms, and tiled bathrooms. Using vivid gel-lighting to produce its characteristic heavily saturated, candy-coloured prints, Suburban mimics the seductive, materialist aesthetics of fashion photography and the set design of television advertisements – strategies that were similarly deployed by his friends and peers during this period, including model and artist Laurie Simmons. The images are often skewed and shot from oblique angles, further destabilising the viewer’s perception of the subjects.
Accompanying the dreamlike colour photographs of the Suburban series are some of DeSana’s subsequent, more abstract efforts from the late 1980s. Made after 1984, when DeSana underwent spleen removal surgery after contracting HIV, the works superimpose warped colour images of everyday objects with collage elements, text, and fragments of figures in motion. DeSana turned away from directly representing the body during this period – in the early years of the ongoing HIV / AIDS epidemic, when gay artists in particular were expected to make work about the epidemic in reaction to government inaction and neglect or misinformation by dominant media.
DeSana was seemingly omnipresent in New York’s punk and No Wave scenes during the late 1970s and 1980s, joining other artists who engaged in symbolic forms of resistance through visual art, literature, music, and film. DeSana photographed a number of prominent figures in those subcultures; the survey will be the first to feature his portraits of art and music luminaries such as Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Patti Astor, David Byrne, John Giorno, Debbie Harry, and Richard Hell. Additionally, the exhibition will highlight DeSana’s photographic contributions to collectives like Collaborative Projects (including their groundbreaking exhibitions and publication, X Motion Picture Magazine), periodicals such as the New York Rocker and Semiotext(e), and No Wave Cinema, in which he was involved as both an actor and a director.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the first scholarly publication on DeSana’s work, featuring essays by Sawyer and artist Laurie Simmons as well as more than two hundred images, co-published with DelMonico Books. Jimmy DeSana: Submission is organised by Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum.
Press release from the Brooklyn Museum
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled (Self-Portrait w/ Graduation Cap)
1978
Polaroid
Cornell University, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Diego Cortez No Wave Collection, 1972-1981, Collection Number: 8120, Box 1, Folder 17 Photo: Courtesy of Cornell University
James, Jim, Jimmy; de Sana, deSana, De Sana, DeSana. Just as Jimmy DeSana rarely stuck with one version of his name, he refused to limit two of his main artistic engagements – photography and the theme of desire – to fixed identities.
Born in Detroit on November 12, 1949, James Arthur DeSana Jr. developed an early involvement in photography when he received a Kodak camera for Christmas at age seven. After graduating with a BFA in photography from Georgia State University in 1972, DeSana moved to New York, where he became involved in correspondence art, collectives and alternative publications, post-punk music, underground film, and queer nightlife.
During this time, DeSana amassed a large collection of hats, like the graduation cap he’s wearing in this Polaroid self-portrait. This fervid interest in hats coincided with DeSana’s use of masquerade and invented personae in his mail artworks; he would go on to make use of the hats in his self-portraits throughout the 1970s and 1980s, continuing his subversion of identity.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Stitches
1984
Silver dye bleach print
18 3/4 × 12 5/8 in. (47.6 × 32.1cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
He was extending the legacy of the Surrealist photographers of the period between the World Wars. Man Ray in particular presented his subjects with a disorienting spin: He inverted the head of a female smoker whose cigarette looks like a chimney, cast dark shadows to make the naked torso of a woman with upheld arms resemble the head of a bull, and shot his lover, the photographer Lee Miller, from an extreme lower angle so that her neck and chin take on a phallic form. He mixed genders, even species, with gleeful abandon. DeSana joined in the game.
But a 1984 DeSana self-portrait pointed to the painful direction his life was about to take. He photographed himself in red Calvin Klein briefs illuminated in a red glow, one hand on his forehead, his eyes upturned and his expression concerned. A bright beam of white light is directed toward two dozen surgical stitches running from his sternum down his left side. His spleen had just been removed, an early warning of H.I.V. infection. The diagnosis of AIDS came a year later.
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Portrait with Dog
Undated
Chromogenic print
20 × 14 in. (50.8 × 35.6cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Condom
1979
Cibachrome print
12 1/4 × 18 3/4 in. (31.1 × 47.6cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Shoes
1979
Chromogenic print
15 1/4 × 23 1/2 in. (38.7 × 59.7cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Gauze
1979
Chromogenic print
12 3/4 × 19 in. (32.4 × 48.3cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Shoe
1979
Chromogenic print
13 × 19 in. (33 × 48.3cm)
Courtesy of Jimmy DeSana Trust and PPOW
Many of the photographs in Jimmy DeSana’s “Suburban” series explore themes of domestic confinement and social conformity through consumer goods and rituals.
In “Sink” (1979), shown here, an anonymous figure wearing a corset and heels leans over, head dunked in a kitchen sink filled with soap suds. DeSana allows contradictions – between agency and conformity, critique and complicity, punishment and pleasure – to remain open-ended in his work, enabling them to identify and “disidentify” with dominant culture.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Leaves
1979
Chromogenic print
18 3/4 × 12 1/2 in. (47.6 × 31.8cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
In the late 1970s, the status of colour photography was still disputed within the spaces of museums and art galleries, in part because of its associations with commercial and vernacular uses of the medium, such as fashion photography, advertisements, and home snapshots.
Perhaps even more than the content of his photographs, Jimmy DeSana’s use of gels and tungsten lights to create garish pinks, greens, reds, and oranges flew in the face of accepted taste and allowed him to utilise the medium in decidedly unconventional ways.
In “Storage Boxes” (1980), shown here, a pair of figures sit poolside in lounge chairs, holding hands but with their heads and feet encased in boxes. While many of the figures in his work from this time appear to be confined or dominated by objects, their performances look not like a limitation so much as a relational space that generates a capacity for self-knowledge and pleasure.
DeSana’s photographs frequently feature visual puns. Here, a nude person, perhaps DeSana himself, lies beneath a car with a breathing tube connecting his gas mask to the exhaust pipe. The image appears to be a visual play on “autoerotic asphyxiation,” or the intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for the purposes of sexual arousal. The image could also be interpreted as a metaphor for America’s subservience to car culture and the harm that automobiles cause us, the red glow adding an ominous tone.
Exhibition label
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Instant Camera
1980
Chromogenic print
15 1/8 × 23 in. (38.4 × 58.4 cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Soap Suds
1980
Chromogenic print
15 1/8 × 22 3/4 in. (38.4 × 57.8cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Four Legs with Shoes
1980
Chromogenic print
14 3/4 × 18 7/8 in. (37.5 × 47.9cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Party Picks
1981
Inkjet print, printed 2013
32 3/4 × 49 1/2 in. (83.2 × 125.7cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Kenneth Anger
1980
Chromogenic print
20 × 13 1/2 in. (50.8 × 34.3 cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Throughout his career, DeSana befriended and photographed an older generation of pioneering queer male artists and writers who similarly transgressed societal norms through their work and life. Also like DeSana, many subverted pop culture imagery and operated outside of official institutions.
In a group of photographs from 1984 and 1985, DeSana explored America’s obsession with fat and dieting, tying it in with his own interest in consumption and forms of discipline and pleasure. Bubblegum, for example, is a self-portrait with his cheeks puffed out, blowing a bubble, his oversize shirt and pants bursting at the seams from stuffing and his back slightly arched to emphasise his protruding belly. He printed this image in numerous colours, including bright pink and acid green.
With a wink to the commonalities of darkrooms and backrooms, Sawyer built a red-light district for DeSana’s extensive investigations of BDSM, in which piss is expelled and enjoyed, and gimp-masked figures kneel in toilets or near dog bowls. In Party Picks (1981 above), toothpicks stuck into gums between teeth make a crown of thorns around a gasping mouth, or maybe make that mouth St. Sebastian’s wound. Cardboard (1985 below) offers a room with a single, lurid red band of light and corrugated cardboard that slices a bending body. In such a place, you might think of Samuel Steward’s card catalog of his conquests, or if Flavin’s work is really about its shadows, or what to do with that butt. DeSana’s frisky, familiar portraits reject the po-faced posing of Mapplethorpe and the social-climbing sadism of Helmut Newton. He gets that such proclivities are mind games played with bodies and bets you might want to play them too.
In his series of photographs titled Suburban, Jimmy DeSana continued to photograph anonymous nude figures while making a more explicit connection between S-M and everyday life.
Many of the photographs comically equate attachments to the objects and ideals of postwar suburban life in the U.S. (washing dishes, taking a shower, driving a car) with forms of bondage and discipline. In Cardboard, from 1985 (shown here), a nude figure is intersected by sheets of cardboard.
Lit with tungsten lights and candy-coloured gels, his collaborators often turned their backs to the camera or buried their heads in purses, sinks, toilets, etc. rather than wearing leather masks. This not only protected the identity of his nude models, many of whom were friends, but also contrasted with his better-known portrait work during this period. Perhaps most important, these images continued his subversion of subjectivity. While all the photographs in the Suburban series feature nude figures, DeSana did not intend for the work to be erotic.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Spoon
1985
Silver dye bleach print
7 1/2 × 9 1/2 in. (19.1 × 24.1 cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Socks
1986
Silver dye bleach print
4 3/4 × 9 1/2 in. (12.1 × 24.1cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled (Self Portrait Sleeping)
1985
Silver dye bleach print
9 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (24.1 × 19.1cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled (Male Nude)
1985
Silver dye bleach print
9 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (24.1 × 19.1cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Ties & Roses
1986
Silver dye bleach print
14 3/4 × 19 1/4 in. (37.5 × 48.9cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Balloons
1985
Silver dye bleach print
13 1/4 × 10 1/4 in. (33.7 × 26 cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Cellophane Tape
1985
Silver dye bleach print
13 15/16 × 10 1/2 in. (35.4 × 26.7cm)
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York
In a series of “auto-portraits” from around 1985, DeSana assumed the guise of figures in famous portraits, such as Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. This body of work developed from DeSana’s previous experiments with role-playing, performance, and concealment.
Building on his engagement with colour photography, DeSana transformed these black-and-white negatives by enlarging them with dyed gels and colour dials. After exposing the colour photographic paper, he took the prints to a lab to finish the developing process.
