Publisher: Ernst Wasmuth A.G. / Berlin
With an Introduction by Charles F. G. Masterman
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 225: York Minster
1926
The last in my four part series on photographs which appear in E. O. Hoppé’s Picturesque Great Britain: Its Architecture and Landscape (1926).
This posting features photographs of the Lake District, Scotland and Ireland.
Today, it seems incredibly strange that Hoppé would include Dublin and all parts Ireland in the catch all “Great Britain”, especially as most of Ireland gained independence from Great Britain in 1922, after the bloody Irish War of Independence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. These photographs are published under fair use conditions for educational purposes only.
This magnificent set of pictures displays, with all the art of genius both in selection and technical skill, the beauty of the British Isles. I know of no similar collection which could give alike to the foreigner who wonders what England is like, to the Englishman who has wandered from his native land into all the great dominions of the world, and to the man who has remained behind, that particular sense of pleasure mingled with pain which all beauty excites, and excites especially a passionate love in the vision of home.
This is an introduction to pictures of the landscapes and the works of man; these latter ennobled by the associations of time, and in some cases by time’s decay. They open vistas through which one may gaze at the history of England for a thousand years.
Charles F. G. Masterman
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 234: Roman Wall
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 235: In Westmorland Country
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 236: Kendal, Westmorland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 237: Windemere, Westmorland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 238: Newcastle, Northumberland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 239: Carter Bar, Northumberland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 240: Dunbar, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 241: Dunbar, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 242: Edinburgh Castle, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 243: The Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 244: Canongate with Tolbooth, Edinburgh, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 248: The Advocates Walk, Edingburgh, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 249: Forth Bridge, Edingburgh, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 255: The Viaduct, Montrose, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 257: Near Peebles, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 259: The Harbour, Aberdeen, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 261: Deeside, Aberdeen, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 262: Braemar Castle, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 264: Devil’s Elbow, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 265: On the Road to Balmoral, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 267: Highland Cattle, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 268: Loch Lomond, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 269: A Scottish Sunset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 272: The Scottish Highlands
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 273: The College Green, Dublin, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 274: Loch Tulla, Argyllshire, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 275: Dumbarton, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 276: Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 277: Christchurch, Dublin, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 278: Christchurch, Dublin, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 279: The Custom’s House, Dublin, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 280: Spittal of Glenshee, Scotland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 281: Powerscourt, Enniskerry, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 283: Lambay Castle, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 284: Luccan, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 287: Glendalough Lake, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 289: Glendalough, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 291: Carrick-on-Suir, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 292: Carrick-on-Suir, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 293: The Middle Lake, Killarney, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 296: The Cathedral, Cork, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 297: The Memorial Church, Cork, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 299: The Lower Lake, Killarney, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 301: The River Shannon, Limerick, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 302: Limerick, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 303: The Cathedral, Limerick, Ireland
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 304: The Scalp Mountains, Ireland
1926
Exhibition dates: 20th February – 17th May 2020? Coronavirus
Participating artists: Bas Jan Ader, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Knut Åsdam, Richard Avedon, Aneta Bartos, Richard Billingham, Cassils, Sam Contis, John Coplans, Jeremy Deller, Rienke Dijkstra, George Dureau, Thomas Dworzak, Hans Eijkelboom, Fouad Elkoury, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Hal Fischer, Samuel Fosso, Anna Fox, Masahisa Fukase, Sunil Gupta, Peter Hujar, Liz Johnson Artur, Isaac Julien, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Karen Knorr, Deana Lawson, Hilary Lloyd, Robert Mapplethrope, Peter Marlow, Ana Mendieta, Anenette Messager, Duane Michals, Tracey Moffat, Andrew Moisey, Richard Mosse, Adi Nes, Catherine Opie, Elle Pérez, Herb Ritts, Kalen Na’il Roach, Collier Schorr, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Clarie Strand, Michael Subotzky, Larry Sultan, Hank Willis Thomas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Karlheinz Weinberger, Marianne Wex, David Wojnarowicz, Akram Zaatari.
As a writer Berger recognised that experience – whether it be personal, historical or aesthetic – will never conform to theories and systems. To read him today is to accept his failures and detours as a unique willingness to take risks.
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John MacDonald. “John Berger,” in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June, 2020
D-Construction: deliberate masculinities in a discontinuous world
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Reviewers of this exhibition (see quotations below) have noted the preponderance of images of “traditional masculinity” – defined as “idealised, dominant (and) heterosexual” – and the paucity of images that show men as working, intelligent, sensitive human beings, “that men ever earned a living, cooked a meal or read a book… scarcely anything about the heart or intellect. Men are represented here almost entirely in terms of their bodies, sexuality or supposed type.” I need make no further comment. What I will say is that I believe the title of the exhibition to be a misnomer: a person cannot be “liberated” through photography, for photography is only a tool of a personal liberation. Liberation comes through an internal struggle of acceptance (thence liberation), one that is foremost FELT (for example, the double life one leads before you acknowledge that you are gay; or experiencing discrimination aimed at others and by proxy, yourself) and SEEN (the bashing of a mother as seen by a small child). Photographs picture the outcomes of this struggle for liberation, are a tool of that process not, I would argue, liberation itself.
What I can say is that I believe in masculinities, plural. Fluid, shifting, challenging, loving, working, intimate, spiritual masculinities that challenge normalcy and hegemonic masculinity, which is defined as “a practice that legitimises men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of the common male population and women, and other marginalised ways of being a man.”
What I don’t believe in is masculinities, plural, that seek to fit into this [dis]continuous world (for we are born and then die) through the stability of their outward appearance, conforming to theories and systems – personal, historical or aesthetic – without reference to subversion, small intimacies, the toil of work, love and the passion of sexual bodies. In other words, masculinities that are not afraid to push the boundaries of being and becoming. To take risks, to experience, to feel.
While I was overjoyed at the “YES” vote on gay marriage that took place in December 2017 in Australia because I felt it was a victory for love, and equality… another part of me rejected as anathema the concept of a gay person buying into a historically patriarchal, heterosexual and monogamous institution such as marriage – too honour and obey. This is an untenable concept for a person who wants to be liberated. Coming out as I did in 1975, only 6 short years after the Stonewall Riots, the last thing I EVER wanted to be, was to be the same as a “straight” person. I was different. I fought for my difference and still believe in it.
Of course, in 2020 it’s another world. Today we all mix in together. But there is still something about “masculinities”, which in some varieties, have a sense of privilege and entitlement. Of power and control over others; of violence towards women, trans, other men and anyone who threatens their little ego, who leaves them, or jilts them. Their jealousy, their ego, bruised – they are so insecure, so insular, that they can only see their own world, their own minuscule problems (but massive in their eyes), and enforce their will on others.
My advice to “masculinities’, in fact any human being, is to go out, get yourself informed, experience, accept, and be the person that nobody thinks you can be. Be a human being. Examine your inner self, look at your dark side, your other side, your empathetic side, and try and understand the journey that you are on. Then, and only then, you might begin on that great path of personal enlightenment, that golden path on which there is no turning back.
Below I discuss some of these ideas with my good friend Nicholas Henderson, curator and archivist at the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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Many thankx to the Barbican Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is a major group exhibition that explores how masculinity is experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed as expressed and documented through photography and film from the 1960s to the present day.
Through the medium of film and photography, this major exhibition considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day. Examining depictions of masculinity from behind the lens, the Barbican brings together the work of over 50 international artists, photographers and filmmakers including Laurie Anderson, Sunil Gupta, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien and Catherine Opie.
In the wake of #MeToo the image of masculinity has come into sharper focus, with ideas of toxic and fragile masculinity permeating today’s society. This exhibition charts the often complex and sometimes contradictory representations of masculinities, and how they have developed and evolved over time. Touching on themes including power, patriarchy, queer identity, female perceptions of men, hypermasculine stereotypes, tenderness and the family, the exhibition shows how central photography and film have been to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture.
In fact, while there are a few gender-fluid figures here, they’re vastly outnumbered by manifestations of “traditional masculinity” – defined as “idealised, dominant (and) heterosexual”. Lebanese militiamen (in Fouad Elkoury’s perky full-length portraits from 1980), US marines (in Wolfgang Tillmans’ epic montage Soldiers – The Nineties), Taliban fighters, SS generals, Israel Defence Force grunts, footballers, cowboys and bullfighters fairly spring out of the walls from every direction. And what’s evident from the outset isn’t so much their diversity, as a unifying demeanour: a threatening intentness that comes wherever men are asked to perform their masculinity, but also a childlike vulnerability. …
Masculinity, the viewer is made to feel, criminalises men (Mikhael Subotzky’s images of South African gangsters on morgue slabs); isolates them (Larry Sultan’s poignant image of his elderly father practising his golf swing in his sitting room); renders them stupid (Richard Billingham’s excruciating, but now classic photo essay on his alcoholic father, ‘Ray’s a Laugh’). To be a man, it seems, is to be condemned to endlessly act out archetypal “masculine” behaviour, whether you’re an elderly drunk in a Birmingham high-rise or the elite American students taking part in the shouting competition staged by Irish photographer Richard Mosse.
