Look at the “colour” of the Parmesan cheese in Strand’s photograph Parmesan, LuzzaraāØ (1953, above). If we think of Ansel Adam’s ‘Zone System’ (the 11 zones in the system from 0-10) where pure black is Zone 0, mid grey (the colour of a Kodak Grey Card) is Zone 5 and pure white is Zone 10… then in “real life” the colour of the wheel of Parmesan would fall in about Zone 5. But what does Strand do? He places the “colour” of the Parmesan wheel in Zone 2-3, much darker than in real life.
In Strand’s “continuous search for a photographic formalism” ā that is, the most important aspect of the photograph being its form, the way it is made and its purely visual aspects rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world ā then we would ignore Strand’s moving zones, his dark, brooding cheese.
I think not.
Strand’s formalism does not stand alone, for his photographs breathe the subject he is photographing. They are not just surfaces (which is what formalism is), for the viewer is invited to imbibe (absorb or assimilate (ideas or knowledge)) of the intensity and feeling of the culture and people from which these photographs emerge. Feel the intensity of the gaze of Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France (1951, below). Imagine placing yourself in the ethereal space of Tir a’Mhurain, Isle of South Uist, Outer Hebrides (1954, below). Dark cheese.
Strand’s photographs are formal and yet they contain a luminiferous ether/real ā transmitting light, but also acting as a medium for the transmission and propagation of spirit.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Through each trip, Paul Strand tries to tell the real life of people: humble people, affected by wars, bad weather, diseases, oppressive regimes… The artist highlights those who fight for their freedom, for their happiness. Touching stories, which give all their power to these photographs.
Art and documentary research, social and political involvement and the desire to remain objective: these ambivalences bring great strength to Paul Strand’s work. It is these opposing imperatives that make his photographs so interesting, so exciting for us as viewers.
The Fondation HCB offers a new perspective on the work of American photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) from the collections of the FundaciĆ³n MAPFRE, Madrid. While Strand is often celebrated as a pioneer of straight photography, this exhibition also addresses the deeply political dimension of his work.
In the mid 1910s Paul Strand produced a series of images of New York portraying a truly genuine perspective of the city. Strand, a young photographer at the time, connected with modern art and incorporated some of its tendencies into a series of unprecedented views of the metropolis. Anticipating Straight Photography, he made images that distanced themselves from the precepts of Pictorialism through a direct portrayal of reality.
His photographs rapidly found favourable reception within the pages of Camera Work, the legendary magazine directed by Alfred Stieglitz who dedicated the last two issues of the publication to Strand’s compositions. Almost half of the images that appeared were close-up portraits shot with a rudimentary system that allowed Strand to photograph his subjects without them noticing. These surprising shots offered a lively perspective of the city and focused on some of its figures, who were marginal albeit ubiquitous, and seldom represented. With this attention to the periphery of urban life, Strand manifested his commitment to reality rooted in the example of his mentor Lewis Hine.
Blind Woman is one of the most iconic images in the history of North American photography. Published in 1917 by Stieglitz it combines the compositional strength and sharp clarity characteristic of Strand’s work.
Text from the FundaciĆ³n MAPFRE Collections website
The Fondation HCB offers a new perspective on the work of American photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) from the collections of the FundaciĆ³n MAPFRE, Madrid. While Strand is often celebrated as a pioneer of straight photography, this exhibition also addresses the deeply political dimension of his work.
“Opposites are cured by opposites,” goes the saying. American photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) was heir to two great traditions in photography, often presented as opposed. He had a formalist approach that sought to prove photography an art, and a social approach, which saw photography as more of a documentary instrument serving political ends. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that Alfred Stieglitz and Lewis Hine, who occupy the two poles in photography history, were both Strand’s mentors in his formative years.
While in the mid-1910s Strand photographed faces of the people on the streets of New York, the first period of his work is especially marked by formalism. In 1917, when Stieglitz dedicated the latest issue of his famous magazine Camera Work to Strand, it was above all to show that photography had its own artistic language. Starting with a journey to Mexico City (1932-1934), then Moscow (1935), his approach became more political. He joined the American Labor Party and worked with more than twenty organisations classified “anti-American” during the McCarthy era, leading to his departure from the United States for France. Many of Strand’s choices were deliberated through this political conscience: his choice of subject, places he photographed, writers he worked with, the book as main vector for distributing his work.
In the past few decades, numerous exhibitions have been held on Strand focusing on his formalism. By no means minimising this perspective, the current project seeks to recontextualise Strand, emphasising the importance of his political commitments. Between formalist pursuits and social concerns, the two forces at work in his art are brought into balance here. If Strand often stands among the 20th century’s major photographers, it is precisely because he knew how to offer just equilibrium between the two poles.
The exhibition presents almost 120 prints from the collections of the FundaciĆ³n MAPFRE, Madrid, the film Manhatta made by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler in 1921 as well as several prints lent by the Centre Pompidou.
Biography
Born in 1890 in New York, Paul Strand entered the New York Ethical Culture School (ECS) in 1907 where he studied under Lewis Hine, who introduced him to the Photo Secession gallery, founded by Alfred Stieglitz at 291 Fifth Avenue. Stieglitz had an important influence on Paul Strand’s work from the beginning. In 1916, his work was published for the first time in Stieglitz’s magazine, Camera Work, of which he was an avid reader, and then exhibited at 291 in the exhibition Photographs from New York and Other Places. During the war, Paul Strand worked as a hospital radiographer and, after his close-ups of machines, began to take an interest in surgical technique. In 1919 he travelled to Nova Scotia in Canada where he photographed his first landscapes and rock piles.