The vivid colour profiles of the Suburban series are riotous, yet the scenes are often subdued, serious, even melancholic. These acid-toned prints are more sinister, more surreal, and less eager to please than the images we often associate with the Pictures Generation. It’s easier to draw a line between DeSana and the surrealist photography of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer than to Cindy Sherman’s plucky film tests or the crisp portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe or Peter Hujar. Further distancing his work from that of his contemporaries, DeSana almost never reveals the identity of his sitters. Faces are almost invariably obscured by a prop: a stocking, a helmet, soap suds, or even the camera itself. The viewers’ innate desire to know the subject is stymied by the unrecognisability of these exploded, contorted anonymous bodies. By making chairs, coat hangers, helmets, and even an iguana an extension of the body, the photographs propose a flattening of the hierarchy between prop and actor, blurring the distinction between stage and sitter, foreground and background, organic and artificial. In much the same way that subjugation and compliance are fundamental to BDSM culture, here the camera becomes dominant, imploring the body to perform for the photographer. DeSana uses these bodies are props, stripping them of agency and compelling them serve the needs of the composition.
DeSana made a career of piercing through the realm of the banal and conventional with the queer and radical. His works suggest that the home itself and the objects within it are in themselves a prop to conceal an arena of libidinal play. For DeSana, the camera acts as catalyst and instigator, a tool used to coerce a performance, a device that invites us to subjugate our egos in the service of latent desires.
Bryan Barcena. “Suburban/Submission,” Focus Essay from FOAM exhibition 09.01.2019 on the Salon 94 website [Online] Cited 20/03/2023
In a 1986 interview with Diego Cortez, Jimmy DeSana remarked on the mutability and transgressive potential of photography: “A photograph is how much you want to lie, how far you want to stretch the truth about the object. And, as photography is always based on real objects, it lends itself, by means of technique or manipulation, to explorations of what may appear to be an absence of reality, balancing on an ambiguous line between concrete and abstract space, between reality and illusion, in a way that no other medium is able to do.”
In a series of “portraits” from the mid 1980s, DeSana played with this tension by obscuring and transforming faces through collage and darkroom techniques. His movement into abstraction – in works that nonetheless address his experience living with HIV / AIDS – was in part a reaction to dilemmas over representations of sexuality and queer bodies during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, from media bias to conservative censorship to activist demands. Critics recognised DeSana’s masquerades and darkroom experiments in colour as tributes to Surrealist photography of the 1920s and 1930s, which still had the power to confound expectations around photography and realism.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
Skilled in the art of negation, DeSana staged intimate scenes that tease out the erotic – in Pants, 1984, a model arches his muscular, shirtless back under bold lighting – yet the artist routinely undermined and lampooned this sexual content: The model’s extremely large pants are filled with stuffing, comically emphasizing his ass and thighs. In this sense, DeSana’s work seems to parody Robert Mapplethorpe’s deadpan oeuvre. In 1979, DeSana published Submission, a photobook poking fun at notions of the body as a sexualized, gendered object. As the title implies, a power dichotomy is at play in the series – the camera assumes the dominant role, forcing the models into the passive ‘sub’ position. The photos … are black-and-white, giving them a self-serious quality, yet, as in his other work, DeSana punctured that effect with dark comedy. In Masking Tape, 1978, a latex bodysuit is traded for the household adhesive, with which a male model has been mummified head to toe – scrotum, penis, nipples, and nostrils excluded. Despite occasional comic absurdity, the photographs still retain a beguiling frisson. DeSana also ably mocked the supposed dangers of sexual alterity by allowing it a certain humanity – a melancholy picture of a hog-tied woman in black lingerie and high heels crouched in a refrigerator (empty save for a dozen eggs) exudes pathos and surprising sophistication. In Television, 1978, real danger in the form of electrocution threatens the supine and masked nude performer (DeSana himself) balancing a TV on his feet. Through this action, DeSana drew out the allure of mass media but underscored its potential for propagating constricting ideologies.
The introduction of beautifully jarring, chromatic lighting to DeSana’s post-Submission scenarios amplifies their urgency and defines his work’s signature aesthetic: slick and otherworldly yet proudly homemade. Thrown against domestic spaces and active bodies, strawberry reds and lysergic greens reverberate wildly. One such multi-hued image, Cowboy Boots, 1984, depicts a nude man in the midst of a one-armed handstand, his four splayed limbs straddling a corner of an apartment, feet and hands covered in tooled-leather cowboy boots. This hybridized body à la Hans Bellmer, not quite an object but a morphing being, defies the behavioural dicta of society. Representing a poignant act of shape-shifting, Bubblegum (Self-Portrait), 1985, an image printed with light-pink dye and made five years before the artist’s AIDS-related death, shows DeSana with his cheeks puffed up while blowing a bubble, his oversize shirt and pants bursting at the seams from stuffing. Such a transformation wryly suggests our physical mutability and the unknown extent to which our bodies and selves might evolve – grossly enlarge, wither away.
Beau Rutland. “Jimmy DeSana,” on the Art Forum website 2013 [Online] 20/03/2023
After his diagnosis with HIV in 1985, DeSana began making a series of still lifes, tackling a genre that for centuries has expressed both the abundance and transitoriness of life and earthly goods.
Like so much of DeSana’s work, this photograph transforms a prosaic object – a softball, with its associations of sports and American culture – into something strange through juxtaposition, scale, and colourisation. The image recalls DeSana’s 1984 self-portrait in which the long, curved scar on his torso evokes a baseball’s stitching.
“‘Abstract photography’ not only turns its back on [the] incessant desire to know and see everything – it seeks to undermine and invert those very intentions,” Jerry Saltz wrote for the catalog that accompanied Jimmy DeSana’s first major curatorial effort at the Emerson in 1989.
The show, which included the work of 26 artists (including: Vikky Alexander, Ellen Brooks, Charlesworth, Morrisroe, Sherman, and Simmons), spoke to how artists were attempting in this era to move beyond the instrumentalisation of representation during a period of intense political divisiveness, and to expand what photography could be as art.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
That uncanny language was shared with Laurie Simmons, known for her staged domestic scenes using dolls and miniature objects that, like the works of DeSana, surrealized suburbia. The two shared a studio until DeSana’s death from AIDS-related illness in 1990. Simmons watched her friend transform after his diagnosis, a change that manifested as both physical degeneration and artistic metamorphosis. “We didn’t want to be painters. We didn’t want to be sculptors,” Simmons recalls. “We wanted that sense of distance and remove. We wanted a tool that we could work with, but that didn’t have anything to do with craft.” Illness forced DeSana to put his camera down and collage. Struggling to make sense of the purpose of the body, and especially the sexualized body, amid a vicious disease that mostly took queer, sexually active bodies like his own, DeSana made sense of his world through chopping and repasting it. The distance and remove that he and Simmons craved, that the camera gave him, was impossible as the reality of death loomed so near. …
The thing that drew us to using a camera was [that] we didn’t want to use our hands. We didn’t want to be painters. We didn’t want to be sculptors. We wanted that sense of distance and remove. We wanted a tool that we could work with, but that didn’t have anything to do with craft. Collage took him to a very intimate, hands-on way of working that’s so much more personal. Yet by rephotographing the collages, he could keep that sense of distance and still see himself as a conceptual artist, which I think was part of how he needed to see himself.
“Collage took him to a very intimate, hands-on way of working that’s so much more personal. Yet by rephotographing the collages, he could keep that sense of distance and still see himself as a conceptual artist, which I think was part of how he needed to see himself.”
“If I could do a show that confused people so much, that was so ambiguous that they didn’t know what to think, but they felt sort of sickened by it and also entertained,” Jimmy DeSana told Laurie Simmons shortly before he passed away from AIDS-related illness in 1990, “then for me that would capture the moment that we;re going through right now.”
For his last major artistic project, DeSana collected his contradictory feelings and images in a book to be titled Salvation. Although he would not complete the volume before his death, he created this maquette. It comprises photomontages of flowers and fragments of male bodies, many recycled from older photographs of DeSana and his partner Darell Bagley. The photographs are black-and-white, but DeSana intended them to be printed with lurid colour through the Cibachrome process.
Ambiguity and opacity became increasingly important to DeSana, especially in reaction to the media’s and other artists’ objectification of queer people living with HIV / AIDS. He also pushed against the expectation that gay artists should somehow counter government inaction and misinformation around the epidemic.
JC: There’s something unrefined about DeSana’s work compared to Mapplethorpe who was more stylistically precise. They must have been aware of each other; their work would feature together in issues of BOMB magazine and such. Of course, back then Mapplethorpe was a lot more famous and upwardly mobile, whereas DeSana seemed more invested in the punk scene. Overall, I appreciate DeSana’s spirit more than his images, many of which strike me as conceptually same-samey. The pictures are cheeky at times though not particularly humorous, so I was as perplexed as you when overhearing someone loudly chuckling at a photograph. To me, there’s too much death-drive going on in the work to laugh. Maybe it’s also because after witnessing Mugler’s flamboyance, finesse, and whimsy, a show like DeSana’s feels like a grim comedown by contrast. I don’t quite know what to make of the “acrobatic” works – contorted nude figures in backbends and pseudo-tantric / yogic poses that sometimes appear as levitation or a magic trick–and then the constant recourse to the stiletto motif – they’re somehow cooler in theory than in practice? The marker cone body as landscape is one of a kind, nobody else thought of that, but beyond this, I feel that had DeSana survived beyond those years of experimentation, he might have been making his best work by now. Of course, that’s total speculation and not entirely fair…
EC: I meant to mention that visitor laughing before, after which we both turned to each other in confusion. She was guffawing at Pink Furniture, which, if I remember correctly, had a blow-up doll hanging in the corner of the room. I do tend to always chuckle at Dog in the Submission series only because it looks like that furious wee puppy is going to bite the shit out of an erection. With his angry little growling face turned towards the camera, it is the perfect shot. Grrr… But I snicker at it more than a full-throated laugh. Full-throated laughing at DeSana feels like you should be put on some sort of watch list.
I agree with what you’re saying about DeSana’s work being still experimental and somewhat unresolved. A lot of work from that Downtown / East Village scene, though I have a special place in my heart for it in all of its flaws, doesn’t quite translate or age well and so much of that is because many of these artists all died so young. That being said, I like DeSana’s work much more than Mapplethorpe’s. Even Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with a whip in his ass feels so precisely posed. In contrast, DeSana’s work just looks like it smells like ball sweat and assholes (this is a compliment). At least DeSana’s subcultural society pics of figures like Debbie Harry, The Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and William S. Burroughs lighten the mood, as do some of the vitrines of zines that don’t include hanging!