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Mark Hudson. “Does the Barbican’s Masculinities exhibition have important things to say about men?” on the Independent website Friday 21 February 2020 [Online] Cited 03/03/2020
There is not much here about work – unless you count the wall of Hollywood actors playing Nazis. You would never think, from this show, that men ever earned a living, cooked a meal or read a book (though there is a sententious vitrine of ‘Men Only’ magazines). Beyond the exceptions given, there is scarcely anything about the heart or intellect. Men are represented here almost entirely in terms of their bodies, sexuality or supposed type.
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Laura Cumming. “Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography review – men as types,” on the Guardian website Sun 23 Feb 2020 [Online] Cited 03/03/2020
“The body can be taken as a reflection of the self because it can and should be treated as something to be worked upon … in order to produce it as a commodity. Overweight, slovenliness and even unfashionability, for example, are now moral disorders,” notes Don Slater
“The state of the body is seen as a reflection of the state of its owner, who is responsible for it and could refashion it. The body can be taken as a reflection of the self because it can and should be treated as something to be worked upon, and generally worked upon using commodities, for example intensively regulated, self-disciplined, scrutinized through diets, fitness regimes, fashion, self-help books and advice, in order to produce it as a commodity. Overweight, slovenliness, and even unfashionability, for example, are now moral disorders; even acute illnesses such as cancer reflect the inadequacy of the self and indeed of its consumption. One gets ill because one has consumed the wrong (unnatural) things and failed to consume the correct (‘natural’) ones: self, body, goods and environment constitute a system of moral choice.”
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Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. London: Polity Press, 1997, p. 92.
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing John Coplans’ work Self-portrait, Frieze No 2, Four Panels 1994 Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Plan of the Masculinities: Liberation through Photography exhibition spaces
Introduction
Masculinities: Liberation through Photography explores the diverse ways masculinity has been experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed in photography and film from the 1960s to the present day.
Simone de Beauvoir’s famous declaration that ‘one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one’ provides a helpful springboard for considering what it means to be a male in today’s world, as well as the place of photography and film in shaping masculinity. What we have thought of as ‘masculine’ has changed considerably throughout history and within different cultures. The traditional social dominance of the male has determined a gender hierarchy which continues to underpin societies around the world.
In Europe and North America, the characteristics and power dynamics of the dominant masculine figure – historically defined by physical size and strength, assertiveness and aggression – though still pervasive today, began to be challenged and transformed in the 1960s. Amid a climate of sexual revolution, struggle for civil rights and raised class consciousness, the growth of the gay rights movement, the period’s counterculture and opposition to the Vietnam War, large sections of society argued for a loosening of the straitjacket of narrow gender definitions.
Set against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, when manhood is under increasing scrutiny and terms such as ‘toxic’ and ‘fragile’ masculinity fill endless column inches, an investigation of this expansive subject is particularly timely, especially given current global politics characterised by male world leaders shaping their image as ‘strong’ men.
Touching on queer identity, race, power and patriarchy, men as seen by women, stereotypes of dominant masculinity as well as the family, the exhibition presents masculinity in all its myriad forms, rife with contradictions and complexities. Embracing the idea of multiple ‘masculinities’ and rejecting the notion of a singular ‘ideal man’, the exhibition argues for an understanding of masculinity liberated from societal expectations and gender norms.
Room 1-4
Disrupting the Archetype
Over the last six decades, artists have consistently sought to destabilise the narrow definitions of gender that determine our social structures in order to encourage new ways of thinking about identity, gender and sexuality. ‘Disrupting the Archetype’ explores the representation of conventional and at times clichéd masculine subjects such as soldiers, cowboys, athletes, bullfighters, body builders and wrestlers. By reconfiguring the representation of traditional masculinity – loosely defined as an idealised, dominant heterosexual masculinity – the artists presented here challenge our ideas of these hypermasculine stereotypes.
Across different cultures and spaces, the military has been central to the construction of masculine identities – which has been explored through the work of Wolfgang Tillmans (below) and Adi Nes (below) among others, while Collier Schorr (below) and Sam Contis’s powerful works (below) address the dominant and enduring representation of the lone cowboy. Athleticism, often perceived as a proxy for strength which is associated with masculinity, is called into question by Catherine Opie’s and Rineke Dijkstra’s tender portraits (below). The male body, a cornerstone for artists such as John Coplans (above), Robert Mapplethorpe and Cassils (below), is meanwhile exposed as a fleshy canvas, constantly in flux.
Historically, the non-western male body has undergone a complex process of subjectification through the Western gaze – invariably presented as either warlike or sexually charged. Viewed against this context, the work of Fouad Elkoury and Akram Zaatari, as well as the found photographs of Taliban fighters that Thomas Dworzak discovered in Afghanistan (below), can be read as deconstructing the Orientalist gaze.
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing a detail from Wolfgang Tillmans’ epic montage Soldiers – The Nineties Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing a detail from trans masculine artist Cassils’ series Time Lapse, 2011 Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing at left a detail from trans masculine artist Cassils’ series Time Lapse, 2011, and at right the work of Rineke Dijkstra Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Adi Nes’ series Soldiers, 1999 Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Adi Nes (Israeli, b. 1966) Untitled
2000
From the series Soldiers
Courtesy Adi Nes & Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles
Adi Nes (Israeli, b. 1966) Untitled
1999
From the series Soldiers
Courtesy Adi Nes & Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles
Adi Nes was born in Kiryat Gat. His parents are Jewish immigrants from Iran. He is openly gay. Nes is notable for series “Soldiers”, in which he mixes masculinity and homoerotic sexuality, depicting Israeli soldiers in a fragile way.
Nes creates cinematic images that reference war, sexuality, life, and death with the kind of stylised polish you might expect from a photographer whose images have appeared in the pages of Vogue Hommes. His partially autobiographical work is deliberate and staged in an attempt to raise questions about sexuality, masculinity and identity in Israeli culture. “The beginning point of my art is who I am,” he says. “Since I’m a man and I’m an Israeli, I deal with issues of identity with ‘Israeli-ness’ and masculinity, but my photographs are multi-layered.”
“The challenge of the photographer is to catch the viewer for more than one second in front of the picture,” says Nes, explaining his provocative images. “If you catch the viewer in front of the picture, it can touch the viewer.”
Anonymous text “Adi Nes on masculinity, sexuality and war,” from the Phaidon website 2012 [Online] Cited 07/03/2020
Thomas Dworzak (Germany, b. 1972) Taliban portraits
2002
Kandahar, Afghanistan
While covering the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak came across a handful of photo studios in Kandahar which despite the Taliban’s ban on photography had been authorised to remain open, for the sole purpose of taking identity photos. Complicating the conventional image of the hypermasculine soldier, the colour portraits Dworzak found in the back rooms of these studios depict Taliban fighters variously posing in front of scenic backdrops, holding hands, using guns or flowers as props or enveloped in a halo of vibrant colours, their eyes heavily made up with black kohl. These stylised photographs directly contradict the public image of the soldier in this overwhelmingly male-dominated patriarchal society.
Masculinities: Liberation through Photography catalogue cover
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Catherine Opie’s series High School Football, 2007-2009 Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
‘Male Order’ invites the viewer to reflect on the construction of male power, gender and class. The artists gathered here have all variously attempted to expose and subvert how certain types of masculine behaviour have created inequalities both between and within gender identities. Two ambitious, multi-part works, Richard Avedon’s The Family, 1976, and Karen Knorr’s Gentlemen, 1981-83, focus on typically besuited white men who occupy the corridors of power, while foregrounding the historic exclusion not only of women but also of other marginalised masculinities.
Male-only organisations, such as the military, private members’ clubs and college fraternities, have often served as an arena for the performance of ‘toxic’ masculinity, as chronicled in Andrew Moisey’s The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual, 2018. This startling book charts the misdemeanours of fraternity members alongside an indexical image bank of US Presidents, alongside leaders of government and industry who have belonged at one time or another to these fraternities. Richard Mosse’s film, Fraternity, 2007, takes a different tack by painting a portrait of male rage that is both playful and alarming.
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Richard Avedon’s series The Family (1976) Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Early in 1976, with both the post-Watergate political atmosphere and the approaching bicentennial celebration in mind, Rolling Stone asked Richard Avedon to cover the presidential primaries and the campaign trail. Avedon counter-proposed a grander idea – he had always wanted to photograph the men and women he believed to have constituted political, media and corporate elite of the United States.
For the next several months, Avedon traversed the country from migrant grape fields of California to NFL headquarters in Park Avenue and returned with an amazing portfolio of soldiers, spooks, potentates, and ambassadors that was too late for the bicentennial but published in Rolling Stone’s Oct. 21, 1976, just in time for the November elections.
Sixty-nine black-and-white portraits … were in Avedon’s signature style – formal, intimate, bold, and minimalistic. Appearing in them are President Ford and his three immediate successors – Carter, Reagan, and Bush. Other familiars of the American polity such as Kennedys and Rockefellers are here, and as are giants who held up the nation’s Fourth Pillar during that challenging decade: A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times who decided to publish the Pentagon Papers, and Katharine Graham who led Woodward and Bernstein at Washington Post.
