Many thankx to The Denver Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Burning oil sludge, north of Denver, Colorado 1973-1974 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) North of Keota, Colorado 1973 printed 1989
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Mobile home park, north edge of Denver, Colorado 1973-1974 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is the first U.S. venue for Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs. The exhibition features more than 200 black-and-white photos spanning Adams’s 45-year career, showcasing the artistic legacy of the American photographer and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Adams lived and worked in Colorado for nearly 30 years. Many of his most acclaimed images were taken in the Rocky Mountain region and will strike a familiar chord with visitors. The exhibition, organised by the Yale University Art Gallery, will be on view September 25, 2011 – January 1, 2012 in the museum’s Gallagher Family Gallery.
“We’re excited to host the work of one of the foremost photographers of our time,” said Eric Paddock, the DAM’s curator of photography. “Robert Adams’s striking yet quiet photos provoke thought about current economic, political and environmental issues Westerners confront every day. We think visitors will see something very familiar in his work.”
Since becoming a photographer in the mid-1960s, Adams has been widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential chroniclers of the American West. Adams’s photographs and writing insist that the realities of everyday landscapes are as beautiful as idealised scenes from nature. They ask questions about the ways people change and interact with nature, and what it means to live simply and quietly in today’s world. This commitment earned Adams prominence in photography’s “New Topographics” movement of the late 20th century and lends authority to his ongoing work. His photographs of Colorado suburban growth and clear cut forests in the Pacific Northwest, for example, express shock at mainstream social and economic values.
“The Denver Art Museum is pleased to be the first U.S. venue for The Place We Live, showcasing our continued commitment to our photography program,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “Colorado has a rich photography history and we’re excited to have visitors engage with these artworks that provide a narrative to the American experience and take a fresh look at their surroundings.”
Featuring more than 200 gelatin silver prints, The Place We Live weaves together four decades of Adam’s work into a cohesive, epic narrative of American experience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Each of the photographer’s major projects is represented, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by prior settlers of his native Colorado to his most recent images of forests and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest.
Biography
Born in Orange, N.J., in 1937, Robert Adams moved with his family from Madison, Wis., to Denver, Colo., at the age of 15. He earned a doctorate degree from the University of Southern California and, intent on pursuing an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Disturbed by the rapid transformation of the Colorado Springs and Denver areas, Adams began photographing a landscape transformed by tract housing, highways, strip malls and gas stations. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy,” Adams wrote. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.” Since 1997, he has lived and worked in Oregon.”
Press release from The Denver Art Museum
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Lakewood, Colorado 1968-1971 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) In a New Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1969 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1969 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1969 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Denver, Colorado c. 1970 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Longmont, Colorado 1973-1974, printed 2007 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Eden, Colorado 1968 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Colorado Springs, Colorado 1968 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Edge of San Timoteo Canyon, looking toward Los Angeles, Redlands, California 1978 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado 1978 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Longmont, Colorado 1979, printed 1985 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Santa Ana Wash, Redlands, California 1983, printed 1991 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Sitka spruce, Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon 1999-2000 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
The Denver Art Museum Civic Center Cultural Complex Located on 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock in downtown Denver
Here’s my pick of the nine best exhibitions in Melbourne (with excursions to Bendigo and Hobart thrown in) that appeared on the Art Blart art and cultural archive in 2011. Enjoy!
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (calf carcass in tree) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23.0 cm x 23.0cm
This was a superb exhibition of 61 black and white photographs by Sidney Nolan. The photographs were shot using a medium format camera and are printed in square format from the original 1952 negatives.
The work itself was a joy to behold. The photographs hung together like a symphony, rising and falling, with shape emphasising aspects of form. The images flowed from one to another. The formal composition of the mummified carcasses was exemplary, the resurrected animals (a horse, for example, propped up on a fifth leg) and emaciated corpses like contemporary sculpture. The handling of the tenuous aspects of human existence in this uniquely Australian landscape was also a joy to behold. Through an intimate understanding of how to tension the space between objects within the frame Nolan’s seemingly simple but complex photographs of the landscape are previsualised by the artist in the mind’s eye before he even puts the camera to his face.
2/ Bill Henson at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, March – April 2011
This was an exquisite exhibition by one of Australia’s preeminent artists. Like Glenn Gould playing a Bach fugue, Bill Henson is grand master in the performance of narrative, structure, composition, light and atmosphere. The exhibition featured thirteen large colour photographs printed on lustre paper (twelve horizontal and one vertical) – nine figurative of adolescent females, two of crowd scenes in front of Rembrandt paintings in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (including the stunning photograph that features The return of the prodigal son c. 1662 in the background, see below) and two landscapes taken off the coast of Italy. What a journey this exhibition took you on!
Henson’s photographs have been said by many to be haunting but his images are more haunted than haunting. There is an indescribable element to them (be it the pain of personal suffering, the longing for release, the yearning for lost youth or an understanding of the deprecations of age), a mesmeric quality that is not easily forgotten. The photographs form a kind of afterimage that burns into your consciousness long after the exposure to the original image has ceased. Haunted or haunting they are unforgettable.
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2009/10 CL SH767 N17B Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
3/ Networks (cells & silos) at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Caulfield, February – April 2011
This was a vibrant and eclectic exhibition at MUMA, one of the best this year in Melbourne. The curator Geraldine Barlow gathered together some impressive, engaging works that were set off to good effect in the new gallery spaces. I spent a long and happy time wandering around the exhibition and came away visually satiated and intellectually stimulated. The exhibition explored “the connections between artistic representation of networks; patterns and structures found in nature; and the rapidly evolving field of network science, communications and human relations.”
Installation photograph of one of the galleries in the exhibition NETWORKS (cells & silos) at the newly opened Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) with Nick Mangan’s Colony (2005) in the foreground
This was a stupendous exhibition by Monika Tichacek, at Karen Woodbury Gallery. One of the highlights of the year, this was a definite must see!
The work was glorious in it’s detail, a sensual and visual delight (make sure you click on the photographs to see the close up of the work!). The riotous, bacchanalian density of the work was balanced by a lyrical intimacy, the work exploring the life cycle and our relationship to the world in gouache, pencil & watercolour. Tichacek’s vibrant pink birds, small bugs, flowers and leaves have absolutely delicious colours. The layered and overlaid compositions show complete control by the artist: mottled, blotted, bark-like wings of butterflies meld into trees in a delicate metamorphosis; insects are blurred becoming one with the structure of flowers in a controlled effusion of life.
Monika Tichacek (Australian born Switzerland, b. 1975) To all my relations (detail) 2011
This was a fabulous survey exhibition of the great artists of 20th century American photography, a rare chance in Australia to see such a large selection of vintage prints from some of the masters of photography. If you had a real interest in the history of photography then you hopefully saw this exhibition, showing as it is just a short hour and a half drive (or train ride) from Melbourne at Bendigo Art Gallery.
6/ Time Machine: Sue Ford at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Victoria, April – June 2011
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Self-portrait 1976 1976 From the series Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) Selenium toned gelatin silver print, printed 2011 24 x 18cm Courtesy Sue Ford Archive
This beautifully hung exhibition flowed like music, interweaving up and down, the photographs framed in thin, black wood frames. It featured examples of Ford’s black and white fashion and street photography; a selection of work from the famous black and white Time series (being bought for their collection by the Art Gallery of New South Wales); a selection of Photographs of Women – modern prints from the Sue Ford archive that are wonderfully composed photographs with deep blacks that portray strong, independent, vulnerable, joyous women (see last four photographs below); and the most interesting work in the exhibition, the posthumous new series Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) that evidence, through a 47 part investigation using colour prints from Polaroids, silver gelatin prints printed by the artist, prints made from original negatives and prints from scanned images where there was no negative available, a self-portrait of the artist in the process of ageing.
Whether looking down, looking toward or looking inward these fantastic photographs show a strong, independent women with a vital mind, an élan vital, a critical self-organisation and an understanding of the morphogenesis of things that will engage us for years to come. Essential looking.