This book is the first monograph to present the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering yet under recognised figure in New York’s downtown art, music, and film scenes during the 1970s and ’80s. The book situates DeSana’s work and life within the countercultural and queer contexts in the American South as well as New York, through his involvement in mail art, punk, and No Wave music and film, and artist collectives and publications. Featuring an original text by Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, it includes his major series that helped create a No Wave aesthetic as well as his portraits of art and music luminaries of the time.
Jimmy DeSana: Submission is the first monograph of this pioneering queer punk photographer whose brief but prolific career helped elevate the medium of photography within the contemporary art world. This publication traces his brief yet prolific career through nearly two hundred works and over twenty years that bridged mail-art networks, New York’s 1970s and ’80s subcultures, the illuminating image-play of the “Pictures Generation,” and various responses to HIV / AIDS.
The book showcases DeSana’s extensive involvement in zines, artist collectives, performance art, experimental film, and club culture. Included are his most famous series – 101 Nudes (1972), his first major work made during Atlanta’s gay liberation movement; Submission (1977-1979), created with the writer William Burroughs; and Suburban (1979-1984), which showcases his work as an early adopter of colour photography. During the late 1970s and early ’80s, DeSana was heavily involved in New York’s punk and No Wave scenes. Included in this book are his portraits of such art and music luminaries as Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Patti Astor, David Byrne, John Giorno, Debbie Harry, and Richard Hell. Accompanying these works are DeSana’s more abstract efforts from the late 1980s, after he was diagnosed with AIDS, that show an artist who resisted dominant narratives about the body and sexuality in the early years of the ongoing HIV / AIDS epidemic.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum website
Jimmy DeSana Submission content page
Jimmy DeSana Submission Performative Identities and Radical Networks pp. 10-11
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 30-31
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 32-33
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 60-61
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 66-67
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 116-117
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 124-125
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 126-127
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052 Phone: (718) 638-5000
Opening hours:
Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays
Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day
After last week’s long piece of writing something more succinct this week…
“Luces y Sombras translates as Lights and Shadows. The exhibition reflects many themes: the landscape, urban life, fantasy and, especially among younger generations, gender and invented situations infused with symbolism. It begins with works by photographers active at the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), notably Manuel Álvarez Bravo, considered Mexico’s first truly modern photographer. It also includes visiting artists such as the Americans Paul Strand and Edward Weston.
Later works by such figures as Manuel Carrillo, Mariana Yampolsky, and Graciela Iturbide reveal the ongoing emphasis by Mexican photographers on everyday life and Mexico’s Indigenous communities. Recent generations of photographers have found new purpose in documenting how ways of life in Mexico continue to be changed by urbanisation, migration, and the pervasive influence of popular Western culture and mass media.” (Exhibition text from the TAM)
It is interesting to hear British photographer Chris Killip’s thoughts on Mexico through a foreign lens. This quote from an upcoming posting on Killip’s work:
He says he stayed [in Newcastle] because he liked it, and that he might never have left had the Harvard job not come along – but he was also inspired by the Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka, who came to visit him early on and “talked about the importance of being in one place, to get under the surface of things”. He was also interested in how differently Paul Strand and Manuel Alvarez Bravo photographed Mexico, he says, despite Strand’s sympathetic, card-carrying Communist credentials.
“Strand beautifies poverty and simplifies the Mexican people into ‘the poor Mexicans, but isn’t this wonderful visually’,” he says. “But Alvarez Bravo was Mexican, his pictures are very complicated because he was able to accept ambiguities and contradictions, which Strand couldn’t… I think because I lived in Newcastle for so long I was able to accept ambiguities and not worry about them, just accept them and show them. I wanted to be there and be more accepting.”1
As I have said in a previous posting on Mexican photography there is something so essential and grounded, so darkly soulful about Mexican photography. They never pull their punches, not just interested in the beauty of people and place but also the rituals, traditions and politics of Mexican society.
As ever, it is the work of Mexican artist Manuel Álvarez Bravo that steals my heart. His work exudes the spirit of the country through its sensitivity and connection to the earth from which he was born. The light and form in Bravo La Siesta de los Peregrinos; the light and form in Retrato de lo Eterno (1935, below). I have studied his work quite closely. He is the blessed one. Through his music, he captures the light and life of Mexico, the spirit of the eternal, “the sunlight [as] a discreet veil that turns the shadows into velvet.” His work is the art of the People.
Further,
“One of my early heroes in photography was Manuel Alvarez Bravo whom I rate as one of the best photographers that has ever lived, up there with Atget and Sudek. His photograph Parabola optica (Optical Parable, 1931, below) lays the foundation for an inherent language of Mexican photography: that of a parable, a short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson. Many Mexican photographs tell such stories based on the mythology of the country: there are elements of the absurd, surrealism, macabre, revolution, political and socio-economic issues, also of death, violence, beauty, youth, sexuality and religion to name but a few – a search for national identity that is balanced in the photographs of Bravo by a sense of inner peace and redemption. This potent mix of issues and emotions is what makes Mexican photography so powerful and substantive. In the “presence” (or present, the awareness of the here and now) of Mexican photography there is a definite calligraphy of the body in space in most of the work. This handwriting is idiosyncratic and emotive; it draws the viewer into an intimate narrative embrace.
Unlike most Australian documentary photography where there is an observational distance present in the photographs – a physical space between the camera/photographer and the subject – Mexican documentary photography is imbued with a revolutionary spirit and validated by the investment of the photographer in the subject itself, as though the image is the country is the photographer. There is an essence and energy to the Mexican photographs that seems to turn narrative on its head, unlike the closed loop present in the tradition of Australian story telling. The intimate, swirling narratives of Mexican photography could almost be termed lyrical socio-realist.”2
What is a revelation to me in this posting is work by two Mexican photographers who I have never heard of before and I should have because they are very good: Manuel Carrillo and Flor Garduño. Carillo joined the Club Fotográfico de México at the age of 49. As James McArdle observes the politics of Carrillo’s photographic work is anchored to his own cultural identity as a Mexican by birth and his time spent in America.
“He quickly found his voice by making images of everyday life throughout Mexico, celebrating local culture and the human spirit. His work is an extension of Mexicanidad, a movement begun in the 1920s to forge a Mexican national identity free of foreign influence… His interest in indigenous cultures and his use of bright sunlight to create compositions with dramatic shadows and bold geometric forms has roots in the photographic work of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, American modernist photographers active in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than idealising, aestheticising, or moralising, Carrillo portrays Mexico from the perspective of an affectionate observer, transforming ordinary moments into expressions of quiet eloquence.”3
A certain paradox can be noted here: the wish for a Mexican identity free of foreign influence and photographs forged in the American modernist tradition. Interesting. It doesn’t stop the visceral photographs being very “Mexican” for all that.
“Garduño’s photographs create a bridge between the present and the past by portraying natural elements such as water, trees, earth, animals, and atmosphere. Garduño worked for the Department of Public Education in her native Mexico, traveling to rural areas to work with indigenous communities. From this she developed her style and got to know what she has referred to as the “profound truth” of the countryside in the Americas. Her work was also influenced by artists Kati Horna, who worked in a surrealistic vein, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who attended carefully to the tonal qualities of his photographs. Garduño similarly uses compositional and darkroom techniques to achieve moody, evocative images.”4
In the work of Mexican photographers – Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, Manuel Carrillo and Flor Garduño – you can palpably feel the essentialness of the Mexican people and begin to understand their connection to the land from which they come. Much as in the work of Chris Killip in England with his embeddedness5 with the people of North Yorkshire … there is an honesty, integrity and openness to their work which, in the case of Mexican photography, has continuous strands (like a river) running through it: that is, a synthesis of aesthetics, politics, land and spirit. Their work is of the people for the people offering a “profound truth” about the nature of their existence in the countryside in the Americas.
5/ Embeddedness: an exchange that takes place within and is regulated by society rather than being located in a social vacuum.
Many thankx to the Tacoma Art Museum, Mark I. Chester and Steven Miller for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
More than 100 photographs spanning more than 85 years of Mexican culture and history are coming to Tacoma Art Museum in the exhibition Luces y Sombras: Images of Mexico I Photographs from the Bank of America Collection.
Luces y Sombras reflects a broad span of Mexico’s modern history, beginning with work by photographers active in the 1920s, not long after the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution. A struggle for political power that began with the overthrow in 1911 of Mexico’s authoritarian president, Porfirio Díaz, became the catalyst for a popular uprising of campesinos, agrarian indigenous and mestizo (mixed race) people who fought for agrarian and social reform. Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata’s rallying cry, “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty), not only galvanised the hundreds of thousands of campesinos who joined the revolt but in its wake, came to represent the affirmation of rural people, whose lives were inextricably tied to the land.
Many images in this exhibition manifest the cultural values that came to the fore in the decades following the Revolution, when politicians and intellectuals alike endeavoured to reconstruct and, indeed, re-envision their nation. In the cultural sphere, Mexico’s new leadership sought to purge the nation of the European influence favoured by the Díaz regime. Nationalist ideals and a broad-based exploration of Mexicanidad (the quality of being Mexican) were accompanied by a new reverence for Mexico’s indigenous roots and for everyday men and women. Photographs made throughout the last century of indigenous and mestizo people reflect not only the survival of indigenous communities and traditions, but also the realities of poverty and social marginalisation that persist for a large lower class up to the present day.
Luces y Sombras reflects many other themes embraced by photographers in Mexico, both native and foreign-born – the landscape, urban life and, especially among younger generations, gender and invented situations infused with symbolism. The inclusion of such foreign photographers as Paul Strand, Elliott Erwitt, Aaron Siskind, Danny Lyon, and Nan Goldin speaks to another key component of the history of photography in Mexico – the significance of a nation seen through foreign eyes.
In gathering work by such a diversity of voices, Luces y Sombras provides vivid testimony to the character of life in a nation in the throes of reinvention, modernisation and continued change over the course of the last century.
