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Jul

Exhibition: ‘Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove’ at the New-York Historical Society, Manhattan, New York

Exhibition dates: 14th May – 11th October, 2021

Curators: Brian Clark, Susan Kravitz, and Parker Sargent for the Cherry Grove Archives Collection and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, associate curator of material culture

Weekend Guest at Hot House
1958
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley

During the 1950s, Cherry Grove provided gay individuals a much-needed escape from the homophobia and the legal and social persecution that many experienced in the era of McCarthyism following World War II. Homosexuals faced physical assault, verbal attacks, family rejection, loss of employment, imprisonment, and even involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation. In the Grove, they could openly socialise and experience a joyful and rare freedom of sexual expression.

I seem to be on a roll at the moment with a series of exhibitions that this archive loves to highlight: human beings who picture, capture, depict, image, or photograph the subversive, marginalised, disenfranchised, hidden ‘Other’ in society – as an act of resistance against living lives of conformity, against the prejudices of patriarchy and religion, and against the oppression of bigotry and discrimination.

This exhibition is no exception.

In the 1950s, in an era of “passing” – where queer people had to pass themselves off as something else, something they were not, in order to keep a job or secure a roof over their heads – it is refreshing to see these candid, vernacular, performative photographs of, admittedly, privileged white gays playing, camping it up and having fun with their liberation and identity construction. Having fun in their lives.

Acknowledgement must be made that this party life on Fire Island in the 1950s was only for the white, middle-upper classes. Black, Hispanic, Latino and poor white gay trash need not apply. But that does not mean that these photographs are any less valuable in documenting queer resistance to the status quo.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to New-York Historical Society for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Curator Confidential: Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove

During weekends and summers in the pre-Stonewall era, gay men and women, including many New Yorkers, traveled to the secluded beach town of Cherry Grove on Fire Island where they found opportunities for sexual exploration and self-expression – behaviour that was both stigmatised and criminalised in the straight world. Together with creative figures like Truman Capote, W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, and Patricia Highsmith, these visitors to the Grove took pleasure in the costumed parties, theatrical events, and liberated atmosphere that this gay sanctuary provided.

On view outdoors in New-York Historical’s rear courtyard, this exhibition explores the gay and lesbian community that flourished during the 1950s in Cherry Grove through some 70 enlarged photographs and additional ephemera from the unique holdings of the Cherry Grove Archives Collection.

Curated by Brian Clark, Susan Kravitz, and Parker Sargent for the Cherry Grove Archives Collection and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, associate curator of material culture.

One Hundred Club Party
1949
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley

During the 1950s, campy costume parties were held every summer weekend. Attendees, straight and gay, showed off flamboyant outfits that would have otherwise been considered a violation of New York laws prohibiting risqué attire and cross-dressing.

Outside of Bea Greer’s Home, Bea’s Brunch
1951
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley

Cocktails, sunbathing, sex, and parties were the norm during summer weekends. Gay men and women found opportunities to socialise out in the open, whether on the beach or on the decks of Grove houses.

Parasol Party
1951
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley

Under the guise of dressing up, many men and women were able to play with gender norms at these fabulous cocktail parties, thereby challenging society’s expectations of “proper” behaviour.

Patricia Fitzgerald and Kay Guinness, Cherry Grove Beach
September 1952
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Gay Nathan and Julie Paradise

Kay Guinness (right) was an iconic Cherry Grove figure. Independently wealthy and closeted, she had affairs with women while also being married three different times to men. She flew small airplanes, had her own motorboat, and loved to be part of fashionable society. In the 1950s, Guinness was arrested in Cherry Grove for nude sunbathing on the beach. Her cottage was named No Man’s Land.

The New-York Historical Society presents Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove, an intimate look at one of the first gay beach towns in the United States, on view in New-York Historical’s rear courtyard May 14 – October 11, 2021. The outdoor exhibition explores mid-20th-century gay life in Fire Island’s remote hamlet of Cherry Grove, located on the barrier island south of Long Island, through some 70 enlarged photographs and additional ephemera from the holdings of the Cherry Grove Archives Collection – which works to collect and archive the community’s rich and colourful history.

“Cherry Grove on Fire Island became a weekend and summer destination for gay men and women in the pre-Stonewall era of the 1950s and 1960s,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical. “At a time when they faced homophobia and persecution, the residents of Cherry Grove found a sanctuary where they could socialise and express themselves freely. We are proud to partner with the Cherry Grove Archives Collection to display these joyful images.”

“The Cherry Grove Archives Collection is honoured to exhibit our 1950s Cherry Grove photographs and ephemera at the New-York Historical Society,” said Susan Kravitz, on behalf of the Cherry Grove Archives Collection. “As you walk around this exhibition, we hope you will become aware of the joyous freedom of expression that LGBTQ people demonstrate in so many of these photographs, remembering that pre-Stonewall 1950s was a time when persecution and prosecution ruled the lives of homosexuals in mainland America. Yet the 1950s was a richly creative historical period in Cherry Grove when gay and straight people worked and played together, whether in theatrical productions, costumed cocktail parties, annual balls, or a range of community-sponsored events.”

Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove is presented in conjunction with the Cherry Grove Archives Collection. Curated by Brian Clark, Susan Kravitz, and Parker Sargent for the Cherry Grove Archives Collection, it’s coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, associate curator of material culture. Throughout the exhibition, visitors can hear personal, recorded accounts from members of the Cherry Grove community about their experiences and memories; the audio will be accessible to visitors through their cell phones.

At Cherry Grove, gay men and women could socialise out in the open, whether on the beach or on the decks of Grove houses. In the evenings, many gathered at local restaurants or at Duffy’s Hotel bar, where they could enjoy same-sex dancing late at night. Photographs in the exhibition depict scenes of summer events, including theatre performances, an annual regatta, art shows, beach baseball, and an end-of-season costume ball.

Writers, artists, dancers, theatre people, and Hollywood celebrities had been drawn to the Grove since the 1930s. Gay people became the majority of the population during the 1950s and joined with local straight families to work in community organisations. Visitors to the Grove took pleasure in the costumed parties, theatrical events, and liberated atmosphere that this gay sanctuary provided. A sense of togetherness could be felt at campy Cherry Grove costume parties where attendees, straight and gay, showed off flamboyant outfits that would have otherwise been considered a violation of New York laws prohibiting risqué attire and cross-dressing. Under the guise of dressing up, many men and women were able to play with gender norms at these fabulous cocktail parties, thereby challenging society’s expectations of “proper” behaviour. The images on view showcase the abundant creativity in the ebullient social scene. Many Grove house parties were fundraisers for organisations such as the Cherry Grove Fire Department; the Arts Project of Cherry Grove, which organised theatrical productions; the Dune Fund, which preserved the beach dunes; and the Doctor’s House, which provided community medical services.

With more and more gay people arriving in the 1950s, long-standing local residents attempted to reinstate “decent” behaviour, and police raids became common through the 1960s. Men in particular risked being arrested, jailed, and exposed by name in local newspapers. Headlines from the Suffolk County News – “Five Arrested in Cherry Grove Raid” (August 23, 1957) and “Fifteen Seized in Cherry Grove Raid” (August 9, 1962) – on display in the exhibition document these risks.

Safe/Haven also highlights the creative atmosphere appreciated by cultural figures, gay and straight, in Cherry Grove. Writers who rented or visited there included Christopher Isherwood, Patricia Highsmith, and Tennessee Williams. Truman Capote, the novelist, playwright, and journalist whose flamboyant lifestyle contributed to his social celebrity, stayed at Carrington House just outside of the Grove in 1957, where he wrote parts of the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In one of the photographs displayed in the exhibition, Marty Mann – a pioneering member of Alcoholics Anonymous who founded the National Council on Alcoholism – is pictured with novelist, poet, and playwright Carson McCullers, who wrote the bestselling novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Both women frequented Cherry Grove in the summer.

The final section of the exhibition explores the changing community of Cherry Grove in more recent decades. In the 1960s, following developments in the civil rights movement, Cherry Grove became more welcoming to Black and Latino gay people, reflected in photographs from that time. Working-class gay women began spending more time in the Grove in the 1960s, a change from the groups of mostly affluent and financially successful women who were there in the 1940s and 1950s. During the 1980s, the AIDS crisis devastated Cherry Grove. Both lesbians and gay men in the Grove took care of many of their male friends who were dying from the disease. Later on, middle-class lesbians had the financial ability to buy houses that had once belonged to these men, preserving the Grove as a gay community.

Press release from the New-York Historical Society

Ed Burke in Ethel Merman’s Mermaid Costume, One Hundred Club Party
1949
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley

Many Grove house parties were also fundraisers for organisations such as the Cherry Grove Fire Department; the Arts Project of Cherry Grove, which organised theatrical productions; the Dune Fund, which preserved the beach dunes; and the Doctor’s House, which provided community medical services. For the One Hundred Club Party, an early fundraiser for the Arts Project, organisers asked attendees to donate $100 to join the festivities.

Two Women Getting Sun
1951
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley

Patricia Fitzgerald, Kay Guinness, Mary Ronin, and Bea Greer, Duffy’s Hotel
c. 1950
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Gay Nathan and Julie Paradise

Long summer days on the beach, gay-themed theatre productions, weekend house parties, sitting together in local bars and restaurants, community fundraisers – all these were spaces where gay people and their straight neighbours could form social connections and share experiences that were not possible off-island.

Men on the Beach
c. 1950
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Paul Jablonski

Same-sex relationships were openly expressed and nurtured within this supportive and relatively safe Fire Island community. Men and women who came to 1950s Cherry Grove were free to explore their same-sex attractions, to develop positive gay identities, and to enjoy gay social support networks.

Diaper Party, II
1951
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley

House members hosting a party would often send out creative invitations with tongue-in-cheek humour.

End of Season APCG Ball, Community House, Woman with Headdress
September 1954
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley

Beginning in the late 1940s, community members in late September ended the season by going to “the Ball.” Some spent the entire summer designing and sewing the outfits they would wear. This tradition continues today. In addition to cocktails, food, and a campy costume contest, attendees were able to dance with same-sex partners within the safety of the Community House.

Young Man Posing for Polaroid
1959
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Don Steeple

Taking photos in Cherry Grove was complicated. People wanted to capture their history but also did not want to be identified, fearing retribution if discovered. The instant Polaroid camera, invented in 1948, produced small-sized photos in a minute but required processing on the spot. Simple cameras models like the 127 Brownie or the Argus C3 were most likely used to take snapshots in 1950s Cherry Grove.

Hot House
1958
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley

Cherry Grove homeowners and renters have a long-standing tradition of naming their homes. These names, like Hot House, often have a charm that reflects the character of the community.

DJ Beast and Candy Stevens, Ice Palace
c. 1980
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Valerie Perez and Evelyn Danko

During the 1980s, the AIDS crisis devastated Cherry Grove. Gay men, women, and trans people of all races, religions, and economic status joined together to care for their male friends who were dying from this disease.

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street)
New York, NY 10024
Phone: (212) 873-3400

Opening hours:
Monday – Thursday CLOSED
Friday 11am – 8pm
Saturday – Sunday 11am – 5pm

New-York Historical Society website

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Jul

Exhibition: ‘Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood’ at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, Polaroid photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: American art, american artist, american photographer, American photography, American photojournalism, American Polaroid photography, American social documentary photography, American teens, American teens at the prom, Batman and Little Barbies, Batman and Little Barbies at the Toys "R" Us Holiday Parade, black and white photography, brothels in Falkland Road Mumbai, Child Acrobat with Two Children in Peacock Costumes, Classroom Kiev, Emine Dressed Up for Republic Day, Erin Blackwell, Falkland Road, Falkland Road in Mumbai, Girl Jumping over a Wall, Idesha and Mikayla Preston, Indian circus, J'Lisa Looks Through the Blinds, Jeanette and Victor, Lakeisha, Laurie in the Bathtub, Lucas Nathan and Grace Bush-Vineberg, Mary Ellen Mark, Mary Ellen Mark Batman and Little Barbies, Mary Ellen Mark Batman and Little Barbies at the Toys "R" Us Holiday Parade, Mary Ellen Mark Child Acrobat with Two Children in Peacock Costumes, Mary Ellen Mark Classroom Kiev, Mary Ellen Mark Emine Dressed Up for Republic Day, Mary Ellen Mark Falkland Road, Mary Ellen Mark Girl Jumping over a Wall, Mary Ellen Mark Idesha and Mikayla Preston, Mary Ellen Mark Indian circus, Mary Ellen Mark J'Lisa Looks Through the Blinds, Mary Ellen Mark Jeanette and Victor, Mary Ellen Mark Lakeisha, Mary Ellen Mark Laurie in the Bathtub, Mary Ellen Mark Lucas Nathan and Grace Bush-Vineberg, Mary Ellen Mark Runaway Girls on Pike Street, Mary Ellen Mark Tashara and Tanesha Reese, Mary Ellen Mark Ursula Phillips and Gregg Whitlock Jr, Mary Ellen Mark Women and Children in a Doorway, National Museum of Women in the Arts, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Polaroid Land Camera, Polaroid photography, Runaway Girls on Pike Street, Streetwise Revisited, Tashara and Tanesha Reese, Ursula Phillips and Gregg Whitlock Jr, Women and Children in a Doorway

Exhibition dates: 3rd March – 8th August 2021

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Tashara and Tanesha Reese, Twins Days Festival, Twinsburg, Ohio
1998 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
20 x 24 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Robert and Kathi Steinke; Photo by Lee Stalsworth
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

I have always liked Mary Ellen Mark’s work.

Photographing subjects living outside of mainstream society, there is something of the spirit of Diane Arbus present in her photographs (see Tashara and Tanesha Reese, Twins Days Festival, Twinsburg, Ohio 1998, above) but pushed further, photographed with more sensitivity and compassion for subject matter.

As a photographer Mark blends into the background leaving her subjects to speak for themselves. Intimate moments, abandoned youths, institutionalised patients and child prostitutes are all documented with a sensitive eye. She does not judge.

Her work is not about developing novels ways of representation. As an artist it is not always about being “fashionable” or “contemporary” or coming up with new ways to represent things. With her subjects comfortable in her presence and before her lens, she records what she sees. She lets her subjects tell their own stories.

Sumeja Tulic states that the photograph Falkland Road, Mumbai, India (1978, below) “leaves one uncomfortable at the sight of girls and women performing their sexuality before her lens.” I don’t feel uncomfortable, do you?

I understand the circumstances of the photograph, I feel sadness that this is happening, I feel anger that this girl has to sell her body to men to survive. I feel the injustice of the world. I want there to be fairness and equity in the world not men controlling women… and I feel the empathy of the photographer towards her subject.

“I don’t like to photograph children as children,” Mark said. “I like to see them as adults, as who they really are. I’m always looking for the side of who they might become.”

Through her vision we might be able to access some of the many paths that life may take: from teen runaway to sex worker, to drug addict, to mother of ten.

Unbounded steps on the precious path of life.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Emine Dressed Up for Republic Day. Trabzon, Turkey
Nd
© Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

In 1965, Mark was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to photograph in Turkey. She took this portrait in the courtyard of Emine’s home. Mark gave minimal direction, encouraging the girl to pose herself. With a hand on her hip, Emine mimics an older teen, but her unbuckled, dirt-stained shoes and hair loosening from its bow reveal markers of childhood. Calling this “the first strong photograph I made,” Mark captured a young girl’s eagerness to grow up.

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Women and Children in a Doorway, Mexico
1965
Vintage gelatin silver print
11 x 14 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Jill and Jeffrey Stern
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation
Photo by Lee Stalsworth

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Laurie in the Bathtub, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon
1976 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
20 x 24 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Susan and Earl Cohen
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation
Photo by Lee Stalsworth

In 1975, Mark visited the hospital in which Milos Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next (1975) was being shot, on assignment for The Pennsylvania Gazette. The living conditions inside Women’s Ward 81 greatly affected Mark, and she returned a year later, living inside the facility for 36 days. During this time, she made a body of work about the institutionalised patients. The exhibition includes one of these photographs: a girl, Laurie, submerged in a bathtub [featured image]. Her hair rests on the bathtub’s rim, and her eyes gaze out at Mark. The photograph excludes the institutional surroundings, transforming the frame into a scene of deceptive domesticity.

Text from Sumeja Tulic. “Mary Ellen Mark’s distinct depictions of girlhood reflect the diverse realities of that word,” on the 1854 website March 2021 [Online] Cited 03/04/2021.

Mark approached her subjects with sensitivity and compassion. While photographing on the set of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), shot at the Oregon State Hospital, Mark encountered young women living in a high-security ward for patients considered dangerous to themselves or others. Interested in getting to know the residents, Mark gained temporary permission to live in an adjacent ward. Laurie’s open expression in this portrait reveals little of the institutional environment, as Mark strove to capture the women’s inner selves beyond their diagnoses.

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Girl Jumping over a Wall, Central Park. New York City
Nd
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Falkland Road, Mumbai, India
1978
Dye transfer print
20 x 24 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Jean Rossall
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

Mark was not always successful in challenging stereotypes or developing novel ways of representation. An image depicting a woman applying lipstick to the lips of a girl sitting on a bed in a dimly-lit room is a jarring example of this. There is synchronicity between the unbuttoned buttons on the girl’s dress and her slightly open mouth. Mark’s caption states that she made the photograph in a brothel, where villagers brought the girl after her husband left her. The image is part of Falkland Road (1981), a book about sex workers in Bombay, India. Although Mark invested deeply in making the series, the work leaves one uncomfortable at the sight of girls and women performing their sexuality before her lens.

Text from Sumeja Tulic. “Mary Ellen Mark’s distinct depictions of girlhood reflect the diverse realities of that word,” on the 1854 website March 2021 [Online] Cited 03/04/2021.

Mark spent three months photographing the brothels that line Falkland Road in Mumbai, India. Though she typically worked in black and white, for this project she used colour film. The vibrant saturation of the jewel-toned walls, curtains, and clothing heightens the intensity of this somber scene in which a teenage sex worker is made up for a client. Mark portrayed each of her subjects with dignity and empathy. Her photographs called international attention to the injustices faced by these overlooked young women.

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Jeanette and Victor, Brooklyn, New York
1979 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Shaun Lucas
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation
Photo by Lee Stalsworth

This portrait of Jeanette and her boyfriend, Victor, captures the tenderness of young love. Mark met fifteen-year-old Jeanette when she was five months pregnant. Several times a week for the remainder of the teen’s pregnancy, Mark visited and photographed the couple and their families in Brooklyn, eventually documenting the birth of their daughter. “Photographing Jeanette was a great learning experience for me,” Mark said. “I learned that you can capture more intimate moments by blending into the background.”

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Runaway Girls on Pike Street, Seattle, Washington
1983
Vintage gelatin silver print
16 x 20 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Robert and Kathi Steinke
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

In 1983, Mark traveled to Seattle to document runaway and abandoned youths living on the streets for Life magazine. That assignment became the basis for Streetwise, a photographic series and film documenting the challenges, complexities, and occasional joys in the lives of these children and teenagers. Many of the youths Mark photographed in Seattle fled violent homes or were forced to the streets by poverty. In this image, two girls rest against a graffitied wall on Pike Street, a popular gathering place for the city’s homeless youth.

An icon of modern photography, Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) created compassionate and candid portraits of subjects living outside of mainstream society. From street children in Seattle to circus performers in India, Mark captured the lives and stories of individuals with empathy, humour, and candour. Through the lens of her camera, she cut through social and societal barriers to champion overlooked communities in the United States, India, Mexico, the former Soviet Union, and other countries.

Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood examines Mark’s depictions of girls and young women living in a variety of circumstances around the globe. While Mark photographed people from all walks of life, she was particularly interested in children. “I don’t like to photograph children as children,” Mark said. “I like to see them as adults, as who they really are. I’m always looking for the side of who they might become.”

Made possible by a recent donation from the Photography Buyers Syndicate of more than 160 Mary Ellen Mark works, this presentation includes approximately 30 photographs that span the artist’s 50-year career – from her earliest work in Turkey in the 1960s to images taken on Polaroid film in the early 2000s. Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood highlights some of the artist’s best-known series, including “Prom,” “Streetwise,” and “Twins,” offering viewers an intriguing glimpse into the artist’s wondrous and uncanny vision of girlhood.

Text from the National Museum of Women in the Arts website

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Classroom, Kiev, Ukraine
1987 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Robert and Kathi Steinke
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Lakeisha, South Dallas
1988 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Robert and Kathi Steinke
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation
Photo by Lee Stalsworth

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Child Acrobat with Two Children in Peacock Costumes, Great Royal Circus, Himmatnagar, India
1989 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Jill and Jeffrey Stern
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

In 1968, during her first visit to India, Mark encountered the Indian circus. Her photographs of the events hint at strange and wondrous sights – including this fantastically costumed trio – but focus on the performers in their down time. Mark said, “I wanted to document the lives of the people when they weren’t performing… If I had photographed from the audience’s point of view, I would have just been a spectator.”

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Batman and Little Barbies at the Toys “R” Us Holiday Parade, New York
2002 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Susan and Earl Cohen
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation
Photo by Lee Stalsworth

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Idesha and Mikayla Preston, 8 Years Old, Idesha Older by 10 Minutes, Twinsburg, Ohio
2002
Polaroid, 28 ¼ x 22 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Susan and Earl Cohen
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Ursula Phillips and Gregg Whitlock Jr., Malcolm X Shabazz Prom
2006
Polaroid
28 1/4 x 22 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Frieder K. Hofmann
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Lucas Nathan and Grace Bush-Vineberg, Palisades Charter High School Prom, Los Angeles, California
2008
Polaroid
28 1/4 x 22 in.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Robert and Kathi Steinke
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

From 2006 to 2009, Mark traveled the United States documenting high school proms. A rite of passage for American teens, the prom symbolises an impending transition to adulthood. Mark’s subjects exhibit a range of reactions; some pose seriously with their dates, while others affect more playful mannerisms. Mark used a six-foot-high, 240-pound Polaroid 20 x 24 Land Camera for these portraits. As with the smaller, more familiar Polaroid instant cameras, each shot produces just one unique print with no negative.

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
J’Lisa Looks Through the Blinds, Streetwise Revisited
Nd
© Mary Ellen Mark / The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

The exhibition also includes one photograph, which Mark took the year before her death. In J’Lisa Looks Through the Blinds (2014), a child gazes through broken window blinds. The subject is the daughter of Erin Blackwell, better known as, Tiny. Mark first photographed Tiny in 1983 while working on her most influential body of work, Streetwise. When Mark met Tiny, she was a teen sex worker. By the end of Mark’s life, Tiny was a mother of 10 children and a recovered drug addict. Streetwise also became a film in 1984, documenting runaway children living on the streets of Seattle.

Text from Sumeja Tulic. “Mary Ellen Mark’s distinct depictions of girlhood reflect the diverse realities of that word,” on the 1854 website March 2021 [Online] Cited 03/04/2021.

Mark often took personal interest in those she met and photographed, and in some instances she formed lasting connections with her subjects. Mark’s involvement with Erin Blackwell (nicknamed “Tiny”) began in 1983 while filming the Streetwise (1984) documentary, when the girl was just thirteen. Over the next thirty-two years, Mark documented Tiny’s transition from teen runaway to sex worker, to drug addict, to mother of ten. In this image, Tiny’s daughter J’Lisa peers out of a window, her expression brimming with anticipation and skepticism.

National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20005

Opening hours:
Exhibition hours
Monday – Saturday 10am – 5pm
Sunday 12 – 5pm

National Museum of Women in the Arts website

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Jul

Exhibition: ‘Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: "El" Station Interior, #1960Now, #1960Now Ferguson protest, 10A Untitled, A Family on the Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, Adult Literacy Project, American conceptual photography, American photographers, American photography, Anna Atkins, Anna Atkins Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Fern, Anna Atkins Mauritius, Architectural Site 17, assemblage, Barbara Kasten, Barbara Kasten Architectural Site 17, Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott "El" Station Interior, Black female bodies, Black female subjectivity, Black female subjectivity in the history of art, Black women, Blaxploitation cinema, Calaeno, Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills, Clarence H. White School of Photography, collage, Cookie and Sharon on the Bed, Cookie Mueller, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Fern, Daytime Fantasies, Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus A Family on the Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, Doris Derby, Doris Derby Grass Roots Organizer, Doris Ulmann, Doris Ulmann Kreiger girl, Doris Ulmann Studious Girl, Elizabeth McCausland, everyone who woke up at the yellow house, feminism, Frida looking into mirror, Gathering Paradise, gender, gender and identity, Graciela Iturbide, Graciela Iturbide Magnolia Juchitán México, Grass Roots Organizer, High Museum of Art, Ilse Bing, Ilse Bing Self-Portrait in Mirrors, Imogen Cunningham, Imogen Cunningham Magnolia Blossom, Jill Frank, Jill Frank everyone who woke up at the yellow house, Joyce Neimanas, Joyce Neimanas Daytime Fantasies, Judy Dater, Judy Dater Self-Portrait on Deserted Road, Kreiger girl, Les Trois Femmes Deux, Lola Alvarez Bravo Frida looking into mirror, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Magnolia Blossom, Magnolia Juchitán México, Mickalene Thomas, Mickalene Thomas Les Trois Femmes Deux, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, nan goldin, Nan Goldin Cookie and Sharon on the Bed, New Woman, non-camera photographic images, Nude Collage #1, Paula Chamlee, Paula Chamlee Nude Collage #1, people of the Appalachian Mountains, photographic images without a camera, Sandy Skoglund, Sandy Skoglund Gathering Paradise, Self-Portrait in Mirrors, Self-Portrait on Deserted Road, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Sexual liberation, sexualised depictions of Black female bodies, Sheila Pree Bright, Sheila Pree Bright #1960Now Ferguson protest, Sheila Pree Bright Suburbia series, Sheila Pree Bright Untitled 13, Somnyama Ngonyama, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Studious Girl, surrealist views of domestic spaces, Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection, Untitled 13, Untitled Film Stills, V. Elizabeth Turk, V. Elizabeth Turk Calaeno, women and photography, women photographers, Xaviera Simmons, Xaviera Simmons 10A Untitled, Zanele Muholi, Zanele Muholi Somnyama Ngonyama, Zanele Muholi Zibuyile I (Syracuse), Zibuyile I (Syracuse)

Exhibition dates: 17th April – 1st August 2021

Curator: Sarah Kennel with Maria Kelly, curatorial assistant for photography

Paula Chamlee (American, born 1944)
Nude Collage #1
1998
Gelatin silver print
7 ¾ x 9 ½
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
© Paula Chamlee

Paula Chamlee’s work stretches beyond the realm of straight photography and into assemblage, painting, and drawing. This collage was inspired by photocopies of prints that her husband, the late photographer Michael A. Smith, intended to share with a prospective collector. Because the photographs’ dimensions did not match with that of the copy machine, the images required cropping and taping. Intrigued by the nature of these cast-off bits piled together and the relationship of the parts to the whole, Chamlee created this collage by piecing together images of her body that Smith had taken.

Out of energy this weekend with all that is going on with being made redundant at the University. Physically and emotionally drained. Apologies.

So just two words… more please!

Marcus

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Many thankx to the High 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.

For nearly all of photography’s one hundred eighty-year history, women have shaped the development of the art form and experimented with every aspect of the medium.

Conceived in conjunction with the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted suffrage for some women, this exhibition showcases more than one hundred photographs from the High’s collection, many of them never before on view, and charts the medium’s history from the dawn of the modern period to the present through the work of women photographers.

Organised roughly chronologically, each section emphasises a distinct arena in which women contributed and often led the way. Among the artists featured are pioneers of the medium such as Anna Atkins as well as more recent innovators and avid experimenters, including Betty Hahn, Barbara Kasten, and Meghann Riepenhoff. The exhibition also celebrates the achievements of numerous professional photographers, including Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, and Marion Post Wolcott, who worked in photojournalism, advertising, and documentary modes and promoted photography as a discipline.

The exhibition also highlights photographers who photograph other women, children, and families, among them Sally Mann, Nan Goldin, and Diane Arbus, and those who interrogate ideals of femininity through self-portraiture. Also on view will be works by contemporary photographers who challenge social constructions of gender, sexuality, and identity, including Zanele Muholi, Sheila Pree Bright, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Underexposed B roll

Mickalene Thomas (American, born 1971)
Les Trois Femmes Deux
2018
Dye coupler print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta. purchase with funds from the Friends of Photography

Mickalene Thomas creates vibrantly layered artworks that reclaim iconic images to centre Black female subjectivity in the history of art. A direct response to Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, this photograph transposes the scene of three White figures having a picnic in a park to an interior view of three exquisitely coiffed and adorned Black women (including Thomas’s partner at right) gazing directly and confidently at the viewer. The colourful, wood-panelled living room, complete with fake plants and mismatched African textiles, evokes Thomas’s 1970s childhood and the aesthetics of Blaxploitation cinema, known for its audacious, dangerous, and sexually confident gun-toting heroines.

This spring, the High Museum of Art will present “Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection” (April 17 – August 1), an exhibition featuring more
than 100 photographs from the Museum’s collection, including many that have never before been exhibited. The artworks demonstrate the notable contributions of women throughout the history of photography, spanning from innovators of the medium to contemporary practitioners who investigate the intersections of photography, representation and identity.

Originally conceived in conjunction with the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, “Underexposed” pays homage to the work of women who have pioneered and championed the art of photography, from its earliest days through today. The exhibition is arranged roughly chronologically and showcases distinct arenas in which women photographers flourished and often led the way: as professionals working across multiple genres; as avid experimenters pushing photography into new directions; as teachers and patrons who supported the growth of the medium; and as creative, critically engaged artists exploring such issues as gender, identity and politics.

“With this exhibition’s focus on women photographers, ‘Underexposed’ highlights a trajectory of participation and influence extending from the earliest days of photography to a leading role in defining the medium today,” said Rand Suffolk, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director.

Sarah Kennel, the High’s Donald and Marilyn Keough Family curator of photography, added, “Focusing on the last 100 years, this exhibition highlights how women have embraced photography as a powerful form of professional and creative expression. In bringing together pioneers of the medium with artists who reflect critically on photography’s capacity to shape and challenge concepts of gender and identity, we have an extraordinary opportunity to expand the history of photography and bring greater recognition to the many women who have contributed to and led the field.”

The exhibition opens with a selection of work by artists who transformed the practice of photography from the 1920s through the 1950s. Coinciding with the global rise of the feminist ideal of the “New Woman” in the late 1900s, practitioners including Ilse Bing, Margaret Bourke White, Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham emerged as savvy leaders in the fields of documentary, fashion and fine art photography. The exhibition continues with a section focused on artists who have experimented with photographic technologies and alternative processes to redefine the expressive and material limits of the medium. Works made in the 1970s and 1980s by artists including Barbara Kasten, Olivia Parker and Sheila Pinkel join pieces by contemporary makers, such as Meghann Riepenhoff and Elizabeth Turk, who continue to expand the language of photography.

The second half of the exhibition explores how women photographers have used photography to reflect on and interrogate the personal, social and cultural dimensions of gender and identity. Works by Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Susan Meiselas, Anne Noggle and Clarissa Sligh reveal different ways women have looked at and photographed other women. Similarly, works by Sheila Pree Bright, Sandy Skoglund and Susan Worsham deconstruct ideas around domesticity and feminine ideals. The exhibition closes with a selection of portraits and self-portraits by Judy Dater, Zaneli Muholi, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems, among others, that explore the intersections of photography, representation and identity.

“Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection” will be presented on the lower level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion. This exhibition is curated by Sarah Kennel with Maria Kelly, curatorial assistant for photography.

Press release from the High Museum of Art

Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871)
Mauritius, from Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Fern
1851-1854
Cyanotype
10 1/8 x 7 15/15 inches
Gift in honour of Edward Anthony Hill

Doris Ulmann (American, 1884-1934)
Studious Girl, Fleischman Relative
before 1931
Platinum print
Purchase

Doris Ulmann began her photographic career while attending the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York – the first art photography school in the United States. There she worked in the Pictorialist tradition, embraced the “painterly” qualities of soft focus, and manipulated surfaces. After undergoing a major surgery, Ulmann decided to pursue her interest in people “for whom life had not been a dance.” She began traveling throughout the southeastern United States documenting the folk traditions and people of the Appalachian Mountains. She made several sun-dappled portraits of this young girl (identified on other prints as “Kreiger girl”) in and around Berea, Kentucky.

Ilse Bing (American, born Germany, 1899-1998)
Self-Portrait in Mirrors
Paris, 1931, printed c. 1941
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
“El” Station Interior, Sixth and Ninth Avenue Lines, Downtown Side
1936
Gelatin silver print
10 3/8 x 13 3/8
Purchase with funds from a Friend of the Museum

A towering figure of photography, Berenice Abbott learned the craft while assisting artist Man Ray in Paris. By 1926, she had established her own portrait studio, capturing the leading cultural icons of the day. She also befriended French photographer Eugène Atget and became his tireless champion, even rescuing many of his negatives after his death. After returning to New York in 1929, Abbott spent the next decade working on a major project documenting the rapidly transforming cityscape, which she published in the 1939 book Changing New York, produced with her partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland. Although known for her urban views, in the 1950s, Abbott started working with Massachusetts Institute of Technology to explore the potential for photography to illustrate scientific principles and phenomena, as shown in this picture.

Lola Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993)
Frida looking into mirror
1944
Gelatin silver print
8 3/4 x 7 1/4 inches
Purchase with funds from Margaretta J. Taylor
© Lola Alvarez Bravo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Doris Derby (American, b. 1939)
Grass Roots Organizer, Mississippi
1968
Gelatin silver print
Purchase with funds from Jeff and Valerie Levy

Dr. Doris Derby is an educator, anthropologist, and photojournalist based in Atlanta. In the 1960s and 1970s, she was an active member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the Adult Literacy Project. Derby’s photographs reflect her interest in and concern for the role of poor, disenfranchised women during the movement. Many women had been fired from their jobs for registering to vote; in response, they built skill-based cooperatives and community groups that kept their families and communities together in very difficult times.

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
A Family on the Lawn One Sunday in Westchester in June, 1968
1968, printed 1970
Gelatin silver print
14 3/4 x 15 inches
Purchase with funds from a friend of the Museum

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Magnolia Blossom
1975
Gelatin silver print
10 ¼ x 13 inches
Purchase with funds from a Friend of the Museum
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Joyce Neimanas (American, b. 1944)
Daytime Fantasies
1976
Gelatin silver print with applied colour
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection

For most of her career, Joyce Neimanas has created photographic images without directly using a camera, choosing instead to make complex collages and photograms of found imagery derived primarily from mass culture. In this work, Neimanas enlarged and printed a still from a 16 mm pornographic film to which she applied colour and annotated with text drawn from the controversial Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Made at a time of expanded conversation around gender, feminism, and sexual liberation, this work explores and challenges conventional representations of women’s sexuality.

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled
1979, printed 1989
From the Untitled Film Stills series
Chromogenic print
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection

Cindy Sherman has used self-portraiture as a strategy to interrogate representations of identity, gender, and mass culture. In her breakout Untitled Film Stills series, she photographed herself in varied guises inspired by generic Hollywood depictions of female characters: the bereft housewife, the sultry vamp, the wide-eyed ingénue. She challenges traditional understandings of photography and self-portraiture and exposes mass media’s constructed norms and ideas about femininity. Although she shot the original series in black and white as a nod to mid-twentieth-century B-grade black and white films, she also reprised the themes in colour works like this one.

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Magnolia, Juchitán, México
1986
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie and Sharon on the Bed, Provincetown, MA, Sept. 1989
1989
Dye destruction print
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection

One of the most important photographers of her generation, Nan Goldin is an artist whose personal life is at the centre of her art. Her Cookie Portfolio documents her intimate friendship with Cookie Mueller. This photograph strikes a somber note as we see Cookie’s friend and lover Sharon sitting at the front of her bed, disconnected from a frail-appearing Cookie, who lies underneath her wedding picture. Cookie’s husband, Vittorio, died from AIDS the month this picture was made, and Cookie would die two months later. Despite the palpable loss sensed in the distance between the earlier and later works in the portfolio, Goldin conveys the steadfastness and tenderness of female friendship and support, which also infused her process: “I’m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I’m not analysing what’s going on – I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.”

Sandy Skoglund (American, born 1946)
Gathering Paradise
1991
Dye coupler print
47 x 60 ½ inches
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James L. Henderson, III

Like many of installation artist and photographer Sandy Skoglund’s surrealist views of domestic spaces, this macabre, pink-tinged scene of squirrels running riot across a patio suggests the frenetic anxiety that bubbles beneath the placid appearance of suburban life. Eschewing digital manipulation, Skoglund meticulously constructs room-size theatrical sets – in this case, complete with sculpted squirrels – which she then photographs. At once funny and unsettling, her photographs of everyday spaces invaded by a menagerie of fantastical animals reveal the nightmarish aspects of the American dream.

Judy Dater (American, born 1941)
Self-Portrait on Deserted Road
1982
Gelatin silver print
14 ¼ x 18 ¼
Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection

Over the course of her career, Judy Dater has primarily photographed women, including herself. This work is from a series she made during ten trips to national parks in the West between 1980 and 1983, where she photographed herself nude amidst the grandeur of nature. Seemingly stranded on an empty, endless road, she appears vulnerable and lost, but across the larger series, her photographs veer from savage self-examination to carefully constructed performances that explore identity, subjectivity, and femininity. One of the key influences on Dater’s photography is the work of Imogen Cunningham, who was also a close friend.

Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936)
Architectural Site 17
1988
Dye destruction print
Support/Overall: 50 x 60 inches
Purchase

Sheila Pree Bright (American, b. 1967)
Untitled 13
2006
From the Suburbia series
Dye coupler print, 49 1/2 inches
Gift of Sandra Anderson Baccus in loving memory of Lloyd Tevis Baccus, M.D.
© Sheila Pree Bright

Sheila Pree Bright (American, b. 1967)
#1960Now Ferguson protest: National March in Ferguson, “We Can’t Stop” Mike Brown, Ferguson, MO, March 2015
2015
From the series #1960Now
Gelatin silver print
Purchase with funds from the Friends of Photography

Sheila Pree Bright is one of Atlanta’s most prominent photographers working today. For the ongoing series #1960Now, she travels with and photographs the civic actions and protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. The title refers to the similarities between these contemporary protests and the civil rights movement and photography of the 1960s. The hashtag in the title refers to social media’s growing role in circulating images and defining current events. Here, two young girls and a little boy are at the forefront of a march in Ferguson, emphasising how the youth of today can be change makers for tomorrow.

Xaviera Simmons (American, born 1974)
10A Untitled
2010
From the Utah series
Dye coupler print, 30 x 40 inches, 2010.21. Purchase with David C. Driskell African American Art Acquisition Fund. © Xaviera Simmons

Zanele Muholi (South African, born 1972)
Zibuyile I (Syracuse)
2015
Gelatin silver print
25 5/8 x 17 inches
Purchase with funds from the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family and the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust

Visual activist Zanele Muholi, whose personal gender pronoun is they, uses self-portraiture to address the politics of gender and race in the ongoing body of work Somnyama Ngonyama (which translates to “Hail, The Dark Lioness” from their mother tongue, Zulu). Muholi poses in locations around the world and incorporates everyday found objects such as props, costumes, and set dressing to build images that draw on their personal family history, consumer culture, and art history. In this photograph, Muholi addresses the viewer with a forceful, piercing gaze, challenging the conventional exoticised, othered, and sexualised depictions of Black female bodies.