Alex Selwyn-Holmes. “The Family, 1976; Richard Avedon” on the Iconphotos website May 18, 2012 [Online] Cited 03/03/2020
Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen, 1981-83 Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing Piotr Uklanski’s Untitled (The Nazis), 1998, a collage of actors dressed as Nazis, courtesy of Massimo De Carlo Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Room 7-8
Too Close to Home: Family and Fatherhood
Since its invention photography has been a powerful vehicle for the construction and documentation of family narratives. In contrast to the conventions of the traditional family portrait, the artists gathered here deliberately set out to record the ‘messiness’ of life, reflecting on misogyny, violence, sexuality, mortality, intimacy and unfolding family dramas, presenting a more complex and not always comfortable vision of fatherhood and masculinity.
Loss and the ageing male figure are central to the work of both Masahisa Fukase and Larry Sultan (both below). Their respective projects marked a new departure in the way men photographed each other, serving as a commentary on how old age engenders a loss of masculinity. An examination of everyday life, Richard Billingham’s tender yet bleak portraits of his father, as chronicled in Ray’s a Laugh, cast a brutally honest eye on his alcoholic father Ray against a backdrop of social decline (below).
Anna Fox’s disturbing autobiographical work undermines expectations of the traditional family album while revealing the mechanics of paternalistic power. Meanwhile, the father-daughter relationship is brought into sharp focus in Aneta Bartos’s sexually charged series Family Portrait which unsettles traditional family boundaries (below).
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing the photographs of Larry Sultan from the series Pictures from Home Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing Richard Billingham’s photographs from the series Ray’s a Laugh Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing the photographs of Aneta Bartos’s sexually charged series Family Portrait Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Aneta Bartos (Born Poland, lives New York) Mirror 2015
From the series Family Portrait
Archival inkjet print
30 x 30.65 inches
Aneta Bartos (Born Poland, lives New York) Apple 2015
From the series Family Portrait
Archival inkjet print
30 x 30.65 inches
Since 2013 New York based artist Aneta Bartos has been traveling back to her hometown Tomaszów Mazowiecki, where she was raised by her father as a single parent from the age of eight until fourteen. Then 68 years old, and having spent a lifetime as a competitive body builder, Bartos’ father asked her to take a few shots documenting his physique before it degenerated and inevitably ran its course. The original request of her father inspired Bartos to transform his idea into a long-term project called Dad. A few summers later Dad developed into a new series of portraits, titled Family Portrait, exploring the complex dynamics between father and daughter.
Text from the Antwerp Art website [Online] Cited 01/03/2020
“The pastoral setting is a romanticised portal to Bartos’s past. Her father’s poses are often heroic; at times the pictures are playful and flirty, almost seductive. Seen together, they display the sadness of a man who knows he is ageing, with the subtext of his waning sexuality. They are bittersweet, images of time passing and memories being preserved.”
Elisabeth Biondi quoted on the Postmasters website 2017 [Online] Cited 01/03/2020
Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Peter Hujar’s series Orgasmic Man 1969 (see below) Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Room 9-12
Queer Masculinity
In defiance of the prejudice and legal constraints against homosexuality in Europe, the United States and beyond over the last century, the works presented in ‘Queering Masculinity’ highlight how artists from the 1960s onwards have forged a new politically charged queer aesthetic.
In the 1970s, artists such as Peter Hujar (below), David Wojnarowicz, Sunil Gupta (below) and Hal Fischer (below) photographed gay lifestyles in New York and San Francisco in a bid to claim public visibility and therefore legitimacy at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offence. Reflecting on their own queer experience and creating sensual bodies of work, artists such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode (below) and Isaac Julien (below) portrayed black gay desire while Catherine Opie’s seminal work Being and Having, 1991 (below), documented members of the dyke, butch and BDSM communities in San Francisco playing with the physical attributes associated with hypermasculinity in order to overturn traditional binary understandings of gender.
Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs by Karlheinz Weinberger Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Sunil Gupta’s series Christopher Street 1976 Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Gupta went on to study under Lisette Model at the New School and take his place among the most accomplished photographers, editors, and curators of his generation, exploring the way identities flower under various sexual, geographical, and historical conditions. But Christopher Street is where it all began. His subjects are engaged in an unprecedented moment in which it seemed possible to build a world of their own. He shows inner lives, barely concealed within the downturned face of a mustachioed man with his hands in his pockets, and outer ones as well, as other men cruise the lens right back, or laugh with each other, unbothered by the stranger with the camera. They were often just engaged in the everyday and extraordinary act of simply existing as gay. In each photograph, Gupta somehow projects a protective and versatile desire: to remember and be remembered at once.
Extract from Jesse Dorris. “Christopher Street Revisited,” on the Aperture website May 30th, 2019 [Online] Cited 29/02/2020
The 1976 Christopher Street series marks the first set of photographs Gupta made as a practicing artist, using the camera as a tool for open expression. His decision to use black and white film was partly aesthetic, yet also practical, as he was developing the prints in his bathroom. Although he uses a documentarian style, Gupta was by no means an impartial observer behind the camera, he was a participant, enthralled by his subjects.
The series … captures a specific moment in history – a cross section of a thriving community in one of New York’s most dynamic areas – Manhattan’s Christopher Street. Dressed in the latest fashions, moving confidently and relaxing on street corners, their visible presence is a signifier of a specific period of public consciousness. Un-staged and spontaneous, most of the artist’s subjects are unaware of the camera and are simply going about their day. Now, with hindsight, Gupta is struck by the routineness of the images, stating:
‘There is a poignancy they never had at the time… A few years later, the AIDS crisis took hold. The public nature of gay life was forced back into the shadows. Thousands of men died. New York shut down its bathhouses, gay parties became private, and this whole world became hidden again.’
Fusing the public with the personal, the Christopher Street series reflects the openness of the gay liberation movement, as well as Gupta’s own “coming out” as an artist. More than a nostalgic time capsule, the photographs reveal a community that shaped Gupta as a person and cemented his lifelong dedication to portraying people who have been denied a space to be themselves.
Extract from Anonymous. “Sunil Gupta: Christopher Street,” on the Monovisions website 24 May 2019 [Online] Cited 29/02/2020
Hal Fischer (American, b. 1950) Handkerchiefs
1977
From the series Gay Semiotics
Gelatin silver print
Hal Fischer (American, b. 1950) Street Fashion Jock
1977
From the series Gay Semiotics Gelatin silver print
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing at left, photographs from Isaac Julien’s series After Mazatlàn, 1999/2000 Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing Catherine Opie’s series Being and Having 1991 Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
The exhibition brings together over 300 works by over 50 pioneering international artists, photographers and filmmakers such as Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and Catherine Opie to show how photography and film have been central to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture. The show also highlights lesser-known and younger artists – some of whom have never exhibited in the UK – including Cassils, Sam Contis, George Dureau, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Hank Willis Thomas, Karlheinz Weinberger and Marianne Wex amongst many others. Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is part of the Barbican’s 2020 season, Inside Out, which explores the relationship between our inner lives and creativity.
Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican, said: ‘Masculinities: Liberation through Photography continues our commitment to presenting leading twentieth century figures in the field of photography while also supporting younger contemporary artists working in the medium today. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and the resurgence of feminist and men’s rights activism, traditional notions of masculinity has become a subject of fierce debate. This exhibition could not be more relevant and will certainly spark conversations surrounding our understanding of masculinity.’
With ideas around masculinity undergoing a global crisis and terms such as ‘toxic’ and ‘fragile’ masculinity filling endless column inches, the exhibition surveys the representation of masculinity in all its myriad forms, rife with contradiction and complexity. Presented across six sections by over 50 international artists to explore the expansive nature of the subject, the exhibition touches on themes of queer identity, the black body, power and patriarchy, female perceptions of men, heteronormative hypermasculine stereotypes, fatherhood and family. The works in the show present masculinity as an unfixed performative identity shaped by cultural and social forces.
Seeking to disrupt and destabilise the myths surrounding modern masculinity, highlights include the work of artists who have consistently challenged stereotypical representations of hegemonic masculinity, including Collier Schorr, Adi Nes, Akram Zaatari and Sam Contis, whose series Deep Springs, 2018 draws on the mythology of the American West and the rugged cowboy. Contis spent four years immersed in an all-male liberal arts college north of Death Valley meditating on the intimacy and violence that coexists in male-only spaces. Complicating the conventional image of the fighter, Thomas Dworzak‘s acclaimed series Taliban consists of portraits found in photographic studios in Kandahar following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, these vibrant portraits depict Taliban fighters posing hand in hand in front of painted backdrops, using guns and flowers as props with kohl carefully applied to their eyes. Trans masculine artist Cassils‘ series Time Lapse, 2011, documents the radical transformation of their body through the use of steroids and a rigorous training programme reflecting on ideas of masculinity without men. Elsewhere, artists Jeremy Deller, Robert Mapplethorpe and Rineke Dijkstra dismantle preconceptions of subjects such as the wrestler, the bodybuilder and the athlete and offer an alternative view of these hyper-masculinised stereotypes.