Text from the TAM website
Ana Casas Broda (Mexican born Spain, b. 1965) Milk III (2) (Leche III (2))
2010
from the series Kinderwunsch (The Desire to Have Children)(El deseo de tener hijos)
Inkjet print on cotton paper Image Overall: 23 5/8 × 35 1/2 in. (60 x 90.2cm)
Bank of America Collection
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Mendicant girl – close up, Guanajuato, Guanajuato (Sin título (Pordiocerita – close up, Guanajuato, Guanajuato))
1930
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 7 1/2 × 9 1/4 in. (19.1 x 23.5cm)
Bank of America Collection
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Untitled (Man inside store, contrasted, baskets on the wall, Zacapoaxtla, Pueblo) (Sin título (Hombre dentro tienda, contrastada, canastas, pared, Zacapoaxtla, Pueblo))
1975
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 7 3/4 × 10 in. (19.7 x 25.4cm)
Bank of America Collection
Manuel Carrillo worked in Mexico in the middle of the 20th century, a time in Mexico that witnessed great political changes and social transformations and a moment in the country’s history when it was establishing its strong cultural identity.
Carrillo’s work, along with the well-known Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Tina Modotti and the American photographer Edward Weston, among others, was a contributing force as to how Mexico saw itself and how the rest of the world came to perceive that complex country. A bit of the understanding and empathy for the daily life of the Mexican people seen in Carrillo’s work would be of great help in how Mexico is perceived today.
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Untitled (Seller of ropes and belts, Oaxaca, Oaxaca) (Sin título (Vendedor reatas y cinturónes, Oaxaca, Oaxaca))
Nd
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 7 3/8 × 9 5/8 in. (18.7 x 24.4cm)
Bank of America Collection
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Untitled (Shawl in the air, Oaxaca, Oaxaca) (Sin título (Rebozo al aire, Oaxaca, Oaxaca))
1958
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 9 1/2 × 8 5/8 in. (24.1 x 21.9cm)
Bank of America Collection
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Untitled (Dog on grave, cemetery, Dolores, Mexico City) (Sin título (Perro sobre tumba, panteon, Dolores, México D.F.)
1930
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 8 × 10 3/4 in. (20.3 x 27.3cm)
Bank of America Collection
Mexican photographer Manuel Carrillo (1906-1989) turned to the camera fairly late in life, joining the Club Fotográfico de México at the age of 49. He quickly found his voice by making images of everyday life throughout Mexico, celebrating local culture and the human spirit. His work is an extension of Mexicanidad, a movement begun in the 1920s to forge a Mexican national identity free of foreign influence. Stylistically, however, Carrillo was inspired by Mexican artists trained abroad and international artists who converged on Mexico during that fertile period. His interest in indigenous cultures and his use of bright sunlight to create compositions with dramatic shadows and bold geometric forms has roots in the photographic work of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, American modernist photographers active in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than idealising, aestheticising, or moralising, Carrillo portrays Mexico from the perspective of an affectionate observer, transforming ordinary moments into expressions of quiet eloquence.
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Untitled (Sick woman on bench, San Miguel Allende) (Sin título (Enferma en banca, San Miguel Allende))
1970
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 8 × 10 3/4 in. (20.3 x 27.3cm)
Bank of America Collection
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Untitled (Camila from above, two faces – close up), Mexico City (Sin título (Camila desde arriba, dos cars – close up), México D.F.))
1961
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 7 3/4 × 7 in. (19.7 x 17.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
By contrast, one might consider the mobility of framing in the work of Mexican Manuel Carrillo (b. 1906) who died on this date in 1989. The influence of American Modernist photographers and artists of his time, and of his better-known compatriot and contemporary Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002), is evident in this extreme point of view.
The aerial angle presents the tops of subjects’ heads, but with sufficient offset to allow a reading of the faces; the curiosity of the young boy and the protectiveness of the mother, both enclosed within a continuous ribbon of cloth and embraced by the square camera frame. The top-down view gives privileged entrée into that intense maternal relationship, encompassed by the geometry of the tiled background that contrasts with the cloth, set at an angle that enhances the figures’ complementary emotional impulses.
Aside from aesthetics, the politics of Carrillo’s photographic work is anchored to his own cultural identity as a Mexican by birth and as an American through his crossing into that country at the age of 16, when in 1922 he left Mexico for New York, becoming an Arthur Murray waltz and tango champion. When in 1930 he returned to Mexico City, he remained until his retirement. Taking up photography in 1955, he joined, at age 49, the Club Fotografico de Mexico and the Photographic Society of America, and within 5 years held his first international exhibition titled, Mi Pueblo (“My People”) in 1960 at the Chicago Public Library. Like influential writers, photographers, and artists, such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Carrillo identified with Mexicanidad, a nationalist and anti-colonial cultural movement that emerged in the 1920s after Mexico’s Revolution. He was inducted as an honorary citizen of EL Paso, Texas in 1980 by the Photographic Society of America.
James McArdle. “January 20: Angle,” on the On This Date in Photography website 20/01/2018 [Online] Cited 31/12/2022
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Untitled (Cross, human shadow, Tepeapulco, Mexico) (Sin título (Cruz, sombra humana, Tepeapulco, México))
1973
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 9 × 7 in. (22.9 x 17.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Untitled (Old lady, alley, pyramidal shadows, Guanajuato) (Sin título (Viejita, callejón, sombras piramidales, Guanajuato))
Nd
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 9 × 7 in. (22.9 x 17.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989) Untitled (Toluca pulque bar (Drunken Barrels)), Toluca, Mexico) (Sin título (Pulquería de Toluca Barriles beodos)), Toluca, México))
1970
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 7 3/4 × 9 3/4 in. (19.7 x 24.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
The photographs in Luces y Sombras span the post-Revolutionary era of the 1920s up until the present day. With work by 28 photographers, both Mexican and other nationalities, this exhibition provides vivid testimony to the character of life in a nation in the throes of reinvention, modernisation and continued change, over the course of the last century. …
Luces y Sombras reflects a wide range of modern Mexican history, beginning with the works of photographers active in the 1920s, shortly after the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution. A struggle for political power that began with the 1911 overthrow of Mexico’s authoritarian President Porfirio Díaz and became a catalyst for a popular uprising of peasants, agrarian Indians, and mestizos (of mixed race) who fought for land and social reform. The rallying cry of peasant leader Emiliano Zapata, “Land and Liberty,” not only galvanised the hundreds of thousands of peasants who joined the revolt, but became the affirmation of the rural people, whose lives were inextricably linked to the earth.
Many images in this exhibition manifest the cultural values that emerged in the decades after the Revolution, as politicians and intellectuals strove to rebuild, and indeed, disimagine their nation. In the cultural sphere, Mexico’s new leadership sought to purge the nation of the European influence favored by the Díaz regime. Nationalist ideals and a broad exploration of mexicanidad (the quality of being Mexican), were accompanied by a new reverence for Mexico’s indigenous roots and for ordinary men and women. The photographs taken throughout the last century of indigenous and mestizo peoples reflect not only the survival of indigenous communities and traditions, but also the reality of poverty and social marginalisation that persist for a large lower class to this day.
Luces y Sombras translates as Lights and Shadows. The exhibition reflects many themes: the landscape, urban life, fantasy and, especially among younger generations, gender and invented situations infused with symbolism. It begins with works by photographers active at the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), notably Manuel Álvarez Bravo, considered Mexico’s first truly modern photographer. It also includes visiting artists such as the Americans Paul Strand and Edward Weston.
Later works by such figures as Manuel Carrillo, Mariana Yampolsky, and Graciela Iturbide reveal the ongoing emphasis by Mexican photographers on everyday life and Mexico’s Indigenous communities. Recent generations of photographers have found new purpose in documenting how ways of life in Mexico continue to be changed by urbanisation, migration, and the pervasive influence of popular Western culture and mass media. Alongside these images, photographs by artists such as Alejandra Laviada, Karina Juárez, and Humberto Ríos explore contemporary issues or convey the artist’s personal reactions to the world around them.
This exhibition and gallery texts have been provided by the Bank of America Art in our Communities® program.
Luces y Sombras refleja una amplia gama de la historia moderna de México, comenzado con las obras de fotógrafos activos en la década de 1920, poco después de la conclusión de la Revolución Mexicana. Una lucha por el poder político que comenzó con el derrocamiento en 1911 del presidente autoritario de México, Porfirio Díaz, y que se convirtió en catalizador de un levantamiento popular de campesinos, indígenas agrarios y mestizos (de raza mixta) que lucharon por la reforma agraria y social. El grito de guerra del líder campesino Emiliano Zapata, “Tierra y Libertad“, no solo galvanizó a los cientos de miles de campesinos que se unieron a la revuelta, sino que se convirtió en la afirmación de la gente rural, cuyas vidas estaban inextricablemente vinculadas a la tierra.
Muchas imágenes en esta exposición manifiestan los valores culturales que surgieron en las décadas posteriores a la Revolución, cuando políticos e intelectuales se esforzaron por reconstruir, y de hecho, desimaginar su nación. En la esfera cultural, el nuevo liderazgo de México busco purgar la nación de la influencia europea favorecida por el régimen de Díaz. Los ideales nacionalistas y una amplia exploración de la mexicanidad (la cualidad de ser mexicano), fueron acompañados por una nueva reverencia por las raíces indígenas de México y por los hombres y mujeres comunes. Las fotografías realizadas a lo largo del último siglo de los pueblos indígenas y mestizos refleja no solo la supervivencia de las comunidades y tradiciones indígenas, sino también la realidad de la pobreza y marginación social que persisten para una gran clase baja hasta el presente día.
Luces y Sombras refleja muchos otros temas abarcados por los fotógrafos en México, tanto nativos como extranjeros: el paisaje, la vida urbana y, especialmente entre las generaciones mas jóvenes, el género y situaciones inventadas infundidas de simbolismo. La inclusión de fotógrafos extranjeros como Paul Strand, Elliot Erwitt, Aaron Siskind, Danny Lyon y Nan Goldin habla de otro componente clave de la historia de la fotografía en México: el significado de una nación vista a travéz de ojos extranjeros.
Al recopilar las obras de una diversidad de voces, Luces y Sombras brinda un testimonio vívido del carácter de la vida en una nación en pleno proceso de invención, modernización y cambio continuo a lo largo del siglo pasado.