My analogy: you are standing in the half-dark, your chest open, squeezing the beating heart with blood coursing between your fingers while the other hand is up your backside playing with your prostrate gland. I think ringmeister David Walsh would approve. My best friends analogy: a cross between a car park, night club, sex sauna and art gallery.
Weeks later I am still thinking about the wonderful immersive, sensory experience that is MONA. Peter Timms in an insightful article in Meanjin calls it a post-Google Wunderkammer, or wonder chest. It can be seen as a mirabilia – a non-historic installation designed primarily to delight, surprise and in this case shock. The body, sex, death and mortality are hot topics in the cultural arena and Walsh’s collection covers all bases. The collection and its display are variously hedonistic, voyeuristic, narcissistic, fetishistic pieces of theatre subsumed within the body of the spectacular museum architecture …
Spectatorship and their attendant erotics has MONA as a form of fetishistic cinema. It is as if what Barthes calls “the eroticism of place” were a modern equivalent of the eighteenth century genius loci, the “genius of the place.” The place is spectacular, the private collection writ large as public institution, the symbolic power of the institution masked through its edifice. The art become autonomous, cut free from its cultural associations, transnational, globalised, experienced through kinaesthetic means; the viewer meandering through the galleries, the anti-museum, as an international flaneur. Go. Experience!
Corten Stairwell & Surrounding Artworks February 2011 Museum of Old and New Art – interior Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art
John Bodin (Australian) I Was Far Away From Home 2009 Type C print on metallic paper 80 x 110cm
The photographs become the surface of the body, stitched together with lines, markers pointing the way – they are encounters with the things that we see before us but also the things that we carry inside of us. It is the interchange between these two things, how one modulates and informs the other. It is this engagement that holds our attention: the dappled light, ambiguity, unevenness, the winding path that floats and bobs before our eyes looking back at us, as we observe and are observed by the body of these landscapes.
One of the fundamental qualities of the photographs is that they escape our attempts to rationalise them and make them part of our understanding of the world, to quantify our existence in terms of materiality. I have an intimate feeling with regard to these sites of engagement. They are both once familiar and unfamiliar to us; they possess a sense of nowhereness. A sense of groundlessness and groundedness. A collapsing of near and far, looking down, looking along, a collapsing of the constructed world.
Like the road in these photographs there is no self just an infinite time that has no beginning and no end. The time before my birth, the time after my death. We are just in the world, just being somewhere. Life is just a temporary structure on the road from order to disorder. “The road is life,” writes Jack Kerouac in On the Road.
Simply put, this was one of the best exhibitions I saw in Melbourne this year.
I had a spiritual experience with this work for the paintings promote in the human a state of grace. The non-material, the unconceptualisable, things which are outside all possibility of time and space are made visible. This happens very rarely but when it does you remember, eternally, the time and space of occurrence. I hope you had the same experience.
Curated by Naomi Cass as part of the Melbourne Festival, this was a brilliant exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. The exhibition explored, “the fraught relationship between the camera and the subject: where the image is stolen, candid or where the unspoken contract between photographer and subject is broken in some way – sometimes to make art, sometimes to do something malevolent.” It examined the promiscuity of gazes in public / private space specifically looking at surveillance, voyeurism, desire, scopophilia, secret photography and self-reflexivity. It investigated the camera and its moral and physical relationship to the unsuspecting subject.
This is one of the best exhibitions this year in Melbourne bar none. Edgy and eclectic the work resonates with the viewer in these days of uncertainty: THIS should have been the Winter Masterpieces exhibition!
The title of the exhibition, The mad square (Der tolle Platz) is taken from Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting of the same name where “the ‘mad square’ is both a physical place – the city, represented in so many works in the exhibition, and a reference to the state of turbulence and tension that characterises the period.”The exhibition showcases how artists responded to modern life in Germany in the interwar years, years that were full of murder and mayhem, putsch, revolution, rampant inflation, starvation, the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism. Portrayed is the dystopian, dark side of modernity (where people are the victims of a morally bankrupt society) as opposed to the utopian avant-garde (the prosperous, the wealthy), where new alliances emerge between art and politics, technology and the mass media. Featuring furniture, decorative arts, painting, sculpture, collage and photography in the sections World War 1 and the Revolution, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic, Metropolis, New Objectivity and Power and Degenerate Art, it is the collages and photographs that are the strongest elements of the exhibition, particularly the photographs. What a joy they are to see.
Albert Renger-Patzsch (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) Harbour with crane c. 1927 Gelatin silver photograph Printed image 22.7 h x 16.8 w cm Purchased 1983 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
What a great piece of writing by Peter Roebuck (below). Such insight into the human condition, so eloquently expounded.
Wise words about life. His wisdom will be greatly missed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
“We are, indeed, shadows passing across the mouth of a cave.”
“If perspective insists that our daily lives are not important, then it is a fool”
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Woody’s room, 226 Punt Road, Prahran
1993
Silver gelatin print
NOTHING is sadder than the extinguishing of a young life. Besides the loss itself, and the pain that follows, the premature ending of a life serves as a shock, reminds of the fragility and foolishness of our existences. When Princess Di died, her country temporarily became a better place. When David Hookes departed, the sorrow reached beyond his immediate circle and into the masses.
Not that it lasts. Still we complain about traffic wardens and shampoo bottles that will not open, and the weather, and the neighbours and taxes and noise and the rest of it. An then a child dies, or a friend is suddenly removed, or a familiar face vanishes, whereupon regret comes over us for the life unled.
Do not suppose your author is any wiser in these regards than anyone else. Everything works in theory and then a drill starts in a nearby house, or a traffic jam is encountered, or a queue, whereupon reason flies out the window. Rage resumes till someone is lost, a depressed youngster or an acquaintance amid a screeching of brakes, whereupon calm returns, for then the truth must be faced. We are, indeed, shadows passing across the mouth of a cave.
It is absurd that we take ourselves and our lives seriously when it all hangs by a thread. Yet it is likewise foolish to waste gifts, for they carry with them a certain responsibility. Without intensity, much less can be achieved. A man cannot spend his entire life with a gaga grin upon his face. Blood, sweat and tears are part of the human expression, part of our growth, and there is no need to regret their place in our lives. Mozart and Tendulkar have provided myriad delights because they dared to pursue their talents.
Often it is the striving that provided satisfaction and then follows the laughter and the strength. If perspective insists that our daily lives are not important, then it is a fool. Nevertheless, much can be missed along the way and it can take an untimely passing to remind us that we are, in so many ways, behaving like fools.
Edited extract of a piece penned by Peter Roebuck after the death of cricketer David Hookes in January 2004
Author and journalist Peter Roebuck fell to his death from a balcony in South Africa in November 2011
Irene Bayer (American, 1898-1991) No title (Man on stage) c. 1927 Gelatin silver photograph Printed image 10.6 h x 7.6 w cm Purchased 1983 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
This is one of the best exhibitions this year in Melbourne bar none. Edgy and eclectic the work resonates with the viewer in these days of uncertainty: THIS should have been the Winter Masterpieces exhibition!
The title of the exhibition, The mad square (Der tolle Platz) is taken from Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting of the same name where “the ‘mad square’ is both a physical place – the city, represented in so many works in the exhibition, and a reference to the state of turbulence and tension that characterises the period.” The exhibition showcases how artists responded to modern life in Germany in the interwar years, years that were full of murder and mayhem, putsch, revolution, rampant inflation, starvation, the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism. Portrayed is the dystopian, dark side of modernity (where people are the victims of a morally bankrupt society) as opposed to the utopian avant-garde (the prosperous, the wealthy), where new alliances emerge between art and politics, technology and the mass media. Featuring furniture, decorative arts, painting, sculpture, collage and photography in the sections World War 1 and the Revolution, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic, Metropolis, New Objectivity and Power and Degenerate Art, it is the collages and photographs that are the strongest elements of the exhibition, particularly the photographs. What a joy they are to see.