In 1921, Paul Strand made the film Manhatta with the photographer and painter Charles Sheeler. Between 1925 and 1932, various exhibitions of his work were shown in New York galleries. He travelled to Mexico from 1932 to 1934, during which time he had a solo exhibition at the Sala de Arte in Mexico City, was appointed Head of Film and Photography at the Mexican Secretariat of Education, and directed the film The Revolts of Alvarado (Redes) for the Mexican government.
Paul Strand travelled to the USSR in 1935, where he met Sergei Eisenstein. He then joined the Nykino group, around Leo Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner and Lionel Berman. Two years later, he became president of Frontier Film, a non-profit educational film production company, with former Nykino members.
In 1943, Paul Strand returned to photography after more than ten years in the film industry. In 1945, MoMA gave him a solo exhibition. From 1949 to 1957, the photographer undertook several trips to Europe, from which several books were written, and began an exile outside the United States, which coincided with the period of McCarthyism. He settled in Orgeval, France, where he remained until his death in 1976.
Press release from the Fondation HCB
ManhattaĀ (1921) | Paul Strand ā Charles Sheeler
In 1920 Paul Strand and artist Charles Sheeler collaborated on Manhatta, a short silent film that presents a day in the life of lower Manhattan. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s book “Leaves of Grass,” the film includes multiple segments that express the character of New York. The sequences display a similar approach to the still photography of both artists. Attracted by the cityscape and its visual design, Strand and Sheeler favoured extreme camera angles to capture New York’s dynamic qualities. Although influenced by Romanticism in its view of the urban environment, Manhatta is considered the first American avant-garde film.
In 1945 a major exhibition dedicated to the work of Paul Strand took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that included 172 photographs, becoming the greatest retrospective devoted to a photographer to date. The project was conceived by Nancy Newhall, Head of the Department of Photography at the institution, who during the show’s preparation proposed to collaborate with Strand on a book about New England, a region located in the northeastern United States.
For a little over a month and a half Strand travelled with his camera throughout the region. His previous experience in Mexico had provided him with an attentive eye for capturing the social and cultural reality of the territory; in this instance through photographs of landscapes, diverse forms of architecture, and through his characteristic portraits. Resulting from this process his first photobook, Time in New England, was published in 1950, with texts by Nancy Newhall. The project’s outcome and his successful collaboration with Newhall inspired Strand to initiate a series of publications that coincided with a growing demand for travel books.
Text from the FundaciĆ³n MAPFRE Collections website
In 1950 Paul Strand left the United States due in great measure to the increasingly hostile social and political environment generated by the “witch hunt” of McCarthyism. Together with Hazel Kingsbury, who would become his third wife, Strand arrived in France. After their wedding that following year, they traveled the country together. Resulting from this journey and following the format of joining image and text that was established in his book Time in New England, the artist produced La France de Profil [France in Profile] in 1952. The book was published by renowned Swiss publisher Guilde du Livre, with texts by the writer and poet Claude Roy, whose points of view on the social reality and the ethical commitment of artists coincided with Strand’s.
In a similar fashion to how he had articulated a unique perspective far from the hegemonic exoticising of Mexico during the 1930s, Strand portrayed France in a way that did not settle on its most picturesque features. As inferred by the title, the series is an oblique perspective on the territory materialised through an assortment of images that are arranged in a singular style. Towns, landscapes, examples of vernacular architecture, and faces of elderly people and fishermen appear next to photographs detailing small objects that ā beyond their documentary value ā join the artistic language of images while simultaneously evoking the time that is inscribed within them.
Young Boy captures the characteristic intensity of the gamut of black and white hues in Strand’s work. The beauty hidden within the heroic ruggedness of the boy’s face, emphasised by the artist’s treatment of light, exemplifies the way in which Strand’s attention to the artistic values he upholds effectuates his political commitment.
Text from the FundaciĆ³n MAPFRE Collections website
Throughout the 1960s, during the Cold War, Paul Strand continued his documentary work traveling to different socialist countries such as Romania, Egypt, and Ghana. As evidenced by the series of photobooks that he published, Strand’s perspective on these realities is translated into portraits, landscapes, and images of the communitiesā daily life and their objects. Nevertheless, although direct references to political issues are eloquently scarce in his photographs, some elements can be observed that subtly point to the positive aspects of the revolutionary processes occurring in these countries.
Such is the case of the portrait of Anna Attinga Frafra ā included in Ghana: An African Portrait (New York, Aperture, 1976) ā in which the simplicity of the composition points to one dissonant element: the books balanced on the girl’s head. The symbolic character of the image serves as a reference to the literacy and education campaigns planned for the Ghanaian populations, which included women, and has an undoubtedly, albeit subtle, propagandistic nature. Nevertheless, the photograph makes sense and coexists seamlessly with the other images that make up the series. As a whole, they offer a vision that is an alternative from ethnographic typology, incorporating the reality of the aspirations, efforts, and hopes of the community without becoming crude propaganda.
Text from the FundaciĆ³n MAPFRE Collections website
300,000 lire, 10 sheets, 10 pillowcases, 10 towels, 10 parures and the bedroom are not enough to marry me, you can’t do less. He has to go into the army, otherwise we’d get married right away even if there’s little work. This year he has done less than a thousand hours of work.