Jill Frank (American, born 1978)
everyone who woke up at the yellow house
2016
Double sided inkjet print
High Museum of Art, gift of Louis Corrigan

V. Elizabeth Turk (American, born 1945)
Calaeno
2018
Van Dyke print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
© Elizabeth Turk

The High Museum of Art
1280 Peachtree St NE
Atlanta, GA
30309

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Sunday 12 – 5pm
Monday closed

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Jul

Photo album: John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell (1892-1960), 1922-1933 Part 1

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: Australian photography, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, existence, intimacy, landscape, light, Melbourne, memory, photography, portrait, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: 1920s photographs of Western Australia, Aboriginal gin, Aboriginal Types, Aboriginal Types along the Trans-Australian Railway, Adolphe shipwreck, Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, Australia in the 1920s and 1930s in photographs, Australian Desert Blacks, Australian documentary photography, Australian photo-book, Australian photobook, Australian photography, Australian racism, Australian vernacular, Australian vernacular photography, Barton S.A, Belmont, Belmont Literary Institute, Belmont Regatta, Belmont Sailing Club, Belmont School of Arts, Belmont Soldier's Memorial Hall, black and white photography, Blue Mountains, Boss-Pearler, Boulder City, Boulder City WA, Boulder City Western Australia, Boulder Mine, Breeza, Camden Grammar School, Chrysler 70, Darlinghurst Courthouse, Fremantle, Frensham Pastoral Play, Geraldton W.A., Grave in Nigger's Cemetery, Great Boulder Gold Mine, Henry Desmond, Horseshoe dump, Hupmobile, Indigenous Australians, Interior Courtyard Old Gaol Fremantle, Ivanhoe mine dump, Jenolan Caves, John "Jack" Faviell, John "Jack" Riverstone Faviell, John C Reid and Mark C Reid, John Dunn, John Dunn executed, John Reid, Kalgoorlie, La Perouse, Lake Macquarie, Maitland Cup Meeting, Mitchell Library, Moss Vale, mother of pearl, Muswellbrook Picnic Races, Myers and Bourke Street, New South Wales 1920-30s, New South Wales in photographs, Newcastle Races, Old Customs Watch Tower, Old Customs Watch Tower La Perouse, Old Gaol Fremantle, Ooldea, Ooldea S.A., Pan-American, Perseverance Gold Mine, photographs of Australia, photographs of Australia 1920-30s, photographs of New South Wales, photographs of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, photographs of Western Australia, Port August to Kalgoorlie, S.A. Constable, Shark's Bay, Shark's Bay WA, South Australian Railways, Sydney Customs House, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney Harbour Bridge opening, Sydney Harbour Bridge opening photographs, Terowie to Pt. Augusta, The old Illawarra Road, Trans-Australian Railway, Vera Capper and the children, vernacular photography, Visit of the Duke and Duchess of York 1927, Wentworth Falls, Where gold was first found by Hannan, White's Cemetery, Wiseman's Ferry

July 2021

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.

John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album front cover

Discovered in an op shop (charity shop in America), this is the most historically important and exciting Australian photo album that I have ever found!

Belonging to John “Jack” Riverston Faviell, a senior New South Wales public accountant and featuring his photographs, the album ranges across the spectrum of Australian life and culture from the East to the West of the continent in the years 1922-1933. A list of locations and topics can be seen below.

I will undertake a fuller analysis of the album Part 2 of the posting, which will contain unknown photographs of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In this posting there are some important photographs of “Aboriginal Types, along the Trans-Australian Railway” and “Australian Desert Blacks.” The Indigenous Australians had come to trade boomerangs and spears in return for money and clothing. According to the excellent book Bitter Fruit: Australian photographs to 1963 by Michael Graham-Stewart and Francis McWhannell, after the completion of the continental railway in 1917,

“The Railway provided a source of income for Aboriginal people, much to the ire of the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, A. O. Neville, to whom the slightest hint of autonomy was anathema. There was some begging (Neville was convinced that children were being ‘bred’ for the purpose), but also a system of charging for photographs. Boomerang and spear demonstrations were given, and artefacts were souvenired.

The most important stop on the line was Ooldea. This was situated six kilometres south of Ooldea Soak, one of the few places in the region with permanent water. The site had long been of great ceremonial and social significance for Aboriginal people, a fact attested by the profusion of stone artefacts in the area… It was a junction of migratory routes, a centre for exchange, and a refuge in times of drought.”1

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As Episode 1 of the series ‘Australia in Colour’ states of similar home movie images, “these photographs offer an unfiltered glimpse into a world seldom seen.”2

Other fascinating images in this posting include the grave of bushranger John Dunn; the Macquarie Watchtower in La Perouse; the goldfields and mines of Kalgoorlie and “Boulder City” in Western Australia; the oldest inhabitant of Geraldton, W.A.; Fremantle prison; and pearling in Shark’s Bay, W.A. including two photographs – one of the dilapidated “White’s Cemetery” with single cross and bones and the other a “Grave in the Niggers Cemetery” with nothing but a mound of earth and some dead branches. Other photographs offer casual racism as a matter of course in their titles.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

Michael Graham-Stewart and Francis McWhannell. Bitter Fruit: Australian photographs to 1963. Michael Graham-Stewart, 2017, p. 66.
Episode 1 Season 1: “Outpost Of Empire”: This episode charts the story of the nation from 1897 to 1929 as agriculture transforms the land. ‘Australia in Colour’ is the history of Australia told via a unique collection of cinematic moments brought to life for the first time in stunning colour. It tells the story of how Australia came to be the nation it is today. Narrated by Hugo Weaving, it’s a reflection on our nation’s character, its attitudes, its politics, and its struggle to value its Indigenous and multicultural past. ‘Australia in Colour’ gives us a chance to relive history from a fresh perspective.

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Grateful thankx to Douglas Stewart Fine Books for their research help with this photo album. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Biscuits and cake and fruit were thrown to them from the train windows, while their boomerangs and native weapons, and their importance in the landscape as subjects for photography, brought many a shilling and sixpence for them to spend.”

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Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines quoted in Bitter Fruit: Australian photographs to 1963.1

“John “Jack” Riverston Faviell, was a senior NSW public accountant. Originally from Colinroobie, near Narrandera in NSW, he married Melanie Audrey Pickburn (daughter of Judge Pickburn) in a society wedding at St James’ Church, Sydney, in February 1925. He built no. 20 Yarranabbe Rd, Darling Point as their first married home but he divorced Audrey in October 1930. He would later remarry in 1934, as would Audrey.”

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Jon Dickson. Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Locations

Blue Mountains, NSW (1922)
Leura Falls, NSW (1922)
Weeping Rock, Wentworth Falls, NSW (1922)
Tarana Picnic Races, NSW (1922)
Doona, Breeza, NSW (1922)
Avoca, NSW (1922)
Newcastle Races, NSW (1923)
Belmont / Belmont Regatta, NSW (1923)
Hawkesbury, NSW (1923)
Frenches Forest, NSW (1923)
“Foxlow” Station, Bungedore, NSW (1923)
Sydney, NSW (Customs House, National Art Gallery, Mitchell Library, Darlinghurst Courthouse) (1923)
Muswellbrook Picnic Races, NSW (1923)
Maitland / Maitland Cup Meeting, NSW (1923)
Breeza, NSW (1923)
Wiseman’s Ferry, NSW (1923)
Moss Vale / Sutton Forest Church, NSW (1923)
Frensham, NSW (1923)
La Perouse, NSW (Historical Society Excursion) (1923)
Old Customs Watch Tower, La Perouse (1923)
The Old Illawarra Road, NSW (1923)
Yarcowie, SA (1923)
Trans-Australian Railway (Port Augusta to Kalgoorlie) (1923)
Karonie, WA (1923)
Kalgoorlie, WA (1923)
Boulder City, WA (1923)
Fremantle, WA (1923)
Geraldton, WA (1923)
Shark’s Bay, WA (1923)
Henry Freycinet Estuary, WA (1923)
Tamala Station, WA (1923)
Perth, WA (1923)
Adelaide, SA (Torrens River) (1923)
“Redbank,” Scone, NSW (1924)
Muswellbrook Picnic Races, NSW (1924)
“Craigieburn,” Bowral, NSW (1924)
The Dudley Cup at Kensington, NSW (1924)
Camden Grammar School, NSW (1924)
Liverpool Church, NSW (1924)
Landsdowne Bridge, NSW (1924)
Jenolan Caves, NSW (1924)
Avon Dam, NSW (1924)
Herald Office, Pitt Street, NSW (1924)
Camping, Cronulla, NSW (1925)
Roseville, NSW (1926)
Whale Beach, NSW (1927)
Visit of the Duke and Duchess of York, Macquarie Street, NSW (1927)
20, Yarranabbe Rd., Darling Point, NSW (1926)
Canberra, ACT (1927)
Jenolan Caves, NSW (Lady Dorothy Hope-Morley) (1927)
Ellen’s Isle, Loch Katrine, Scotland (1925)
Sydney Harbour Bridge, NSW (1931-32)
“Springfield,” Byng, Near Orange, NSW (1932)
Lucknow, near Orange, NSW (1933)
Hawkesbury, NSW (1933)
Bathurst, NSW (1933)
“Millambri, ” Canowindra, NSW (1933)
Melbourne, VIC (1933)

Topics

Men
Pastoralism and grazing
Horses / country horse racing
Sheep and shearing
Cows
Mill / logging
Pine plantation
Bush
Bores and dams
Cathedral / churches
Tennis
Golf
Cars (Ford, Pan-American, Essex, Oldsmobile, early Hupmobile, Chrysler 70)
Buses
Bank, post office
Pastoral Play
Monuments
Rock carvings
Houses
Cemetery / tombstones
John Dunn, executed 1866
South Australian Railways / locomotives
S.A. constable and Adelaide cop
Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal types, along the Trans-Australian Railway)
Australian Desert Blacks
Gold mine / gold panning
Mining (Boulder and Perseverance Mines)
Convict gaol
Oldest inhabitant (Henry Desmond)
Hotels
Beach and sea, surf girls
Mother of pearl
Dates
Afghan / camels
Yachting, sailing / boats
Guano
Fred Adams, Boss-Pearler
Stations and station hands
Rowing
Dredging
Polo
Rugby
Caves
Guns
Nobility and royalty
Camping, picnics
Tennis
House building / old houses
Parliament House
Prime Ministers residence
Bridges and bridge building
Federal and state governors
The world’s first auto-gyro plane (1909-1912)
The Southern Cross
Pioneers
Mounted police
First house in Byng
Rabbiting
Glamour
Social status / socialite
Family
Women and children
Sydney Harbour Bridge opening
Carillon (bells)
Myers and Bourke Street, Melbourne

“Blue Mountains, N.S.W,” January, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains are a mountainous region and a mountain range located in New South Wales, Australia. The region borders on Sydney’s metropolitan area, its foothills starting about 50 kilometres (31 mi) west of centre of the state capital, close to the major suburb of Penrith. The public’s understanding of the extent of the Blue Mountains is varied, as it forms only part of an extensive mountainous area associated with the Great Dividing Range. Officially the Blue Mountains region is bounded by the Nepean and Hawkesbury rivers in the east, the Coxs River and Lake Burragorang to the west and south, and the Wolgan and Colo rivers to the north. Geologically, it is situated in the central parts of the Sydney Basin. …

The Blue Mountains have been inhabited for millennia by the Gundungurra people, now represented by the Gundungurra Tribal Council Aboriginal Corporation based in Katoomba, and, in the lower Blue Mountains, by the Darug people, now represented by the Darug Tribal Aboriginal Corporation…

Examples of Aboriginal habitation can be found in many places. In the Red Hands Cave, a rock shelter near Glenbrook, the walls contain hand stencils from adults and children. On the southern side of Queen Elizabeth Drive, at Wentworth Falls, a rocky knoll has a large number of grinding grooves created by rubbing stone implements on the rock to shape and sharpen them. There are also carved images of animal tracks and an occupation cave. The site is known as Kings Tableland Aboriginal Site and dates back 22,000 years.

Text from the Wikipedia website

You’ll find the locality of Kanimbla Valley in New South Wales about 90km west-northwest of Sydney. At about 677m above sea level, Kanimbla Valley is one of the higher localities in New South Wales.

“Tarana Picnic Races,” January, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Tarana

Tarana is a small town in the Central West of New South Wales, Australia in the City of Lithgow.

“Doona, Breeza,” October, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

J. Pickering – John Pickering, grazier of Breeza, Upper Hunter Valley, killed by a log he was loading onto a wagon in February 1924.
B.B. Capper – Capper family of Rossmer Homestead at Breeza, Upper Hunter Valley.
Doona Station and Breeza Station owned by the Clift family.

Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books

“Doona, Breeza,” October, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Breeza

Breeza is a small village located about 45 kilometres south east of Gunnedah on the Kamilaroi Highway. The aboriginal name for Breeza means “one hill”.

The village overlooks the rich fertile Liverpool Plains and this diverse farming area produces many and varied crops throughout the year. When in season, the fields of sunflowers, sorghum, canola, wheat and cotton provide a picturesque vista across the sweeping plains.

Breeza was settled in 1848 by Andrew Lang. Old folk say that Bushranger Ben Hall was born at Breeza, he was in fact born near Maitland, but his father, Ben Hall Snr worked on Breeza Station at one time. A mural ‘Ben Hall’s Wall’ stands in the heart of Breeza to commemorate Ben Hall’s final years set against “those wild colonial days” of yesteryear.

Text from the australias.guide website [Online] Cited 18/10/2019

“Avoca,” Xmas, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Avoca Beach

Avoca Beach is a coastal suburb of the Central Coast region of New South Wales, Australia, about 95 kilometres (59 mi) north of Sydney. Avoca Beach is primarily a residential suburb but also a popular tourist destination. Terrigal is a major coastal suburb of the Central Coast region of New South Wales, Australia, located 12 kilometres (7 mi) east of Gosford on the Pacific Ocean. (Text from the Wikipedia website)

“Newcastle Races,” New Year, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Located in the heart of Newcastle on the picturesque Hunter Coast only two hours drive north of Sydney is Newcastle Racecourse. In operation for over 100 years, the Newcastle Racecourse is the largest provincial club in NSW.

“Belmont,” New Year, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Belmont, on Lake Macquarie near Newcastle, NSW.

“Saddington’s Ford,” New Year, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Belmont,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

John C Reid and Mark C Reid

The Reid brothers John C Reid and Mark C Reid were nephews of Sir George Houstoun Reid, 4th Prime Minister of Australia and former Premier of New South Wales prior to Federation. On Friday 14 January, 1898 the Reid boys were at the train station to welcome their uncle the Premier to Newcastle.

Roger Steel, Historian, Belmont

O.E. Friend (died 1942)

O.E. Friend was a very wealthy man and was Director of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney with a keen interest in pastoral pursuits, investments, etc., Perhaps Faviell worked for Friend or was a close confidante, which would explain all the shots of pastoral locations (Friend’s interests).

Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Obituary

MR. O. E. FRIEND DIES IN SYDNEY

Mr O. E. Friend, 60, died today. He was a director of the Permanent Trustee Company, the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, Pitt, Son, and Badgery, the United Insurance, and Howard Smith companies, and several other business organisations. Mr. Friend was keenly interested in pastoral pursuits. He was chairman of directors of Retreat Station Ltd., Queensland, and was formerly president of the Royal Historical Society.

The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, Qld., Tue 26 May, 1942, Page 4 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 05/11/2019

“Belmont Regatta,” 1.1.23 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Belmont Regatta

I am researching the local history of Belmont, NSW and in particular the history of the Belmont Sailing Club. The Belmont Sailing Club was formed at a meeting on 13th May 1922 and it held its first race on 7th October 1922.

Whilst an annual regatta had been held on Belmont Bay for some decades, the Belmont Regatta held on 1st January 1923 is the first run under the auspices of the newly formed Belmont Sailing Club. The photo in the album would be the earliest photograph of 16ft skiffs sailing on Belmont Bay.

Interestingly, John C. Reid, living in Weeroona on the shores of Lake Macquarie was the sailing club’s first patron, having been involved previously with the Belmont regattas as well as the regattas held on Newcastle Harbour. He was also a benefactor providing trophies for the club and had a high profile having formerly been the Mayor of Newcastle and the French Consul for Newcastle, there to assist French sailors. He played a significant role following the wreck of the ship Adolphe (1904, see below) in Newcastle Harbour. His younger brother Mark Christian Reid was the sailing club’s first President. Both of these men lived truly amazing lives.

Is there any possibility of getting a high resolution scan of a few of these photographs? In particular the photo of the 1923 Belmont Regatta is priceless.

The skiffs in the club then used numbers on their sails instead of ensigns like other 16ft skiff clubs. Its hard to see, but it looks like the leading skiff has the number one on the sail, making it the skiff named ‘Clift’ (No numbers are visible on the sails just splotches – Marcus). That name Clift is significant in Belmont as you can see from your photo album. The Clifts were wealthy graziers from Breeza who would holiday at Belmont in their 17 room home.

Roger Steel, Historian, Belmont

Email to Marcus Bunyan 07/07/2021

This slide depicts the wreck of the Adolphe as photographed on 30 September 1904. You can also see the mast of the shipwreck Regent Murray in this photo.
University of Newcastle Library’s Cultural Collections

Adolphe

The Adolphe was a sailing ship that was wrecked at the mouth of the Hunter River in New South Wales, Australia, in 1904. The ship is now the most prominent of several wrecks on what is now the Stockton breakwall, which protects Newcastle harbour. The rescue of the ship’s crew has gone down in local maritime history as one of the most remarkable in local waters.

On 30 September 1904, the Adolphe was being towed through the entrance of Newcastle harbour by the tugs Hero and Victoria after an 85-day voyage in ballast from Antwerp under the command of Captain Lucas. Heavy seas prevented the tugs from holding her, and after the tug hawser parted she was swept first on to the wreck of the Colonist, then battered by waves that forced her on top of other submerged wrecks on what was then called the Oyster Bank. The lifeboat hurried to the scene and within two hours all 32 of the crew had been taken off. The northern breakwater of the entrance to the port of Newcastle was extended after the loss of the Adolphe. The French consul made an official visit to Newcastle to recognise the efforts of the lifeboat crew.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Fun at The Lake,” 17/19 February, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“O.E.F. (O.E. Friend) & B.B.C. (Basil Cappers),” 17/19 February, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“The Basil Cappers’ departure for England,” 9 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Untitled,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Pan-American, 6666,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“The Hawkesbury from the train,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow,” 3/5 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow,” March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow,” 3/5 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow Station, Bungendore,” 3/5 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow,” 3/5 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Foxlow

Bungendore property “Foxlow” has more than 7500 hectares of land. It was purchased by F.B.S Falkiner (the son of F.S. Falkiner) in 1920.

Before the Falkiner family ownership, “Foxlow” had been in the hands of the Osborne family, and previously the Rutledge family; they had a short ownership of two years after purchasing it from John Hosking, in the 1860s. Hosking himself was the first mayor of Sydney, and had given the property its name, after his wife, Martha Foxlow Terry.

Mr Falkiner said “Foxlow” was one of the first farms to be taken up in the Molonglo Valley.

The property was profiled in The Land‘s country homes series in 1976, which detailed the property’s history extending back to an original grant in 1839 to Thomas Wood.