The exhibition examines patriarchy and the unequal power relations between gender, class and race. Karen Knorr‘s series Gentlemen, 1981-83, comprised of 26 black and white photographs taken inside men-only private members’ clubs in central London and accompanied by texts drawn from snatched conversations, parliamentary records and contemporary news reports, invites viewers to reflect on notions of class, race and the exclusion of women from spaces of power during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Toxic masculinity is further explored in Andrew Moisey‘s 2018 photobook The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual which weaves together archival photographs of former US Presidents and Supreme Court Justices who all belonged to the fraternity system, alongside images depicting the initiation ceremonies and parties that characterise these male-only organisations.
With the rise of the Gay Liberation Movement through the 1960s followed by the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, the exhibition showcases artists such as Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowiz, who increasingly began to disrupt traditional representations of gender and sexuality. Hal Fischer‘s critical photo-text series Gay Semiotics, 1977, classified styles and types of gay men in San Francisco and Sunil Gupta’s street photographs captured the performance of gay public life as played out on New York’s Christopher Street, the site of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. Other artists exploring the performative aspects of queer identity include Catherine Opie‘s seminal series Being and Having, 1991, showing her close friends in the West Coast’s LGBTQ+ community sporting false moustaches, tattoos and other stereotypical masculine accessories. Elle Pérez‘s luminous and tender photographs explore the representation of gender non-conformity and vulnerability, whilst Paul Mpagi Sepuya‘s fragmented portraits explore the studio as a site of homoerotic desire.
During the 1970s women artists from the second wave feminist movement objectified male sexuality in a bid to subvert and expose the invasive and uncomfortable nature of the male gaze. In the exhibition, Laurie Anderson‘s seminal work Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity), 1973, documents the men who cat-called her as she walked through New York’s Lower East Side while Annette Messager‘s series The Approaches, 1972, covertly captures men’s trousered crotches with a long-lens camera. German artist Marianne Wex‘s encyclopaedic project Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, 1977, presents a detailed analysis of male and female body language and Australian indigenous artist Tracey Moffatt‘s awkwardly humorous film Heaven, 1997, portrays male surfers changing in and out of their wet suits.
Further highlights include New York based artist Hank Willis Thomas, whose photographic practice examines the complexities of the black male experience; celebrated Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase‘s The Family, 1971-1989, chronicles the life and death of his family with a particular emphasis on his father; and Kenneth Anger‘s technicolour experimental underground film Kustom Kar Kommandos, 1965, explores the fetishist role of hot rod cars amongst young American men.
Press release from the Barbican Art Gallery
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing Hank Willis Thomas’ series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008 2005-08 (below) Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Room 13-14
Reclaiming the Black Body
Giving visual form to the complexity of the black male experience, this section foregrounds artists who over the last five decades have consciously subverted expectations of race, gender and the white gaze by reclaiming the power to fashion their own identities.
From Samuel Fosso’s playfully staged self-portraits, taken in his studio, in which he performs to the camera sporting flares and platforms boots or flirtatiously revealing his youthful male physique (below) to Kiluanji Kia Henda’s fictional scenarios in which he adopts the troubled personas of African men of power, the works presented here reflect on how black masculinity challenges the status quo (below).
The representation of black masculinity in the US is born out of a violent history of slavery and prejudice. Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008 by Hank Willis Thomas (below) draws attention to the ways in which corporate America has commodified the African American male experience while simultaneously perpetuating and reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Similarly, Deana Lawson’s powerful work Sons of Cush, 2016, highlights how the black male figure is often ‘idealised (in their physical beauty) and pathologised by the culture (as symbols of violence or fear)’.
Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976) The Johnson Family
1981/2006
From the series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008
2005-08
Concerned with the literal and figural objectifications of the African American male body, in his complex series Unbranded Hank Willis Thomas redeploys magazine adverts featuring African Americans made between 1968 – a pivotal moment in the struggle for civil rights – and 2008, which witnessed the accession of Barack Obama to the US presidency. By digitally stripping the ads of all text, branding and logos, Thomas draws attention to the ways in which corporate America has commodified the African American experience while simultaneously perpetuating and reinforcing cultural stereotypes.
Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976) It’s the Real Thing!
1978/2008
From the series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008
2005-08
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing a photograph from Kiluanji Kia Henda’s series The Last Journey of the Dictator Mussunda Nzombo Before the Great Extinction Act I Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing part of Marianne Wex’s encyclopaedic project Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, 1977 Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Room 15-16
Women on Men: Reversing the Male Gaze
As the second-wave feminist movement gained momentum through the 1960s and ’70s, female activists sought to expose and critique entrenched ideas about masculinity and to articulate alternative perspectives on gender and representation. Against this background, or motivated by its legacy, the artists gathered here have made men their subject with the radical intention of subverting their power, calling into question the notion that men are active and women passive.
In the early 1970s pioneers of feminist art such as Laurie Anderson (below) and Annette Messager consciously objectified the male body in a bid to expose the uncomfortable nature of the dominant male gaze. In contrast, filmmakers such as Tracey Moffatt (below) and Hilary Lloyd (above) turn the tables on male representations of desire to foreground the power of the female gaze.
In his humorous series The Ideal Man, 1978 (below), Hans Eijkelboom invited ten women to fashion him into their image of the ‘ideal’ man. Through this act Eijkelboom reverses the male to female power dynamic and inverts the traditional gender hierarchy.
Laurie Anderson (American, b. 1947) Man with a Cigarette
1973
From the series Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity)
Laurie Anderson (American, b. 1947) Two men in a car
1973
From the series Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity)
Anderson photographed men who called to her or whistled her on the street. In her artist statement she writes about one experience,
“As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon. I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered ‘Wanna fuck?’ This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the woman to backtrack if she should dare to object. I wheeled around, furious. ‘Did you say that?’ He looked around surprised, then defiant ‘Yeah, so what the fuck if I did?’ I raised my Nikon, took aim began to focus. His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK.
As it turned out, most of the men I shot that day had the opposite reaction. When i confronted them, the acted innocent, then offended, like some nasty invisible ventriloquist had ticked them into saying dirty words against their will. By the time I took their pictures they were posing, like taking their picture was the least I could do.”
“I decided to shoot pictures of men who made comments to me on the street. I had always hated this invasion of my privacy and now I had the means of my revenge. As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon, I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered ‘Wanna fuck?’ This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the woman to backtrack if she should dare to object. I wheeled around, furious. ‘Did you say that?’ He looked around surprised, then defiant. ‘Yeah, so what the fuck if I did?’ I raised my Nikon, took aim, began to focus. His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK.”
Anderson takes the power from her male pursuers, allowing them nothing more than the momentary fear that their depravity has just been captured in a picture.
“A playful video that glories in the female gaze and objectification of men. It zeros in on the Australian national sport, surfing, and in particular on several dozen good-looking muscular men changing into or out of their swimming trunks. This ritual is usually conducted in parking lots or on sidewalks, always near cars and sometimes inside them; it usually but not always involves a beach towel wound carefully around the torso. Ms Moffatt begins by shooting her subject unseen from inside a house and gradually moves closer and closer, engaging some in conversations that are never heard. The soundtrack alternates between the ocean surf and the sounds of drumming and chanting, male rituals of another, more authentic Australian culture. By the tape’s end, the artist’s voyeurism has shifted to participation; the camera shows her free hand, the one not holding the camera, darting into view, trying to undo the towel of the last surfer.”
New York Times
Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing part of Hans Eijkelboom’s series The Ideal Man, 1978
Glossary of Terms by CN Lester
Homosociality: Typically non-romantic and/or non-sexual same-sex relationships and social groupings – may sometimes include elements of homoeroticism, as they are frequently interdependent phenomena.
Normativity: The process by which some groups of people, forms of expression and types of behaviour are classified according to a perceived standard of what is ‘normal’, ‘natural’, desirable and permissible in society. Inevitably, this process designates people, expressions and behaviours that do not fit these norms as abnormal, unnatural, undesirable and impermissible.
Hegemonic Masculinity: ‘Hegemonic’ means ‘ruling’ or ‘commanding’ – hegemonic masculinity, therefore, indicates male dominance and the forms of masculinity occupying and perpetuating this dominant position. The term was coined in the 1980s by the scholar R. W. Connell, drawing on the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony.
Hierarchy: Across many cultures throughout history, and continuing into the present moment throughout large parts of the world, gender functions as a hierarchy: some gender categories and gender expressions are granted higher value and more power than others. Men are often higher up the gender hierarchy than women, but the gender hierarchy is affected by racism, disablism, ageism, transphobia and other factors; in the West, men in their thirties are likely to be considered higher up the gender hierarchy than men in their eighties, for example.
Gender roles: Specific cultural roles defined by the weight of gendered ideas, restrictions and traditions. Men and women are often expected, sometimes forced, to occupy oppositional gender roles: aggressor versus victim, protector versus nurturer and so on. Many gender roles are specific to intersections of race, class, sexuality, religion and disabled status – examples of these types of gender roles can be seen in the stereotypes of the Jezebel or the Dragon Lady.