Text by Zavattini, photographs by Paul Strand, Turin, Einaudi, 1955, p. 73
As DeSana developed his Suburban series in the early 1980s, gender and sexuality became increasingly ambiguous in his images. Here, photographed from behind, the body is a headless, unidentifiable creature composed of shapes. The marker cones evoke a similar indeterminacy: they are socially gendered “feminine” as makeshift stilettos and “masculine” as signifiers of roadside construction or sports, perhaps pointing to DeSana’s own experiences or ideas about the disciplining of bodies. A glittering field of bright-green artificial grass adds to this surreal composition, evoking the Astroturf surface of a football field.
Exhibition label
FORGET ME NOT
I have to be honest and say that before I started constructing this posting I had never heard of the artist Jimmy DeSana. You can’t know everything.
But now, having spent many hours reading about his life and his art, now I am at least a little more informed… and stand in awe and wonder at what this artist achieved before he died. It has been a real privilege and honour to imbibe at the fountain of DeSana.
I am still processing the work and what I have learnt about it but it would seem to me that what DeSana left behind is a body of work that is challenging, vital, full of ideas, paradoxes and questions about the human condition. Not who are we, but who can we be if we follow the path of our imagination and our soul.
Written by many other commentators, I have distilled their thoughts about his life, work, subject matter and the concepts he investigated into a few words:
1/ To play and dream 2/ punk rebel, the queer visionary, the wry interpreter of consumerism and media cultures, and the sometime transgressor of “good taste” in photography 3/ masquerades = 4/ the body as object 5/ peeled back the veneer of suburban life 6/ discrepancy between the public and private lives of post-war Americans 7/ queer and radical 8/ surrealistic, S/M-tinged, staged photos 9/ absurdist and unsettling 10/ vagaries of the human heart and the human psyche 11/ his central subject was always himself, and especially his sexual and emotional identity 12/ address the basic enigmas of identity 13/ Punk Provocateur 14/ Fierce 15/ Downtown /East Village scene 16/ post-punk New York 17/ fetishistic work about human bodies, very poetic 18/ mail art 19/ negative prints, double exposures and luridly coloured lighting 20/ psychological portraits, sexually charged tableaux and still lifes 21/ the body as a playground, gender as an ongoing invention, and domestic interiors as surreal constructions 22/ potential to push boundaries 23/ autoerotic asphyxiation 24/ visceral, more lo-fi, and more voyeuristic 25/ Transgressive Vision of Life and Desire 26/ Surrealism, Fluxus, punk and pure Pop 27 queer visibility 28/ strangeness 29/ suburban life 30/ Stonewall 31/ Gay Liberation 32/ interconnectedness of art and life 33/ Pictures Generation 34/ sexual, political, degenerated, ungendered 35/ sexual and emotional identity 36/ AIDS, sexuality and death
But these words tell what the work is about, they don’t tell you how the art makes you feel!
The art makes me feel dis/embodied and at the same time emboldened and strong. It makes me feel queer (in its original sense, when it was primarily used to mean strange, odd, peculiar or eccentric). Personally, it opens up a new vision for exploring my ordered place in the world, pushing boundaries of who I am and who I could be. Never settling for something that you don’t want to be. I love the “queerness” of the art (in the recent use of the word, used to describe a broad spectrum of non-normative sexual or gender identities and politics). I love its panache and bravado, its sensitivity and camp, it raunchiness and colour. The colour of life. Being different.
Sadly, we lost so many people, so many artists during the first wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, supremely talented artists such as Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Stephen Varble, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jimmy DeSana. I would like to have met Jimmy, to have talked to him about his passion, his love, his vision of the world that surrounded him. From a distance in time and space he seems to have a certain magic energy within him.
In the vitality of the work lies his im/mortality. And it is because of this energy that we will never lose the remembrance of Jimmy DeSana. Forget him not.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“My dear, it’s all so Christian and medieval and gloomy. Precisely. Jimmy DeSana, your intrepid photographer, has witnessed and preserved for posterity the unspeakable rights of these benighted natives, rites as clearly derived from Christianity as a black mass”
William Burroughs, 1979
“DeSana’s camera was as dear to him as his sexual life; the two were mutually constitutive, and his engagement with the BDSM subculture provided boundless inspiration to him, both as an artist and as a gay man.”
“As a gay man, a photographer, an artist of the AIDS era, a lover, a son, and a friend, DeSana is as beautifully complex as his work. After he died of AIDS in 1990, DeSana left his estate to his best friend and muse, the artist Laurie Simmons. Simmons told me, “I gave myself twenty years to sort out a lifetime’s worth of breathtaking material. I also felt certain that the work would look as fresh twenty years later as it did at the time of its making.” The resurgence of DeSana’s revolutionary career could not come at a more opportune moment; his oeuvre is exemplary of new outlets for reconstituting the Pictures Generation with queer modes of vision and critique.”
William J. Simmons. “Surreal Sexuality,” in Aperture Issue 218, “Queer” on the Aperture website January 18, 2017 [Online] Cited 20/03/2023
Installation views of the exhibition Jimmy DeSana: Submission at the Brooklyn Museum, New York
The first comprehensive exhibition and book on the surreal, queer and humorous photographic art of Jimmy DeSana, a central figure in New York’s art and music scenes of the 1970s and ’80s
This is the first overview of the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering yet under recognised figure in New York’s downtown art, music and film scenes during the 1970s and 1980s. The book situates DeSana’s work and life within the countercultural and queer contexts in the American South as well as New York, through his involvement in mail art, punk and No Wave music and film, and artist collectives and publications.