There is a small 2″ x 3″ contact print portrait of Hanna Höch by Richard Kauffmann, Penetrate yourself or: I embrace myself (1922) that is an absolute knockout. Höch is portrayed as the ‘new women’ with short bobbed hair and loose modern dress, her self-image emphasised through a double exposure that fragments her face and multiplies her hands, set against a contextless background. The ‘new women’ fragmented and broken apart (still unsure of herself?). The photograph is so small and intense it takes your breath away. Similarly, there is the small, intimate photograph No title (Man on Stage) (c. 1927) by Irene Bayer (see above) that captures performance as ‘total art’, a combination of visual arts, dance, music, architecture and costume design. In contrast is a large 16 x 20″ photograph of the Bauhaus balconies (1926) by László Moholy-Nagy (see below) where the whites are so creamy, the perspective so magnificent.
No title (Metalltanz) (c. 1928-1929) by T. Lux Feinenger, a photographer that I do not know well, is an exceptional photograph and print. Again small, this time dark and intense, the image features man as dancer performing gymnastics in front of reflective, metal sculptures. The metal becomes an active participant in the Metalltanz or ‘Dance in metal’ because of its reflective qualities. The print, from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is luminous. In fact all the prints from the Getty in this exhibition are of the most outstanding quality, a highlight of the exhibition for me. Another print from the Getty that features metal and performance is Untitled(Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet) by T Grill c. 1926-1927 (see below) where the spiral costume becomes an extension of the body, highlighting its form. Also highlighting form, objectivity and detachment is a wonderful 3 x 5″ photograph of the New Bauhaus Building, Dessau (1926) by Lucia Moholy from the Getty collection, the first I have ever seen in the flesh by this artist. Outstanding.
Following, we have 4 photograms by Lucia’s husband, László Moholy-Nagy which display formalist experimentation “inspired by machine aesthetic, exploring a utopian belief that Constructivism and abstract art could play a role in the process of social reform.” Complimenting these photograms is a row of six, yes six! Moholy-Nagy including Dolls (Puppen)1926-1927 (Getty), The law of the series 1925 (Getty), Lucia at the breakfast table 1926 (Getty), Spring, Berlin 1928 (George Eastman House), Berlin Radio Tower1928 (Art Institute of Chicago) and Light space modulator1930 (Getty). All six photographs explore the fascinating relationship between avant-garde art and photography, between they eye and perspective, all the while declaiming what Moholy-Nagy called the “new vision”; angles, shadows and geometric patterns that defy traditional perspective “removing the space from associations with the real world creating a surreal, disjointed image.” This topographic mapping flattens perspective in the case of the Berlin radio tower allowing the viewer to see the world in a new way.
Finally two groups of photographs that are simply magnificent.
First 8 photographs in a row that focus on the order and progressive nature of the modern world, the inherent beauty of technology captured in formalist studies of geometric forms. The prints range from soft pictorialist renditions to sharp clarity. The quality of the prints is amazing. Artists include the wonderful E. O. Hoppé, Albert Renger-Patzsch (an outstandingly beautiful photograph, Harbour with cranes 1927 that is my favourite photograph in the exhibition, see below), Two Towers 1937-1938 by Werner Mantz and some early Wolfgang Sievers before he left Germany for Australia in 1938 (Blast furnace in the Ruhr, Germany 1933, see below). These early Sievers are particularly interesting, especially when we think of his later works produced in Australia. Lucky were many artists who survived in Germany or fled from Nazi persecution at the last moment, including John Heartfield who relocated to Czechoslovakia in 1933 and then fled to London in 1938 and August Sander whose life and work were severely curtailed under the Nazi regime and whose son died in prison in 1944 near the end of his ten year sentence (Wikipedia).
August Sander. Now there is a name to conjure with. The second magnificent group are 7 photographs that are taken from Sander’s seminal work People of the 20th Century. All the photographs have soft, muted tones of greys with no strong highlights and, usually, contextless backgrounds. The emphasis is on archetypes, views of people who exist on the margins of society – circus performers, bohemians, artists, the unemployed and blind people. In all the photographs there is a certain frontality (not necessarily physical) to the portraits, a self consciousness in the sitter, a wariness of the camera and of life. This self consciousness can be seen in the two photographs that are the strongest in the group – Secretary at West German radio in Cologne, 1931 and Match seller 1927 (see below).
There is magic here. Her face wears a somewhat quizzical air – questioning, unsure, vulnerable – despite the trappings of affluence and fashionability (the smoking of the cigarette, the bobbed hair). He is wary of the camera, his face and hands isolated by Sander while the rest of his body falls into shadow. His right hand is curled under, almost deformed, his shadow falling on the stone at right, the only true brightness in this beautiful image the four boxes of matches he clutches in his left hand: as Sander titles him ironically, The Businessman.
Working as I do these days with lots of found images from the 1940s-1960s that I digitally restore to life, I wonder what happened to these people during the dark days of World War 2. Did they survive the cataclysm, the drop into the abyss? I want to know, I want to reach out to these people to send them good energy. I hope that they did but their wariness in front of the camera, so intimately ‘taken’ by Sander, makes me feel the portent of things to come. How differently we see images armed with the hindsight of history!
In conclusion, this is a fantastic exhibition that will undoubtedly be in my top ten of the year for Melbourne in 2011.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Michael Thorneycroft for his help and The National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the accredited photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Felix Nussbaum (German, 1904 – after September 1944) The mad square (Der tolle Platz) 1931 Oil on canvas 97 x 195.5cm Berlinische Galerie Public domain
Over the winter and spring of 1927-1928, Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy took a series of perhaps nine views looking down from the Berlin Radio Tower, one of the most exciting new constructions in the German capital. Moholy had already photographed the Eiffel Tower in Paris from below, looking up through the tower’s soaring girders. In Berlin, however, Moholy turned his camera around and pointed it straight down at the ground. This plunging perspective showed off the spectacular narrowness of the Radio Tower, finished in 1926, which rose vertiginously to a height of 450 feet from a base seven times smaller than that of its Parisian predecessor (which opened in 1889). Moholy attached exceptional importance to this, his boldest image: he hung it just above his name in a room devoted to his work at the Berlin showing of Film und Foto, a mammoth traveling exhibition that he had helped to prepare. Moholy also chose this view and one other to offer Julien Levy, the pioneering art dealer, when Levy visited him in Berlin in 1930. The following year the pictures went on view at the Levy Gallery in New York, in Moholy’s first solo exhibition of photographs.
The Light-Space Modulator is the most spectacular and complete realisation of László Moholy-Nagy’s artistic philosophy. Machine parts and mechanical structures began to appear in his paintings after his emigration from Hungary, and they are also seen in the illustrations he selected for the 1922 Buch neuer Künstler (Book of new artists), which includes pictures of motorcars and bridges as well as painting and sculpture. Many contemporary artists incorporated references to machines and technology in their work, and some, like the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, even designed plans for fantastic structures, such as the ambitious Monument to the Third International, a proposed architectural spiral of glass and steel with moving tiers and audiovisual broadcasts. (See Tatlin’s Tower.)
In the Light-Space Modulator, Moholy-Nagy was able to create an actual working mechanism. Although he censured capitalism’s inhumane use of technology, he believed it could be harnessed to benefit mankind and that the artist had an important role in accomplishing this. Moholy had made preliminary sketches for kinetic sculptures as early as 1922 and referred to the idea for a light machine in his writings, but it was not until production was financed by an electric company in Berlin in 1930 that this device was built, with the assistance of an engineer and a metalsmith. It was featured at the Werkbund exhibition in Paris the same year, along with the short film Light Display Black-White-Gray, made by Moholy-Nagy to demonstrate and celebrate his new machine.
The Light-Space Modulator is a Moholy-Nagy painting come to life: mobile perforated disks, a rotating glass spiral, and a sliding ball create the effect of photograms in motion. With its gleaming glass and metal surfaces, this piece (now in the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University) is not only a machine for creating light displays but also a sculptural object of beauty, photographed admiringly by its creator.