Patriarchy: Literally ‘the rule of the father’, a patriarchy is a society or structure centred around male dominance and in which women (and those of other genders) are not treated as or considered equal.
Queer: A slur, a term of reclamation and a specific and radical site of community and activism in solidarity with many kinds of difference, and specifically opposed to heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Queer studies and queer theory are important emerging fields of study.
Gender identity: Identity refers to what, who, and how someone or something is, both in the way this is understood as selfhood by an individual, and also the self as it is shaped and positioned by the world. Gender identity can be a surprisingly difficult term to pin down and is perhaps best understood as the stated truth of a person’s gender (or lack of gender), which is in itself the sum of many different factors.
Fetishisation: To turn the subject into a fetish, sexually or otherwise. Fetishisation in terms of gender and desire frequently occurs in conjunction with objectification and power. Men and women of colour are frequently fetishised by white people, in society and in artistic practice, through different stereotypes and limitations. Trans and disabled people are also subject to fetishisation, particularly in bodily terms. Kobena Mercer’s critical essay on Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘Reading Radical Fetishism’,1 and David Henry Hwang’s play and afterword to M. Butterfly (1988) both explore the notion of fetishisation.
1. Kobena Mercer, ‘Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’, in Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 307-29.
Critical race theory: A branch of scholarship emerging from the application of critical theory to the study of law in the 1980s, critical race theory (CRT) is now taken as an approach and theoretical foundation across both academic and popular discourse. CRT names, examines and challenges the social constructions and functions of race and racism. Rejecting the idea of race as a ‘natural’ category, CRT looks instead to the cultural, structural and legal creation and maintenance of difference and oppression. Scholars working in this field include Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Patricia Williams.
Me Too movement: ‘#MeToo is a movement that was founded in 2006 to support survivors of sexual violence, in particular black and brown girls, who were in the program that we were running. It has grown since then to include supporting grown people, women, and men, and other survivors, as well as helping people to understand what community action looks like in the fight to end sexual violence’ – Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too movement.
Male gaze: A term coined by film critic Laura Mulvey, the notion of the male gaze develops Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of le regard (the gaze) to take into account the power differentials and gender stereotyping inherent in ways of looking within patriarchal, sexist culture. The male gaze refers to how the world – and women in particular – are looked at and presented from a cisgender, straight, frequently white male perspective. In visual art the male gaze can be understood in multiple ways, from the male creator of the work, to men within the work viewing women or the world around them, to the (assumed) male viewer of the work itself. Many women artists have countered the male gaze through deconstruction and through the creation and promotion of works that centre the ‘female gaze’.
Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery
Publisher: Ernst Wasmuth A.G. / Berlin
With an Introduction by Charles F. G. Masterman
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 145: Market Cross, Castlecoombe, Wiltshire
1926
Part 3 of my humungous posting on photographs from E.O. Hoppé’s book Picturesque Great Britain: Its Architecture and Landscape 1926.
I found a little more information about Hoppé’s process:
“He travelled across many countries including Great Britain, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the United States, India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand for projects such as the Orbis Terrarum book series for the Berlin-based publishing company Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, and devoted months, often a year or more, of his careful, meticulous attention to each of these countries in order to, as he himself once wrote, eventually select from 5000 negatives 300 images that could together with a text for the respective country, represent the selected topic and be published.”
Over a year in time, taken from 5000 negatives, to select 300 images. This means that Hoppé was working on a ratio of using about 6% of all the photographs of a subject that he took. From my personal experience I always work on 10% of what I take being “good” images, with about 5% actually being usable in a series, sequence or body of work.
As in the earlier postings, we can again see many of his compositional devices at work: double vanishing points (189: Norwich Cathedral, Norfolk), occlusion of foreground looking at subject in distance (186: Castle Rising, Norfolk; 199: Hop Poles & Oast Houses, Kent), superb use of “near far” (185: The Harbour, Kings Lynn, Norfolk; 190: The Broads at Wrexham, Norfolk), modernity and the geometric construction of the image plane (169: Caius Cambridge, Cambridge), strong elements holding up one side of the image and leading the eye into the subject (156: Pangbourne, Berkshire; 183: Walberswick, Suffolk); and wonderful use of light and chiaroscuro to picture atmosphere and emotion in the archaic and modern (218: The Canal, Manchester, Lancashire; 219: Warehouses, Manchester, Lancashire; 221: Steelworks, Sheffield, Yorkshire; 227: Evening, York).
Boy, would I like to see the ones he rejected!
Marcus
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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. These photographs are published under fair use conditions for educational purposes only.
This magnificent set of pictures displays, with all the art of genius both in selection and technical skill, the beauty of the British Isles. I know of no similar collection which could give alike to the foreigner who wonders what England is like, to the Englishman who has wandered from his native land into all the great dominions of the world, and to the man who has remained behind, that particular sense of pleasure mingled with pain which all beauty excites, and excites especially a passionate love in the vision of home.
This is an introduction to pictures of the landscapes and the works of man; these latter ennobled by the associations of time, and in some cases by time’s decay. They open vistas through which one may gaze at the history of England for a thousand years.
Charles F. G. Masterman
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 147: At Hatfield, Hertfordshire
1926
Emil Otto Hoppé (born 1878 in Munich, died 1972 in England) was an exciting and mysterious phenomenon. During his lifetime, especially in the 1910s, 20s, 30s and 40s, he was one of the most famous photographers in the world and a highly-respected portrait photographer in London, with a large house and studio in South Kensington (Millais House, which had 27 rooms on four floors and had previously been inhabited by the renowned Victorian painter John Everett Millais) as well as a clientele comprising the most important politicians, businessmen, artists, dancers, poets, writers, philosophers and of course the English nobility, including Queen Mary and King George V. For many years he was a dedicated travel photographer. He travelled across many countries including Great Britain, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the United States, India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand for projects such as the Orbis Terrarum book series for the Berlin-based publishing company Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, and devoted months, often a year or more, of his careful, meticulous attention to each of these countries in order to, as he himself once wrote, eventually select from 5000 negatives 300 images that could together with a text for the respective country, represent the selected topic and be published. “Romantic America”, “Picturesque Great Britain: The Architecture and the Landscape”, “Romantik der Kleinstadt”, “The Fifth Continent” [Australia] and “Deutsche Arbeit” are the titles of just some of the 20 books he published in his lifetime. …
The first task in the development of the history of photography was to build as simple a framework as possible and to gain a recognisable, nameable overview of the key movements. The work of Emil Otto Hoppé perhaps simply did not to fit in; instead his diversity and attitude must have been unsettling. On the one hand, he threw quite a modern look on the people, villages, landscapes and especially industries. At the same time he was for long periods wont to print his pictures in more tonal and soft-focus ways. His black-and-white pictures are often characterised by a particularly dense and colourful tonality, while his portraits (and other genres) are often soft and almost a little out-of-focus. He himself describes printing his portraits as follows in his autobiography “Hundred Thousand Exposures: The Success of a Photographer” from 1945: “I use a soft-focus lens in the enlarger. I begin the exposure with the smallest stop considered advisable. During the exposure the iris diaphragm is slowly opened and closed. The effect is calculated by dividing the estimated exposure by the smallest stop used in the process and closing the iris diaphragm for fractions of the period which are approximately 1/5, 1/20, 3/4 (…) The final effect is a roundness which I have not found it possible to obtain by another method.” …
In a speech delivered by E.O. Hoppé to the Royal Photography Society in 1946, he addressed some of these issues himself. For example: “The function of the camera here would be to make a simple, straightforward picture, which probably would not be accepted by any Salon of Photography. No tricks of exposure, angle or printing would have a place.” […] “The search for the most effective angle is the prime task of the photographer, and his success will largely be judged by his success in that search. The harm comes when he does not look for the most effective angle but for the most bizarre and peculiar.” […] “I see no reason to think a man a better artist because he ignores public taste, despises supply and demand and has dirty finger-nails.” […] “Similarly, I cannot agree with the intellectual snobbishness which declares that a man who wears a clean shirt and has a bank account is necessarily a tradesman and cannot be an artist.” His line of argument seems to address some reasons why his work was for a long time forgotten vis-à-vis a romantic image of the artist and the search for an approach that could be precisely isolated and named.