DeSana’s first major project was 101 Nudes, made in Atlanta during the city’s gay liberation movement. After moving to New York in 1973, DeSana became immersed in queer networks, collaborating with General Idea and Ray Johnson on zines and mail art, and documenting the genderqueer street performances of Stephen Varble.
By the mid-1970s, DeSana was a fixture in New York’s No Wave music and film scenes, serving as portraitist for much of the period’s central figures and producing album covers for Talking Heads, James Chance and others. His book Submission, made with William S. Burroughs, humorously staged scenes out of a S&M manual that explored the body as object and the performance of desire. DeSana was also an early adopter of colour photography, creating his best-known series, Suburban, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This body of work explores relationships between gender, sexuality and consumer capitalism in often humorous, surreal ways. After DeSana became sick as a result of contracting HIV, he turned to abstraction, using experimental photographic techniques to continue to push against photographic norms.
Text from the Amazon website Nd [Online] Cited 15/03/2023
Introduction
James, Jim, Jimmy; de Sana, deSana, De Sana, DeSana. Just as Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) consistently altered his name, he refused to pin down his approach to two main artistic interests: photography and desire. From the 1960s until his death from AIDS-related illness, DeSana created experimental, subversive photographs that upended traditional approaches and viewpoints. He produced and shared these provocative works by participating in a range of avant-garde movements ā from queer mail art networks to Fluxus [a loose international group of rebellious artists, poets, and musicians with a shared impulse to integrate art and life] to punk music and cinema, to the “Pictures Generation” and its image-based play with mass culture.
Jimmy DeSana: Submission, the first retrospective on this pioneering yet under recognised figure, unites these bodies of work to demonstrate how DeSana emphasised and expanded photography as a contemporary form. The first section considers his early years in Atlanta and New York (1968-1976), where he began exchanging artworks through the mail and playing with sexuality and identity. The next section follows DeSana’s entree into New Yorkās dynamic countercultural art, music, film, and club scenes (1976-1984). The final section delves into the artist’s darkroom experiments during his last years (1984-1990), after he was diagnosed with HIV. At a time when his own desires were considered deviant and even criminal, DeSana continually embraced transgression as a path toward both artistic and personal freedom.
DeSana was born in Detroit in 1949 to middle-class suburbanites, who raised him and his brother in Atlanta. His mother was a strict Methodist; his father abandoned the family as DeSana entered adulthood. While studying art at Georgia State University, DeSana began making precocious, conceptual photography of suburban houses, generally banal, and of his friends, often naked. But his final thesis, 101 Nudes (1972), is a landmark. Likely taken with a Leica IIIf and lit by a flash, as Sawyer notes in his catalog essay, the portraits form a kind of fanzine of queer friends. DeSana shows off their muscles like he’s making Physique Pictorial, or crouches and crops their bodies like a funnier Man Ray. A drag queen looks right into the camera, bold; a man shoves his face into a pillow, ass beckoning. Bodies are unstable, and DeSana captures how funny, and how frightening, that can be, and how those two emotions comprise desire. Sawyer hangs these prints on the wall like Teen Beat posters in a teenage bedroom. Itās hard not to be a fan. ā¦
Photographer Jimmy De Sana was part of the countercultural “punk” community of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village in the 1970s and ’80s. Among his best-known works are portraits of important figures from that scene, including Debbie Harry and Billy Idol, though these constitute only a small part of his practice. With work that is personal, surrealistic, and often shocking in its treatment of sexuality, De Sana helped raise the standing of photography in the art world and increased critical respect for the medium.
101 Nudes comprises 56 halftone black-and-white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posing inside or just outside homes. The artist was 20 years old and attending college in Atlanta when he first printed the series in 1972. The figures, which include De Sana’s friends as well as himself, are photographed from a variety of viewpoints. Although the series shows the influence of “grainy” pornography from the 1950s, the postures of the figures do not seem to suggest or invite sexual engagement; the artist noted that they are “without eroticism.” Sometimes the photographs feature only a fragment of the body, such as the pelvic area or buttocks. De Sana’s engagement with the history of surrealism has been noted, and these partial views in particular recall the surrealist photography of artists such as Man Ray, who in the 1920s photographed the body parts of friends and lovers in ways that removed them from their context and made them into almost abstract images.
Anonymous. “101 Nudes,” on the ICA website Nd [Online] Cited 20/03/2023
When De Sana (1950-1990) shot and self-published the 56 halftone images that would make up the “101 Nudes” series, he was just 20 years old and still a college student in Atlanta. Using his friends as models, he constructed each photograph as an insight into the possibilities of form, capturing with his flash-camera something both artful and sincere. His subjects (nearly all of them naked) were “without eroticism” as De Sana has said, the series as much about isolation as it is sexuality. The careful, strange postures of his figures, collapsed across a couch or balanced on a dining-room table, often had a touch of the surreal. His later work, in particular the S&M series that came to comprise his 1980 book “Submission” (also on display), explored sexuality and digression front-on in the spirit of William Burroughs, whose writing was a significant influence on the artist from a young age. De Sana created these images ā which pre-dated Mapplethorpe’s fetish work ā with an even stronger sense for composition, all the while seeking the boundaries of comfort through the bizarrely positioned, leather-bound figures.