Albert Renger-Patzsch (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) Harbour with crane c. 1927 Gelatin silver photograph Printed image 22.7 h x 16.8 w cm Purchased 1983 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Wolfgang Sievers (Germany 1913 – Australia 2007) Blast furnace in the Ruhr, Germany 1933 Gelatin silver photograph 27.5 h x 23 w cm Purchased 1988 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The Ruhr region was at the centre of the German acceleration of industry in pre-war Germany, with rapid economic growth creating a heavy demand for coal and steel. In keeping with Modernist trends in photography, Sievers shot this blast furnace – the mechanism that transforms ore into metal – from an unusual, dynamic angle. It dominates the frame, appearing menacing and strange. Despite being imprisoned and beaten by the Gestapo, Sievers studied and taught at a progressive private art school until graduation in 1938. In that year he escaped Germany after being called up for military service, ending up in Australia.
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Match seller 1927 From the portfolio People of the 20th century, IV Classes and Professions, 17 The Businessman
Robert Wiene, Director (German 1873-1938) Still from from the Cabinet of Dr Caligari 1919 5 min excerpt, 35mm transferred to DVD, Black and White, silent, German subtitles Courtesy Transit Film GmbH Production still courtesy of the British Film Institute and Transit Film GmbH
Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978) Love 1931 From the series Love Photomontage 21.8 x 21cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased, 1983
Hannah Höch made some of the most interesting Dada collages and photomontages, including Love, an image of two strange composite female. Höch’s technique of pasting images together from magazine clippings and advertisements was a response to the modern era of mass media, and a way of criticising the bourgeois taste for ‘high art’. In many of her works, Höch explores the identity and changing roles of women in modern society.
The Mad Square takes its name from Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting which depicts Berlin’s famous Pariser Platz as a mad and fantastic place. The ‘mad square’ is both a physical place – the city, represented in so many works in the exhibition, and a reference to the state of turbulence and tension that characterises the period. The ‘square’ can also be a modernist construct that saw artists moving away from figurative representations towards increasingly abstract forms.
The exhibition features works by Max Beckman, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, Kurt Schwitters and August Sander. This group represents Germany’s leading generation of interwar artists. Major works by lesser known artists including Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Schlichter and Hannah Höch are also presented in the exhibition in addition to works by international artists who contributed to German modernism.
The Mad Square brings together a diverse and extensive range of art, created during one of the most important and turbulent periods in European history, offering new insights into the understanding of key German avant‐garde movements including – Expressionism, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism, and New Objectivity were linked by radical experimentation and innovation, made possible by an unprecedented freedom of expression.
World War 1 and the Revolution
The outbreak of war in 1914 was met with enthusiasm by many German artists and intellectuals who volunteered for service optimistically hoping that it would bring cultural renewal and rapid victory for Germany. The works in this section are by the generation of artists who experienced war first hand. Depictions of fear, anxiety and violence show the devastating effects of war – the disturbing subjects provide insight into tough economic conditions and social dysfunction experienced by many during the tumultuous early years of the Weimar Republic following the abdication of the Kaiser
Dada
The philosophical and political despair experienced by poets and artists during World War 1 fuelled the Dada movement, a protest against the bourgeois conception of art. Violent, infantile and chaotic, Dada took its name from the French word for a child’s hobbyhorse or possibly from the sound of a baby’s babble. Its activities included poetry readings and avant‐garde performances, as well as creating new forms of abstract art that subverted all existing conditions in western art. Though short‐lived, in Germany the Dada movement has profoundly influenced subsequent developments in avant-garde art and culture. The impact of the Dada movement was felt throughout Europe – and most powerfully in Germany from 1917-21.
Bauhaus
The Bauhaus (1919‐1933) is widely considered as the most important school of art and design of the 20th century, very quickly establishing a reputation as the leading and most progressive centre of the international avant‐garde. German architect Walter Gropius founded the school to do away with traditional distinctions between the fine arts and craft, and to forge an entirely new kind of creative designer skilled in both the conceptual aesthetics of art and the technical skills of handicrafts. The Bauhaus was considered to be both politically and artistically radical from its inception and was closed down by the National Socialists in 1933
Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic
Having emerged in Russia after World War I, Constructivism developed in Germany as a set of ideas and practices that experimented with abstract or non-representational forms and in opposition to Expressionism and Dada. Constructivists developed works and theories that fused art and with technology. They shared a utopian belief in social reform, and saw abstract art as playing a central role in this process.
Metropolis
By the 1920s Berlin has become the cultural and entertainment capital of the world and mass culture played an important role in distracting a society traumatised by World War 1, the sophisticated metropolis provided a rich source of imagery for artists, it also come to represent unprecedented sexual and personal freedom. In photography modernity was emphasised by unusual views of the metropolis or through the representation of city types. The diverse group of works in this section portray the uninhibited sense of freedom and innovation experienced by artists throughout Germany during the 1920s
New Objectivity
By the mid 1920s, a new style emerged that came to be known as Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. After experiencing the atrocities of World War 1 and the harsh conditions of life in postwar Germany, many artists felt the need to return to the traditional modes of representation with portraiture becoming a major vehicle of this expression, with its emphasis on the realistic representation of the human figure
Power and Degenerate Art
After the seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933 modern artists were forbidden from working and exhibiting in Germany, with their works confiscated from leading museums and then destroyed or sold on the international art market. Many avant‐garde artists were either forced to leave Germany or retreat into a state of ‘inner immigration’.
The Degenerate art exhibition, held in Munich in 1937, represented the culmination of the National Socialists’ assault on modernism. Hundreds of works were selected for the show which aimed to illustrate the mental deficiency and moral decay that had supposedly infiltrated modern German art. The haphazard and derogatory design of the exhibition sought to ridicule and further discredit modern art. Over two million people visited the exhibition while in contrast far fewer attended the Great German art exhibition which sought to promote what the Nazis considered as ‘healthy’ art.
Karl Grill (German active Donaueschingen, Germany 1920s) Untitled (Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet) c. 1926-1927 Gelatin silver print 22.5 x 16.2cm J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
In 1922, Oskar Schlemmer premiered his “Triadic Ballet” in Germany. He named the piece “Triadic” because it was literally composed of multiples of three: three acts, colours, dancers, and shapes. Concentrating on its form and movement, Schlemmer explored the body’s spatial relationship to its architectural surroundings. Although an abstract design, the spiral costume derived from the tutus of classical ballet.