Anonymous. “Emil Otto Hoppé: Unveiling a Secret Industrial Photographs, 1912-1937,” on the Urs Stahel website January 2015 [Online] Cited 18 May 2020
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 148: The Spires of Oxford, Oxfordshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 150: The Cloisters, New College, Oxford
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 156: Pangbourne, Berkshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972)
157: West Hagbourne, Berkshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 164: Trinity Gates, Cambridge
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 169: Caius Cambridge, Cambridge
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 171: Old Inn & Hostelry, Cambridge
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 172: Haddenham, Cambridgeshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 175: Housetops, Cathedral Close, Ely, Cambridgeshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 177: Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 178: Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 181: Fine Specimens of Ancient Domestic Architecture, Plastered Houses at Ipswich, Suffolk
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 182: Near Walberswick, Suffolk
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 183: Walberswick, Suffolk
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 184: Market House, Wymondham, Norfolk
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 185: The Harbour, Kings Lynn, Norfolk
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 186: Castle Rising, Norfolk
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 187: Cottage at Southery, Norfolk
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 189: Norwich Cathedral, Norfolk
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 190: The Broads at Wrexham, Norfolk
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 193: An Essex Landscape
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 195: Beeleigh Abbey, Essex
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 196: Plastered House, Safron Walden, Essex
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 198: The Friars, Aylesford, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 199: Hop Poles & Oast Houses, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 200: Staplehurst, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 201: Allington Castle, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 202: Allington Castle, Maidstone, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 203: Allington Castle, Maidstone, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 205: The Old Smithy, Penhurst, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 207: Penhurst, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 208: Cobham Hall, Gravesend, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 211: Canterbury Cathedral, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 213: The Weavers, Cantebury, Kent
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 215: Tideswell Cathedral, Derbyshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 218: The Canal, Manchester, Lancashire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 219: Warehouses, Manchester, Lancashire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 221: Steelworks, Sheffield, Yorkshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 222: Steelworks, Sheffield, Yorkshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 224: Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 227: Evening, York
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 228: Galilee Chapel, Durham Cathedral
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 229: Durham Cathedral, Durham
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 231: In Durham Cathedral
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 232: The Cloisters, Durham Cathedral
1926
Exhibition dates: 7th September – 1st December 2019, posted June 2020
Curator: Estrella de Diego, Professor of Modern Art at the Complutense University of Madrid
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) George Antheil
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
George Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author, and inventor whose modernist musical compositions explored the modern sounds – musical, industrial, and mechanical – of the early 20th century.
This was one of the most memorable photography exhibitions of my European sojourn during August – October 2019, in the most beautiful of gallery spaces. I was so very lucky to complete my time in Europe before the current pandemic arrived.
I will comment more on the exhibition in Part 2 of the posting, but suffice to say it was a real pleasure to see the work of Berenice Abbott side by side with the photographs of Eugène Atget, an artist she did much to champion (including printing his photographs). Her portraits of Atget taken in the year of his death were magnificent. They provide a portal between old and new, between the artist looking back on his work (his life), and the 20th century artist realising that they have to accommodate Atget within their future kinēsis … and in so doing, Abbott pictures an artist whose spirit possessed all of Old Paris.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
All iPhone photographs by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
This autumn Huis Marseille will present a large retrospective of the famous American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). This is the first time that an extensive selection of her work, held by important American collections, will be shown in the Netherlands. Abbott is one of the key figures in the history of 20th-century photography. Her legacy is not only an eclectic photographic oeuvre but also a strong opinion on the role of photography in society, to which she gave expression in numerous publications. Her work forms a bridge linking the artistic avant-garde in the ‘Old World’ with the emerging art scene of the 1920s and 1930s in New York.
Modernity
The idea of modernity pervades all of Berenice Abbott’s work: from her portraits of pioneering artists and intellectuals, and her astonishing views of the city of New York, to her photos of scientific themes, documenting the results of various physics experiments. Abbott’s oeuvre also reflects her own modernism, her constant desire to be on the front line, and her exceptional talent for not just noticing the changes that were going on around her but for depicting them to striking effect. Berenice Abbott was an enthusiastic proponent of modernism in photography, and was strongly opposed to picturalism, the painterly style that dominated photography in the early 20th century. In her view a good photograph was shaped by the specific characteristics of photography itself, and not by those of painting.
Lost Generation
In 1918 Berenice Abbott left her birthplace Ohio and moved to New York to study sculpture, where she soon gravitated towards Greenwich Village, a hotbed of avant-garde and radical artists, bohemians, and others whose lifestyles put them outside the American mainstream. In 1921 she arrived in Paris and joined the artistic community of Montparnasse on the famous left bank of the Seine. Its writers and artists included many American expats who, disillusioned by the senseless violence of the First World War and by Prohibition in America, had taken refuge in Europe. The American writer Gertrude Stein called them the ‘lost generation’, a generation to which Abbott also belonged, which questioned traditional values and favoured an alternative kind of life. Abbott would go on to portray many of these writers, including Djuna Barnes and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Portrait photographer
Abbott’s life as a photographer began in 1923, in the Parisian studio of the famous American photographer, Dadaist and Surrealist Man Ray. As his assistant she learned the technical, artistic and commercial aspects of portrait photography. In 1926, with financial support from the immensely rich American art collector Peggy Guggenheim, she opened her own Paris studio. Her clients were mostly expats, socialites, bohemians, writers, artists and the ‘new women’ who, like herself, were willing to live on the margins of society in order to be free. Many had broken ties with their origins and their gender, such as the journalist Janet Flanner, the publisher Jane Heap, and the writer Sylvia Beach. Abbott immortalised them in assertive, powerful portraits. Beach was also the publisher of James Joyce’ Ulysses (1922), a book that Abbott greatly admired, and she portrayed the writer, his wife and daughter on several occasions.
Eugène Atget
Through Man Ray in Paris Abbott met the photographer Eugène Atget, with whose work she felt an immediate visual and artistic affinity. For decades Atget had documented Paris in plain, unadorned images, and with a keen eye for seemingly unimportant details. After his death in 1927 Abbott looked after a large part of his oeuvre, promoting it tirelessly in America through exhibitions and books. The present exhibition therefore also includes a small selection of photos by Eugène Atget, which Abbott printed from the original negatives in 1956.
Changing New York
The heart of the exhibition is formed by Abbott’s photos of New York City. When she returned to New York in 1929 she felt an immediate urge to photograph the city itself, with its enormous contrasts and contradictions, a city that changed constantly and was never the same from moment to moment. In 1935 she received a substantial grant from the Federal Art Project, a government initiative that was intended to create jobs and boost the economy following the crisis years, and this allowed her to begin work in earnest. She called her project Changing New York; it was also published in book form in 1939, with texts by her partner Elizabeth McCausland. Her camera transformed New York into a living being, with an extraordinary character, which visitors can experience to this day as they move through its busy streets and stare amazed at the modern beauty of its skyscrapers. Shops, people, bridges, streets, interiors, construction sites, iconic buildings seen from outside or from above – everything comes together to create a portrait of the city.
Science
In the late 1930s Abbott became deeply interested in science, and saw that photography could play a role as spokesperson. The cerebral world of science needed the vitality and imaginative powers of photography to reach a wider audience. Moreover, the scientific interpretation of the world was not reserved for scientists alone; any citizen ought to be able to consider a scientific question, and photography could serve as an intermediary. With this goal in mind, for years Abbott did darkroom experiments with all kinds of camera techniques. In 1957 the Physical Science Study Committee of the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology hired her services to provide photographic illustrations for new and influential schoolbooks.
Curation
The exhibition was created in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, a Spanish non-profit organisation with which Huis Marseille has worked regularly over the last ten years – most recently in 2016 for the Stephen Shore retrospective in Huis Marseille. It was curated by Estrella de Diego, Professor of Modern Art at the Complutense University of Madrid, and has been shown in Barcelona and Madrid.
Loans
The exhibition comprises almost 200 vintage photographs generously loaned from the New York Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, the International Center of Photography (NY), the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY), the Howard Greenberg Gallery (NY) and the MIT Museum (Cambridge, Massachusetts), together with a selection of Abbott’s publications on loan from the Rijksmuseum library and other collections.
Publication
Estrella de Diego, Julia van Haaften, Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity, Madrid (Fundación Mapfre) 2019.
Text from the Huis Marseille website
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Jean Cocteau (installation views)
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Jean Cocteau, the author of so many memorable films and works of literature, is shown embracing a sort of mask that perhaps alludes to the repeated play of mirrors that runs through his Orphic Trilogy. He represents the kind of masculinity that Abbott renders in her portraits of homosexual activists such as André Gide and Cocteau or the ‘new men’ who had ceased to be certain of their identity – like the characters in the novels of George Bernard Shaw or Thomas Hardy – and had adopted a less monolithic masculinity. This trait can also be found in D.H. Lawrence, and in James Joyce, who sat for Abbott in 1928.
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Janet Flanner in Paris (installation view)
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing the exhibition Janet Flanner in Paris, 1927 Photo: Eddo Hartmann
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Janet Flanner in Paris
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Abbott’s portraits depict some of the modern intellectuals with whom she associated in New York’s Greenwich Village following her arrival there from the native Ohio. These included people who also had links with Paris, such as the writer and journalist Janet Flanner, a personal friend of the writer Djuna Barnes. Abbott gave Flanner an ambiguous aspect; with her cropped hair and masculine dress she is another representative of the strong ‘New Women’. Abbott photographed many of these New Women who were prepared to live on the margins of society in order to safeguard their freedom.
Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing in the top image, the photographs of Janet Flanner (above) Eugène Atget (below) Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Eugène Atget (installation view)
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Eugène Atget
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Eugène Atget (installation view)
1927
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
In 1927 Berenice Abbott produced two portraits, front-facing and in profile, of Eugène Atget, the photographer who was adored by the Surrealists and who captured the mood of late 19th-century Paris. The portraits, reminiscent of a documentary work – of police records, almost – highlight Abbott’s extraordinary skill as a portrait photographer. Atget provided the inspiration for Abbott’s wonderful portrait of New York City, Changing New York. She made generous efforts to promote the French photographer’s work, even acquiring his negatives after his death.