One year later, on June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, sparking an uprising that would launch the modern gay liberation movement. This spark of rebellion and hope made its way to Atlantaās Ansley Mall Mini Cinema, where Andy Warhol’s homoerotic underground film, “Lonesome Cowboys,” was showing. Fifteen minutes into the film’s only screening, police officers raided the cinema and confiscated the reels. Many of the audience members were harassed, photographed and arrested.
DeSana may or may not have been in the audience that night, but he was certainly aware that his classmates and professors experienced censorship from school officials and the city. In the catalog accompanying the Brooklyn exhibition, curator Sawyer writes that in 1972, DeSana’s teacher, photographer John McWilliams, organized Atlanta’s annual arts festival where he displayed nudes made by his students and invited the highly regarded photographer Frederick Sommer to judge the exhibition.
“Sommer awarded prizes to several of the students, but within days there were letters and reviews in Atlanta’s daily papers complaining of the exhibitionās pornography,” writes Sawyer.
Against this backdrop of censorship and taboos, DeSana turned his perceptions of suburbia into his final thesis project, “101 Nudes,” spoofing the title of Walt Disney’s “101 Dalmations.”
The 56 humorous black-and-white images in “101 Nudes” are all fairly innocent scenes carefully posed in middle-class American homes. It’s kink for beginners: a nude perches on the edge of an overstuffed sofa; another plunges face-first into cushions; a goofy-looking naked boy stands on one leg on a dining room table. There are even close-up shots of buttocks, breasts and genitals, yet, as DeSana himself noted, they are “without eroticism,” adding, “that is the way the suburbs are, in a sense.”
As Jean Cocteau said of a Jean Genet poem, “His obscenity is never obscene.”
Against a backdrop of gay liberation and censorship in early 1970s Atlanta, DeSana combined his explorations of suburban culture and nude figures into a final thesis project. In 1970-1972, DeSana staged photographs of his mostly queer friends, including the notorious drag performer Diamond Lil, nude in suburban environments. While other Conceptual artists were focused on the architectural homogeneity of suburbia, in 101 Nudes DeSana penetrated the veneer of seriality and conformity.
According to DeSana, both his subjects’ poses and his halftone reproduction techniques mimicked images from mass-market, soft-core pornographic magazines that emerged during his youth. The title sends up that of the wholesome 1961 Disney animated film 101 Dalmatians, which was rereleased in 1972. DeSana would continue to draw from and parody popular cultural forms into the early 1980s.
Against a backdrop of policing, censorship, and gay liberation in early 1970s Atlanta, DeSana staged photographs of his mostly queer friends, including the notorious drag performer Diamond Lil, nude in suburban environments. While other Conceptual artists using photography like Dan Graham were focused on the architectural homogeneity of suburbia, in “101 Nudes,” a portfolio of 56 photolithographic prints, DeSana penetrated the veneer of seriality and conformity.
Both his subjects’ poses and his halftone reproduction techniques mimicked images from mass-market, soft-core pornographic magazines that emerged during the artist’s youth. The title sends up that of the wholesome 1961 Disney animated film 101 Dalmatians, which was rereleased in 1972.
DeSana eventually sent copies of the portfolio through the mail, which served as an alternative channel for sharing Conceptual art and challenging the privileged spaces of museums and commercial galleries during these years. He embraced “correspondence art” in part to connect with other gay artists and construct identities that defied mainstream standards of “respectability” for gay people.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
John Jack Baylin Fanzini Goes to the Movies 1974 Periodical; offset print 11 Ć 8 1/2 in. (27.9 Ć 21.6cm) Courtesy of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
Publisher: General Idea, Canadian, 1969-1994 File, vol. 3, no. 1, “Glamour” issue Autumn 1975 Periodical; off-set print, staple bound, illustrated wrappers 14 Ć 10 11/16 in. (35.6 Ć 27.1cm) Collection of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
Publisher: General Idea, Canadian, 1969-1994 File, vol. 2, no. 4, “Mondo Nudo” issue December 1973 Periodical; offset print, staple bound, illustrated wrappers 14 Ć 10 3/4 in. (35.6 Ć 27.3cm) Collection of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
Publisher: General Idea, Canadian, 1969-1994 File, vol. 2, no. 3, “Paris” issue September 1973 Periodical; offset print, staple bound, illustrated wrappers 14 Ć 11 in. (35.6 Ć 27.9cm) Collection of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
During the golden age of downtown performance art in the 1970s, Jimmy DeSana documented the work of numerous artists, sometimes for income.
In 1975, he photographed public interventions by Stephen Varble, an artist who performed his “Gutter Art” in the streets of Soho and Midtown, while wearing his signature gender-bending ensembles. As the critic Gregory Battcock put it, Varble came to be “considered by some the embarrassment of SoHo, and by others the only touch of real genius south of Houston Street.” DeSana’s photographs of Varble appeared in publications during this time, including General Idea’s FILE Megazine.
DeSana’s photographs are invaluable records of an ephemeral practice, which has only recently been given its proper due thanks in part to the work of art historian David Getsy.
Throughout the 1970s, Jimmy DeSana created campy portraits of his extended circle of friends and collaborators in New York, which included musicians, filmmakers, writers, artists, critics, and curators.