~ Berlin’s population doubles to two million people
1911
~ Expressionists move from Dresden to Berlin
1912
~ Social Democratic Party (SPD) the largest party in the Reichstag
1913
~ Expressionists attain great success with their city scenes
1914
~ World War I begins ~ George Grosz, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Franz Marc enlist in the army
1915
~ Grosz declared unfit for service, Beckmann suffers a breakdown and Schlemmer wounded
1916
~ Marc dies in combat ~ Dada begins at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich
1917
~ Lenin and Trotsky form the Soviet Republic after the Tzar is overthrown
1918
~ Richard Huelsenbeck writes a Dada manifesto in Berlin ~ Kurt Schwitters creates Merz assemblages in Hanover ~ Revolutionary uprisings in Berlin and Munich ~ Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and flees to Holland ~ Social Democratic Party proclaims the Weimar Republic ~ World War I ends
1919
~ Freikorps assassinates the Spartacist leaders, Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg ~ Bauhaus established in Weimer by Walter Gropius ~ Cologne Dada group formed ~ Treaty of Versailles signed
1920
~ Berlin is the world’s third largest city after New York and London ~ Inflation begins in Germany ~ National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) founded ~ Kapp Putsch fails after right‐wing forces try to gain control over government ~ First International Dada fair opens in Berlin
1921
~ Hitler made chairman of the NSDAP
1922
~ Schlemmer’s Triadic ballet premiers in Stuttgart ~ Hyperinflation continues
1923
~ Hitler sentenced to five years imprisonment for leading the Beer Hall Putsch ~ Inflation decreases and a period of financial stability begins
1924
~ Hitler writes Mein Kampf while in prison ~ Reduction of reparations under the Dawes Plan
1925
~ New Objectivity exhibition opens at the Mannheim Kunsthalle ~ The Bauhaus relocates to Dessau
1926
~ Germany joins the League of Nations
1927
~ Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis released ~ Unemployment crisis worsens ~ Nazis hold their first Nuremburg party rally
1928
~ Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The threepenny opera premieres in Berlin ~ Hannes Meyer becomes the second director of the Bauhaus
1929
~ Street confrontations between the Nazis and communists in Berlin ~ Young Plan accepted, drastically reducing reparations ~ Stock market crashes on Wall Street, New York ~ Thomas Mann awarded the Nobel Prize for literature
1930
~ Resignation of Chancellor Hermann Müller’s cabinet ending parliamentary rule ~ Minority government formed by Heinrich Brüning, leader of the Centre Party ~ Nazis win 18% of the vote and gain 95 seats in the National elections ~ Ludwig Miles van der Rohe becomes the third director of the Bauhaus ~ John Heartfield creates photomontages for the Arbeiter‐Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ)
1931
~ Unemployment reaches five million and a state of emergency is declared in Germany
1932
~ Nazis increase their representation in the Reichstag to 230 seats but are unable to form a majority coalition ~ Miles van der Rohe moves the Bauhaus to Berlin ~ Grosz relocates to New York as an exile
1933
~ Hindenberg names Hitler as Chancellor ~ Hitler creates a dictatorship under the Nazi regime ~ The first Degenerate art exhibition denouncing modern art is held in Dresden ~ Miles van der Rohe announces the closure of the Bauhaus ~ Nazis organise book burnings in Berlin ~ Many artists including Gropius, Kandinski and Klee flee Germany ~ Beckmann, Dix and Schlemmer lose their teaching positions
1934
~ Fifteen concentration camps exist in Germany
1935
~ The swastika becomes the flag of the Reich
1936
~ Spanish civil war begins ~ Germany violates the Treaty of Versailles ~ Olympic Games held in Garmisch‐Partenkirchen and Berlin ~ Thomas Mann deprived of his citizenship and emigrates to the United States
1937
~ German bombing raids over Guernica in Spain in support of Franco ~ The Nazi’s Degenerate art exhibition opens in Munich and attracts two million visitors ~ Beckmann, Kirchner and Schwitters leave Germany ~ Purging of ‘degenerate art’ from German museums continues 1
1/ Timeline credit: Chronology compiled by Jacqueline Strecker and Victoria Tokarowski from the following sources:
~ Catherine Heroy ‘Chronology’ in Sabine Rewald, Glitter and Doom: German portraits from the 1920s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, exh cat, 2006, pp. 39‐46 ~ Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, eds, ‘Political chronology’, The Weimar Republic sourcebook, Berkely 1994, pp. 765‐71 ~ Jonathan Petropoulos and Dagmar Lott‐Reschke ‘Chronology’ in Stephanie Barron, ‘Degenerate Art’: the fate of the avant‐garde in Nazi Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, exh cat, 1991, pp. 391‐401
László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) Bauhaus Balconies 1926 Silver gelatin photograph
John Heartfield’s photomontages expose hidden agendas in German politics and economics of the 1920s and 30s. This image was published six months before the National Socialist Party came to power, and shows Hitler with a spine made of coins and his stomach filled with gold. The caption says that he ‘swallows gold’, alluding to generous funding by right-wing industrialists, and ‘spouts rubbish’.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938) Woman in hat 1911 Oil on canvas Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) Suicide (Selbstmörder) 1916 Oil on canvas 100 × 77.5cm Tate Modern Public domain
Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955) Tingle tangel 1919-1920 Oil on canvas
George Grosz (German, 1890-1945) Tatlinesque Diagram 1920 Watercolour, collage and ink on paper 41 x 29.2cm Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969) Dr Paul Ferdinand Schmidt 1921 Oil on canvas 63 x 82cm Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany
El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941) New Man (Neuer) 1923 Color lithograph on wove paper 12 × 12 1/2 in. (30.5 × 31.8cm)
Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950) The trapeze 1923 Oil on canvas 196.5 x 84cm Toledo Museum of Art Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey Photo: Photography Incorporated, Toledo
Kaho Yu (Hong Kong) Untitled from the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
I like these photographs. There is a stillness to them that is intoxicating.
The wonderful quotation by Charles Babbage (the air as a form of perpetual palimpsest) coupled with Yu’s insight that he sought to capture – through long time exposure – those infinitesimal residual movements of voice and sound trapped in the diffused movements of all the particles in the atmosphere, compliment the work.
These are intelligent, emotive, quiet photographs.
Kaho Yu (Hong Kong) Untitled From the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
Kaho Yu (Hong Kong) Untitled From the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
Kaho Yu (Hong Kong) Untitled Fom the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
“The air is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the unified movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.”
Charles Babbage, 1837
The photographs in this series were taken during a period when I was feeling existentially bored. Instead of distracting myself with activities and accumulating new sensations, I decided to “look” at boredom, to study, and perhaps to understand it. The most natural strategy was to observe the immediate environments where my daily activities take place – train stations, cubicles, copy machines room, etc. I carried a medium format camera on a tripod and spent the odd hours wandering alone through those familiar spaces.
My “study” did not lead me to any revelation or answer. Instead, I found myself spending a lot of time waiting in a long silence, between the opening and the closing of the camera shutter.
Charles Babbage, a scientist in 1837, postulated that every voice and sound, once imparted on the air particles, does not dissipate but remains in the diffused movements of all the particles in the atmosphere. Thus, there might one day come a person equipped with the right mathematical knowledge of these motions who will be able to capture the infinitesimal vibrations and to trace back to their ultimate source.
Taking a long exposure, letting the light slowly accumulate an image on the celluloid surface, to me, is not unlike a sound seeker searching in the air particles, for the tiny residual movements that have been conveyed through the history of mankind, from the beginning of time.
Kaho Yu artist statement
Kaho Yu (Hong Kong) Untitled From the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
Kaho Yu (Hong Kong) Untitled From the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
Kaho Yu (Hong Kong) Untitled From the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
Kaho Yu (Hong Kong) Untitled From the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
Exhibition dates: 14th October – 16th December, 2011
Co-curators: Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills
Many thankx to the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1977/78 1977-1978 From the Untitled sequence 1977/78 series 1977-1978 From a series of 16 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated by James Mollison AO through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008
Untitled 1977 is a series of black-and-white photographs that depict a naked adolescent male seemingly lost in a state of private reverie.
This early series highlights Henson’s interest in states of existence that are
indeterminate or ambiguous, which has remained a central concern of his practice over the years. In this body of work, a slightly androgynous youth seems to float in and out of consciousness. In later work, Henson continues to explore borderline states between night and day, dream and reality, childhood and adulthood.
Henson’s interest in ambiguity is also apparent at a formal level, with his use of lighting. Shadows swallow the figure’s contours and highlights dissolve the details, giving the youth a ghostly quality.
Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1977/78 1977-1978 From the Untitled sequence 1977/78 series 1977-1978 From a series of 16 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1977/78 1977-1978 From the Untitled sequence 1977/78 series 1977-1978 From a series of 16 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1977/78 1977-1978 From the Untitled sequence 1977/78 series 1977-1978 From a series of 16 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1980-82 1980-82 From a series of 220 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
These five works come from a series that includes a total of 220 photographs, which are printed at various sizes. When exhibiting the full series, Henson arranges the works into small groupings that create an overall effect of aberrant movement and fragmentation. From within these bustling clusters of images, individual faces emerge like spectres of
humanity that will once again dissolve into the crowd.