It is not known exactly when Hosking himself purchased the property, but his ownership lasted until 1868 when it was purchased by Thomas Rutledge, and then later George Osborne, who had owned the property for 50 years before the Falkiner family ownership.

Nick Heydon. “Historic ‘Foxlow’ offering,” on The Land website 26 April 2014 [Online] Cited 28/10/2019

Foxlow sold for $15 million in 2015.

“Mr Friend examining the old bell,” March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Sydney,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Customs House,” Sydney, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Customs House, Sydney

Customs House, Sydney is a heritage-listed museum space, visitor attraction, commercial building and performance space located in the Circular Quay area at 45 Alfred Street, in the Sydney central business district, in the City of Sydney local government area of New South Wales, Australia. The building served as a customs house prior to Federation and then as the head office of New South Wales operations of the Government of Australia agency Department of Trade and Customs (and its successors) until 1988. The customs function relocated to a new site in 1990. The initial designs were by Mortimer Lewis and it was built during 1845 by under the administration of Governor Sir George Gipps.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“National Art Gallery,” Sydney, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Upper Hunter Amateur Race Club Meeting… (Muswellbrook Picnic Races)” 15/16 May, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Muswellbrook

Muswellbrook is a town in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia, about 243 km (151 mi) north of Sydney and 127 km (79 mi) north-west of Newcastle. Geologically, Muswellbrook is situated in the northern parts of the Sydney basin, bordering the New England region. The area is predominantly known for coal mining and horse breeding, but has also developed a reputation for gourmet food and wine production.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Upper Hunter Amateur Race Club Meeting… (Muswellbrook Picnic Races)” 15/16 May, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“The Button’s Essex,” May, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Muswellbrook Picnic Races,” 15/16 May, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Belmont,” 23/25 June, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Three women standing in front of Belmont Soldier’s Memorial Hall (middle) and Belmont School of Arts (right) in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Belmont Soldier’s Memorial Hall and Belmont School of Arts

My interest in the photo of the women in front of the Belmont Soldier’s Memorial Hall (opened 1921) (above) is also in the hope of seeing what is written on the building beside it (it says Belmont Literary Institute – more commonly known as the Belmont School of Arts, opened 1914). If it is the School of Arts, this suggests the building may have been moved at some stage. I’m very curious as I believed the School of Arts was close by in an adjoining street.

Roger Steel, Historian, Belmont

Belmont

Belmont is a suburb in the Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia, located 20 kilometres (12 mi) from Newcastle’s central business district on the eastern side of Lake Macquarie and is part of the City of Lake Macquarie. Belmont is situated on a sandy peninsula formed by the Tasman Sea on the east and Lake Macquarie.

“”Weroona”, Belmont,” 23/25 June, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

3 women at Weeroona in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Weeroona and the Reid’s

If we look carefully at the photograph of the 3 women at Weeroona with the lake in the back ground (above), you can see the old stone ferry jetty. It was in a state of disrepair in 1923 and Mark C Reid, having been a former Alderman on Newcastle Council and a very prominent business man, was lobbying Lake Macquarie Shire Council to have the jetty repaired. Note this jetty became the club house of Lake Macquarie Yacht Club in the early 1930’s, built at the end of the pier, and still in the same location to this day. I’ve attached an old postcard (below) which shows a view of the yacht club from the Weeroona boatshed.

Some of the information from the Wikipedia page is not correct (below). John C Reid didn’t live in Weeroona during his retirement as he died relatively young and Mark C Reid took over his brother’s position as manager of John Reid Limited and as French Consul following his brother’s unexpected death. The Crippled Children’s Association did purchase Weeroona in about 1950 following Mark C Reid’s death however based on my memory, Weeroona would have been demolished much later than 1979.

Roger Steel, Historian, Belmont

John Christian Reid

John Christian Reid, JP (1873 – 20 March 1932) was a New South Wales businessman, yachtsman and alderman, who served several terms as Mayor of Newcastle… In retirement, Reid lived with his family at his residence, “Weroona”, in Belmont, which later became the holiday home for the NSW Crippled Children’s Association and was demolished in 1979.

Text from the Wikipedia website

The Reid’s water-front, Lake Macquarie in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Belmont, Near Newcastle
1950s?
Postcard
Colour lithograph

“Maitland,” 25 August, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Maitland

Maitland is a city in the Lower Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia and the seat of Maitland City Council, situated on the Hunter River approximately 166 kilometres (103 mi) by road north of Sydney and 35 km (22 mi) north-west of Newcastle. It is on the New England Highway about 17 km (11 mi) from its start at Hexham.

“Dr Kennedy’s house, East Maitland,” August, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Maitland Cup Meeting,” Spring, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Finish of The Cup,” Spring, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Breeza (Doona Cyprus Pine Venture),” 13th September, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“”Karua” household,” September, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Breeza,” 13th September, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

John Pickering was killed by a log, 1924. Cyprus Pine venture was an investment project that Friend and Faviell were working on with Pickering and Capper?

Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Breeza

Breeza is a locality in New South Wales, Australia. It is about 43 kilometres south of Gunnedah, in the Liverpool Plains agricultural region. The area around Breeza in particular is called the “Breeza Plains”. The name “Breeza” may be derived from an Aboriginal word meaning “one hill”.

“The team in the bush,” Breeza, September 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Breeza,” 13th September, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Wiseman’s Ferry,” 25 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Wisemans Ferry

Wisemans Ferry is a town in the state of New South Wales, Australia, located 75 kilometres north north-west of the Sydney central business district in the local government areas of Hornsby Shire, The Hills Shire, City of Hawkesbury and Central Coast Council. The town is a tourist spot with picnic and barbecue facilities. As well as a rich convict and colonial heritage in the area, the Dharug National Park and Yengo National Park are close by.

The town was originally called Lower Portland Headland, but the name was eventually changed to Wisemans Ferry, named after Solomon Wiseman, a former convict (1778-1838), who received a land grant in the area from Governor Macquarie in 1817. Wiseman established a ferry service on the Hawkesbury River in 1827 for the transport of produce and provisions to the convicts building the Great North Road and was known to many as King of the Hawkesbury.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Moss Vale,” 8/9 December, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Moss Vale

Moss Vale is a town in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, Australia, in the Wingecarribee Shire. At the 2016 census, it has a population of 8,579 and is sited on the Illawarra Highway, which connects to Wollongong and the Illawarra coast via Macquarie Pass.

“Frensham Pastoral Play,” 8th December 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Frensham School

Frensham School is an independent non-denominational comprehensive single-sex early learning, primary, and secondary day and boarding school for girls, located at Mittagong, south of Sydney, in the Southern Highlands region of New South Wales, Australia.

“La Perouse (Historical Society Excursion),” 17 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Captain J. H. Watson, Royal Historical Society

O.E. Friend was President of the Royal Historical Society. Faviell was evidently also a member and visited La Perouse on a RHS excursion, with O.E. Friend. Friend disappears from the album after this time. Did Friend and Faviell part ways?

Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books

La Perouse

La Perouse is a suburb in south-eastern Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. The suburb of La Perouse is located about 14 kilometres southeast of the Sydney central business district, in the City of Randwick.

“La Perouse (Historical Society Excursion),” 17 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“John Dunn. Executed, 19.3.1866,” 17 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

John Dunn

John Dunn (14 December 1846 – 19 March 1866) was an Australian bushranger. He was born at Murrumburrah near Yass in New South Wales. He was 19 years old when he was hanged in Darlinghurst Gaol. He was buried in the former Devonshire Street Cemetery in Sydney.

“Old Customs Watch Tower, La Perouse,” 17 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Macquarie Watchtower

The Macquarie Watchtower is the earliest known surviving, sandstone tower building in Australia, the oldest surviving building on Botany Bay, and has long been recognised as a picturesque landmark on the headland, particularly popular for wedding photographs. The c. 1820 Macquarie Watchtower is thought to have been commissioned by Governor Macquarie. Not only is it the oldest surviving watchtower in Australia but it is the only known tower specifically constructed for colonial border protection and the prevention of smuggling.

“The old Illawarra Road,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Vera Capper and the children,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“South Australian Railways,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

South Australian Railways

South Australian Railways (SAR) was the statutory corporation through which the Government of South Australia built and operated railways in South Australia from 1854 until March 1978, when its non-urban railways were incorporated into Australian National, and its Adelaide urban lines were transferred to the State Transport Authority.

“Terowie to Pt. Augusta, 120 ml.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“S.A. Constable,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Trans-Australian Railway (Port August to Kalgoorlie, 1051 miles),” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Trans-Australian Railway

The Trans-Australian Railway crosses the Nullarbor Plain of Australia from Port Augusta in South Australia to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. It includes a 478-kilometre (297 mi) stretch of dead-straight track, the world’s longest, between the 797 km (495 mi) post west of Ooldea and the 1,275 km (792 mi) post west of Loongana.

The line forms an important freight route between Western Australia and the eastern states. Currently two passenger services also use the line, the Indian Pacific for its entire length and The Ghan between Port Augusta and Tarcoola. Earlier passenger services on the route were known as the Great Western Express.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Aboriginal Types, along the Trans-Australian Railway,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“At Ooldea, S.A.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“At Barton, S.A.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Ooldea,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Ooldea

Ooldea is a tiny settlement in South Australia. It is on the eastern edge of the Nullarbor Plain, 863 km (536 mi) west of Port Augusta on the Trans-Australian Railway. Ooldea is 143 km (89 mi) from the bitumen Eyre Highway.

“At Ooldea,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Australian Desert Blacks,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Untitled,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Kalgoorlie,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Kalgoorlie-Boulder

Kalgoorlie-Boulder, known colloquially as just Kalgoorlie, is a city in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia, located 595 km (370 mi) east-northeast of Perth at the end of the Great Eastern Highway. The city was founded in 1889 by the amalgamation of the towns of Kalgoorlie and Boulder, which developed in 1893 during the Coolgardie gold rush, on Western Australia’s “Golden Mile”. It is also the ultimate destination of the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme and the Golden Pipeline Heritage Trail.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Where gold was first found, by Hannan. 15 Jan., 1893,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Boulder City,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Boulder

Boulder is a suburb in the Western Australian Goldfields 595 kilometres (370 mi) east of Perth and bordering onto the town of Kalgoorlie in the Eastern Goldfields region.

“Perseverence Mine,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Perseverance Gold Mine, Golden Mile Mines, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Kalgoorlie-Boulder Shire, Western Australia, Australia

The lease was spoken as the richest 24 acre block on the Golden Mile in 1901. Ten shafts were on the lease, but the two most important was Main Shaft (700feet 1901) in the centre of the block accessing the Perseverance Lode, and No6 Shaft (600 feet 1901) near the southern boundary on the Consols Lode. Measurements are in imperial in keeping with the historic references. Lake View Consols was to its north, South Kalgurli to its south, Associated to its east, and Great Boulder Proprietary to its west.

The general manager of the mine was Ralph Nicholls who arrived in July 1899, about three years after the mine opened. He was in for a torrid time later. A new mill was constructed shortly after to process the sulphide ore, while remaining oxidised ore was taken to Hannan’s Public Crushing Company, which the mine owned. All ore was processed at a new mill constructed on the lease in 1910.

Around 1900 a series of scandals hit the Golden Mile mines. From 1896-1900 they had mined incredibly rich ore loads, but as these became exhausted, lower (but still very profitable) gold grades became the norm. Several of the mines had over estimated the potential gold which could be extracted, leading to wild fluctuations in share prices. Employees of the companies were accused of what we would now call insider trading of shares they owned.

Around 1903, the Boulder Perseverance Mine was the latest to be caught in the scandal. The outcry finally forced the Government’s hand which launched a Royal Commission. Delivering its report in 1904, it was scathing of the company.

Text from “Perseverance Gold Mine (Boulder Perseverance Mine),” on the mindat.org website [Online] Cited 29/10/2019

“Boulder Mine,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Great Boulder Gold Mine, Golden Mile Mines, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Kalgoorlie-Boulder Shire, Western Australia, Australia

The Great Boulder Mine was the first large scale mine on the Golden Mile, and considered the largest and richest on the field.

The town of Boulder (as in Kalgoorlie-Boulder) was named after the mine.

Visitors to the underground workings in the early part of the Twentieth Century wrote in amazement at seeing ore shoots loaded with fine grained gold. One writer wrote the battery was barely keeping up with gold being processed from the access tunnels, let alone the ore shoots. In 1929 the mine had extracted the most gold of any location in Western Australia. In 1940 it was noted as the second largest producer to that point in Australia.

The discovery of gold at Hannans, just north of the Golden Mile, led to the greatest gold-rush in Australia’s history. After only a couple of years of frenzied activity, by thousands of individual miners, the alluvial gold had been exhausted.

British speculators successfully floated the Great Boulder and Lakeview Mines in 1895 to access the rich underground reefs. The Great Boulder Gold Mines Limited was formed at this time, until it ceased as a company in 1972. …

Between 1895-1931 over four million tonnes of ore was processed for almost the same amount in ounces of gold. Dividends amounted to 3524% of the initial capital invested. The company had produced 15 million pounds of gold monetary wise, and 7.5 million pounds in profits.

Text from “Great Boulder Gold Mine,” on the mindat.org website [Online] Cited 29/10/2019

“Fremantle,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Interior Courtyard, Old Gaol,” Fremantle, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Fremantle Prison

Fremantle Prison, sometimes referred to as Fremantle Gaol or Fremantle Jail, is a former Australian prison and World Heritage Site in Fremantle, Western Australia. The six-hectare (15-acre) site includes the prison cellblocks, gatehouse, perimeter walls, cottages, and tunnels. It was initially used for convicts transported from Britain, but was transferred to the colonial government in 1886 for use for locally-sentenced prisoners. Royal Commissions were held in 1898 and 1911, and instigated some reform to the prison system, but significant changes did not begin until the 1960s.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Geraldton, W.A.,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Geraldton

Geraldton is a coastal city in the Mid West region of the Australian state of Western Australia, 424 kilometres (263 mi) north of the state capital, Perth.

“Oldest Inhabitant (Henry Desmond.),” Geraldton, W.A. 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Shark’s Bay, W.A.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Pearling interests? Investments? in Western Australia (Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books)

Shark Bay

Shark Bay is a World Heritage Site in the Gascoyne region of Western Australia. The 23,000-square-kilometre (8,900 sq mi) area is located approximately 800 kilometres (500 mi) north of Perth, on the westernmost point of the Australian continent.

“The only street (Entirely paved of Mother of Pearl),” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Shark’s Bay,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“White’s Cemetery,” Shark’s Bay, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Grave in Nigger’s Cemetery,” Shark’s Bay, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Shark’s Bay,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Gin

Gin is the term for an Aboriginal woman. It is racist, the derogatory saying most people would be familiar with is “looks like a gin’s camp”, meaning they think the place is dirty/untidy.

“Shark’s Bay,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“All Mother-of-Pearl,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Douglas Stewart Fine Books
720 High Street
Armadale VIC 3143
Australia
Phone: +61 3 9066 0200
info@douglasstewart.com.au

Opening hours:
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Jun

Exhibition: ‘Friedrich Seidenstücker – Life in the City: Photographs from the 1920s to 1940s’ at the Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 21st May – 15th August 2021

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Family tandem
1947
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Recognising small diversions

A photographer I knew nothing about. Now I do.

The museum supplied me with 15 media images – hardly enough to give an overview of a life’s work – so I have supplemented them with more images, the best I could find, to give a broader idea of this artist’s work. Unfortunately, there are hardly any large photographs of his nudes or his important photographs of the destruction of Berlin directly after the war online.

An anonymous text on the The Wall Street Journal website (see below) observes that Seidenstücker’s pre- and post war photographs of Berlin “can seem a bit like moral disengagement when one recalls that the era saw the Nazis’ rise, World War II and the dismembering of Berlin itself… Even his shots of postwar rubble work hard to avoid the abyss. Kids and picnickers make the best of the ruins, napping amid the broken bricks or heaping them into playful piles.”

This is hardly true from the photographs I have seen. With a twinkle in his eye and a delicious sense of humour, Seidenstücker documents the mass and form of “the hardships and travail, but also of the longings, the small diversions, and the pleasures of life in the city.” Here is hard work and exhaustion, happiness and poverty, beauty and the ungainly. Impoverished Jewish women gather while coal porters trudge… and in the small photographs of his postwar ‘ruins’ work that I have viewed, hardly a picnicker can be observed.

Seidenstücker was a ‘Momentknipser’ (capturer of the moment) who “documents people in the social fabric of the modern metropolis with an attentive eye and keen intuition”. Which poses the question… does every photograph have to be political? Does every photograph have to be reinterpreted many years later for hidden ‘manifestations of will’ in which the artist knowingly or unknowingly made decisions about what, and who, to photograph?

Or can a photograph exist not only in the moment it was taken, but in the extension of that moment into present and future time just as it is? Can we simply accept that the artist captured what he was interested in through a process of Purpose – Aim – Goal – Valuation – Motivation – Intention, in “empathy, that is, the capacity to enter, so to speak, into the skin of others, and by means of intuitive imagination, become aware of the effects our words and acts may produce.”

Photographs are declarative, they make information known. To take a photograph of the world is not to image in reduction, in simplification – everything is political – for this act in itself is a form of interpretive fascism. Thus, we cannot prescribe a way for them to be interpreted much as we cannot prescribe a way for them to be taken.

As he strolls through the city Seidenstücker’s considered urges to action (the taking of photographs) arrive in the form of superconscious “illuminations” of everyday life. Through his intuitions and inspirations he records ostensibly incidental events and occurrences. These incidental events and occurrences, these puddle jumpers, can only be seen if the mind and will of the excursionist (those that run) are attuned and receptive, are empathetic to the wor(l)ds of others.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Stettiner Bahnhof railway station
1930
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

“Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) is the flaneur among Berlin photographers. As a 22 year-old trained mechanical engineer, he came to the German capital where he worked as an airplane constructor with Zeppelin AG in Potsdam during the First World War. He cultivated his eye for detail in another regard as well, as a precise chronicler with the camera. At 32, he began another course of studies in sculpture, but always kept turning back to his other passion, photography, which he finally made a profession in 1930 upon signing a contract with Ullstein publishing. From then on, he worked for magazines such as Der Querschnitt (The Profile), Illustrierte Zeitung (Illustrated Newspaper), UHU, Die Neue Linie (The New Line), Die Dame (The Lady) and Die Woche (The Weekly). Above all, Seidenstücker became famous for his awareness of every day life, pictures from the Berliner zoo and nude photographs. Similar to Herbert List in Munich, Richard Peter in Dresden or Hermann Claasen in Cologne, he strikingly documented the post-war ruins of Berlin. What interested him overridingly was the unspectacular, the charm of the second glance.”

Dr Boris von Brauchitsch. “Friedrich Seidenstücker,” on the Lumas website [Online] Cited 20/06/2021

“Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) didn’t sell his first photograph until he was 46. Trained as a sculptor, he never lost his eye for mass and form. His photographs of Berlin daily life during the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s freeze passersby in poses either accidentally graceful or, more frequently, droll and ungainly. In Shine (1925), four women clamber out of a swimming pool; the title refers to the wet gleam of the fabric on their behinds… Seidenstücker relished confounding man and beast, as in the image of a curious rhino peering at a seemingly captive zookeeper. On a trip to Copenhagen, he snapped a man whose splay-footed waddle evokes nothing so much as a penguin – indeed, he is dragging a box of fish down the sidewalk. But the irony on display … can seem a bit like moral disengagement when one recalls that the era saw the Nazis’ rise, World War II and the dismembering of Berlin itself. ‘This entire period did not agree with me’ was Seidenstücker’s understated explanation – though during the war he sustained a Jewish friend with gifts of food. Even his shots of postwar rubble work hard to avoid the abyss. Kids and picnickers make the best of the ruins, napping amid the broken bricks or heaping them into playful piles.”