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Eugène Atget
1927
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Abbott’s photographs of Eugène Atget Photo: Eddo Hartmann
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) James Joyce, Paris (installation view)
1920
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Audrey McMahon (installation view)
1925-1946
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Audrey McMahon was the Director of the New York region of the Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943; the region she oversaw included New York City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Born in New York City in 1898, she attended the Sorbonne, and she was the director of the College Art Association. …
Her approach to the administration of the Federal Art Project attempted to give the artists employed a great deal of freedom, and as she recalled later, “It is gratifying to note… that almost all of the painters, sculptors, graphic artists, and muralists who recall those days remember little or no artistic stricture.”
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Jane Heap (installation view)
1929-1931
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Jane Heap (November 1, 1883 – June 18, 1964) was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner (who for some years was also her lover), she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. Heap herself has been called “one of the most neglected contributors to the transmission of modernism between America and Europe during the early twentieth century.”
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Jane Heap
1929-1931
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam with at bottom left, Eugène Atget’s photo Eclipse, Paris 1912 Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) L’éclipse (installation view)
April 1912
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Pendant l’éclipse
1912
Albumen print
Although the moon is not visible in this photograph by Eugène Atget, its presence and appeal are implied. The crowd gathered in Paris’s Place de la Bastille on April 17, 1912, was observing a solar eclipse through viewing apparatuses. Atget, rather than recording the astronomical event itself, turned his attention to its spectators. Though Atget made more than 8,500 pictures of Paris and its environs in a career that spanned over thirty years – most documenting the built environment – this photograph is an unusual example that focuses on a crowd of people.
Text from the MoMA website
Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing the photographs of Eugène Atget with at second right Avenue des Gobelins, 1925 Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Avenue des Gobelins
1925
Albumen print
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Interior of a worker’s room, Rue de Romainville, 19th arr. (installation view)
c. 1910
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Courtyard, 7 Rue de Valence, 5th arr. (installation view)
June 1922
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Courtyard, 7 Rue de Valence, 5th arr.
June 1922
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 13.
Library of Congress
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Rue St. Rustique (installation view)
March 1922
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Rue St. Rustique
March 1922
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 9.
Library of Congress
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Ragpicker’s Hut (installation views)
1910
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Street diversions (or B organ)
1898-99
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 16
Library of Congress
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Street Pavers (installation views)
1899-1900
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Street Pavers
1899-1900
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 12
Library of Congress
Abbott saw in Eugène Atget a documentary photographer who revealed in his photographs of Paris a city frozen in time, a city that one might almost describe as antiheroic. Abbott understood that all documentary photography (and an photograph can be documentary, free from fault lines) contains a larger amount of autobiography, and Atget’s photography tells the story of a man and his camera traipsing around the city to seek out its nooks and crannies. To take a photo is to think with your eyes and with your brain. To observe is to be part of the scene.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Butcher’s shop, Rue Christine (installation view)
c. 1923
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Butcher’s shop, Rue Christine
c. 1923
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 17
Library of Congress
The surrealists were fascinated by Eugène Atget and his shifting play with Paris’s innermost structure, his phantasmagorias. In contrast with this, Abbott emphasises the documentary characteristics of Atget, at first glance a ‘realist’ photographer who captured the deserted landscapes of the city described by Albert Valentin in 1928 as “cerebral landscapes”. Atget photographed the everyday, the events in the house next door, expressing the sense of encountering the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange – rather like Abbott did, years later.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Mannequin (installation views)
1926-27
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Mannequin
1926-27
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 15.
Library of Congress
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Shop, Avenue des Gobelins (installation view)
1925
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Bar interior, 15 Rue Boyer, 20th arr.
1900-1911
Albumen print
Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Aerial View of New York by Night at centre and New York Stock Exchange at centre right Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at left, Aerial View of New York by Night Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Aerial View of New York by Night
March 20, 1936
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
The changes in points of view in [the book] Changing New York – which sometimes seem like a juggling act or a pirouette, ways of seeing form above and from outside – are what convert the most emblematic or familiar places into landscape seen for the first time. And then there is the beautiful photograph of New York at night, the image that offers a full view, the one captured whole by our gaze” an exercise in light that prefigures Abbott’s later photographs on scientific themes.
Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing New York Stock Exchange Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) New York Stock Exchange
1933
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Washington Square, looking north
April 16, 1936
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1949
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) From Trinity Church Yard (installation view)
March 1, 1938
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) John Watts statue, from Trinity Churchyard looking toward One Wall Street, Manhattan
March 1, 1938
Gelatin silver print
Wikipedia, Public domain
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Broadway near Broome Street, Manhattan (installation views)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at bottom left, Lamport Export Company, 507-511 Broadway, Manhattan October 7, 1935; and at top right, Broadway and Thomas Street 1936 Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Broadway and Thomas Street
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at third right, Abbott’s 5th Avenue, No’s 4, 6, 8 March 20, 1936 Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Abbott’s 5th Avenue, No’s 4, 6, 8 March 20, 1936 Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 5th Avenue, No’s 4, 6, 8 March 20, 1936
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Tempo of the City II, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street looking west from Seymour Building, 503 Fifth Avenue
September 6, 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection
Wikipedia, Public domain
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Allen Street, No’s 55-57, Manhattan 1937
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Publisher: Ernst Wasmuth A.G. / Berlin
With an Introduction by Charles F. G. Masterman
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 74: Land’s End, Cornwall
1926
In this, the second tranche of photographs from E. O. Hoppé’s 1926 book Picturesque Great Britain: Its Architecture and Landscape, we can analyse some of the techniques of picture construction that the artist has so creatively mastered.
Firstly, that of the floating horizon line. In photographs such as 74: Land’s End, Cornwall; 80: Selworthy, Somerset; 82: Selworthy Church, Selworthy, Somerset; 84: Minehead, Somerset; and 91: Cambden Crescent in Bath, Somerset, Hoppé com/piles the foreground with tone, form and structure, but let’s the eye escape to a distant horizon which moves up and down, according to context, place, space… within the image frame. Time and again he uses this method of allowing the eye to escape the confines of the image.
Secondly, a framing device that the artist is particularly fond of is that of the road, pathway or bridge that helps lead the eye into the image and on to the vanishing point. We can see this approach in photographs such as 96: Approach to Cloisters, Gloucester Cathedral; 97: The Cloisters, Gloucester Cathedral, Gloucestershire; 101: Withe Cottage, Conway, Wales; and 132: The Bridge, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire.
Another framing device that the artist uses very effectively is what I call the blocked approach (to the subject) – which can be seen in photographs such as 77: Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset; 117: Chester, Cheshire; 119: Norman Arches, Much Wenlock Abbey, Shropshire; and 142: Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire, where the object which is in focus in the distance is revealed through out of focus arches, wood, masonry or pillars.
A further device is that of the mid-distance band within the pictorial plane, where Hoppé contains the important architectural information into a central section of information. In photographs such as 103: Carnavon Castle, Wales; 121: Evesham, Worcestershire; and 144: Bideston, Wiltshire the artist focuses the viewers attention in the mid-distance, where the buildings float between ground and air. Instead of closing in to fill the frame, Hoppé is content, satisfied with things as they are… happy to enunciate in the images the sum of what he has perceived, discovered, and learned about his subject, without the need to approach to closely or force the matter. In other words, he lets the architecture speak for itself within the landscape.
In looking at architectural forms of different periods, Hoppé does not rely on the formulaic, the tried and tested traditions of landscape and architecture photography from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. His is not the normal seeing of flat images with limited depth (of substance, of feeling). He is too talented (and experimental) and artist for that.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. These photographs are published under fair use conditions for educational purposes only.
This magnificent set of pictures displays, with all the art of genius both in selection and technical skill, the beauty of the British Isles. I know of no similar collection which could give alike to the foreigner who wonders what England is like, to the Englishman who has wandered from his native land into all the great dominions of the world, and to the man who has remained behind, that particular sense of pleasure mingled with pain which all beauty excites, and excites especially a passionate love in the vision of home.
This is an introduction to pictures of the landscapes and the works of man; these latter ennobled by the associations of time, and in some cases by time’s decay. They open vistas through which one may gaze at the history of England for a thousand years.