Henson shot this series over several years in different cities around the world, capturing images of individuals, crowds and architectural details, all apparently adrift in the flow of urban life. The people in these images have an anonymity that allows them to represent universal human experiences of alienation, mortality and fatigue. The views of buildings, however, are more specific. They were photographed in Dresden and East Berlin in the 1970s, when Henson travelled to Germany specifically for the purpose of
documenting these world-weary structures. Taken together, the images remind us of how tragically fleeting a sense of belonging can be.
Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1980-82 1980-82 From a series of 220 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1980-82 1980-82 From a series of 220 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1980-82 1980-82 From a series of 220 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection draws on work from the Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection. MGA holds one of the largest collections of Bill Henson’s photography. With its concentration of work from 1977-92, the collection provides a significant survey of Henson’s early career.
Bill Henson is one of Australia’s best-known artists. Many of us have heard his name. Some of us may also be familiar with his photographs. For many, the experience of Henson’s extraordinary work has probably been through reproduction of it in the media. However, it is important to view Henson’s actual photographs. This offers a much richer visual experience, and a deeper appreciation of his art. Henson printed all of the work in this exhibition in the darkroom by hand, using chemicals and carefully chosen paper stock. The uneven surfaces of the early black-and-white photographs are a result of this wet-printing process, and give the photographs a mysterious, almost alchemic quality. The larger colour photographs display a richness of tone and palette that is an artefact of the artist’s meticulous approach to the printing process. These material properties are not evident in reproductions of Henson’s images.
The other aspect that is lost in reproduction is the physical difficulty of seeing Henson’s pictures clearly. The darkness of Henson’s photographs appeals to the artist’s romantic sensibility. He tends to let shadows obscure visual detail so that enigmas lurk at the threshold of perception. Publishers like to override this quality of Henson’s work by adjusting the contrast and brightness of the images for print. Viewers of this exhibition will find themselves drawn into an inscrutable visual space of shadows and deep, reflective blacks.
Born in 1955, Bill Henson grew up in Glen Waverley, a burgeoning suburb of
Melbourne. From the 1950s to the 1970s the area swelled beyond the termination of the Glen Waverley train line, urged on by the relative affordability, ease and comfort of car travel. Self-serve petrol stations appeared at major intersections, their brightly coloured signage adding their glow to the landscape.
The influence of expanding American suburbia on Australia continued with Glen Waverley becoming home to the first McDonalds restaurant in Victoria (1971). The 1980s saw an expansion of large international chains that offered ‘drive-thru’ services (from fast food to alcohol) favouring prominent roadside locations and large signage to stamp their corporate identities on the landscape.
It is from within this ever changing and expanding landscape, between the end of the train line and country, that Henson’s vision was founded; a place where listless youth claim the vacant lots and preservations between estates as their own private worlds, lost in the evening shadows.
The youth that populate Henson’s images take on a strange, almost hollow look, their eyes becoming dark holes in their ghostly facades. Light and shadow compete to pull their bodies from one plane to the other, Henson seeks to capture this moment, the hovering between child and adult.
These liminal zones, the “intervals in the landscape”1 provided a backdrop for the developing artist. Bill Henson’s early work is undeniably – and perhaps unintentionally – a discussion of the changing landscape of suburbia and in turn the influence of international trends on what it meant to be growing up in Australia at that time. Henson’s early work is significant in Australian photography because of its depiction of this change in both this suburban landscape and the human condition.
1/ Bill Henson as quoted in Dominic Sidhu. “Nocturne: The photographs of Bill Henson (Interview with Bill Henson),” in EGO Magazine, New York, August 29, 2005. No longer available online.
Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 57 1985-1986 From the series Untitled 1985-86 Chromogenic print 106 x 86cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 61 1985-1986 From the series Untitled 1985-86 Chromogenic print 128 × 100cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) holds one of the largest collections of photographs by Bill Henson. With its concentration on work made between 1977 and 1992, the MGA collection represents a significant survey of Henson’s early career, from which twenty-nine works have been selected for the Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection exhibition.
Henson has been described as a ‘passionate and visionary explorer’, and has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally for over three decades, yet this is the first exhibition dedicated to this major artist’s work to be presented in Adelaide.
Passionate discussion about Henson’s work in the Australian media in recent times, has served to illuminate an important debate about the nature of art. But while many of us may be familiar with Henson’s images through reproduction, to view a museum exhibition of the artist’s photographs offers a much deeper appreciation of his art, and is a rare opportunity for audiences to themselves experience his work first hand.
The ‘in conversation’ event is a highlight to accompany a very special exhibition at the Samstag Museum from one of Australia’s most distinguished artists. Bill Henson: early work from the MGA Collection, with selected recent landscapes offers South Australians a unique opportunity to experience the power and beauty of the work of Bill Henson, Australia’s best-known contemporary photographer. This is the first exhibition dedicated to this major artist’s work ever to be presented in Adelaide.
The exhibition features twenty-nine iconic images from many of Henson’s major series from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, all drawn from the Monash Gallery of Art, who hold one of the largest collections of Henson’s work in the country.
For many, the experience of Henson’s extraordinary work has been through its reproduction in the media. However, it is important to view the actual photographs as this offers a much richer visual experience. All of the early work in the exhibition was printed by hand in the darkroom, and consequently the uneven surfaces of the black and white photographs have a mysterious, alchemic quality not present in reproductions of Henson’s images.
Alongside the MGA Collection exhibition, the Samstag Museum is presenting a selection of recent landscape photographs by Henson. These are works of compelling power and continue the artist’s fascination with a diverse range of subject matter. Through them we explore an island of rocky outcrops, monoliths rising dramatically from the ocean and waterfalls captured in a blaze of light.
Text and press release from the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art website
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 63 1985-1986 From the series Untitled 1985-86 Chromogenic print 106 x 86cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1991 Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 72 1985-1986 From the series Untitled 1985-86 Chromogenic print 106 x 86cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1991 Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
The series Untitled 1985-86 is constructed of 154 photographs that explore the psychological space of Henson’s youth. Henson grew up in Glen Waverley, in Melbourne’s South-east, and he has often spoken about the importance of maintaining a connection with the suburban environment that shaped his sensibilities. This series includes a range of specific references to the streetscapes of the area, often shot at night or dusk,
with fluorescent lights investing the darkness with a wistful glow.
Henson’s emphasis on nocturnal life alludes to his interest in treating real landscape as if it is a dreamscape, an idea that is underscored by the use of sleeping figures in this series. And, by juxtaposing suburbia with photographs of summertime girls and Egyptian temples, Henson takes us into the dreamy imaginings of an adolescent boy living on the outskirts of the city.
Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 73 1985-1986 From the series Untitled 1985-86 Chromogenic print 106 x 86cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Donated by the artist 1989 Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 137 1985-1986 From the series Untitled 1985-86 Chromogenic print 106 x 86cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1990-1991 From the series Paris Opera Project Type C photograph 130 × 130cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
In 1990 Bill Henson was commissioned to produce a body of work that responded to the world-renown Opéra de Paris. He decided to focus on the audience, and while at the Opéra photographed the faces of people while they sat enveloped in darkness, their features softly illuminated by the reflected glow of stage lighting. The photographs shot in Paris subsequently became Henson’s source material, as he restaged the portraits in his Melbourne studio to accentuate the mood and atmosphere of an evening at the opera.
When the subsequent series of fifty photographs was first exhibited in Melbourne during 1991, they were hung floor-to-ceiling as if to suggest an auditorium of spectators. With their far-away eyes, gazing off toward something that is not revealed in the photographs, these faces express the sublime sensuality of a musical experience. And the atmospheric cloudscapes that punctuate the series allude to the rich horizons being opened up in the imaginations of the audience.
Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1990-1991 From the series Paris Opera Project Type C photograph 130 × 130cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1-5 B 1990-1991 From the series Paris Opera Project Type C photograph 130 × 130cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1990-1991 From the series Paris Opera Project Type C photograph 130 × 130cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art Hawke Building, City West campus University of South Australia 55 North Terrace, Adelaide Phone: (08) 8302 0870
More planes, this time a series of work titled Vertical (2011). The series is now online on my website.