Anonymous. “Photo-Op: Zoo View,” on The Wall Street Journal website [Online] Cited 20/06/2021

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) is one of the most important chroniclers of everyday life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. His atmospheric photographs, mostly taken on his strolls through the city, tell of ostensibly incidental events and occurrences: of Sunday fun and everyday work, of children playing in the street and the goings-on at railway stations and in the zoo. Seidenstücker shows – often from a humorous perspective – the people and life in the metropolis. At the same time, his photographs make the hardships of big-city existence visible and, in the background, repeatedly allow the contrasts of social reality in the interwar years to shine through.

The exhibition featuring 100 works from the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich, invites you to follow Friedrich Seidenstücker on his walks through Berlin 100 years ago.

The art of the moment

With few exceptions, the ‘Momentknipser’ (capturer of the moment), as he called himself, found his motifs outside on the street. As visual metaphors, his famous photographs of ‘Pfützenspringerinnen’ (puddle-leapers) represent metropolitan modernity and urban life. With a portable camera and a light-sensitive lens, he instinctively documented many other scenes and figures – including small tradesmen such as porters, coachmen, and travelling salesmen, as well as nannies, rubbish collection workers, and newspaper vendors – in their daily activities, but also while waiting or resting.

“I am an excursionist / I’m a day tripper“

Seidenstücker characterised himself thusly and set out to accompany his models to the Wannsee beach or to see the cherry blossoms in Werder. His favourite place, however, was the Berlin Zoological Garden. In his photographs taken here, it is not only the enthusiasm of the zoo visitors that becomes visible – occasionally, the observer and the observed seem to reverse their roles: Are the animals also interested in the people?

Seidenstücker’s photographs from the 1920s to the ’40s are images of everyday life, early street photography that documents people in the social fabric of the modern metropolis with an attentive eye and keen intuition. With a twinkle in his eye, he created images that give us today an idea of the hardships and travail, but also of the longings, the small diversions, and the pleasures of life in the city.

The exhibition was organised in special cooperation and with the scientific support of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich.

Press release from Käthe Kollwitz Museum translated from the German

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Puddle jumpers
1925
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemälde, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Children in the city
1928
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Dog painter
1928
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Encounters in the zoo
1926
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Lastenträger (Load carrier)
1928
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Hotel servant
1930
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Potsdamer Platz
After 1931
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde,
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Celebrities snapped, Berlin Zoological Garden
1930
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Photo school, amateur photographers, Berlin
1920-30s
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Berlin Nord im Wedding
1923
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Zebras
1920-30s
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
In his father’s trousers
c. 1950
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Self-portrait with camera
c. 1925
© Archiv Ann und

Poster for the special exhibition
Design: Michael Krupp
Motif: Friedrich Seidenstücker, family tandem, 1947
© Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich

More photographs

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Untitled (Sch)
1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966)
Untitled
c. 1930
Vintage print
6 15/16 x 5 1/16 in. (17.6 x 12.9cm)
Galerie Berinson, Berlin
Photo: Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) is noted for his atmospheric photographs of everyday life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Thanks to his compassionate studies of animals, he has an almost legendary reputation among animal and zoo lovers, and his haunting pictures of Berlin in ruins are a precious source of material for historians. His images seem to be spontaneous, sympathetic examples of the kind of photography that excels at capturing the moment. They are free of any exaggeration or extravagance, and display a sense of humour rarely found in photography. His work is buoyed by a fundamental optimism, yet it does not ignore the harshness, poverty, and suffering that prevailed at that time.

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Potsdamer Bahnhof, Berlin
1932

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Alexanderplatz, Berlin
1928

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Two walruses emerging from water
1925-1935

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Polar bear, Berlin Zoo
1929

Polar bear perspective: who is actually behind bars here? Photographer Seidenstücker often seemed to have been closer to animals than to humans – this is the impression made by many of his photographs, such as those from 1929 at the Berlin Zoo.

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Pelican, Berlin Zoo
1928

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Berlin Zoo
1933

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Berlin Zoo
1936

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Curious goat
1920-30s

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Monday morning, Oberbaumbrücke, Berlin
1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Posing javelin thrower
1932-1938

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Berlin
1925

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Kleines Mädchen malt mit Kreide auf den Straßenasphalt (Little girl paints with chalk on the asphalt road)
1925-1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Elderly couple in Berlin
1929

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
At the Waterpump
1927

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Woman Jumping Puddle, Berlin
1925

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Puddle Jumper
1925

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Puddle Jumpers
1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Faschingsfigur (Carnival figure)
1925

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
The front stairs are scrubbed
1928

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Vor dem Bäckerladen
1929

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Ice cream after school
1931

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Verarmte Jüdinnnen in de Grenadierstraße (Impoverished Jewish women in de Grenadierstrasse)
c. 1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Konzentration vor dem Abschuß des Pfeils (Concentration before the arrow is fired)
1932

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Stove-fitter
1930-35

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Coal porter
1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Next to Wertheim
c. 1935

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Jungfernbrücke an der Friedrichsgracht (Maiden Bridge on the Friedrichsgracht)
1946

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966)
Ein rollstuhlfahrer passiert die ruine des stadtschlosses (A wheelchair user passes the ruins of the city palace)
1947

The Hohenzollern residence, located in the eastern sector, bore the legend, “remove war criminals from all positions!!!”

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Untitled (Bismark)
1946

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966)
The Twins, Hilde und Helga Fischer
1948

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Aufstieg der Begabten, Berlin (Rise of the gifted, Berlin)
1950

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Pachyderms: Zoo visitors at the elephant enclosure in Berlin
1950

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Autumn in the Zoo, African Rhinoceros
c. 1955

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Nude
Nd

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Untitled (Self-portrait with dove)
1952

Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
Neumarkt 18-24 / Neumarkt Passage
50667 Köln
Phone: +49 (0)221 227 2899
Phone: +49 (0)221 227 2602

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm

Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne website

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Jun

Exhibition: ‘Eugène Atget, Voir Paris’ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, Paris, photography, psychological, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: A corner of Marie bridge, Ambassade d'Autriche, Ancien hôtel Sully-Charost, Église Saint-Médard, Cabaret de l'Homme armé, Church of Saint-Médard, Coin de la place Saint-André-des-Arts, Corner of Place Saint-André-des-Arts, Documents for artists, Eugène Atget A corner of Marie bridge, Eugène Atget Ambassade d'Autriche, Eugène Atget Ancien hôtel Sully-Charost, Eugène Atget Austrian embassy, Eugène Atget Cabaret de l'Homme armé, Eugène Atget Church of Saint-Médard, Eugène Atget Coin de la place Saint-André-des-Arts, Eugène Atget Corner of Place Saint-André-des-Arts, Eugène Atget Fontaine du passage des Singes, Eugène Atget Former Sully-Charost hotel, Eugène Atget Fortifications porte de Sèvres, Eugène Atget Maison de Balzac, Eugène Atget Parc Delessert, Eugène Atget Place du Tertre Montmartre, Eugène Atget Rue des Chantres, Eugène Atget Un coin de l'entrepôt de Bercy, Eugène Atget Un coin du pont Marie, Eugène Atget Vieille maison 6 rue de Fourcy, Eugène Atget Voir Paris, Eugene Atget, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fontaine du passage des Singes, Former Sully-Charost hotel, Fortifications porte de Sèvres, French art, French art photography, french artist, French documentary photography, French photographer, French photography, Maison de Balzac, Montmartre, Parc Delessert, Passage des Singes fountain, photography of Old Paris, Place du Tertre, Place du Tertre Montmartre, Rue des Chantres, Un coin de l'entrepôt de Bercy, Un coin du pont Marie, Vieille maison 6 rue de Fourcy

Exhibition dates: 3rd June – 19th September 2021

Curators: Anne de Mondenard, Head of the Photography and Digital Images Department, musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris Agnès Sire, Artistic director, Fondation HCB

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Parc Delessert, XVIe
1914
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

The power of imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

.
Albert Einstein

Imagination, or Visualisation, may be simply defined as the formation of mental images or pictures. It helps us form images of the world – in the case of Atget, images of Old Paris – in which the viewer can value the experience of walking in the city, Paris, walking in the footsteps of history through the gaze of the artist, our gaze.

If we exercise our imagination we can resist, and subvert, our presumed reality – undermining the so-called reality of the world, a world in which we are rationally and relationally forced to understand how things are and how they work.

This is what artists do… they undermine the logic of the world through being exposed to the qualities instantiated in the physical world, and by then stepping aside from that world they exercise their imagination to create, to imagine, to expose themselves (much like a photographic plate) to the perceptions of an external physical world viewed from multiple perspectives.

Thus, “Imagination … plays a central role in empirical cognition by serving as the basis for both memory and the creative arts. In addition it also plays a kind of mediating role between the faculties of sensibility and understanding. Kant calls this mediating role a “transcendental function” of the imagination. It mediates and transcends by being tied in its functioning to both faculties. On one hand, it produces sensible representations, and is thus connected to sensibility. On the other hand, it is not a purely passive faculty but rather engages in the activity of bringing together various representations, as does memory, for example. Kant explicitly connects understanding with this kind of active mental processing.”1

How appropriate for the visualisations of Atget, purported documents for artists but in an alternative reality, poetic concepts (of his imagination) in which he “invites us to exercise our gaze, to consider the complexity of the world as the source of our faculty of imagination.”

You only have to look at one image to imagine Atget lugging his large plate camera to the Place du Tertre, Montmartre in 1922 (below); scouting the square in the 18th arrondissement of Paris near the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur; setting up the camera on its heavy tripod, throwing the dark cloth over his head and then focusing the composition on the ground glass – to then place a tree dissected by another tree directly in your eye line, and starting half way up the tree.2 Who would do that!

It gives you the shivers… the scene is just a little too real. It appears from the transcendental function of the imagination as surrealist “other”. It is un/real. Super real.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Colin McLear. “Kant: Philosophy of Mind,” on the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy website [Online] Cited 20/06/2021.
Also note how far the camera front has moved beyond the circle of light from the lens – so vertical parallels stay parallel.

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

Eugène Atget gave up a career as an actor in order to pursue a relatively new art: photographic recording. From the most classical architecture to the most remote courtyards, Atget, more interested in the city, obsessively depicted a Paris marked by history, offering his prints to painters and libraries. Characters that show up in the frame blend into the background.

Atget said little to nothing about his own work. Reported statements served to define his project as essentially documentary, but it was his direct, poetic approach that fascinated many of his contemporaries. This produced contradictory commentary on his unusual oeuvre. He was fundamentally independent, a bit austere, and fostered neither intellectual concepts nor artistic principles as foundations from which to value experience. He invites us to exercise our gaze, to consider the complexity of the world as the source of our faculty of imagination.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Église Saint-Médard, Ve (Church of Saint-Médard, Ve)
1900-1901
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Ambassade d’Autriche, 57, rue de Varenne, VIIe (Austrian embassy, 57, rue de Varenne, VIIe)
1905
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Un coin de l’entrepôt de Bercy, rue Léopold, XIIe (A corner of the Bercy warehouse, rue Léopold, XIIe)
1913
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Maison de Balzac, 24, rue Berton, XVIe
1913
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Place du Tertre, Montmartre, XVIIIe
1922
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Fortifications, porte de Sèvres, XVe
1923
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

This exhibition, presented at the Fondation HCB, is the fruit of long research efforts jointly undertaken by the two institutions throughout the musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris’ collections. The result is an outstanding presentation of the oeuvre of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a unique figure and photography pioneer. Above all an artisan, Atget’s prolific output of photographs was intended for artists and lovers of the old Paris; he rose to fame posthumously. A forerunner of modernity is seen in his work by art critics and photographers, among them Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose early work sought to imitate Atget. Paris’ place within the oeuvre of Cartier-Bresson is also the subject of an exhibition at the musée Carnavalet from June 15 to October 31, a project in partnership with the Fondation HCB.

First acknowledged in the United States and by the French surrealist scene before finding acclaim with succeeding generations of photographers, Atget still exerts unprecedented influence in the 21st century, though reception of his work remains mixed. Bearing a view camera and glass plates, he often captured his subject at dawn. For almost thirty years, he sought to make a collection of the Paris of his time. He also explored city limits, what is known as “the zone”. Today, his images of nearly‑deserted streets, store fronts, and courtyards evidence urban change at the turn of the 20th century.

Beyond its documentary aspects, Atget’s photography expresses a deep aesthetic sensibility, illustrating the incalculable contribution he made to the medium. As Paris changed, Atget’s work method evolved accordingly, becoming more and more sensitive to the light and to atmospheric effects. This devotion to detail (using a modest subject matter), in contrast to the triumphant pictorialism of the time, is also singularly modern, allowing a notion of pleasure to surface – one which is rarely mentioned in reference to Atget. The exhibition and its accompanying publication propose sharing this pleasure.

The exhibition is organised by the musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris-Musées and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. The musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris houses a collection of over 9,000 prints by Atget, the largest archive on the photographer. The exhibition Eugène Atget – Voir Paris presents a selection of around 150 of the artist’s original prints.

Biography

Eugène Atget was born in Libourne, France in 1857. He gave up a career as an actor and took up photography starting in 1888. He was self-taught. In 1890, he began producing material for use by artists: shots of plants, landscapes and diverse objects. In 1897, he started to take photographs of the Paris of his time systematically, attentive to scenes of urban life, architectural detail and the capital’s topography. Towards the end of his life, he met Man Ray’s assistant, Berenice Abbott, who took two portraits of him. He died in Paris in 1927. Abbott learned of his death just as she was planning to offer him the portraits. Along with gallerist Julien Levy and Atget’s executor, André Calmettes, Abbott aided in rescuing Atget’s studio archive, the recognition of his work through various publications, and the admission of the Abbott / Levy collection to the New York Museum of Modern Art’s collection in 1968.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Cabaret de l’Homme armé, 25, rue des Blancs-Manteaux, IVe
September 1900
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Ancien hôtel Sully-Charost, 11, rue du Cherche-Midi, VIe (Former Sully-Charost hotel, 11, rue du Cherche-Midi, VIe)
1904
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Vieille maison, 6, rue de Fourcy, IVe (Old house, 6, rue de Fourcy, IVe)
1910
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Fontaine du passage des Singes, 6, rue des Guillemites, IVe
1911
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Coin de la place Saint-André-des-Arts et de la rue Hautefeuille, VIe (Corner of Place Saint-André-des-Arts and Rue Hautefeuille, VIe)
1912
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Un coin du pont Marie, IVe (A corner of Marie bridge, IVe)
1921
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Rue des Chantres, IVe
1923
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

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

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

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Jun

Exhibition: ‘Herbert List: Italia’ at Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, surrealism, time and works on paper
Tags: 1950s European photography, 1950s photographs of Italy, 1950s photography, avantgarde photography, Balloons at the Trevi Fountain, Boy with Italian flag Rome, Boys Playing Soccer, Capuchin Monk in front of a fragment of the Statua Colossale di Costantino, Dream States, existence, existential photography, Fight in Trastevere, Finger of God, Fotografia Metafisica, Garden of Pier Francesco Orsini, german photographer, German photography, Girls playing in a Passageway, herbert list, Herbert List Balloons at the Trevi Fountain, Herbert List Boys Playing Soccer, Herbert List Fight in Trastevere, Herbert List Finger of God, Herbert List Girls playing in a Passageway, Herbert List Italia, Herbert List Italian Painter Giorgio de Chirico, Herbert List Orco Sacro Bosco, Herbert List Ottavio Russo The Vagabond, Herbert List Painter in the Forum Romanum, Herbert List Self-Portrait in a Mirror, Herbert List The Enchanted At the Villa Magica, Herbert List View from a window Little Garibaldi, Italian Painter Giorgio de Chirico, jaws of Orcus, Magic Realism, magical landscape, metaphysical photography, metaphysical school of photography, Orco Sacro Bosco, Ottavio Russo, Painter in the Forum Romanum, photographic magic, photography of Italy, Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo, Self-Portrait in a Mirror, social documentary photography, The Enchanted, The Enchanted At the Villa Magica, The Vagabond, urban photography, View from a window: Little Garibaldi

Exhibition dates: 20th May – 31st July 2021

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Orco, Sacro Bosco – Garden of Pier Francesco Orsini, Bomarzo, (Lazio), Italy
1952
Vintage gelatin silver print
30.4 x 24cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Every kind of pleasure

I feel that Herbert List is a very underrated photographer.

While celebrated socialites and fashion, architectural and urban(e) photographers in their day, the fame of List (together with his compatriots George Hoyningen-Huene and Horst P. Horst) has largely waned.

Is this because of the photographs aesthetic beauty and classical forms, their austerity and stillness, or their allusion to Romantic realism? Or is it because all three are gay and their homoerotic photographs of youthful masculinity still possess a residual stigma that clings to photographs of young men?

Whatever the reason this is a great pity for they are, all, superb photographers.

In his Self-Portrait in a Mirror, Rome, Italy (1955, below), List can be seen as an illusionist.

With seeming simplicity but utmost dexterity, List constructs magical spaces within the image plane – enchanted openings into other worlds that are actually present in the here and now: The Enchanted – At the Villa Magica, Rome Italy (1949, below); Painter in the Forum Romanum, Rome, Italy (1949, below).

His photographs play (there is the critical word) with how the camera pictures the reality of life on earth.

At a fundamental level of existence, this is magic (realism)1 played out on a global scale that investigates the fabric and structure of existence itself.

As a song I love titled “Dreams” by the group Nuages reflects:

“… and you understand black implies white

self implies other

life implies death

you can feel yourself

not as a stranger in the world

not as something here on probation

not as something that has arrived here by fluke

but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental

what you are basically

deep deep down

far far in

is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.“

Dr Marcus Bunyan

The existence of fantastic elements in the real world provides the basis for magical realism. Writers do not invent new worlds, but rather, they reveal the magical in the existing world, as was done by Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote the seminal work One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the world of magical realism, the supernatural realm blends with the natural, familiar world. List’s style of fotografia metafisica, which pictured dream states and fantastic imagery, is related to magic realism.

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

“The lens is not objective. Otherwise photography would be useless as an artistic medium.”

.
Herbert List. “Photografie als künstlerisches Ausdrucksmittel,” in List, H. (1985). ‘Herbert List’. München: Christian Verlag., p. 36.

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Boys Playing Soccer, Naples, Italy
1950
Vintage gelatin silver print
23 x 29.5cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Painter in the Forum Romanum, Rome, Italy
1949
Vintage gelatin silver print
29.1 x 22.4cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Ottavio Russo – The Vagabond, Naples, Italy
1961
Vintage gelatin silver print
29 x 22cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Installation view of the exhibition Herbert List: Italia at Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne showing at right, Fight in Trastevere (1953)

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Fight in Trastevere, Trastevere, Rome, Italy
1953
Vintage gelatin silver print
29.3 x 23.2cm

Galerie Karsten Greve is presenting an exhibition dedicated to one of the major photographers of the 20th century: Herbert List Italia. This is a debut for Herbert List at Karsten Greve’s Cologne gallery space. Photo essays, photo reports, and portraits from the artist’s estate are on show, including around 80 vintage gelatin silver prints, based on photographs taken during Herbert List’s stays in Italy between 1934 and 1961. As much a bon vivant and educational traveler as an artist, professional photographer, and a collector of 16th to 18th-century Italian Old Master drawings, Herbert List felt closely connected to Italy.