Charles F. G. Masterman
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 75: Packhorse Bridge, Allerford, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 77: Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 80: Selworthy, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 81: Selworthy, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 82: Selworthy Church, Selworthy, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 83: From Porlock Hill, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 84: Minehead, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 86: Minehead, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 87: The Market Place, Dunster
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 89: The Royal Crescent, Bath, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 90: Bath, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 91: Cambden Crescent in Bath, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 93: Wells Cathedral, Somerset
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 96: Approach to Cloisters, Gloucester Cathedral
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 97: The Cloisters, Gloucester Cathedral, Gloucestershire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 98: Pembridge, Herefordshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 101: Withe Cottage, Conway, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 102: Carnavon Castle, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 103: Carnavon Castle, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 105: Pass of Bwlch-Goerd, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 106: Bwlch-Goerd Pass, on the Road to Bala, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 107: The Druid Circle, Aberystwyth, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 108: On the Bwlch-y-Goerd Pass, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 110: Beddgelert, Carnavonshire, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 111: Llandinam Lake, Mid-Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 112: Snowdon, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 113: Snowdon at Pen-y-Gwryd, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 114: Llanberis Pass, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 115: Wye Valley, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 116: In the Wye Valley, Wales
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 117: Chester, Cheshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 119: Norman Arches, Much Wenlock Abbey, Shropshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 120: Bridgenorth, Shropshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 121: Evesham, Worcestershire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 124: Harlebury Castle, Worcestershire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 125: Worcester Cathedral
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 126: Rous Lench, Worcestershire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 127: Court Farm, Broadway, Worcestershire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 130: Broadway, Worcestershire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 132: The Bridge, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 133: Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 134: The Grammar School, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 135: Welfford-on-Avon, Warwickshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 137: Leycester Hospital, Warwick, Warwickshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 138: Leycester Hospital, Warwick, Warwickshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 139: Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 140: Stoneleigh Abbey, Near Leamington, Warwickshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 142: Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 143: Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire
1926
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972) 144: Bideston, Wiltshire
1926
Publisher: Ernst Wasmuth A.G. / Berlin
With an Introduction by Charles F. G. Masterman
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972)
Publisher Ernst Wasmuth A.G. / Berlin Picturesque Great Britain: Its Architecture and Landscape cover
1926
304 photoprints
E. O. Hoppé
Now there’s a name to conjure with!
I found this book in a charity shop, for $5. I couldn’t believe my luck. Here is a book, published in 1926, by one of the most underrated and oft forgotten of the great master photographers of the early twentieth century. It contains 304 photoprints of his journey around Great Britain – “picturesque” photographs – with all the implications that this name brings forth, with its link to Pictorialist photography.
Except, some of these photographs are far from “picturesque” ((of a place or building) visually attractive, especially in a quaint or charming way.) In fact, for the time, they can be seen as downright modern in their composition. Hoppé’s construction of the pictorial frame is exquisite. A wonderful sense of balance and proportion, use of chiaroscuro, low depth of field, geometric form, and a shear sense of space pervade these images. His use of near / far is a joy to behold, as he holds the foreground while drawing the viewers gaze into the distance, to an attendant bridge or dome of St Paul’s cathedral.
In this, the first of a four-part posting, what also strikes one is the rich tonality of these photogravure-like photoprints, with their dark, inky shadows and the sfumato blending of mid tones and highlights. Just look at Plate 33, Hoppé’s photograph of Stonehenge (below) and be swept away by this masters voice. In this photograph, as in many of the photographs, there is an almost abstract quality to them coupled with a wistful romanticism for time and place, for the history of the country he is photographing. Just imagine, hiring a car (or possibly a van) and travelling through a summer around Great Britain taking many many photographs, before whittling them down to the final 300 or so. Did he develop the film in the back of the van after each days shooting, before piling into bed at the local hotel? I don’t know, but I want to go on that road journey!
Being British, these photographs have a great pull and nostalgia for me. I love the British countryside and miss it dearly. What particularly strikes me about them is the absence of people and cars in the photographs, and how archaic and ancient this land seems. Despite being the head of the British Empire, despite being the leader of the Industrial Revolution (pictured throughout the book with pictures of Manchester and the Northern industrial cities), you cannot imagine that this country, a mere 14 years after these photographs were taken, would be on its knees after the withdrawal from Dunkirk, facing invasion from the Nazis… and yet, somehow, hold out, and eventually win the Second World War with the help of Russia and America.
These photographs portray Great Britain as an almost medieval country complete with castle and moat, cathedral and henge, fog descending over the Thames, horse and plough tilling the fields with nere a tractor in sight. People in one’s and two’s tramp the deserted streets, while thatched cottages silently await the rushing conflagration. How Great Britain, pictured here in all its beauty and serenity, survived the coming Armageddon – can perhaps be seen in these photographs very essence, their sense of history and place, of steadfastness and Britishness.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. These photographs are published under fair use conditions for educational purposes only.
This magnificent set of pictures displays, with all the art of genius both in selection and technical skill, the beauty of the British Isles. I know of no similar collection which could give alike to the foreigner who wonders what England is like, to the Englishman who has wandered from his native land into all the great dominions of the world, and to the man who has remained behind, that particular sense of pleasure mingled with pain which all beauty excites, and excites especially a passionate love in the vision of home.
This is an introduction to pictures of the landscapes and the works of man; these latter ennobled by the associations of time, and in some cases by time’s decay. They open vistas through which one may gaze at the history of England for a thousand years.
Charles F. G. Masterman
E. O. Hoppé (British, born Germany 1878-1972)
Publisher Ernst Wasmuth A.G. / Berlin Picturesque Great Britain: Its Architecture and Landscape title page
1926
304 photoprints
Emil Otto Hoppé (14 April 1878 – 9 December 1972) was a German-born British portrait, travel, and topographic photographer active between 1907 and 1945. Born to a wealthy family in Munich, he moved to London in 1900 to train as a financier, but took up photography and rapidly achieved great success.
He was the only son of a prominent banker, and was educated in the finest schools of Munich, Paris and Vienna. Upon leaving school he served apprenticeships in German banks for ten years, before accepting a position with the Shanghai Banking Corporation. He never arrived in China. The first leg of his journey took him to England where he met an old school friend. Hoppé married his old school friend’s sister, Marion Bliersbach, and stayed in London. While working for the Deutsche Bank, he became increasingly enamored with photography, and, in 1907, jettisoned his commercial career and opened a portrait studio. Within a few years, E.O. Hoppé was the undisputed leader of pictorial portraiture in Europe. To say that someone has a “household name” has become a cliché, yet in Hoppé’s case the phrase is apt. Rarely in the history of the medium has a photographer been so famous in his own lifetime among the general public. He was as famous as his sitters. It is difficult to think of a prominent name in the fields of politics, art, literature, and the theatre who did not pose for his camera.”
Although Hoppé was one of the most important photographic artists of his era and highly celebrated in his time, in 1954, at the age of 76, he sold his body of photographic work to a commercial London picture archive, the Mansell Collection. In the collection, the work was filed by subject in with millions of other stock pictures and no longer accessible by author. Almost all of Hoppé’s photographic work – that which gained him the reputation as Britain’s most influential international photographer between 1907 and 1939 – was accidentally obscured from photo-historians and from photo-history itself. It remained in the collection for over thirty years after Hoppé’s death, and was not fully accessible to the public until the collection closed down and was acquired by new owners in the United States.
In 1994 photographic art curator Graham Howe retrieved Hoppé’s photographic work from the picture library and rejoined it with the Hoppé family archive of photographs and biographical documents. This was the first time since 1954 that the complete E.O. Hoppé Collection was gathered together. Many years were spent in cataloguing, conservation, and research of the recovered work.
Unknown photographer Photograph of Allied War exhibition, Serbian Section, V&A (installation view)
1917
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
The older I grow, the more exponentially I appreciate and love these early photographs. Imagine having a collection like this!
Wonderful to see Edward Steichen’s Portrait – Lady H (1908, below) as I have a copy of Camera Work 22 in my collection.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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All iPhone images by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The V&A has been collecting photographs since 1856, the year the Museum was founded, and it was one of the first museums to present photography exhibitions. Since then the collection has grown to be one of the largest and most important in the world, comprising around 500,000 images. The V&A is now honoured to have added the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection to its holdings, which contains around 270,000 photographs, an extensive library, and 6,000 cameras and pieces of equipment associated with leading artists and photographic pioneers.
Take a behind-the-scenes look at our world class photography collection following the transfer of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Collection, which has enabled a dramatic reimagining of the way photography is presented at the V&A. The photographs curators introduce a series of five highlights that are on display in the new Photography Centre, which opened on 12th October 2018. The first phase of the centre will more than double the space dedicated to photography at the Museum.
Text from the V&A and YouTube websites
Unknown photographer Photograph of Allied War exhibition, Serbian Section, V&A (installation view)
1917
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
The V&A has been collecting and exhibiting photographs since the 1850s. This image shows part o a photographic exhibition held over 100 years ago in the same galleries you are standing in today. The exhibition presented a densely packed display of images depicting the Allied Powers during the First World War.
Installation views of the V&A Photography Centre, London
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833) Christ Carrying his Cross (installation views)
1827
Heliograph on pewter plate
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
The French inventor Niépce made the earliest surviving photographic images, which he called ‘heliographs’ or ‘sun-writing’. Only 16 are thought to still exist. Although Niépce experimented with light-sensitive plates inside a camera, he made most of his images, including this one, by placing engravings of works by other artists directly onto a metal plate. He would probably have had the resulting heliographs coated in ink and printed.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833) Christ Carrying his Cross (installation view)
1827
Heliograph on pewter plate
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