These are original black and white aircraft recognition slides from the Second World War, turned vertically, with the natural colour embedded in the slides enhanced through Photoshop.
Inspiration for the series came from the tragic crash of “The Galloping Ghost”, a highly modified North American P-51D Mustang racing aircraft, which crashed vertically into spectators while competing at the Reno Air Races in 2011.
There are 22 images in the series formed as a sequence. Below is a selection of images from the series. I hope you like the work!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2011 From the series Vertical Digital prints
This man is legend. He created some of the most memorable and moving photographs in the history of the medium. Once seen, for example his seminal photograph Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath (1972, below), they are never forgotten. Look at the photographs, really look deeply at them. The compositions are flawless, peerless. Smith’s use of chiaroscuro makes his images sing and flow, like a Bach fugue. In spite of everything, “in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.”
Through that courage he left us a body of work that will live forever as masterpieces of the art of photography. Applause.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Martin-Gropius-Bau for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
One of the most well-known photojournalists in the 20th century, Eugene Smith, with his wife at that time Aileen, took this photograph of Tomoko Uemura bathed by her mother, Ryoko. Tomoko was severally disabled, as a result of mercury poisoning, through her mother who ate fish caught in the nearby bay, contaminated by industrial wastewater from a chemical factory. The Smiths lived in a small fishng village in Southern Japan for four years, and documented the human victims and the natural environments destroyed by industrial pollution.
This photograph was carefully posed and lit by the photographers to create a composition similar to that of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture in which Mary holds the dead body of her son Jesus. The Smiths created the photograph as a tool to raise the public’s awareness of mercury poisoning and to help the victims’ fight against the polluting corporation and ultimately the Japanese government.
W. Eugene Smith, who was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, and died in 1978 in Tucson, Arizona, first made a name for himself as a politically and socially committed photojournalist in the USA in the 1940s. Many of his photographic reports appeared in Life, the leading picture magazine that had been launched in New York in 1936. Smith saw in photography more than just an illustration to a text and had often asked editors for a greater say in the composition of a photo-essay. His painstakingly researched and emotionally moving features set new standards of photojournalism in the 1940s and 1950s.
Smith had begun to take photographs as a fifteen-year-old, having been inspired by his mother, a keen amateur photographer. In 1936, following the suicide of his father as a result of the Great Crash, Smith initially enrolled at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. But he dreamed of becoming a photographer and moved to New York, where he attended the New York Institute of Photography. He embarked on his professional career in 1937 as a photo reporter for Newsweek.
A year later he began to work as a freelance for the Black Star Agency, and his pictures appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Collier’s, Time and Life. With Life he was to have a close association that went on for years.
When the USA found itself at war at the end of 1941 Smith initially took propaganda shots for the magazine Parade to support the American troops. Then, as a correspondent for Flying magazine, he took part in reconnaissance flights, taking photos from the air. In 1944 he was back on the staff of Life – this time as a war correspondent – documenting the battle of Saipan and the American landings on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In the course of the fighting the style of his photos changed. Instead of being gung ho they tended to focus on the terrible sufferings of the civilian population and were shot in a way that involved the viewer emotionally. On 22 May 1945 Smith himself was seriously injured, forcing him to submit to a series of operations that went on until 1947.
His new lease of life was symbolised by the first photograph he took after his wound. A Walk to Paradise Garden depicts his two youngest children walking towards a sun-bathed clearing. “While I followed my children into the undergrowth and the group of taller trees – how they were delighted at every little discovery! – and observed them, I suddenly realized that at this moment, in spite of everything, in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.” (1954)
After his recovery he went back to work for Life again. Documentary features showing the dedicated work of ordinary people were particularly popular with readers. In The Country Doctor (1948) he accompanied a young country doctor from the Denver area on his rounds for several weeks. His report Nurse Midwife (1951) on the black midwife Maud Callen was produced against a background of racial discrimination and the brazen activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. In developing the prints Smith adjusted the lighting so as to enhance the emotional atmosphere – during a birth, for example – and so arouse sympathy for the selfless efforts of the midwife. His social commitment, however, did not always meet with approval, as in the case of the unpublished report (1950) on the re-election campaign of Clement Attlee, the candidate of the British Labour Party.
Life intended the report to strengthen indirectly the position of the Conservatives by presenting the results of Attlee’s nationalisation policies in a critical light. Smith’s coverage, however, aroused sympathy for Attlee’s programme and the candidate himself. Smith had more success with his Spanish Village feature (1951). He wanted to convey an impression of living conditions under a fascist regime. After obtaining the necessary shooting permission, he spent two months studying the Spanish countryside before finally selecting a remote village in the Estremadura as his subject. Not a few of the photographs, with their chiaroscuro and clearly structured composition, are reminiscent of classical paintings and convey by means of this stylistic device a sense of the hardships but also the beauty of life there.
Smith’s feature on the work of Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné was to be his last for Life whose refusal to give him a say in the selection and layout of pictures had become unacceptable, and he left the periodical after the appearance of his photo essay Albert Schweitzer – Man of Mercy in November 1955.
A career alternative offered itself in the shape of membership of Magnum, the photographers’ agency founded in 1947. Stefan Lorant commissioned Smith to do an extensive feature on the city of Pittsburgh and its iron foundries, which occupied him for the next few years and nearly exhausted his financial and personal resources. Instead of the 100 prints agreed with Lorant, there arose 13,000 shots out of which he wanted to compose an essay which would be entirely in line with his convictions. In 1958 88 photographs were published in Popular Photography’s Annual Guide, although the essay never appeared in its entirety.
In 1957 Smith, who was known for his excessive devotion to his work, had left his family and moved to 821 Sixth Avenue in New York. The house was visited and used for rehearsals by many well-known jazz musicians, and Smith, who was a passionate music lover, photographed and documented this creative milieu over the next few years, while also keeping an audio record on 1,740 tapes, which were only discovered among his posthumous effects in 1998. At the same time he photographed street scenes from his window while also working on the construction of a psychiatric clinic in Haiti.
In 1961 a commission from the Cosmos PR Agency to photograph the company Hitachi Ltd. took Smith to Japan for a year. This was followed in 1963 by a book which contrasted modern Japan with its deeply rooted traditions. A decade later he again turned to the forced modernisation of Japan and its grave consequences with a shocking series about the Minamata epidemic which had been triggered by the environmental pollution caused by the chemical concern Chisso, which had discharged mercurial waste into the sea near the town of Minamata. The Committee for the Defence of the Victims hired Smith to document the human and ecological dimensions of the catastrophe, and the photographer, who threw himself heart and soul into the project, moved with his second wife, Aileen Mioko Smith, to Minamata. In the course of his researches he was beaten up by company security guards and severely injured. The pictures he took, which appeared in Life and his book Minamata: A Warning to the World largely contributed to publicising the scandal.
By the early 1970s Smith’s photographic work was attracting the attention of museums. His photo A Walk to Paradise Garden had already been selected by Edward Steichen as a symbolic climax to the exhibition The Family of Man (1955), but it was not until 1971 that the first retrospective Let Truth Be the Prejudice was held in the Jewish Museum in New York. In 1977 Smith, by this time seriously ill, moved to Tucson, Arizona, to take up a teaching post at the university there in what was to be the last year of his life.
Exhibition dates: 17th November – 27th November, 2011
Curator: the artist
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) I hear the River 2009 Lightjet photographic print 80 x 140cm
Congratulations to David-Ashley Kerr on his first solo exhibition: the photographs and concept are very interesting.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to David for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs to see a larger version of the image.
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) I hear the Sea 2010 Lightjet photographic print 80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) I hear the Wind 2010 Lightjet photographic print 80 x 140cm
Although rückenfigur is popularly associated with the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, its appearances in art very much pre-date his time. Early forms of it were attributed to Giotto but it became a more substantial style in the 15th century, creeping into the works of painters such as Jan van Eyck and later with Allaert van Everdingen and Jan Luiken.