Esta exhibición y los textos de esta galería fueron brindados por el programa Bank of America Art in our Communities®.
Mexico Through a Foreign Lens
Mexico became a magnet for American artists and photographers in the post-Revolutionary era, an idealistic period when artists, musicians, writers and other intellectuals sought to forge a cohesive nationalist identity through the arts. This cultural renaissance, led by such celebrated figures as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, if not for the country’s sheer exoticism to foreigners, endowed Mexico with an allure similar to that of Paris for earlier generations of artists.
Mexico held great appeal for figures such as Edward Weston and his partner, the Italian Tina Modotti, who arrived in Mexico City in 1923 in search of bohemian freedom and new creative possibilities. During his few years in Mexico, Weston transformed his artistic vision, articulating a modernist aesthetic that veered away from the picturesque, soft-focus style of photography prevalent at the turn of the century, in favour of an approach that emphasised sharp resolution and form. the details, or as he once wrote, “the quintessence of the thing itself.” Both photographers had a lasting impact in Mexico – Weston by promoting an aesthetic that decisively influenced the course of modern photography, and Modotti, as a pioneering photographer and model of the socially and politically engaged artist.
Another key early figure in Mexico is Paul Strand, who took a deeply humanistic approach in photographing indigenous people and their environments while traveling around the country in the 1930s. This exhibition also contains work by American photographers active in the 1950s and 1960s. Mexico remained a destination for artists and free spirits in these years, including members of the Beat Generation, counter-culture writers and musicians active at mid-century who found in Mexico ample opportunity for both creative inspiration and debauchery. Such photographers who are now considered leading figures of this era, including Elliott Erwitt, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan and Danny Lyon, spent extended time in Mexico and created significant bodies of work.
México a travéz de una lente extranjera
México se convirtió en un imán para los artistas y fotógrafos americanos en la era posrevolucionaria, un período idealista en el que artistas, músicos, escritores y otros intelectuales buscaron forjar una identidad nacionalista cohesiva a través de las artes. Este renacimiento cultural, liderado por figuras tan célebres como Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo – sino fuera por el exotismo del país para los extranjeros – dotó a México un atractivo similar al de París para los artistas de generaciones anteriores.
México tuvo un gran atractivo para figuras como Edward Weston y su compañera, la italiana Tina Modotti, que llegaron a la Ciudad de México en 1923 en busca de libertad bohemia y nuevas posibilidades creativas. Durante sus pocos años en México, Weston transformó su visión artística, articulando una estética modernista que se apartó del estilo pintoresco de enfoque suave de la fotografía que prevalecía a principios del siglo, en favor de un enfoque que enfatizaba la forma y la resolución nítida de los detalles, o como escribió una vez, “la quintaesencia de la cosa misma.” Ambos fotógrafos tuvieron un impacto duradero en México – Weston al promover una estética que influyó decisivamente en el curso de la fotografía moderna, y Modotti, como una fotógrafa pionera y modelo del artista social y políticamente comprometido.
Otra figura clave en México es Paul Strand, quien adoptó un enfoque profundamente humanista al fotografiar a los indígenas y sus entornos mientras viajaba por el país en la década de 1930. Esta exposición también contiene las obras de fotógrafos americanos activos en las décadas de 1950 y 1960. México siguió siendo un destino para artistas y espíritus libres en estos años, incluidos los miembros de Beat Generation, escritores de contracultura y músicos activos a mediados de siglo que encontraron en México una gran oportunidad tanto de inspiración creativa. Tales fotógrafos que ahora se consideran figuras destacadas de esta era como Elliott Erwitt, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan y Danny Lyon, pasaron mucho tiempo en México y crearon importantes obras.
Contemporary Voices
Photography made in Mexico over the last twenty years or so encompasses distinct tendencies. There exists, on the one hand, the continued vitality of an aesthetic that can be traced as far back as the 1920s, favouring sharp-focus black-and-white photography and a preoccupation with recording everyday life. But especially since the 1980s, photographers have approached the medium with a sense of freedom, embracing forms of image that radically depart from long-established modes. This kind of experimentation with the medium, although a lesser recognised aspect of photography in Mexico, is not new. As early as the 1920s, smaller numbers of photographers created images with unconventional approaches, whether through darkroom manipulation, photomontage or constructing scenes for the camera. Younger generations have extended this spirit of experimentation, deploying the medium in conceptual projects and elaborately staging images to craft pointed statements about race, gender and political issues. As a result, the current photography scene in Mexico is remarkably diverse. Its practitioners respect the medium’s remarkable history in their country while illuminating timely subject matter and devising new modes of working with the camera and with digital means.
This exhibition contains the work of younger photographers whose work examines the complex construction of identity in the millennial era, whether with Ana Casas Broda’s idiosyncratic explorations of childhood, or portrayals of gender by Luis Arturo Aguirre, Nelson Morales and Roberto Tondopó. Photographs by Alejandra Laviada and Humberto Ríos reflect another mode in contemporary photography: to stage scenes, whether with individuals or with objects, for the camera – often a means of evoking dreams, the subconscious and psychological states.
Voces contemporáneas
La fotografía realizada en México durante los últimos veinte años abarca distintas tendencias. Por un lado, existe le vitalidad continúa de una estética que se remonta a la década de 1920, favoreciendo la fotografía en blanco y negro con enfoque nítido y la preocupación por la grabación de la vida cotidiana. Pero especialmente desde la década de 1980, los fotógrafos se ha acercado al medio con un sentido de libertad, abrazando formas de imagen que se alejan radicalmente de los modos establecidos desde hace mucho tiempo. Este tipo de experimentación con el medio, aunque es un aspecto menos reconocido de la fotografía en México, no es nuevo. Ya en la década de 1920, un número menor de fotógrafos crearon imágenes con enfoques no convencionales, ya sea a través de la manipulación en el cuarto oscuro, el fotomontaje o la construcción de escenas para la cámara. Las generaciones más jóvenes han ampliado este espíritu de experimentación, desplegando el medio en proyectos conceptuales y elaborando imágenes para hacer declaraciones puntuales sobre cuestiones de raza, género y problemas políticos. Como resultado, la escena fotográfica actual en México es notablemente diversa. Sus profesionales respetan la extraordinaria historia del medio en su país al tiempo que ilustran temas oportunos y diseñan nuevos modos de trabajar con la cámara y con medios digitales.
Esta exposición contiene las obras de fotógrafos mas jóvenes, que examina la compleja construcción de la identidad en la era del milenio, ya sea con las idiosincrásicas exploraciones de la infancia de Ana Casas Broda, o representaciones del género de Luis Arturo Aguirre, Nelson Morales y Roberto Tondopó. Las fotografías de Alejandra Laviada y Humberto Ríos reflejan otro modo en la fotografía contemporánea: crear escenas, ya sea con individuos o con objetos, para la cámara, a menudo un medio de evocar sueños, estados subconscientes y psicológicos.
Before the Conquest, all art was of the people, and popular art has never ceased to exist in Mexico. The art called popular is fugitive in character, with less of the impersonal and intellectual characteristics of the schools. It is the work of talent nourished by personal experience and that of the community – rather than being taken from the experiences of painters in other times and other cultures. ~ Manuel Álvarez Bravo
The perspective of Mexicanidad, the quality of being Mexican, sought to remove colonial influences from Mexican art. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, artists and intellectuals came together to forge a new Mexican culture, one that placed new value on Mexico’s indigenous, working-class and agrarian roots as a repudiation of dictator Porfirio Díaz’s focus on wealthy, powerful and often white individuals. Known as the Mexican Cultural Renaissance, this movement gave rise to art that defined a new sense of Mexican identity. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Latin America’s best-known photographer, made visually sophisticated photographs with a formally complex approach often including symbolic elements. He didn’t identify as such, but many viewers have seen surrealist aspects in his work. His work often looks at Mexico’s traditional cultures as they experience significant and rapid change.
Artists active in the decades after the Mexican Revolution, examined what it meant to be Mexican, without the colonial, European focus of the dictatorship. Manuel Carrillo documented street scenes, workers and children with empathy and care, seeking to record a cultural identity with attention to form and composition. Graciela Iturbide makes documentary photographs that are rich with metaphor and grace, finding spirituality and beauty in traditions and everyday life.
Antes de la Conquista, todo el arte era popular. El arte nunca ha dejado de existir en México. El arte llamado popular es de carácter fugitivo, con menos de las características impersonales e intelectuales de las escuelas. Son obras de talento alimentado por la experiencia personal y la de la comunidad – en lugar de ser tomado de las experiencias de los pintores en otros tiempos y otras culturas. ~ Manuel Álvarez Bravo
La perspectiva de la mexicanidad, la cualidad de ser mexicano, buscaba eliminar las influencias coloniales del arte mexicano. Después de la revolución mexicana de 1910-1920, los artistas e intelectuales se unieron creando una nueva cultura mexicana dieron un nuevo valor a las raíces indígenas, de la clase trabajadora y agrarias de México como un repudio al enfoque del dictador Porfirio Díaz en los individuos ricos, poderosos y a menudo blancos. Este movimiento, conocido como el Renacimiento Cultural Mexicano, dio lugar a un arte que le atribuyó un nuevo sentido a la identidad mexicana. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, el fotógrafo mas conocido de América Latina, hizo fotografías visualmente sofisticadas con un enfoque formalmente complejo que a menudo incluye elementos simbólicos. No se identificó como tal, pero muchos espectadores han visto elementos surrealistas en sus obras. Estas a menudo analizan las culturas tradicionales de México a medida que experimentan un cambio significativo y rápido.
Artistas activos en las décadas posteriores a la Revolución Mexicana, examinaron lo que significaba ser mexicano, sin el enfoque colonial y europeo de la dictadura. Manuel Carrillo documentó escenas callejeras, trabajadores y niños con empatía y cuidado, buscando registrar una identidad cultural con atención a la forma y composición. Graciela Iturbide hace fotografías documentales que son ricas en metáfora y gracia, encontrando espiritualidad y belleza en las tradiciones y en la vida cotidiana.