Born in Hamburg in 1903, the son of Felix List of coffee importers List & Heineken, Herbert List started an apprenticeship with a Heidelberg coffee wholesaler in 1921 while studying art history and literature at Heidelberg University, attending lectures, for instance, given by Friedrich Gundolf, a professor of German philology, Goethe scholar, and member of the George circle. His encounter with photographer Andreas Feininger, who introduced him to the reflex camera (Rolleiflex), inspired Herbert List to take up photography in 1930. Influenced by Surrealism and the Bauhaus, he began shooting still life and portraits. In 1936, he emigrated to London and Paris; most of the time between 1937 and 1941, he spent in Greece. In 1941, to avoid internment, he fled to Munich where the American military government eventually admitted him as a photo reporter after he had been forbidden to officially publish or work in Germany. Being drafted into the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, in 1944, he served in Norway until the end of the war. In 1946, he took photos of the ruins in bombed-out Munich. He became art editor of Heute magazine. In 1952, he joined Magnum, the international photographic cooperative, in Paris and traveled Italy. He completed several book projects. From the mid-1960s, he devoted himself almost entirely to his collection of Italian Old Master drawings. Herbert List died in Munich in 1975.

The artist’s estate, formerly in the care of Max Scheler from 1975 to 2003, is currently managed by Peer-Olaf Richter in Hamburg. Since Herbert List’s first solo exhibition in Paris in 1937, his oeuvre has been shown in numerous international exhibitions and published in internationally renowned magazines. His works are held in notable public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Kunsthaus Zürich, the Photography Museum (now Photography Collection) at Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and the Musée Picasso in Paris.

In the 1930s, creating works of homoerotic sensuality in line with classical aesthetics, Herbert List took photographs of vigorous boys worshiping the sun on the beaches and coasts of Liguria, and on the islands of Capri and Ischia. He dealt with age, loneliness, and death in a 1938 picture essay about Casa Verdi, the old age residence and final destination for many singers and musicians at La Scala in Milan. List’s photographs taken in the catacombs of Palermo’s Capuchin monastery (Le Catacombe dei Cappuccini) with skeletons wrapped in robes whose bizarre facial expressions gain an uncanny presence thanks to close vision and lighting effects, date from 1939. Another grotesque photographic essay shows the monster monuments overgrown with moss and leaves in the Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo (province of Viterbo, Lazio), which is used as a pasture and playground. In the jaws of Orcus, the personified throat of hell, stands a shepherd boy trying to survey his flock of grazing sheep. The ingenious gardens designed by architects Pirro Ligorio and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola on behalf of the Roman condottiero and patron of the arts Pier Francesco (called Vicinio) Orsini between 1552 and 1585 are unique and full of puzzles.

Herbert List uncovers, and, at the same time, ironically comments on, the monumental character of architecture in Rome, the Eternal city, by juxtaposing it with people or animals: the giant marble hand of the Colossus of Emperor Constantine points its index finger towards Heaven behind a monk’s head; a cat poses under a monumental head of Jupiter. In 1952, the camera artist first used a 35 mm camera (Leica) with a telephoto lens to candidly capture events on the piazza in the Trastevere district for his View from a Window series. For a photo report about Naples, Herbert List went on photographic forays through the city starting in 1957. His sympathy was with the local residents: fishermen, traders, craftsmen, seamstresses, and laundresses, but also nuns and priests, idlers and singers, and, in particular, with the street urchins. A native of Naples, director and actor Vittorio De Sica interviewed the people List portrayed. Their collaboration resulted in Napoli, an illustrated book published in 1962; featuring photographs of authentic everyday occurrences and quotations from the people shown, it provides an overall picture of the southern Italian metropolis interspersed with social criticism.

As a specialty of Herbert List’s photography, the exhibition presents vintage gelatin silver prints of portraits of contemporary artists, writers, and intellectuals from List’s circle of acquaintances, including Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi, Anna Magnani, Wystan H. Auden, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Benedetto Croce, to name just a few of these character studies that are considered among the outstanding achievements of 20th century portrait photography.

Accompanying the exhibition, a publication on Herbert List published by Galerie Karsten Greve is available: HERBERT LIST Italia, text: Matthias Harder, Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris, 2020, 12.00 euros.

Text from the Galerie Karsten Greve website

Installation views of the exhibition Herbert List: Italia at Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne

Born in Hamburg in 1903, the son of Felix List of coffee importers List & Heineken, Herbert List started an apprenticeship with a Heidelberg coffee wholesaler in 1921 while studying art history and literature at Heidelberg University, attending lectures, for instance, given by Friedrich Gundolf, a professor of German philology, Goethe scholar, and member of the George circle. His encounter with photographer Andreas Feininger, who introduced him to the reflex camera (Rolleiflex), inspired Herbert List to take up photography in 1930. Influenced by Surrealism and the Bauhaus, he began shooting still life and portraits. In 1936, he emigrated to London and Paris; most of the time between 1937 and 1941, he spent in Greece. In 1941, to avoid internment, he fled to Munich where the American military government eventually admitted him as a photo reporter after he had been forbidden to officially publish or work in Germany. Being drafted into the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, in 1944, he served in Norway until the end of the war. After his return to Germany, the American military government eventually admitted him as a photo reporter after he had been forbidden to officially publish or work in Germany. He became art editor of Heute magazine. In 1952, he joined Magnum, the international photographic cooperative, in Paris and traveled Italy. He completed several book projects. From the mid-1960s, he devoted himself almost entirely to his collection of Italian Old Master drawings. Herbert List died in Munich in 1975.

In the 1930s, creating works of homoerotic sensuality in line with classical aesthetics, Herbert List took photographs of vigorous boys worshiping the sun on the beaches and coasts of Liguria, and on the islands of Capri and Ischia. He dealt with age, loneliness, and death in a 1938 picture essay about Casa Verdi, the old-age residence and final destination for many singers and musicians at La Scala in Milan. List’s photographs taken in the catacombs of Palermo’s Capuchin monastery (Le Catacombe dei Cappuccini) with skeletons wrapped in robes whose bizarre facial expressions gain an uncanny presence thanks to close vision and lighting effects, date from 1939. Another grotesque photographic essay shows the monster monuments overgrown with moss and leaves in the Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo (province of Viterbo, Lazio), which is used as a pasture and playground. In the jaws of Orcus, the personified throat of hell, stands a shepherd boy trying to survey his flock of grazing sheep. The ingenious gardens designed by architects Pirro Ligorio and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola on behalf of the Roman condottiero and patron of the arts Pier Francesco (called Vicinio) Orsini between 1552 and 1585 are unique and full of puzzles.

Herbert List uncovers, and, at the same time, ironically comments on, the monumental character of architecture in Rome, the Eternal city, by juxtaposing it with people or animals: the giant marble hand of the Colossus of Emperor Constantine points its index finger towards Heaven behind a monk’s head; a cat poses under a monumental head of Jupiter. In 1952, the camera artist first used a 35 mm camera (Leica) with a telephoto lens to candidly capture events on the piazza in the Trastevere district for his View from a Window series. For a photo report about Naples, Herbert List went on photographic forays through the city starting in 1957. His sympathy was with the local residents: fishermen, traders, craftsmen, seamstresses, and laundresses, but also nuns and priests, idlers and singers, and, in particular, with the street urchins. A native of Naples, director and actor Vittorio De Sica interviewed the people List portrayed. Their collaboration resulted in Napoli, an illustrated book published in 1962; featuring photographs of authentic everyday occurrences and quotations from the people shown, it provides an overall picture of the southern Italian metropolis interspersed with social criticism.

Text from the Galerie Karsten Greve website

Installation view of the exhibition Herbert List: Italia at Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne showing at right, Italian Painter Giorgio de Chirico #4 (1951)

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Italian Painter Giorgio de Chirico #4, Rome, Italy
1951
Vintage gelatin silver print
30 x 22 .7cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Italian Painter Giorgio di Chirico in his Atelier and Home at Piazza di Spagna

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Girls playing in a Passageway, Naples, Italy
1959
Vintage gelatin silver print
28.9 x 21.6cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Installation view of the exhibition Herbert List: Italia at Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne showing at left, The Enchanted – At the Villa Magica (1949)

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
The Enchanted – At the Villa Magica, Rome Italy
1949
Vintage gelatin silver print
29.4 x 23.8cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
View from a window: Little Garibaldi – Boy with Italian flag, Rome, Trastevere, Italy
1953
Vintage gelatin silver print
22.5 x 29cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Finger of God – Capuchin Monk in front of a fragment of the Statua Colossale di Costantino, Italy, Rome
1949
Vintage gelatin silver print
28.8 x 22.2cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Balloons at the Trevi Fountain, Rome, Italy
1950
Vintage gelatin silver print
28.9 x 23.7cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Self-Portrait in a Mirror, Rome, Italy
1955
Vintage gelatin silver print
15.9 x 21.6cm
© Herbert List Estate, Hamburg, Germany
Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Paris St. Moritz

Galerie Karsten Greve
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Phone: +49 (0)221 257 10 12

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May

Photographs: ‘The “Green Ticket” roundup – first roundup of Jews in France during World War II’, Memorial de la Shoah, Paris

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, Paris, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: 11th arrondissement, Admiral François Bard, analogue black and white photography, aris-Austerlitz railway station, Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp, black and white photography, collaboration, Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs, concentration camps, degenerate, documentary photography, duty of remembrance, Final Solution, Final Solution in France, first mass arrest of Jews in Paris, foreign Jews in France, Francois Bard, French Jews, General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, genocide, German Army, German photography of the Second World War, German war photography, Green Ticket, green ticket round-up, Harry Croner, Holocaust Museum of Paris, internment camp, internment camps in the Loiret, internment of the Jews, Japy gymnasium, Japy sports hall, Jewish men, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Memorial de la Shoah, Nazi death camps, Nazi propaganda, photo-reportage, picturing genocide, Pithiviers internment camp, Propaganda Kompanie, remembrance, rounding up Jews in Paris, Second World War, Shoah in France, The Holocaust, Theodor Dannecker, Vel' d'Hiv' detainees, Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup, Vichy, Vichy State, war photography

May 2021

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Japy Gymnasium: the arrested men are parked in the stands upstairs]
May 14, 1941

Japy Gymnasium: the arrested men are parked in the stands upstairs. The centre of the gymnasium is emptied. Only police officers circulate. The first stage of the roundup has already taken place: the summoned Jews have entered the mousetrap. We see for the first time the interior of Japy and the hundreds of Jewish men crowded together.

Death, duplicity and dishonour

Recently discovered at a Normandy flea market, these photographs by German photographer Harry Croner are taken from 5 contact sheets of 35mm negatives (probably taken on a Leica or similar). These documentary photographs are efficient, well seen, silent and in light of subsequent events… eloquent and emotional. They depict the first roundup of French Jews in Paris on May 14, 1941 at the Japy Gymnasium and a day later at the internment camps into which they were placed.

Lured to several places across the city in a pre-planned trap, Jews were “summoned to town halls across the city for what was billed as routine registration. Instead, the 3,747 men who showed up were arrested by the French authorities… As far as the Japy gymnasium is concerned, 1,061 Jews are summoned at 7.00 am; 800 respond to the summons. When they arrive, they are checked and detained inside the gymnasium. The person accompanying them is asked to go to their home and return with a suitcase containing their personal belongings.”

Today, we know that these images are probably the last photographs of these men alive that were ever taken. They were held in the internment camps for a year before being deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. A year later during the “during the Vel’ d’Hiv’ Roundup of July 16 and 17, 1942, it is the families’ turn to be arrested and detained in these same camps before their deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp”

In collusion with and at the behest of their Nazi overlords, this was not the French government’s finest hour.

The roundup – overseen by the Germans, supervised by government officials (through the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, created by the Vichy State in March 1941 and run by fascist and anti-Semite Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs), enforced by the French police – was undertaken with alacrity, complicity and a ruthless efficiency.

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The ironic aspect of these photographs is that Harry Croner, the German Army photographer, was soon after kicked out of the German Army after it was discovered that his father was Jewish. “In 1940 Croner was drafted and came to the Western Front as a war correspondent, but was then dismissed as “unfit for military service” because of his Jewish father. Back in Berlin, he worked in his shop for a while. In 1944, Croner was sent to a labour camp and in March 1945 was taken prisoner by the Americans, from which he was not released until April 1946.” So Croner ended up in the very place, a concentration camp, which he depicted so efficiently a few years earlier.

The head of the museum’s photography department Lior Lalieu-Smadja has wondered whether this knowledge of his Jewish father made Croner capture these Jewish men in a more humane light than other propaganda photographs of the same event. In an emotional sense I would say “yes” to this question, but in a technical sense, I do not think so. I don’t think the knowledge of his heritage would have influenced the aesthetic and pictorial construction of the images. In the photographs we can observe a wonderful balance within the picture frame – the use of strong intersectional points, the use of diagonals (the angle of the buses in Arrested men leave the gymnasium by bus for Austerlitz station), the use of near to far, the massing of bodies in crowd scenes, the use of flash, evidence of the decisive moment (Arrested men leave the gymnasium by bus for Austerlitz station) as the gendarme and the man turn to look at the camera coupled with the attitude of the man’s leg as he kisses his partner goodbye, and the use of the punctum in the image… the couple sitting on the stairs at top right in Inside the Japy Gymnasium, Paris XI, place of arrest of foreign Jews on May 14, 1941; the boy with his hands in his pockets in Japy gymnasium: some men still arrive carrying their summons; and the women staring out of the window of the Boutique à Louer at far right in Arrested men leave the gymnasium by bus for Austerlitz station, reminiscent of the ghostly faces of men pictured by Eugène Atget staring out of the windows of Parisian bars and cafés.

But above all these are now, today, emotional photographs, ultimately a memorialisation of the soon to be dead, photographs of people that we know are soon to be dead. They are gut wrenching in their simplicity, heart wrenching in their emotional power – the anguish of the women, that last kiss, the stoicism and calm of the men – as we trace the journey of the condemned. We can literally follow the route of one unknown man (see the first three images below) to his known fate.

A final thought enters my head… would Croner have still been in the German Army for the rest of the war, part of the Nazi war machine, if it was not discovered that his father was Jewish? Would he have hidden that fact in order to survive while at the same time serving the fascists even as they killed his own kind? The paradox of this seemingly absurd and contradictory proposition, might have been undeniable.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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All photographs digitally cleaned and balanced by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Many thankx to the Memorial de la Shoah for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

5 contact sheets were recently discovered by the Shoah Memorial, retracing photo after photo of the fate of the Jews summoned by the “green ticket round-up”, the context of the raid, the German and French sponsors and especially the families excluded until now from the known propaganda photos of this roundup. While the press echoed it at the time, the official images were intended to be dehumanising and humiliating for these foreign Jews. The emotion and the dismay of these families, shown in these photos, are a rare illustration of the Shoah in France.

“Pure evil operates tidily, silently and seems so stylish.”

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Jane Silberman

“The French gendarmes had licence to slap, beat, kick, whip, or insult any prisoner who broke the [Drancy] camp rules, but since these rules were never published it meant that they could ill-treat whomever they wanted whenever they wanted – and, with one or two honourable exceptions, this is just what they did. In 1942, when there were female and male prisoners in the camp, the French commandant of the camp, Marcelin Vieux, was seen whipping a woman for being too slow to move away from the middle of the yard. Another inmate remembered Vieux punching inmates and beating them with his truncheon. He also vividly recalled his two violently anti-Semitic French subordinates, who never went on patrol without their truncheons at the ready. Dr. Falkenstein, another prisoner, saw one of these men hit a four-year-old girl so hard that he knocked her unconscious.”

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David Drake. ‘Paris at War: 1939-1944’. Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 209.

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Japy Gymnasium: the arrested men peer outside the upper windows of the gymnasium] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Men boarding a train at Austerlitz station for the Loiret camps] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Theodor Dannecker oversees the transfer of the rounded up Jews to the Austerlitz station] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Never-before-seen photos going on display in Paris this week shine a light on a dark moment in France’s role in rounding up Jews to send to Nazi death camps during World War II. The “green ticket round-up” was first carried out in Paris on May 14 and 15, 1941, with more than 6,000 foreign-born Jews summoned to town halls across the city for what was billed as routine registration. Instead, the 3,747 men who showed up were arrested by the French authorities and shipped to camps south of Paris. Thousands more were rounded up in the following months.

They were held there for a year before being deported to the Auschwitz death camp.

By chance, a stash of 98 photos from the first green ticket round-up, taken by a German soldier on propaganda duty, were recently discovered by the Memorial de la Shoah, the Holocaust Museum of Paris.

Most were taken at the Japy sports hall in the city’s 11th arrondissement, where close to 1,000 were arrested, and where the photos are being put on display from Friday, exactly 80 years on. One shows SS officer Theodor Dannecker, who was in charge of implementing the “Final Solution” in France, alongside French police commissioner Francois Bard in the hall. Others show couples embracing outside, unaware that they would never see each other again.

“These photos are important because we see the opposite of Nazi propaganda that tried to depict these people as sub-human ‘parasites’,” said Lior Lalieu-Smadja, who heads the museum’s photography department. Was that a deliberate move by the photographer? “One has to wonder,” said Lalieu-Smadja, not least because the photographer was identified as Harry Croner, who was soon after kicked out of the German army after it was discovered that his father was Jewish.

The photos were bought years ago by an antiques dealer in Normandy who had found them at a flea market. He pulled them out of storage recently and contacted the museum, who informed him they were the only known pictures from the infamous round-up. Little else is known about the photos’ journey.

“The only thing we know for certain is that once they were taken, they were sent directly to Berlin. The photographer himself could not keep them, which makes this discovery even more incredible,” said Lalieu-Smadja.

Press release from the Memorial de la Shoah website

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Inside the Japy Gymnasium, Paris XI, place of arrest of foreign Jews on May 14, 1941]
May 14, 1941

A German delegation with SS Theodor Dannecker, responsible for Jewish affairs in France, and French led by the prefect of police François Bard, comes to inspect the operation.

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Japy gymnasium: relatives, often wives and their children, are asked to separate from the summoned men]
May 14, 1941

Japy gymnasium: relatives, often wives and their children, are asked to separate from the summoned men. They are asked to come back with some things for 2 to 3 days. The reasons given are the same: “examination of the situation”.

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Japy gymnasium: relatives, often wives and their children, are asked to separate from the summoned men] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Japy gymnasium: some men still arrive carrying their summons]
May 14, 1941

Japy gymnasium: some men still arrive carrying their summons and are received by the police who guard the entrance to the gymnasium. Women with children arrive with suitcases and packages. The following scenes show them standing in line and waiting their turn to hand over the suitcases.

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Japy gymnasium: some men still arrive carrying their summons] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Japy gymnasium: families waiting to hand over the suitcases to their loved ones]
May 14, 1941

Green Ticket roundup: The Shoah Memorial discovers a previously unpublished photo-reportage

The Shoah Memorial announces the recent acquisition of five contact sheets, totalling 98 photographs. This as yet unreleased photo-reportage accurately details every step of the first mass arrest of Jews in Paris by the French police forces on the orders of the German authorities 80 years ago, on May 14, 1941.

The discovery in detail

The Shoah Memorial has purchased five contact sheets – documenting the location of the roundup known as the “Green Ticket” on May 14, 1941 – from two specialised collectors. The contact sheets acquired by the Memorial, numbered 182 to 187 (contact sheet 185 is missing), represent 98 photographs. The photographer’s five rolls of film provide a reality that differs greatly from the photos released by the collaborationist press alone. For the first time, the location of the arrests as well as the protagonists of the roundup are captured from multiple angles. Dehumanised until then by propaganda and even completely erased from reportages, the families of the detainees are shown during their emotional farewells, before the very eyes of onlookers and neighbours. The most important element of this discovery, which is indispensable to history and to the duty of remembrance, allows us to follow the trajectory of these rounded-up men, from their arrival at the Japy gymnasium – the site of the trap, in Paris – up to their internment in the camps of the Loiret.