Performance artist and fixture of New York City’s downtown scene Stephen Varble, shown here, was one of DeSana’s repeat subjects. DeSana captured many of the performances staged by Varble whose guerilla practices served as commentary on gender identity, class, and capitalism. These performance-based and ephemeral events would continue to inform DeSana’s work in photography throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Stephen Varble 1975 Gelatin silver print 8 Ć 10 in. (20.3 Ć 25.4cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Jack Smith c. 1976 Gelatin silver print 7 Ć 6 in. (17.8 Ć 15.2 cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Gregory Battcock Trylon and Perisphere, No. 1 December 1977 Periodical, offset print, saddle stitched, illustrated wrappers 10 Ć 7 in. (25.4 Ć 17.8cm) Courtesy of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Eric Mitchell 1977 Gelatin silver print 15 3/4 Ć 11 1/2 in. (40 Ć 29.2cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Throughout the 1970s, Jimmy DeSana created theatrical, often comic photographs related to his sexual S-M experiences.
Like other artists in his circle, such as Laurie Simmons and AA Bronson, he parodied advertising and fashion photography, as well as the disciplinary nature of heteronormativity and consumerism in the United States. He eventually published some of these photographs in his first book, Submission (1980), which included an introduction by the punk icon William Burroughs.
The photographs in this series typically feature nude, masked individuals eccentrically interacting with domestic interiors and objects. DeSana staged most images in his studio or the homes of friends and family. He used his signature lighting to create a heightened sense of drama and horror, calling attention to the images’ artifice. DeSana later observed: “I was trying to push sexuality to the limit. As long as I could come up with an idea that related to bizarre sexuality and still make an interesting statement about a product, the photo was successful for me.”
Text from the Brooklyn Museum Tumblr website
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Auto 1978 Gelatin silver print 6 3/4 Ć 9 9/16 in. (17.1 Ć 24.3cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Television 1977-1978 Gelatin silver print 12 1/4 Ć 8 1/4 in. (31.1 Ć 21cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Masking Tape 1977-1978 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 Ć 6 1/2 in. (24.1 Ć 16.5cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Pliers 1977-1978 Gelatin silver print 6 3/4 Ć 9 1/4 in. (17.1 Ć 23.5cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
DeSana’s photographs and Terence Sellers’s writings engage with a variety of often erotic practices known then as S-M (sadomasochism) and more commonly now as BDSM (bondage, dominance, and submission / sadomasochism). The term “sadomasochism” is derived from the names of two European authors: the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), who wrote about his exploits and fantasies of deriving pleasure from inflicting pain, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), who wrote of the erotic enjoyment he experienced while being dominated and punished.
In the 1970s, DeSana and Sellers were among a growing group of practitioners, writers, artists, and activists attempting to redefine “acceptable” behaviour and desires, as well as sexual and gender identities. In exploring S-M through an aesthetic lens, Sellers and DeSana also joined a long lineage of artists and thinkers who had engaged with these practices to encourage debate on freedom of expression and power.
It was not until 2010 that the American Psychiatric Association announced it would no longer diagnose consenting adults practicing BDSM as mentally ill, which had perpetuated stigmatisation that could lead to legal and social repercussions. More recently, studies have suggested that BDSM can provide therapeutic tools to investigate control and release, and to reclaim oneās sexuality after traumatic experiences.
“The very word ‘submission’ contains the paradox of wanting and not wanting,” William S. Burroughs wrote in the introduction of Jimmy DeSana’s 1980 book Submission.
For the photogragraphic series featured in the publication, made between 1977 and 1978, DeSana built on 101 Nudes (1972) and his work for File Megazine by creating theatrical and often comic photographs that push the limits of respectability and explore domestic confinement, consumer affluence, and social conformity. He was also mocking the recent trend of S-M scenarios in fashion photography and advertisements.
He titled many of the images after the objects depicted in them ā Toilet, Coffee Table, Television, Shoes, Shower ā rather than sex acts or the names of the individuals shown, who are always anonymous and often wearing masks. This strategy not only protected the identity of his models, many of whom were friends, but also contrasted with his better-known portrait work during this period, which he did to make money. Many of the photographs comically equate practices of everyday life and consumerism (washing dishes, taking a shower, driving a car) with forms of bondage and discipline.
In exploring S-M through an aesthetic and performative lens, DeSana joined a long history of twentieth-century avant-gardes that engaged with these practices in order to compel debate on freedom of expression and power.
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Terence Sellers (American, 1952-2016) The Correct Sadist: The Memoirs of Angel Stern 1983 Book 8 1/2 Ć 5 9/16 in. (21.6 Ć 14.1 cm) Private collection
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled 1978 From the Dungeon series Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 Ć 6 5/8 in. (24.1 Ć 16.8cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled 1978 From the Dungeon series Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 Ć 6 5/8 in. (24.1 Ć 16.8cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Contact Sheet of Portraits of Jimmy DeSana and Laurie Simmons c. 1978 New York University, Fales Library, Jimmy DeSana Papers, MSS.202, Box 66 Photo: Courtesy of Fales Library at NYU
In 1973, shortly after moving to New York, Jimmy DeSana met fellow artist Laurie Simmons while riding the A train to Far Rockaway.
The two soon shared a SoHo loft with twin photographic darkrooms. Simmons has often acknowledged that DeSana, who received a BFA in photography, taught her most of what she knows about the medium, acting as a friend, mentor, and interlocutor until his death in 1990. Simmons also became a model and muse for DeSana’s work.