Exhibition text from the TAM
Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023) Guanajuato, Mexico
1957
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 8 1/2 × 13 1/2 in. (21.6 x 34.3cm)
Bank of America Collection
Flor Garduño (Mexican, b.1957) Cloud, Mexico (Nube, México)
1982
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 13 × 17 in. (33 x 43.2cm)
Bank of America Collection
Flor Garduño (Mexican, b. 1957) Tree of Life, Mexico (Arbol de la vida, México)
1982
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 13 × 17 in. (33 x 43.2cm)
Bank of America Collection
Garduño’s photographs create a bridge between the present and the past by portraying natural elements such as water, trees, earth, animals, and atmosphere. Garduño worked for the Department of Public Education in her native Mexico, traveling to rural areas to work with indigenous communities. From this she developed her style and got to know what she has referred to as the “profound truth” of the countryside in the Americas. Her work was also influenced by artists Kati Horna, who worked in a surrealistic vein, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who attended carefully to the tonal qualities of his photographs. Garduño similarly uses compositional and darkroom techniques to achieve moody, evocative images.
Flor Garduño (Mexican, b. 1957) Zinacantec Wedding, Mexico (Matrimonio Zinacanteco, México)
1987
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 17 5/8 × 13 1/2 in. (44.8 x 34.3cm)
Bank of America Collection
Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico
The photographs of Graciela Iturbide not only bear witness to Mexican society but express an intense personal and poetic lyricism about her native country. One of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, Iturbide captures everyday life and its cultures, rituals, and religions, while also raising questions about paradoxes and social injustice in Mexican society. Her photographs tell a visual story of Mexico since the late 1970s – a country in constant transition, defined by the coexistence of the historical and modern as a result of the culture’s rich amalgamation of cultures. For Iturbide, photography is a way of life and a way of seeing and understanding Mexico and its beauty, challenges, and contradictions.
In the summer of 2018, Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, and members of the exhibition team visited Graciela Iturbide at her home and studio in Mexico City. In this documentary, produced by the MFA, the artist discusses the different series and themes explored in this exhibition, as well as her creative process.
Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) Cemetery, Juchitán, Oaxaca (Cementerio, Juchitán, Oaxaca)
1992
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 12 1/4 × 8 3/4 in. (31.1 x 22.2cm)
Bank of America Collection
Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) The Chickens, Juchitán, México (Los pollos, Juchitán, México)
1979 (negative); print c. 1992 Image Overall: 11 3/4 × 7 3/4 in. (29.8 x 19.7cm)
Bank of America Collection
Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) Sponge Vendor, Oaxaca (Vendedora de zacate, Oaxaca)
1974 (negative); print 1992
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 18 1/8 × 12 1/2 in. (46 x 31.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) The Sacrifice, La Mixteca, Oaxaca (El sacrificio, la Mixteca, Oaxaca)
1992
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 16 7/8 × 12 1/4 in. (42.9 x 31.1cm)
Bank of America Collection
Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) Angel Woman, Sonora Desert, Mexico (Mujer ángel, desierto de Sonora, México)
1979 (negative); printed later
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 9 1/2 × 13 in. (24.1 x 33cm)
Bank of America Collection
Kenro Izu (Japanese, b. 1949) Tajín #13
1987 (negative and print)
From the series Sacred Places
Platinum palladium print Image Overall: 7 3/4 × 9 3/4 in. (19.7 x 24.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Truck in Nueva Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico (Camión en nuevas casas grandes, Chihuahua, México)
1975 (negative and print)
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 8 × 12 in. (20.3 x 30.5cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Church, Cuapiaxtla, Mexico (Iglesia, Cuapiaxtla, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 6 1/4 × 4 7/8 in. (15.9 x 12.4cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Woman, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, Mexico (Mujer, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 6 3/8 × 5 in. ( 16.2 x 12.7cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Women of Santa Ana, Michoacán, Mexico (Mujeres de Santa Ana, Michoacán, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 5 5/8 × 6 1/8 in. (14.3 x 15.6cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Woman and Baby, Hidalgo, Mexico (Mujer y bebe, Hidalgo, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 5 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (14 x 16.5cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Near Saltillo, Mexico (Cerca de Saltillo, Mexico)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 5 3/8 × 6 3/4 in. (13.7 x 17.1cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Young Woman and Boy, Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico (Mujer joven y niño, Toluca de Lerdo, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 5 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (14 x 16.5 cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Men of Santa Ana, Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacán (Hombres de Santa Ana, Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacá)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 6 7/8 × 5 1/4 in. (17.5 x 13.3cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) White Plaza, Puebla, Mexico (Plaza blanca, Puebla, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 5 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (14 x 16.5cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Boy, Uruapan, Michoacán, Mexico (Niño, Uruapan, Michoacán, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 10 × 7 7/8 in. (25.4 x 20cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Man, Tenancingo de Degollado, Mexico (Hombre, Tenancingo de Degollado, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 6 3/8 × 5 in. (16.2 x 12.7cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Boy, Uruapan, Michoacán, Mexico (Niño, Uruapan, Michoacán, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 6 1/2 × 5 1/4 in. (16.5 x 13.3cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Virgin San Felipe, Oaxaca, Mexico (Virgen San Felipe, Oaxaca, Mexico)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 10 1/4 × 7 7/8 in. (26 x 20cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cristo, Oaxaca, Mexico (Cristo, Oaxaca, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 11 × 8 1/2 in. (27.9 x 21.6cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Church Gateway, Hidalgo, Mexico (Puerta de iglesia, Hidalgo, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 10 1/2 × 8 1/4 in. (26.7 x 21cm)
Bank of America Collection
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cristo with Thorns, Huexotla, Mexico (Cristo con espinas, Huexotla, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure Image Overall: 10 1/8 × 7 7/8 in. (25.7 x 20cm)
Bank of America Collection
Andrés Juárez Troncoso (Mexicano, b. 1972) The Virgin of the Heights (La virge n de las alturas)
2016
From the series The Spotless Others
Digital print Image Overall: 20 1/8 × 29 1/2 in. (51.1 x 74.9cm)
Bank of America Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Pyramid of the Sun, Mexico (Pirámide del Sol, México)
1923
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 7 1/2 × 9 3/8 in. (19.1 x 23.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
Mariana Yampolsky (Mexican, b. 1925) Stable (Caballeriza)
1982 (negative); print c. 1992
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 13 × 17 3/4 in. (33 x 45.1cm)
Bank of America Collection
Mariana Yampolsky (Mexican, b. 1925) Caress, San Simón de la Laguna (Caricia, San Simón de la Laguna)
1989
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 9 × 12 1/4 in. (22.9 x 31.1cm)
Bank of America Collection
Mariana Yampolsky (Mexican, b. 1925) Head Cover, Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca (Huipil de tapar, Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca)
1989
Gelatin silver print Image Overall: 13 1/2 × 13/12 in. (34.3 x 34.3cm)
Bank of America Collection
Tacoma Art Museum
1701 Pacific Avenue
Tacoma, WA 98402
The Art Blart archive has been going since November 2008. This is the first time I have posted on the avant-garde artist Isle Bing and her documentary humanism. Elements of Modernism, movement, New Vision, Bahuas, Surrealism, abstraction, form, geometry are all spontaneously and intuitively, precisely and poetically expressed in the artist’s work. Manipulation, solarisation, enlargement of fragments and cropping in the darkroom enhance the original negative.
“In addition to numerous portraits, Ilse Bing was primarily interested in urban motifs. They were fascinated by architectural elements and structures as well as urban hustle and bustle. Her way of working repeatedly explores the tracing of symmetry and rhythm in the experience of everyday situations.”1
“In Paris, Ilse Bing forged her style [using a Leica], combining poetry and realism, dreamlike enchantment and the clarity of modernity. She sought contrasts and original juxtapositions that transformed the banal reality of daily life into a new idea.”2
“Ilse Bing was once amongst the very first few women photographers to influentially master the avant-garde handheld Leica 35mm camera in the 1930s. She was also amongst the first to use solarisation, electronic flash and night photography, and established her own distinctive photographic style adoring romanticism, symbolism and dream imagery of surrealism.”3
“It was a time of exploration and discovery. … We wanted to show what the camera could do that no brush could do, and we broke every rule. We photographed into the light – even photographed the light, used distorted perspective, and showed movement as a blur. What we photographed was new, too – torn paper, dead leaves, puddles in the street—people thought it was garbage! But going against the rules opened the doors to new possibilities.” ~ Ilse Bing
3/ Anonymous. “Ilse Bing: Paris and Beyond,” on the Exibart street website [Online] Cited 02/01/2023
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Ilse Bing (Frankfurt, 1899 – New York, 1998) was born into a well-off Jewish family. Having discovered her true vocation while preparing the illustrations for her academic thesis, in 1929 she abandoned her university studies in order to focus entirely on photography. The medium would be her chosen form of expression for the following thirty years of her fascinating life and career.
In 1930 Bing moved to Paris where she combined photojournalism with her own more personal work, soon becoming one of the principal representatives of the modernising trends in photography which emerged in the cultural melting pot of Paris during those years. With the advance of the Nazi forces, in 1941 she and her husband, the pianist Konrad Wolff, went into exile in New York. Two decades later the sixty-year-old Bing gave up her photographic activities in order to channel her creativity into the visual arts and poetry until her death in 1998.
Bing’s work cannot be ascribed to any of the movements or tendencies that influenced her. She worked in almost all the artistic genres, from architectural photography to portraiture, self-portraits, images of everyday objects and landscapes. The diversity of styles which she employed reflect her significant and notably individual interpretation of the different cultural trends that she assimilated, from the German Bauhaus and New Objectivity to Parisian Surrealism and the ceaseless dynamism of New York.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website
“I felt the camera grow as an extension of my eyes and move with me.”
Ilse Bing’s photographic oeuvre, created between 1929 and the late 1950s, was influenced by the different cities where she lived and worked: Frankfurt prior to the 1930s, Paris in that decade and post-war New York where above all she experienced the situation of an enforced emigré. Her work cannot, however, be easily located within the photographic and cultural trends that she encountered, although it was certainly enriched by all of them. Bing’s output was influenced by Moholy-Nagy’s Das Neue Sehen (The New Vision) and the Weimar Bauhaus, by André Kertész and by the Surrealism of Man Ray, which she encountered when she moved to Paris in 1930. At the time of her arrival the French capital was a melting pot of artistic and intellectual trends and the setting for the emergence of a number of movements that would be crucial for the evolution of the avant-gardes. Surrealist echoes are evident in Bing’s photographs of objects and in her approach to the framing of her shots of chairs, streets and public spaces, images that transmit a sense of strangeness and almost of alienation.