What the photographs reveal

The 98 photographs printed on contact sheets give a chronological, step-by-step run-down of the roundup.

The first images show the protagonists of the roundup engaged in a discussion inside the Japy gymnasium. The two German and French sponsors are perfectly recognisable:
– Théodor Dannecker (1913-1945), who represents Eichmann in France and heads Section IV J of the Gestapo, in charge of Jewish affairs
– Admiral François Bard (1889-1944), the recently appointed Prefect of the Paris Police
The Japy photo series: the arrested men are confined to the upper floor bleachers. The first stage of the roundup has already taken place: the Jews who have been summoned have entered the trap. These as yet unreleased photos show the interior of Japy and the hundreds of Jewish men crowded together, as well as those accompanying them, often their wives
The exterior of Japy: men are still arriving carrying their summons and are received by the police officers at the entrance to the gymnasium. They bid farewell to their families while a line of women and children is formed. They wait to hand over clothes to their loved ones
The neighbourhood is closed off. Neighbours are at their windows. Families are pushed to the back of the street and wait to hear from their loved one. They have anguished faces. The police blocks the street, then evacuates it
Men of all ages who have been arrested come out one by one, watched over by police officers and carrying their belongings, board buses parked just outside the gymnasium, rue Japy
The arrival at the Paris-Austerlitz railway station through the rear entrance to the station
At Pithiviers, a previously unpublished view of the black hangar – of which there were no images until now – during the internment of the Jews, which will subsequently serve as the registration centre for the Vel’ d’Hiv’ detainees and for deportations

The “Green Ticket” roundup: first roundup of Jews in France during World War II

The “Green Ticket” Roundup is the first mass arrest of Jews in Paris, and it takes place on Wednesday May 14, 1941. These unsuspecting men, mainly foreigners from Eastern Europe are summoned on Wednesday morning by the Police Prefecture with a “green ticket” for a “status review” and asked to be accompanied by a relative or friend.

The men, most of them family men who were army volunteers at the beginning of the war and therefore fought for France, expect a verification of their status. Fleeing antisemitism and persecutions in their countries of origin – Poland, USSR, Romania, Czechoslovakia – and believing that they will find refuge in the land of freedom, they are arrested chiefly because they are Jewish and foreigners.

Several assembly points are indicated on the “green tickets”: the Caserne Napoléon (in the 4th arrondissement), the Caserne des Minimes (in the 3rd arrondissement), 52 rue Edouard Pailleron (in the 19th arrondissement), 33 rue de la Grange-aux-belles (in the 10th arrondissement) and the Japy gymnasium (in the 11th arrondissement) as well as other centres in the arrondissement police stations and Paris suburbs.

As far as the Japy gymnasium is concerned, 1,061 Jews are summoned at 7.00 am; 800 respond to the summons. When they arrive, they are checked and detained inside the gymnasium. The person accompanying them is asked to go to their home and return with a suitcase containing their personal belongings.

After that, the 3,700 arrested Jews are taken to the Paris-Austerlitz railway station in special buses, under the supervision of French police officers, and interned in the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps (in the Loiret). They spend more than a year there before being deported directly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp by Convoy #4 on June 25, 1942, #5 on June 28, 1942 and #6 on July 17, 1942. During the Vel’ d’Hiv’ Roundup of July 16 and 17, 1942, it is the families’ turn to be arrested and detained in these same camps before their deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp between July and September 1942.

Propoganda photographs

As of the Armistice on June 25, 1940, the press is muzzled in France by the German occupier, and press photography is placed under censorship control. The Propaganda Kompanie (PK), set up within the Wehrmacht, is made up of photographers, cameramen, radio and press reporters, who are equipped with high-performance photographic material. This unit, under the direct control of Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is in charge of documenting the historic dimension of the military effort and producing propaganda reports for foreign countries, for the press and for domestic agencies.

The Shoah Memorial

The Shoah Memorial, Europe’s largest archives center dedicated to the history of the Shoah, is a place of remembrance, of education and of transmission on the history of the genocide of the Jews during World War II in Europe. Today it incorporates five sites: the Shoah Memorial in Paris and the Shoah Memorial in Drancy, the Lieu de mémoire du Chambon-sur-Lignon (Haute-Loire), the CERCIL Musée – Mémorial des Enfants du Vel d’Hiv (Loiret), and the Centre culturel Jules Isaac de Clermont-Ferrand (Puy-de-Dôme).

Opened to the public on January 27, 2005 in the historic Marais district, the Paris site provides multiple spaces and an awareness program catering to all audiences: a permanent exhibition on the Holocaust and the history of the Jews in France during World War II; a temporary exhibition space; an auditorium programming screenings and symposia; The Wall of Names on which the names of 76,000 Jewish men, women and children deported from France between 1942 and 1944 as part of the “Final Solution” are engraved; the documentation center (50 million archive materials and 1,500 sound archives, 350,000 photographs, 3,900 drawings and objects, 12,000 posters and postcards, 30,000 cinema documents, 14,500 movie titles including 2,500 testimonials, and 80,000 books) and its reading room; educational spaces where children’s workshops and activities for classrooms and teachers take place; a specialty bookstore.

Better understanding the history of the Holocaust is also aimed at preventing the return of hatred and all forms of intolerance today. The Memorial has also been working for more than a decade on education programs focusing on other genocides of the 20th century, such as the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, or the Armenian genocide.

Press release from the Shoah Memorial

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Japy Gymnasium: men arrested awaiting their fate in the mousetrap that the Japy gymnasium has become]
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Japy Gymnasium: men arrested awaiting their fate in the mousetrap that the Japy gymnasium has become] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [The inhabitants of the district discover the fate of their now captive neighbours]
May 14, 1941

The inhabitants of the district discover the fate of their now captive neighbours and the unusual emotion that reigns around the Japy gymnasium.

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [The inhabitants of the district discover the fate of their now captive neighbours] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)

West Berlin stage: Harry Croner’s photographs from four decades

For 40 years, press photographer Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992) accompanied life in Halbstadt with his camera: the reconstruction and creation of new landmarks, large and small events, celebrities from culture and politics, especially what happened on the city’s stages. His acquaintance with many artists living and visiting Berlin made it possible for him to take impressive snapshots and portraits. Croner’s photographic work, which is being presented for the first time with this selection, is the chronicle of an era and at the same time an homage to a small island of world politics, which was above all one thing, the big stage for culture.

Late career as a photographer

Harry Croner was born on March 16, 1903 in Berlin. From 1920 to 1922 he completed a commercial apprenticeship, worked for various automobile companies as an advertising manager and finally as a travel representative for Bayerische Motorenwerke. When he set up his own photo business in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in 1933, he probably already had a career as a photographer in mind. In addition to selling cameras and accessories, he also took portraits. In 1940 Croner was drafted and came to the Western Front as a war correspondent, but was then dismissed as “unfit for military service” because of his Jewish father. Back in Berlin, he worked in his shop for a while. In 1944, Croner was sent to a labour camp and in March 1945 was taken prisoner by the Americans, from which he was not released until April 1946.

The estate

With the support of the Prussian Sea Trade Foundation, the extensive archive (around 100,000 black and white photographs and over 1.3 million negatives) was acquired in February 1989. A representative part of the estate was digitised in 2013, supported by the Digitalization Service of the State of Berlin. Around 8,000 photos are already accessible online.

Text from the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin website [Online] Cited 20/05/2021 translated from the German by Google Translate

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Arrested men leave the gymnasium by bus for Austerlitz station]
May 14, 1941

After a few hours, the men left the scene under police custody and had to board requisitioned buses for transfer to the Austerlitz station.

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Arrested men leave the gymnasium by bus for Austerlitz station]
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Arrested men leave the gymnasium by bus for Austerlitz station] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Arrested men leave the gymnasium by bus for Austerlitz station]
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Arrested men leave the gymnasium by bus for Austerlitz station] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Men boarding a train at Austerlitz station for the Loiret camps]
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Men boarding a train at Austerlitz station for the Loiret camps] (detail)
May 14, 1941

The 3,710 men arrested in Paris at the various summons were transferred to the Austerlitz station to be interned in the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps. Four convoys of passenger wagons are formed, two convoys with 2140 men to the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande and two convoys with 1570 men to that of Pithiviers. These convoys arrive on the afternoon of May 14.

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Theodor Dannecker oversees the transfer of the rounded up Jews to the Austerlitz station]
May 14, 1941

Theodor Dannecker oversees the transfer of the rounded up Jews to the Austerlitz station. His presence in the photos in this roundup shows that he followed and supervised the entire roundup.

Theodor Dannecker (German, 1913-1945)

Theodor Dannecker (German, 27 March 1913 – 10 December 1945) was an SS-captain (Hauptsturmführer), and an associate of Adolf Eichmann. As a specialist on Nazi anti-Jewish policies (Judenberater), he was one of those who orchestrated the Final Solution in several countries during the World War II genocide of European Jews in what became known as the Holocaust … In December 1945, Dannecker was arrested by the United States Army, and, on 10 December, he committed suicide in Bad Tölz. …

From September 1940 until July 1942, Dannecker was leader of the Judenreferat at the SD office in Paris, where he ordered and oversaw round ups by French Police. More than 13,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp where most died in the Final Solution. …

Dannecker developed under Eichmann into one of the SS’s most ruthless and experienced experts on the “Jewish Question”, and his involvement in the genocide of European Jewry was one of primary responsibility. A passage from a 1942 report by Dannecker illustrates how the “Jewish Question” was handled in France:

“Subject: Points for the discussion with the French State Secretary for Police, Bousquet… The recent operation for arresting stateless Jews in Paris has yielded only about 8,000 adults and about 4,000 children. But trains for the deportation of 40,000 Jews, for the moment, have been put in readiness by the Reich Ministry of Transport. Since the deportation of the children is not possible for the time being, the number of Jews ready for removal is quite insufficient. A further Jewish operation must therefore be started immediately. For this purpose Jews of Belgian and Dutch nationality may be taken into consideration, in addition to the former German, Austrian, Czech, Polish and Russian Jews who have so far been considered as being stateless. It must be expected, however, that this category will not yield sufficient numbers, and thus the French have no choice but to include those Jews who were naturalised in France after 1927, or even after 1919.”1

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Eichmann trial – The District Court Sessions”. Nizkor Project. 9 May 1961. Retrieved 23 December 2013

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Theodor Dannecker oversees the transfer of the rounded up Jews to the Austerlitz station] (detail)
May 14, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [The photos were taken the day after the raid at the Pithiviers and Beaune-la Rolande camps]
May 15, 1941

The photos were taken the day after the raid at the Pithiviers and Beaune-la Rolande camps. The men had to settle in cold and unsanitary barracks under construction. The straw that will serve as mattresses in the bedsteads is still outside the barracks.

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [The day after the raid, the men arrested at the Pithiviers camp]
May 15, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [The day after the raid, the men arrested at the Pithiviers camp] (detail)
May 15, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [Green Ticket Roundup, the next day at the Pithiviers camp. The black hut can be seen where the Vel d’Hiv raids will be recorded in 1942]
May 15, 1941

Harry Croner (German, 1903-1992)
Untitled [The day after the roundup of the Billet Vert, a French gendarme posted on a watchtower in the Beaune-la-Rolande camp]
May 15, 1941

The gendarme to the left of the photo, posted in a watchtower, monitoring the Beaune-la-Rolande camp, is the emblematic photo from the film Nuit et Brouillard, censored when it was released in 1955.

Nuit Et Brouillard
Alain Resnais
1955

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May

Exhibition: ‘Zanele Muholi’ at Tate Modern, London

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: African photography, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: "corrective" rape, activist artist, African artist, African diaspora cultural pride, African/unAfrican, Afro combs, apartheid, artist activist, artist of the world, Bester I, Bester VIII, Black feminist thought, Black lesbians and transgender men, Black LGBTQIA+, Black LGBTQIA+ South Africa, Black queer, Black queer and trans, Black queer and trans visual history, Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa, Black trans women and transfeminine people, Bona Charlottesville, Brave Beauties, Buhlalu I The Decks, Busi Mdaki and Malesedi Nthute, Busi Sigasa Braamfontein, challenge stereotypes and taboos, challenging heteronormative and white supremacist cultures, classified as white, contemporary art, contemporary photographer, Contemporary Photography, Dimpho Tsotetsi, Eva Mofokeng II, Faces and Phases, FEW Stop the War on Women's Bodies, Fisani Parktown, gay, genderqueer, Hail the Dark Lioness, heterosexuality and white patriarchy, ID Crisis, Inkanyiso, intersectionality, isiZulu, Julile I Parktown, Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Lerato Dumse Muntu Masombukas Funeral, LGBTQIA+ community, Lungile Cleo Dladla, MaID-IV New York, Marcel Kutumela, misogyny, Miss D'vine II, Miss Gay Beauty pageants, Miss Lesbian VII, Nokuthula Dhladhla, Nolwazi II Nuoro, Non-binary identities, non-binary people, Nosipho Solundwana, Ntozakhe II Parktown, Only Half the Picture, Parktown, patriarchal gaze, pencil test, portraits of lesbians, Qiniso The Sails, queer, Queer Activism = Queer Media, queer life in Africa, queerphobic and transphobic stereotypes, racial and socio-economic oppression, racism, resistance, Roxy Msizi Dlamini, Sazi Jali, Sebenzile Parktown, sexual orientation, social empowerment and visibility, Somizy Sincwala, Somnyama Ngonyama, Somnyama Ngonyama Hail the Dark Lioness, Somnyama Ngonyama II, South Africa, South African LGBTQIA+ community, South African visual activist, Thulani II Parktown, TK Tekanyo, TommyBoys, trans women, transmisogynoir, transmisogyny, transphobia, transphobia and misogyny, Tumi Mokgosi, Vile Gothenburg, Xiniwe at Cassilhaus, Yaya Mavundla Parktown, Zanele Muholi, Zanele Muholi Aftermath, Zanele Muholi Being, Zanele Muholi Beloved V, Zanele Muholi Bester I, Zanele Muholi Bester VIII, Zanele Muholi Bona Charlottesville, Zanele Muholi Brave Beauties, Zanele Muholi Buhlalu I The Decks, Zanele Muholi Busi Mdaki and Malesedi Nthute, Zanele Muholi Busi Sigasa Braamfontein, Zanele Muholi Dimpho Tsotetsi, Zanele Muholi Eva Mofokeng II, Zanele Muholi Faces and Phases, Zanele Muholi Fisani Parktown, Zanele Muholi ID Crisis, Zanele Muholi Julile I Parktown, Zanele Muholi Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Zanele Muholi Lerato Dumse Muntu Masombukas Funeral, Zanele Muholi Lulamile, Zanele Muholi Lungile Cleo Dladla, Zanele Muholi MaID-IV New York, Zanele Muholi Manucha, Zanele Muholi Marcel Kutumela, Zanele Muholi Miss D'vine II, Zanele Muholi Miss Lesbian VII, Zanele Muholi Nokuthula Dhladhla, Zanele Muholi Nolwazi II Nuoro, Zanele Muholi Nosipho Solundwana, Zanele Muholi Ntozakhe II Parktown, Zanele Muholi Only Half The Picture, Zanele Muholi Qiniso The Sails, Zanele Muholi Roxy Msizi Dlamini, Zanele Muholi Sazi Jali, Zanele Muholi Sebenzile Parktown, Zanele Muholi Somizy Sincwala, Zanele Muholi Somnyama Ngonyama II, Zanele Muholi Thulani II Parktown, Zanele Muholi TK Tekanyo, Zanele Muholi TommyBoys, Zanele Muholi Tumi Mokgosi, Zanele Muholi Vile Gothenburg, Zanele Muholi Xiniwe at Cassilhaus, Zanele Muholi Yaya Mavundla, Zanele Muholi Zazi II Boston, Zanele Muholi Ziphelele Parktown, Zanele Muholi Zukiswa Gaca Makhaza, Zazi II Boston, Ziphelele Parktown, Zukiswa Gaca Makhaza

Exhibition dates: 11th November 2020 – 31st May 2021

Curators: Yasufumi Nakamori, Senior Curator and Sarah Allen, Assistant Curator with Kerryn Greenberg, Head of International Collection Exhibitions, Tate and formerly Curator, Tate Modern.

Unclassified fabulousness

There are so many words that you can say about an artist and their work. So many unnecessary words. All you have to do is look at the work. Does it speak to you? does it make you feel, does it empower you?

For me, artists either have it or they don’t… and in this case, visual activist Zanele Muholi possesses it by the bucketful. Panache, flair, downright unclassified fabulousness, call it what you want. They just have it.

They are powerful, they are strong, they are courageous, they tell great stories, they make you question history, they make you analyse what you think you know, they challenge your memories, they make you feel something about their participants, they make you want to fight for LGBTQIA+ social rights. They make you want to stand up and fight for equality and freedom for everyone. No person is an island, alone by themselves; we should all be equal under this cosmic sky.

The older I get the less tolerant I get of the stupidity of the human race and its non-evolution, in terms of spirit of self. When is the human race going to just grow up! Ditch the patriarchy, misogyny, colonialism, racial and socio-economic oppression. Appreciate difference, value the quality of every human being, debunk the dogma of religion, curtail the power of corporations and live in harmony with the earth. Not f…ing much to ask is it, after all these thousands of years.

I won’t live to see it, but with artists like Muholi, there is hope for humanity yet. Unclassifiable. Beautiful. Hail the Dark Lioness – all power to them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Tate Modern presents the first major mid-career survey of visual activist Zanele Muholi in the UK. Born in South Africa, Muholi came to prominence in the early 2000s with photographs that sought to envision black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex lives beyond deviance or victimhood.

“My mission is to re-write a Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in South Africa and beyond.”

“In my world, every human is beautiful.”

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Zanele Muholi

“Muholi prefers to be called an activist rather than an artist. Art, for them, is a means to an end, a tool to convey messages about social empowerment and visibility. “Zanele Muholi’s visual activism is not an occupation. It’s a lifestyle,” Kerryn Greenberg explains. “It’s something that occupies them day and night – whether they receive a call from someone in the community needing money to pay for a hospital appointment, or consoling those who’ve lost someone close to them in an act of violence, or giving some kind of public address at a wedding or a funeral. It’s about being a very active member of the community, and a public voice within that community.”

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Maisie Skidmore. “Yes, but why? Zane Muholi,” on the ‘We Present’ website [Online] Cited 11 April 2021

“The connection that Muholi has with their participants (which they are eager to distinguish from the word “subject,” which implies a distanced gaze) translates to the viewer, who, in looking at these images, is immediately welcomed into a space of understanding and empathy. Muholi also often highlights the voices of the participants in their shows, books and events. …

The political agenda of the 260 photographs on display – which critique centuries of anti-Black sentiment, oppression and erasure – echoes the rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement and the racial justice reckoning it has inspired worldwide. “Muholi’s work takes on an enormous importance within the context of Black Lives Matter because of its potential to educate audiences and promote mutual understanding,” said Sarah Allen. Each piece makes a clear visual statement: not only that Black queer lives matter but also that Black queer lives are nuanced, cherished and deserve to be celebrated.”

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Cassidy George. “Zanele Muholi’s Photographs Celebrate Radical, Queer, Black Beauty,” on the ‘W Magazine’ website 11/03/2020 [Online] Cited 11/05/2021

Zanele Muholi – ‘In My World, Every Human is Beautiful’ / Tate

Visual activist, Zanele Muholi, uses photography and film to document and explore issues of race and representation and to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa and beyond. Here they talk about how the power of images can show LGBTQIA+ people of South Africa, and QTIPOC people worldwide, that they are not alone. Watch as they introduce us to four key bodies of work and the ideas behind them.