Now the executor of the Jimmy DeSana Trust for several decades, Simmons writes, “I am immensely grateful for every moment Jimmy and I spent together, for every freezing second I floated naked in a pool or held an awkward pose for way too long, for this was my graduate program in photography ā this is really where I learned to make a pictureā¦ standing within Jimmy’s quiet but determined force field, emulating his laser-like focus and his ultimate belief that making art was a space to play and dream.”
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Betsy Sussler 1978 Gelatin silver print 15 7/8 Ć 11 in. (40.3 Ć 27.9cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
The Brooklyn Museum Presents Jimmy DeSana: Submission, the First Museum Survey of Work by the Pioneering Queer, Punk Photographer. The exhibition features more than two hundred works, which trace a career that bridged mail art networks, New York’s 1970s punk and No Wave subcultures, the illuminating image-play of the “Pictures Generation,” and the various artistic and affective responses to the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Jimmy DeSana: Submission is the first museum survey of work by a major yet overlooked figure in the histories of photography, LGBTQ artists, and New York City. Among his many significant contributions, Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) reintroduced the body and sexuality into the conceptual photographic practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s, helping to elevate the medium within the contemporary art world. The exhibition traces the artist’s brief but prolific career through more than two hundred works on display (some for the first time), created during a time of profound cultural and political transformation in the United States. From his early days photographing suburban landscapes in Atlanta, Georgia, to his time as a key figure in the New York art and music scenes of the 1970s and 1980s, DeSana conveyed the radical spirit of his era and a pointed, ironic critique of the American Dream and its images. Jimmy DeSana: Submission opens November 11, 2022, and is organised by Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum.
“This retrospective, the first since DeSana’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, will enable so many to view for the first time the full breadth of his iconoclastic artistic output, positioning his more well-known series within his interdisciplinary and collaborative practice in mail art, zines, performance, and film,” says Sawyer. “DeSana drew upon punk, Camp, sadomasochism, dreamworlds, performance art, experimental film, club culture, and the legacy of twentieth-century avant-gardes in ways that make his work unique among his peers. Jimmy DeSana: Submission brings together these multiple themes to show why his work is so relevant to artistic practices today.”
Along with his friends and peers, Jimmy DeSana sought to forge arts communities outside of traditional institutions (and the concurrent gentrification that displaced artists from Lower Manhattan). Instead, he chose to display his work via collectives, artist-run spaces, and the informal groupings of the underground nightclub scene, as well as the more democratised dissemination systems of mail art networks. Submission prominently features examples of DeSana’s contributions to early queer zines throughout the 1970s ā from General Idea’s File magazine to John Jack Baylin and John Dowd’s Fanzini to Gregory Battcock’s Trylon & Perisphere ā as well as his first major series, 101 Nudes (1972), which was circulated through mail art networks. DeSana published this portfolio of photolithographic prints, portraying his friends posing nude in the bland interiors of Atlanta’s postwar houses, at the height of the Gay Liberation Movement and the city’s reactive censorship. These formative images employ a distinctly queer approach to domesticity and invite viewers to look beneath the veneer of suburban propriety, a concept that would capture the artistās creative attention for the rest of his career.
The exhibition also contains selections from Submission (1980), DeSana’s book of BDSM-related photographs that play with liberation and conformity, and ideological power alongside the myths of postwar capitalism. This section also includes related photographs from a collaboration with writer and sex worker Terence Sellers (American, 1952-2016) that were intended for her first book, The Correct Sadist (1983). Most of these photographs have not been previously displayed or published.
Continuing the survey is DeSana’s series Suburban (1979-1984), perhaps the artist’s best-known photographs and his first in colour. Building off of 101 Nudes, DeSana used a cast of friends and collaborators to explore the queerness of postwar suburban culture by placing nude bodies, often abstracted and contorted, in suburban backyards, wood-panelled living rooms, and tiled bathrooms. Using vivid gel-lighting to produce its characteristic heavily saturated, candy-coloured prints, Suburban mimics the seductive, materialist aesthetics of fashion photography and the set design of television advertisements ā strategies that were similarly deployed by his friends and peers during this period, including model and artist Laurie Simmons. The images are often skewed and shot from oblique angles, further destabilising the viewer’s perception of the subjects.
Accompanying the dreamlike colour photographs of the Suburban series are some of DeSana’s subsequent, more abstract efforts from the late 1980s. Made after 1984, when DeSana underwent spleen removal surgery after contracting HIV, the works superimpose warped colour images of everyday objects with collage elements, text, and fragments of figures in motion. DeSana turned away from directly representing the body during this period ā in the early years of the ongoing HIV / AIDS epidemic, when gay artists in particular were expected to make work about the epidemic in reaction to government inaction and neglect or misinformation by dominant media.
DeSana was seemingly omnipresent in New York’s punk and No Wave scenes during the late 1970s and 1980s, joining other artists who engaged in symbolic forms of resistance through visual art, literature, music, and film. DeSana photographed a number of prominent figures in those subcultures; the survey will be the first to feature his portraits of art and music luminaries such as Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Patti Astor, David Byrne, John Giorno, Debbie Harry, and Richard Hell. Additionally, the exhibition will highlight DeSana’s photographic contributions to collectives like Collaborative Projects (including their groundbreaking exhibitions and publication, X Motion Picture Magazine), periodicals such as the New York Rocker and Semiotext(e), and No Wave Cinema, in which he was involved as both an actor and a director.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the first scholarly publication on DeSana’s work, featuring essays by Sawyer and artist Laurie Simmons as well as more than two hundred images, co-published with DelMonico Books. Jimmy DeSana: Submission is organised by Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum.