Often these uses were simply to direct the viewer to behold the landscape in the scene. Friedrich’s approach transfigured this into a different concept, sometimes referred to as “the halted traveller”, where the lonely wanderer has appeared to have been “stopped” by the view of the landscape. This implies to us as a viewer that there is perhaps more to the landscape than we see, but those thoughts may remain unknown to us… privately contained in the mind of the rückenfigur in the scene.
It appears to me that in looking at rückenfigur art, there are two distinct thematic conveyances. The first is the aforementioned “halted traveller” lost in the contemplation of the landscape. In gazing upon the landscape, the rückenfigur is quite separate from the scene being viewed. Although s/he is anonymous and without identity, there is still a distinct identity from that of the landscape.
The second appears, to me at least, to be quite the opposite. Another form of rückenfigur seems to be where the figure(s) are distantly placed deep within the landscape itself. You’ve still got “back figures” in contemplation, but the composition makes them part of the landscape rather than separate. While we still identify with them as a viewer, the identity of the figures are very much subsumed into the grandeur of the landscape, maybe even biblically so.
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) I hear Them 2010 Lightjet photographic print 80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) Territory 2010 Lightjet photographic print 80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr is a Melbourne based visual artist working with large-format photography. This is his first Australian solo show, a selection of landscape studies completed since 2009 that began as a photographic investigation of the Rückenfigur, or back figure. This visual device is commonly associated with German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. It involves depicting a human figure that does not engage the viewer, introspectively contemplating the natural world or landscape before them.
David Ashley Kerr’s photographic practice is a visual inquiry into the relationship between cultural identity and physical environment, site, or place. He currently investigates the use of a staged lone figure in contemporary landscape photography, attempting a symbolic representation of belonging to ‘place’ in a national context, in relation to both indigenous and non-indigenous Australian ownership and connection to land.
David Ashley Kerr completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Art at Deakin University (2009) and a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University (2010). He is currently undertaking a PhD at Monash University on an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship, his research inquiring into place theory through photography, investigating the visual relationship between Australian cultural identity and physical environment.
Text from the Dear Patti Smith website
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) Ore 2010 Lightjet photographic print 80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) Trash 2010 Lightjet photographic print 80 x 140cm
David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986) Game 2009 Lightjet photographic print 80 x 140cm
“Through a process of materialisation, using the technique of assemblage, Ou weaves a lack of fixity into her photographs. She creates a tapestry in the surfaces of her images, a play of pattern / randomness that redefines the significations of the body in the fold of inscription.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 25th October – 19th November, 2011
Curator: the artist and gallery director
Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977) Tim, Hair Stylist, Lower East Side, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm
A strong, nuanced body of work by Selina Au at Sophie Gannon Gallery in Richmond. In the flesh these large colour photographs have a wonderful, polyvocal presence. The solo portraits are stronger in terms of composition and intertextuality than the double portraits.
Derived from the Latin intertexto, meaning to intermingle while weaving, intertextuality is a term first introduced by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties.1 Intertextuality “is always an iteration which is also a re-iteration, a re-writing which foregrounds the trace of the various texts it both knowingly and unknowingly places and dis-places.”2 Intertexuality is how a text is constituted. It fragments singular readings. The reader’s own previous readings, experiences and position within the cultural formation influences these re-inscriptions.
Reminding me of a contemporary redefinition of the work of Diane Arbus, Ou’s reconceptualisations of space “produce a plurality of meanings and signifying / interpretive gestures that escape the reduction of knowledge to fixed, monological re-presentations, or presences.”3 Through a process of materialisation, using the technique of assemblage, Ou weaves a lack of fixity into her photographs. She creates a tapestry in the surfaces of her images, a play of pattern / randomness that redefines the significations of the body in the fold of inscription.
Take the first three portraits in this posting, for example.
The photograph Tim, Hair Stylist, Lower East Side, New York weaves space, time and memory within the pictorial frame. The physical space between the portrait on the wall at rear, Tim and the clock at right is crucial to a reading of this photograph, as is the disjuncture between the appearance of the man in the framed photograph (in jacket and tie) and the casual attire of Tim. Just as important is the memorialisation of both men within the same space (where both presumably work/ed), the collapsing of past and present into a fluid space that is neither here nor there (the past of the man in the framed photograph, the moment of passing of Tim when the photograph was ‘taken’ and the present of the photograph being looked at). There is no fixed, monological representation here: the reading of this photograph hovers between past and present, between memory and reality and haunts the body of the subject, Tim.
Similarly, Raquel, Waitress and Fashion Designer, Nolita, New York and Jerome, Retail Assistant and Fashion Designer, Soho, New York offer radical re-iterations of space, this time with less temporal associations. In Raquel, two red chevrons at top left and right frame the face of the subject, playing off the colour-changing hair of the waitress/fashion designer, the title of the photograph an ironic comment on the intertextual nature of contemporary life: a waitress (low paid, menial labourer) and a fashion designer (famous, highly visible entrepreneur). The nonchalantly limp-wristed, ringed hand and over large glasses, coupled with the bedraggled threads of the black shorts – echoing the tousled nature of the subjects hair – also belies the statement “fashion designer.” The word Cervesas (beer) offers a dichotomy with the coloured bottles of flavoured water that surround the lower half of the subject while the reflection in the window behind Raquel provides a metaphorical vista into this distorted world view.
In Jerome, the same problem in a person’s relationship with self and others is evident: the context of Jerome as both a retail assistant (low paid, menial labourer) and a fashion designer (famous, highly visible entrepreneur). The narcissistic, self-importance of Jerome is beautifully portrayed by Ou as she balances the context of his body in space – his polka-dot shirt reflecting the dotted neon of the shops name, his logo emblazoned necklace doing the same, while the reflections in the shop window again hint at outside forces (the car and consumerism) and other worlds. The defiant, could not give a shit gaze of the subject into the camera lens hints at years of subjugation and unrequited ambition for this is not his shop, these are not his clothes despite the label “fashion designer.” He is just a retail assistant, the subject of his own con(text).
The strength of these photographs is that they blur the outlines of the fixed image dispersing an image of totality, “into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and con-texts.”4 In this sense the solo portraits are much more successful than the rest of the work as Ou magically weaves the tapestry of life into her compositions, ready for the reader to bring their own experiences to these re-inscriptions.
In a word these photographs are, literally, breath-taking.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Sophie Gannon Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Endnotes
1/ Keep, Christopher, McLaughlin, Tim and Parmar, Robin. “Intertextuality,” on The Electronic Labyrinth website [Online] Cited 13/11/2011. No longer available online
2/ Ibid.,
3/ Thumlert, Kurt. Intervisuality, Visual Culture, and Education. [Online] Cited 10/08/2006. No longer available online
4/ Keep Op cit.,
Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977) Raquel, Waitress and Fashion Designer, Nolita, New York 2011 C-type print 100 x 100cm
Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977) Jerome, Retail Assistant and Fashion Designer, Soho, New York 2011 C-type print 100 x 100cm
Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977) Darren, Model and Carlito, Artist, Soho, New York 2011 C-type print 100 x 100cm
Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977) Carolyn and Jane, Lolitas, Brooklyn Botanical Garden, New York 2011 C-type print 100 x 100cm
Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977) Issa and Lamine, Taxi Mechanics, Upper West Side, New York 2011 C-type print 100 x 100cm
Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977) Clementine, Liz and Billy Bob, Mercer-Houston Dog Run, Greenwich Village, New York 2011 C-type print 100 x 100cm
Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977) Derek, Student, Chrystie st, New York 2011 Chromogenic photograph 100 x 100cm
Sophie Gannon Gallery 2, Albert Street Richmond, Melbourne
![Karl Grill (German active Donaueschingen, Germany 1920s) 'Untitled [Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet]' c. 1926-1927](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/grill-spiral-costume-from-the-triadic-ballet.jpg "Karl Grill (German active Donaueschingen, Germany 1920s) 'Untitled [Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet]' c. 1926-1927")
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