Zanele Muholi: In Conversation with Lady Phyll / Artist’s Talk / Tate Exchange

Watch an in conversation between Muholi and Lady Phyll of UK Black Pride. Together, they discuss what difficult love looks like for QTIPOC communities in South Africa and Britain and the importance of chosen families.

This talk forms a part of From a Place of Love, a collaboration between Tate Exchange’s Love programme and UK Black Pride, whose theme for 2020 is home.

Born in 1972 and raised in Umlazi, a township on South Africa’s eastern coast, Muholi had a childhood shaped by the racial brutality of Apartheid – a white supremacist regime that systematically oppressed and displaced South Africa’s non white population for half a century. Muholi was an adolescent when Apartheid absolved and South Africa’s constitution was rewritten in 1996, with the intention of ushering a new era of equality. Even though South Africa’s constitution was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, as a young queer person, Muholi was constantly reminded that the violent realities of gay life in South Africa did not align with this utopic vision of the future. Homophobia, queerphobia and transphobia remained rampant, and in South Africa, Black lesbians and transgender men are among the most at risk, and are often victims of heinous hate crimes, like “corrective” rape, abduction and murder. Drawing inspiration from the work of the American photographer Nan Goldin, whose early photographs documented queer culture and the HIV epidemic through intimate portraits of her family and friends, Muholi embarked on a mission to commemorate the battles and triumphs of her community with pictures.

Cassidy George. “Zanele Muholi’s Photographs Celebrate Radical, Queer, Black Beauty,” on the W Magazine website 11/03/2020 [Online] Cited 11/05/2021

Zanele Muholi is a South African visual activist whose pronouns are they/them/theirs. Their work tells the stories of Black LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Agender, Asexual) lives in South Africa and beyond. Their photography raises awareness of injustices and aims to educate, while creating positive visual histories for under and mis-represented communities. Muholi also turns the camera on themself, making self-portraits that address race, history and representation. This exhibition charts Muholi’s emergence as an activist in the early 2000s to the present day.

During the 1990s, South Africa underwent major social and political change. Apartheid was officially abolished in 1994. This was a political and social system of racial segregation underpinned by white minority rule. Anyone who was not classified as white was actively oppressed by the regime. Apartheid continued the segregation that had begun under the Dutch and British colonial regimes in the late 19th century. The apartheid regime also upheld injustice and discrimination based on gender and sexuality. While the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, the LGBTQIA+ community remains a target for prejudice, hate crimes and violence.

Installation photographs of Room 1 of the Zanele Muholi exhibition, Tate Modern, November 2020 showing photographs from the series Only Half the Picture (2002-6)
Photos © Andrew Dunkley

Room 1: Only Half The Picture

This room incudes work from Muholi’s first series Only Half the Picture (2002-6). It documents survivors of hate crimes living across South Africa and its townships. Under apartheid, townships were established as residential areas for those who had been evicted from places designated as ‘white only’. The people Muholi photographs – their participants – are presented with compassion, dignity and courage in the face of ongoing discrimination. The series also includes images of intimacy, expanding the narrative beyond victimhood. Muholi reveals the pain, love and defiance that exist within the Black LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa.

Exhibition room guide text

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Aftermath
2004
From the series Only Half the Picture
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
600 x 395mm
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
ID Crisis
2003
From the series Only Half the Picture
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
325 x 485mm
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

The exhibition opens with a group of deceptively gentle images. In the first, Aftermath (2004), a torso is cropped from waist to knees, hands modestly clasped in front of Jockey shorts, a huge scar running down the person’s right leg almost like a piece of body art. In another, Ordeal (2003), hands wring out a cloth in an enamel basin of water placed on a floor. A third image shows a cropped, seated figure, again waist to thighs, hands folded in their lap, plastic hospital ties around their wrists. These pictures have a softness and beauty which completely belies the fact that their subjects are all survivors of sexual violence and “corrective rape”.

As the caption to the last picture, Hate crime survivor I, Case number (2004) explains, “Corrective rape is a term used to describe a hate crime in which a person is raped because of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. The intended consequence of such acts is to enforce heterosexuality and gender conformity.” This horrific practice is by no means unique to South Africa, but the term seems to have originated there – feminist activist Bernedette Muthien used it during an interview with Human Rights Watch in 2001 – and its effects on the community resonate throughout this exhibition.

Anonymous. “Zanele Muholi, Tate Modern,” on the Something I’m Working On website Wednesday 30th December 2020 [Online] Cited 11/05/2021

Room 2: Being

This room features work from Muholi’s series Being (2006 – ongoing). The portraits capture moments of intimacy between couples, as well as their daily life and routines. Muholi addresses the misconception that queer life is ‘unAfrican’, a falsehood emerging in part out of the belief that same-sex orientation was a colonial import to Africa. Each couple is shown in the private spaces they share. Muholi explains how ‘lovers and friends consented to participate in the project, willing to bare and express their love for each other.’

Commenting on this series they say, ‘my photography is never about lesbian nudity. It is about portraits of lesbians who happen to be in the nude.’ This series dismantles the white patriarchal gaze and rejects negative or heteronormative images, common in political and social systems that uphold heterosexuality as the norm or default sexual orientation.

Since slavery and colonialism, images of us African women have been used to reproduce heterosexuality and white patriarchy, and these systems of power have so organised our everyday lives that it is difficult to visualise ourselves as we actually are in our respective communities. Moreover, the images we see rely on binaries that were long prescribed for us (heterosexual / homosexual, male/female, African / unAfrican). From birth on, we are taught to internalise their existences, sometimes forgetting that if bodies are connected, connecting, the sensuousness goes beyond simplistic understandings of gender and sexuality.

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Exhibition room guide text

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg
2007
From the series Being (2006 – ongoing)
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Beloved V
2005
From the series Being (2006 – ongoing)
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Busi Mdaki and Malesedi Nthute, Johannesburg
2007
From the series Being (2006 – ongoing)
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
TommyBoys
2004
From the series Being (2006 – ongoing)
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

In “TommyBoys,” a colour photograph, two muscular figures in tracksuit pants sit on a tarmac. One, in a red T-shirt, sits with her hands folded against her chest, while next to her, the second uses her white vest to wipe something from her eyes. (“Tommy Boy” is a word used in South Africa, like “butch,” to refer to a masculine-presenting lesbian.)

Text from the New York Times website

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Busi Sigasa, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
2006
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Installation photographs of Room 3 of the Zanele Muholi exhibition, Tate Modern, November 2020 showing in the bottom photograph the series Miss Lesbian I-VII, Amsterdam (2009)
Photos © Andrew Dunkley

Room 3: Queering Public Space

Photographing Black LGBTQIA+ participants in public spaces is an important part of Muholi’s visual activism. This room contains portraits of transgender women, gay men and gender non-conforming people photographed in public places.

Several of the locations are important in the history of South Africa. Some images are taken at Constitutional Hill, the seat of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. It is a key place in relation to the country’s progression towards democracy. Other participants are photographed on beaches. These were segregated during apartheid. They are therefore potent symbols of how racial segregation affected every aspect of life. Participants are often shown on Durban Beach, close to Muholi’s birthplace of Umlazi.

Muholi states that ‘we’re ‘queering’ the space in order for us to access the space. We transition within the space in order to make sure that the Black trans bodies are part of this as well. We owe it to ourselves.’ Muholi often chooses to photograph participants in colour, bringing the work closer to reality and rooting them in the present day.

Exhibition room guide text

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Miss D’vine II
2007
Lambda print
765 x 765 mm
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Miss Lesbian VII, Amsterdam
2009
C-print
86.5 x 60.5cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Tate Modern presents the first major UK survey of visual activist Zanele Muholi.

Zanele Muholi is one of the most acclaimed photographers working today, and their work has been exhibited all over the world. With over 260 photographs, this exhibition presents the full breadth of their career to date.

Muholi describes themself as a visual activist. From the early 2000s, they have documented and celebrated the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities.

In the early series Only Half the Picture, Muholi captures moments of love and intimacy as well as intense images alluding to traumatic events – despite the equality promised by South Africa’s 1996 constitution, its LGBTQIA+ community remains a target for violence and prejudice.

In Faces and Phases each participant looks directly at the camera, challenging the viewer to hold their gaze. These images and the accompanying testimonies form a growing archive of a community of people who are risking their lives by living authentically in the face of oppression and discrimination.

Other key series of works, include Brave Beauties, which celebrates empowered non-binary people and trans women, many of whom have won Miss Gay Beauty pageants, and Being, a series of tender images of couples which challenge stereotypes and taboos.

Muholi turns the camera on themself in the ongoing series Somnyama Ngonyama – translated as ‘Hail the Dark Lioness’. These powerful and reflective images explore themes including labour, racism, Eurocentrism and sexual politics.

Exhibition organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, Gropius Bau, Berlin and Bildmuseet at Umeå University.

Text from the Tate Modern website

Tate Modern presents the first major UK survey of South African visual activist Zanele Muholi. Muholi (b. 1972) came to prominence in the early 2000s with photographs that told the stories of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex lives in South Africa. Over 300 photographs are brought together to present the full breadth of Muholi’s career to date, from their very first body of work Only Half the Picture, to their on-going series Somnyama Ngonyama. These works challenge dominant ideologies and representations, presenting the participants in their photographs as fellow human beings bravely existing in the face of prejudice, intolerance and often violence.

During the 1990s, South Africa underwent major social and political changes. While the country’s 1996 post-apartheid constitution was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, the LGBTQIA+ community remains a target for violence and prejudice to this day. In the early series Only Half the Picture Muholi aimed to depict the complexities of gender and sexuality for the individuals of the queer community. The collection includes moments of love and intimacy as well intense images alluding to traumatic events in the lives of the participants. Muholi also began an ongoing visual archive of portraits, Faces and Phases, which commemorates and celebrates black lesbians, transgender people and gender non-conforming individuals. Each participant looks directly at the camera, challenging the viewer to hold their gaze, while individual testimonies capture their stories. The images and testimonies form a living and growing archive of this community in South Africa and beyond.

The exhibition includes several other key series of works, including Brave Beauties, which celebrates empowered non-binary people and trans women, many of whom have won Miss Gay Beauty pageants, and Being, a series of tender images of couples which challenge stereotypes and taboos. Images like Melissa Mbambo, Durban also attempt to reclaim public spaces for black and queer communities, such as a beach in Durban which was racially segregated during apartheid. Within these series, Muholi tells collective as well as individual stories. They challenge preconceived notions of deviance and victimhood, encourage viewers to address their own misconceptions, and create a shared sense of understanding and solidarity.

More recently, Muholi has begun an acclaimed series of dramatic self-portraits entitled Somnyama Ngonyama (‘Hail the Dark Lioness’ in Zulu). Turning the camera on themself, the artist adopts different poses, characters and archetypes to address issues of race and representation. From scouring pads and latex gloves to rubber tires and cable ties, everyday materials are transformed into politically loaded props and costumes. The resulting images explore themes of labour, racism, Eurocentrism and sexual politics, often commenting on events in South Africa’s history and Muholi’s experiences as a South African black queer person traveling abroad. By enhancing the contrast in the photographs, Muholi also emphasises the darkness of their skin tone, reclaiming their blackness with pride and re-asserting its beauty. Muholi has created some new self-portraits for this series which are being shown at Tate Modern for the first time.

Zanele Muholi is co-curated by Yasufumi Nakamori, Senior Curator and Sarah Allen, Assistant Curator with Kerryn Greenberg, Head of International Collection Exhibitions, Tate and formerly Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition is organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, Gropius Bau in Berlin and Bildmuseet at Umeå University. Supported by the Zanele Muholi Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate Americas Foundation, Tate International Council, Tate Patrons and Tate Members . Research supported by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor.

About Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, Durban and lives in Johannesburg. They studied at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, and Ryerson University, Toronto. Co-founder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, and founder of Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual media, Muholi is also an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. Solo exhibitions of Muholi’s work have been hosted around the world, including at the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg (2012); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2017); Autograph ABP, London (2017-) and Museo de Arte moderno de Buenos Aires (2018). Muholi has won numerous awards, including the Lucie Humanitarian Award (2019), the 2019 ‘Best Photography Book Award’ by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation for their book Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail, The Dark Lioness (Aperture), the Rees Visionary Award by Amref Health Africa (2019); a fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society, UK (2018); France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2017); the Mbokodo Award in the category of Visual Arts (2017);the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the Carnegie International (2013); a Prince Claus Award (2013); and both the Casa África award for best female photographer and a Fondation Blachère award at Les Rencontres de Bamako biennial of African photography (2009). Somnyama Ngonyama was shown at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Faces and Phases was shown at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012) and the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).

Muholi’s pronouns are they, them, their.

Press release from the Tate website

Installation photographs of Room 4 of the Zanele Muholi exhibition, Tate Modern, November 2020 showing photographs from the series Brave Beauties (2014 – ongoing)
Photos © Andrew Dunkley

Room 4: Brave Beauties

Brave Beauties (2014 – ongoing) is a series of portraits of trans women, gender non-conforming and non-binary people. Many of them are also beauty pageant contestants. Queer beauty pageants offer a space of resistance within the Black LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa. They are a place where individuals can realise and express their beauty outside heteronormative and white supremacist cultures. Muholi has commented that these participants ‘enter beauty pageants to change mind-sets in the communities they live in, the same communities where they are most likely to be harassed, or worse.’

This series is also inspired by fashion magazine covers. Muholi has questioned whether ‘South Africa as a democratic country would have an image of a trans woman on the cover of a magazine.’ These images aim to challenge queerphobic and transphobic stereotypes and stigmas.

As with all of Muholi’s images, the portraits are created through a collaborative process. Muholi and the participant determine the location, clothing and pose together, focusing on producing images that are empowering for both the participant and the audience.

Exhibition room guide text

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Sazi Jali, Durban
2020
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Somizy Sincwala, Parktown
2014
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

The series Brave Beauties, started in 2014, is “a series of portraits of trans women, gender non-conforming and non-binary people. Many of them are also beauty pageant contestants.” The queer beauty pageant is many things: a celebration – and redefinition – of beauty, a declaration of independence by contestants, a challenge to “heteronormative and white supremacist cultures,” and an attempt, as Muholi puts it, “to change mind-sets in the communities [the contestants] live in, the same communities where they are most likely to be harassed or worse.”

Anonymous. “Zanele Muholi, Tate Modern,” on the Something I’m Working On website Wednesday 30th December 2020 [Online] Cited 11/05/2021

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Dimpho Tsotetsi, Parktown
2014
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

What I really want to talk about is beauty. Because I think for Muholi, that’s kind of where it all stems from, is recognising beauty in things that you might not expect. Muholi has said “All I want to see is beauty. And that doesn’t mean you have to smile, or try harder. Just be.”

I think that’s very much linked to the history of Apartheid, of course […] As a Black person being told constantly ‘your hair isn’t straight enough’, ‘you should look like this’, ‘you should look like that’ and that being legislated under Apartheid. But it’s also what is in the magazines, this idea of the perfect beauty. Muholi’s counteracting them, saying actually, none of that is relevant. It’s about being the beauty that you want to be.

There’s a really great series called Brave Beauties, which […] pictures trans women and gender non-binary individuals, many of whom have been in beauty pageants, occupying space. Demanding attention. And being absolutely stunningly beautiful. And you kind think, ‘yeah, what are our notions of beauty, what are these kind of constructions that are absolutely false?’

Kerryn Greenberg

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Eva Mofokeng II, Parktown, Johannesburg
2014
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Room 5: Collectivity

Collectivity lies at the heart of Muholi’s work. Many of Muholi’s large network of collaborators are members of their collective, Inkanyiso. This means ‘light’ in isiZulu, Muholi’s first language and one of 11 official languages in South Africa. Inkanyiso’s mission is to ‘Produce, educate and disseminate information to many audiences, especially those who are often marginalised or sensationalised by the mainstream media.’ Queer Activism = Queer Media, is the collective’s motto.

Self-organisation, mentorship and skill sharing are central to Muholi’s collaborative activity. This room features images that are collaboratively made. Whether documenting public events such as Pride marches and protests, or private events such as marriages and funerals, these images form an ever-expanding visual archive. By recording the existence of the Black LGBTQIA+ community, they resist erasure.

Exhibition room guide text

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Lerato Dumse, Muntu Masombuka’s Funeral, Johannesburg
2014
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Room 6: Faces and Phases

Muholi began their ongoing series Faces and Phases in 2006. The project currently totals 500+ works. As a collective portrait, it celebrates, commemorates and archives the lives of Black lesbians, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals.

It is important to mark, map and preserve our mo(ve)ments through visual histories for reference and posterity so that future generations will note that we were here.

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Many of these portraits are the result of a long and sustained relationship and collaboration. Muholi often returns to photograph the same person over time. Faces refers to the person being photographed. Phases signifies a transition from one stage of sexuality or gender expression and identity to another. It also marks the changes in the participants’ daily lives, including ageing, education, work experience and marriage. The gaps in the grid indicate individuals that are no longer present in the project, or a portrait yet to be taken. One wall in the exhibition is dedicated to the participants who have passed away.

Faces and Phases forms a living archive that visualises Muholi’s belief that ‘we express our gendered, radicalised, and classed selves in rich and diverse ways.’

Exhibition room guide text

Installation photographs of Room 6 of the Zanele Muholi exhibition, Tate Modern, November 2020 showing Muholi’s series Faces and Phases (2006 – ongoing)
Photos © Andrew Dunkley

Faces and Phases is an ongoing series whereby the artist was seeking to document and photograph Black lesbians, trans men and gender non-conforming individuals. There’s now a mass of these incredibly beautiful portraits, which generally are presented in a grid, to show that, actually […] giving visibility to these people is a life’s work. There are many portraits of the same individuals over the course of a number of years. So you can see how people age, how they transition, sometimes, and how the way they present themselves, alters.

It is about acknowledging pain and trauma, and trying to heal people, and heal oneself through those images. Images that Muholi wants their community, to be proud of, and feel well represented by.

Kerryn Greenberg

Death is a constant presence in Muholi’s community and work. The largest space in this exhibition is given to Faces and Phases (2006 – ongoing), a collection of portraits – 500, and counting. The images “celebrate, commemorate and archive the lives of Black lesbians, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals.” People appear more than once. Some spots on the walls are empty, marking a portrait yet to be taken or a participant no longer there. One wall is dedicated to those who have passed away.

Anonymous. “Zanele Muholi, Tate Modern,” on the Something I’m Working On website Wednesday 30th December 2020 [Online] Cited 11/05/2021

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Tumi Mokgosi, Yeoville, Johannesburg
2007
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Nosipho Solundwana, Parktown, Johannesburg
2007
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Manucha, Muizenberg, Cape-Town
2010
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Nokuthula Dhladhla, Berea, Johannesburg
2007
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
TK Tekanyo, Gaborone, Botswana
2010
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Zukiswa Gaca Makhaza, Khayelitsha, Cape-Town
2010
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Marcel Kutumela, Alexandra, Johannesburg
2008
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Lungile Cleo Dladla, KwaThema, Community Hall, Springs, Johannesburg
2011
Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
© Zanele Muholi

Room 7: Sharing Stories

From their earliest days as an activist, Muholi sought to record first-hand testimonies and experiences of Black LGBTQIA+ people. Giving participants a platform to tell their own story, in their own words, has been an enduring goal. They have said:

Each and every person in the photos has a story to tell but many of us come from spaces in which most Black people never had that opportunity. If they had it at all, their voices were told by other people. Nobody can tell our story better than ourselves.

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In this room, eight participants share stories of their lives and experiences as members of the LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa. Some of them feature in the Faces and Phases project in the previous room. The interviews have been conducted and produced by Muholi’s collaborators, some of whom are members of Inkanyiso. Some testimonies do not use Muholi’s preferred gender pronouns they, them, theirs.

Exhibition room guide text