The Bauhaus was an extremely important influence on Bing’s work via both El Lissitzky’s theories and those of Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision, which promoted the fusion of architecture and photography and the autonomy of photography as a medium in relation to painting. New Vision offered infinite possibilities and Bing took full advantage of them, employing some of them in her work, such as abstraction, close-ups, plunging viewpoints, di sotto in sù, photomontages and overprinting, all to be seen in the images on display in the exhibition.
Ilse Bing belonged to a generation of women photographers who achieved unprecedented visibility. It was not the norm that women should be artists in a field habitually occupied by men, who regarded their presence as active agents in the social and cultural realm with disdain and even hostility. Like many of her contemporaries – Germaine Krull, Florence Henri, Laure Albin-Guillot, Madame d’Ora, Berenice Abbott, Nora Dumas and Gisèle Freund – Bing’s camera became an essential tool of self determination and a means to confirm her own identity.
Ilse Bing was born in Frankfurt on 23 March 1899 to a middle-class Jewish family. She took her first photographs at the age of fourteen. Self-taught in this field, she realised that this would become her principal activity when she began photographing in order to illustrate her doctoral thesis. She studied mathematics and physics before opting for art history. In 1929 she gave up her university studies and, armed with her inseparable Leica, devoted herself to photography for the next thirty years. In 1930 she moved to Paris, where she continued active as a photojournalist while also producing her own more creative work, gradually becoming one of the leading representatives of modern French photography. In 1941 and with the advance of National Socialism, Bing moved to New York with her husband, the pianist Konrad Wolff. Two decades later, at the age of 60, she ceased taking photographs and focused her attention on making collages, abstract works, drawings and also poetry writing. Ilse Bing died in New York in 1998.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE exhibition brochure
Ilse Bing (Frankfurt, 1899 – New York, 1998) was born into a well-off Jewish family. Having discovered her true vocation while preparing the illustrations for her academic thesis, in 1929 she abandoned her university studies in order to focus entirely on photography. The medium would be her chosen form of expression for the following thirty years of her fascinating life and career.
In 1930 Bing moved to Paris where she combined photojournalism with her own more personal work, soon becoming one of the principal representatives of the modernising trends in photography which emerged in the cultural melting pot of Paris during those years. With the advance of the Nazi forces, in 1941 she and her husband, the pianist Konrad Wolff, went into exile in New York. Two decades later the sixty-year-old Bing gave up her photographic activities in order to channel her creativity into the visual arts and poetry until her death in 1998.
Bing’s work cannot be ascribed to any of the movements or tendencies that influenced her. She worked in almost all the artistic genres, from architectural photography to portraiture, self-portraits, images of everyday objects and landscapes. The diversity of styles which she employed reflect her significant and notably individual interpretation of the different cultural trends that she assimilated, from the German Bauhaus and New Objectivity to Parisian Surrealism and the ceaseless dynamism of New York.
The exhibition
Featuring around 200 photographs and a range of documentary material, the exhibition presents a chronological and thematic survey of Ilse Bing’s career, divided into ten sections: “Discovering the world through a camera: the beginnings”, “The life of still lifes”, “The dancing body and its circumstances”, “Lights and shadows of modern architecture”, “The hustle and bustle of the street: the French years”, “The seduction of fashion”, “The United States in two phases”, “Self-image revelations”, “Portrait of time”, and “Live nature”.
Four keys
The Bauhaus. From 1910 onwards Frankfurt became the prototype of modern urban design thanks to the architect Ernst May, and the city’s medieval layout was gradually modified in a transformation based on its different societal requirements. This new architecture soon began to echo the ideas of El Lissitzky’s Constructivism, partly via the Dutch architect Mart Stam, a friend of Ilse Bing. Stam and the theories of the Bauhaus had a major influence on her works. László Moholy-Nagy, who taught at the Bauhaus, had promoted the union of architecture and photography as well as the independence of the latter in relation to painting. The possibilities of Das Neue Sehen (The New Vision) seemed endless and Bing applied some of its concepts and devices to her work: abstraction, immediate close-ups, plunging and di sotto in sù viewpoints, photo-montage and overprinting.
Surrealism, the spirit of an era. When Ilse Bing moved to Paris in 1930 the city was a melting pot of artistic and intellectual trends and the setting for the emergence of some of the key movements in the evolution of the avant-gardes. One of them – Surrealism – had a particular influence on her and its echoes are clearly discernible in her photographs of accessories taken for fashion magazines which reflect Surrealist theories on fetishism. It is also evident in the framing she chose for her images of chairs, streets and public spaces, which transmit a sense of strangeness and almost of alienation. Finally, this influence also arose from Bing’s relationship with prominent figures associated with the movement, such as Elsa Schiaparelli.
Movement. Despite her fascination with abstraction and pure compositions, evident in many of her photographs of architecture and her still lifes, Ilse Bing was also captivated by the dynamism and movement of life and changing reality. She expressed this in her photographs of the Moulin Rouge and its surrounding area and in her investigation of dance. Bing captured the dynamism of the dancers twirling their skirts but also the expressivity of their bodies as they moved, jumping into the air or doing the splits.
Woman photographer. Ilse Bing belonged to a generation of women photographers who achieved unprecedented visibility. It was not the norm that women should be artists in a field habitually occupied by men, who regarded their presence as active agents in the social and cultural realm with disdain and even hostility. Like many of her contemporaries – Germaine Krull, Florence Henri, Laure Albin-Guillot, Madame d’Ora, Berenice Abbott, Nora Dumas and Gisèle Freund – Bing’s camera became an essential tool of self-determination and a means to confirm her own identity.
The artistic career of Ilse Bing (Frankfurt, 1899-New York, 1998) can be located within a particularly complex temporal and socio-cultural context. This German photographer principally lived and worked in three places: in Frankfurt prior to the 1930s, in Paris in that decade and in post-war New York where she above all experienced the status of enforced emigré. Bing also visited other places, including Switzerland, Italy and Holland, but they never became decisive spaces that significantly influenced her way of working with regard to photography.
Analysed with the distance and perspective offered by the passing of time, Ilse Bing’s artistic corpus cannot easily be located within the various photographic trends she encountered during her lifetime, particularly in her initial German phase and the decade in Paris. While her work is charged with elements associated with both Das Neue Sehen (The New Vision) and the Bauhaus, which emerged during the Weimar Republic, as well as with the Surrealism she assimilated during her years in France, Bing’s position evades any strict norm or visual orthodoxy. In this sense it could be said that hers is a notably unique photographic gaze and approach in which modernity and formal innovation are indissolubly linked to a humanist approach involving a social conscience.
It is also important to emphasise that Ilse Bing’s career within the context of relatively difficult times was marked by a resolute determination to make her way in a world which viewed the presence of women as active agents in the social and thus the cultural realm with disdain or even hostility. Bing belonged to a generation of female photographers that achieved a previously unattainable visibility. The camera became for an essential tool of self-determination for numerous women artists, including figures such as Germaine Krull, Florence Henri, Laure Albin-Guillot, Madame d’Ora, Berenice Abbott, Nora Dumas and Gisèle Freund.
Juan Vicente Aliaga
Curator
Discovering the World Through A Camera: The Beginnings
With the exception of a few photographs of an amateur type, nothing indicated that Ilse Bing, who was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Frankfurt, would dedicate much of her life to the practice of photography. After an initial focus on scientific subjects and a period studying art history, Bing decided to illustrate her doctoral thesis with images taken in different museums. From that moment onwards and following a study trip to Switzerland when she discovered the work of Vincent van Gogh, she took the decision to focus her attention on photography. While she initially made use of a Voigtländer plate camera, she soon acquired a Leica which she would continue to use for much of her career. This was the camera she employed for the commissions she received from newspapers such as the Frankfurter Zeitung, work that gave her a degree of financial independence during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic.
At the outset Bing covered a range of subjects, doing so with ease and formal audacity. Everything seemed to attract her attention: men at work, the spatial simplicity of a gallery, the organic lines of a roof, the leg and arm movements of the ballerinas of the Rudolf von Laban company, the modern architecture which she had discovered through her friend the Dutch architect Mart Stam, and more. Bing’s gaze sought out unusual angles, it looked upwards and downwards, at times encountering normally overlooked elements of no monetary value and ones brought together by chance, as in Dead Leaf and Tramway Ticket on Sidewalk, Frankfurt (1929).
The Life of Still Lifes
Objects from daily life are frequently present in modern art: a bottle, a newspaper, a letter, a collage-like fragment of a label, a jug, etc. Surrealism marked a revolution with regard to the representation of the object, which is never literal but rather filled with hidden aspects. The insertion of external objects into the visual space combined with other ones favours the emergence of the imaginary. By the time Ilse Bing arrived in Paris in 1930 she was already captivated by the chance encounter of often humble elements. Her French period served to accentuate her interest in a wide range of cast-off possessions and objects that seemed to allude to a universe in flux. Bing’s gaze always came to rest on real elements. The chairs she photographed existed but the framing she employed, the closeness or distance of the shot, the fact that the chairs are unoccupied and that the floor on which they stand has the silvery darkness of rain are all the result of her choices, adding an air of melancholy to the image.
Over the course of her career Bing used a range of different techniques in parallel while remaining constantly fascinated by inanimate objects. During her Paris years and despite financial difficulties her work is generally characterised by a poetic gaze in which the imagination moves towards undefined, almost dream-like realms. In contrast, in the period of exile in the United States a degree of coolness emerges, with the appearance of formal and symbolic traits such as a closing-in or enclosing of the depicted scene.
The Dancing Body and Its Circumstances
During her initial phase, in 1929 Ilse Bing established contacts with the dance and gymnastics school founded by Rudolf von Laban. She was struck by the way in which he aimed to draw a parallel between geometry and human movements and gestures.
Soon after arriving in Paris, Bing was commissioned to photograph the Moulin Rouge waxworks museum. The old Parisian dance hall where La Goulue and Toulouse-Lautrec had been leading attractions had lost much of its splendour. Bing spent time there and was attracted by numerous aspects of the place: its daily life on and off stage, including the couples who enjoyed a drink there, the boxing matches taking place, a dancer cheering up a weary boxer, the interesting nature of the clients, and the boredom of the doorman at the entrance to the cabaret. Aside from these aspects, what really caught the attention of the Paris photography world were Bing’s images of dancers in movement. Her restless eye was able to represent the vibration of the circular twists and turns, the complex, effortful open leg movements of a dancer captured in action, the troupe of dancers energetically waving their skirts, and more.
Another group of images of the troupe centres around the dancer Gerard Willem van Loon.
The third and last series of images focusing on dance was commissioned in relation to the ballet L’Errante, choreographed by the American George Balanchine and with set designs and libretto by the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. Bing demonstrated her skill at capturing movement without making it seem frozen or trapped in time. Her eye translated the weightlessness of dreamlike fantasies to her images through the dynamic way in which she captured shadows.
Lights and Shadows of Modern Architecture
The architecture of Paris is generally reflected in Bing’s photography through images of middle- or working-class houses or walls and façades of dilapidated buildings. There was one notable exception, namely the Eiffel Tower. This emblematic work, constructed for the Universal Exhibition of 1889, was nothing less than a revelation for Bing. The Tower’s imposing metal structure had been captured by various photographers, including László Moholy-Nagy in 1925, followed by Erwin Blumenfeld, André Kertész, François Kollar and Germaine Krull.
Bing chose to locate herself inside the structure and take shots at different heights, the majority looking downwards. Using this method, the reality of the space occupied by passers-by becomes perfectly visible. In other words, the intention is not to emphasise the abstract core, pure geometry and beauty of the forms, girders, mainstays, braces and other constructional elements but rather to show that this architectural marvel was also located in a specific place, in this case the gardens of the Champ de Mars.
At a later date, New York’s modern architecture astonished Bing for its display of power expressed as imposing constructions. She translated her amazement into a group of images primarily characterised by a distanced and simultaneously critical gaze on the architectural spectacle before her eyes. Her position was not simply an uncritical and admiring one, as evident in various photographs of skyscrapers abutting on poor areas of the city. The thrust of the symbolic power of vertical architecture is called into question by being juxtaposed with humble spaces and buildings, as we see with Chrysler Building (1936).
The Hustle and Bustle of the Street: The French Years
When Ilse Bing arrived in Paris in late November 1930 the city’s cultural context was particularly favourable in terms of the number of illustrated publications that made use of images taken by a large group of male and female photographers. These publications included Vu, Voilà, Marianne, Regards, L’Art Vivant, Arts et Métiers Graphiques and Urbanisme.
One of the commissions that Bing received allowed her to delve into an evident reality: the existence of poverty in certain parts of a major capital such as Paris. She focused her work on portraying the soup kitchens where large numbers of destitute people gathered.
The artist revealed her abilities in Paris, rue de Valois (1932), an image that allows for a questioning of the supposedly objective truth habitually associated with photography. On an inner city street Bing’s gaze focuses on a puddle in which the roofs of an adjacent building are reflected. She shows us the paradox of something that is located above and high up appearing below, on the ground.
While Bing’s Parisian photography has a melancholy, even sombre tone to it, it also looked at areas of human activity characterised by lively bustle and social interaction, such as her images of a gingerbread fair.
These years in France provided the setting for a veritable laboratory of ideas in which the influence of Bing’s Frankfurt years is still evident. It was also a time when the emergence of Surrealism was occupying the Parisian cultural scene, with its exploration of the unconscious and of hidden desires. It can be detected in the ghostly feel of the solarised photographs that Bing took on the Place de la Concorde.
In this context, and thanks to an invitation from the Dutch-born Hendrick Willem van Loon, Bing discovered the Netherlands, visiting places such as Veere and Amsterdam and capturing different moments of daily life. The country’s nature as a terrain regained from the sea also led the artist to reflect this geographical reality in a number of snapshots.
The Seduction of Fashion
During her Paris years Bing experienced financial difficulties, a recurrent problem for her over the years, for which reason in November 1933 she began to contribute to the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, an American publication noted for its modern style. She secured this work with a recommendation from the editor of the French edition, Daisy Fellowes, a fashion-world figure brought up in aristocratic circles. Some of Bing’s photographs are in fact of accessories that belonged to Fellowes, including the grey felt hat and an elegant pair of gloves. In these and other images Bing applied a highly innovative approach in which she brought out the texture of the objects and the sheen of the surfaces by cropping the frame in such a way that the various garments acquired a sensual touch as well as suggesting the attractiveness of a coveted object.
During these years Bing also met Elsa Schiaparelli, the celebrated Italian fashion designer with links to Surrealism. Bing took photographs as advertisements for perfumes such as Salut and Soucis, both of 1934. The aim of these images was to encourage the viewer to desire the product with all its sensual resonances without renouncing a modern aesthetic.
The United States in Two Stages
Bing’s experiences in New York can be divided into two quite distinct phases. The first was a visit in 1936 while the second came in 1941 with her forced departure from France following the Nazi occupation. She continued to live there until her death in 1998, although she brought her photographic activity to an end forty years earlier.
The first American trip lasted from April to June 1936. Bing was impressed by the colossal dimensions of the city’s architecture while her restless gaze also focused on other aspects of the metropolis: the harsh life of down-and-outs (Variation on Dead End), the dirtiness of the streets, a circus show with acrobats and animals, and more.
In these difficult circumstances and experiencing isolation, Bing transferred her sense of solitude to the reality that surrounded her, observing it attentively. The result is a number of desolate images in which her own feelings are transmuted into melancholy landscapes and objects: scrawny, leafless tree branches, picket fences enclosing plots, and a fire hydrant in a snowy landscape next to a fallen tree.
From 1941 onwards, still suffering from the effects of exile and in need of earning a living in a hostile environment, Bing turned her activities to various different jobs, taking passport photographs for immigrants, portrait photographs on commission and even working as a dog groomer, among other things. The illustrated magazine world clearly turned its back on her at this period.
Self-Image Revelations
In 1913 the teenage Bing took what she considered to be her first self-portrait. She poses in her bedroom in the family home in Frankfurt, sitting sideways at a desk and resting her feet on a chair. What we see in reality is her reflection in a cupboard mirror, which shows the young Ilse with her long hair. In front of a background of paintings, she looks out attentively and places her hand on the camera – a Kodak box model. She was unaware at the time that this device (albeit not this make) would become her principal working tool.
Throughout her life as an artist Bing repeated the exercise of portraying herself (usually indoors) with the aim of leaving a record of a specific moment of her existence. Through these self-portraits she forged her own identity as an emancipated and independent woman in times of enormous patriarchal pressure.
During her first visit to New York Bing conceived an image that is a clear indication of the sense of estrangement and alienation she felt at seeing herself so small before the immensity of the mecca of skyscrapers, as in New York, the Elevated, and Me (1936).
Bing would later make the representation of shadow a stark extension of her life and personality, frequently using it throughout her American years.
During the course of her lifetime Ilse Bing explored the transitory states of her own identity, sometimes presenting herself as firm and decided, at times as vulnerable and anxious and on other occasions as a fleeting shadow cast on a wall.
Portrait of Time
In addition to seeking out the intricacies of her subjectivity in her own image, from almost the outset Bing engaged in an intensive photographic activity in which she combined commissions for portraits, especially of children, with the desire to explore the human psyche.
With regard to childhood, Bing saw children as complete beings on the same level as adults, with their own internal struggles and issues. During her own childhood the prevailing view was that they were not fully formed but Bing was uncomfortable with this perception and over time she learned to see adulthood and childhood as two phases of life that had much more in common than was generally thought.
Similarly, she did not share the view that women should be conceived on the male model as if they were a mere accompaniment to their tune. She considered that “the human being can be represented and symbolised by women”, albeit without aiming to idealise them. These concepts, which clearly reflect an underlying feminist attitude, seem to allude to a holistic vision of existence devoid of hierarchies or fixed categories.
Bing went beyond merely capturing the moment, the temporal space in which her models pose. Rather, with both her child sitters and adults she aimed to show them engaged in an activity, extracting aspects of their character and personality from them.
Live Nature
Any assessment of Ilse Bing’s work must necessarily emphasise the impact on her career of her urban experiences in Frankfurt, Paris and New York. While this assertion seems indisputable, an analysis of her corpus would be diminished without a consideration of the close relationship she maintained with nature, both the untamed natural world and nature designed and organised by human hand, as in the case of the gardens of Versailles.
The natural world was also the locus in which Bing’s emotions and feelings took hold. The photographs taken on the banks of the Loire, for example, generally exude an air of calm and balance comparable to that which she felt in her own life at the time, contrasting strongly with the landscapes of wild and rugged places such as those she captured in the mountains of Colorado at a period of greater personal tension.
In 1959 Ilse Bing gave up photography for good. After three decades as a photographer and long before her work started to be recognised in museums in the United States, France and Germany, with exhibitions and publications of her work in Paris, New Orleans, Aachen and New York, the artist, who had proved herself able to represent the vibration of life, considered that she no longer had anything new to say or contribute in this medium.
![Unidentified photographer. 'Untitled [Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York]' c. 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-a.jpg "Unidentified photographer. 'Untitled [Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York]' c. 1939")
![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); 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)](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2024/05/weegee-installation-hcb.jpg "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); 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)")
![Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York]' 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-untitled-young-man-smoking-cigarette-in-crashed-car-while-waiting-for-ambulance-new-york-1941.jpg "Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York]' 1941")
![Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Tenement sleeping during heat spell, Lower East Side, New York]' May 23, 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-tenement-sleeping-during-heat-spell-lower-east-side-new-york.jpg "Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Tenement sleeping during heat spell, Lower East Side, New York]' May 23, 1941")
![Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]' 1947](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-fire-in-loft-building.jpg "Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]' 1947")
![Weegee (American, born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899 - 1968 New York) '[Outline of a Murder Victim]' 1942](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/weegee-outline-web.jpg)
![Vasyl Yermilov (Ukrainian, 1894-1967) 'Nove Mystetstvo' ([New Art], magazine cover design) c. 1927](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/yermilov_nove_mystetsvo.jpg "Vasyl Yermilov (Ukrainian, 1894-1967) 'Nove Mystetstvo' ([New Art], magazine cover design) c. 1927")
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