Press release from the Brooklyn Museum
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled (Self-Portrait w/ Graduation Cap) 1978 Polaroid Cornell University, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Diego Cortez No Wave Collection, 1972-1981, Collection Number: 8120, Box 1, Folder 17 Photo: Courtesy of Cornell University
James, Jim, Jimmy; de Sana, deSana, De Sana, DeSana. Just as Jimmy DeSana rarely stuck with one version of his name, he refused to limit two of his main artistic engagements ā photography and the theme of desire ā to fixed identities.ā
Born in Detroit on November 12, 1949, James Arthur DeSana Jr. developed an early involvement in photography when he received a Kodak camera for Christmas at age seven. After graduating with a BFA in photography from Georgia State University in 1972, DeSana moved to New York, where he became involved in correspondence art, collectives and alternative publications, post-punk music, underground film, and queer nightlife. ā
During this time, DeSana amassed a large collection of hats, like the graduation cap he’s wearing in this Polaroid self-portrait. This fervid interest in hats coincided with DeSana’s use of masquerade and invented personae in his mail artworks; he would go on to make use of the hats in his self-portraits throughout the 1970s and 1980s, continuing his subversion of identity.
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Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Stitches 1984 Silver dye bleach print 18 3/4 Ć 12 5/8 in. (47.6 Ć 32.1cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
He was extending the legacy of the Surrealist photographers of the period between the World Wars. Man Ray in particular presented his subjects with a disorienting spin: He inverted the head of a female smoker whose cigarette looks like a chimney, cast dark shadows to make the naked torso of a woman with upheld arms resemble the head of a bull, and shot his lover, the photographer Lee Miller, from an extreme lower angle so that her neck and chin take on a phallic form. He mixed genders, even species, with gleeful abandon. DeSana joined in the game.
But a 1984 DeSana self-portrait pointed to the painful direction his life was about to take. He photographed himself in red Calvin Klein briefs illuminated in a red glow, one hand on his forehead, his eyes upturned and his expression concerned. A bright beam of white light is directed toward two dozen surgical stitches running from his sternum down his left side. His spleen had just been removed, an early warning of H.I.V. infection. The diagnosis of AIDS came a year later.
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Portrait with Dog Undated Chromogenic print 20 Ć 14 in. (50.8 Ć 35.6cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Condom 1979 Cibachrome print 12 1/4 Ć 18 3/4 in. (31.1 Ć 47.6cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Shoes 1979 Chromogenic print 15 1/4 Ć 23 1/2 in. (38.7 Ć 59.7cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Gauze 1979 Chromogenic print 12 3/4 Ć 19 in. (32.4 Ć 48.3cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Shoe 1979 Chromogenic print 13 Ć 19 in. (33 Ć 48.3cm) Courtesy of Jimmy DeSana Trust and PPOW
Many of the photographs in Jimmy DeSana’s “Suburban” series explore themes of domestic confinement and social conformity through consumer goods and rituals.
In āSink” (1979), shown here, an anonymous figure wearing a corset and heels leans over, head dunked in a kitchen sink filled with soap suds. DeSana allows contradictions ā between agency and conformity, critique and complicity, punishment and pleasure ā to remain open-ended in his work, enabling them to identify and “disidentify” with dominant culture.
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Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Leaves 1979 Chromogenic print 18 3/4 Ć 12 1/2 in. (47.6 Ć 31.8cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
In the late 1970s, the status of colour photography was still disputed within the spaces of museums and art galleries, in part because of its associations with commercial and vernacular uses of the medium, such as fashion photography, advertisements, and home snapshots.
Perhaps even more than the content of his photographs, Jimmy DeSana’s use of gels and tungsten lights to create garish pinks, greens, reds, and oranges flew in the face of accepted taste and allowed him to utilise the medium in decidedly unconventional ways.
In “Storage Boxes” (1980), shown here, a pair of figures sit poolside in lounge chairs, holding hands but with their heads and feet encased in boxes. While many of the figures in his work from this time appear to be confined or dominated by objects, their performances look not like a limitation so much as a relational space that generates a capacity for self-knowledge and pleasure.
DeSana’s photographs frequently feature visual puns. Here, a nude person, perhaps DeSana himself, lies beneath a car with a breathing tube connecting his gas mask to the exhaust pipe. The image appears to be a visual play on “autoerotic asphyxiation,” or the intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for the purposes of sexual arousal. The image could also be interpreted as a metaphor for Americaās subservience to car culture and the harm that automobiles cause us, the red glow adding an ominous tone.
Exhibition label
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Instant Camera 1980 Chromogenic print 15 1/8 Ć 23 in. (38.4 Ć 58.4 cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Soap Suds 1980 Chromogenic print 15 1/8 Ć 22 3/4 in. (38.4 Ć 57.8cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Four Legs with Shoes 1980 Chromogenic print 14 3/4 Ć 18 7/8 in. (37.5 Ć 47.9cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Party Picks 1981 Inkjet print, printed 2013 32 3/4 Ć 49 1/2 in. (83.2 Ć 125.7cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Kenneth Anger 1980 Chromogenic print 20 Ć 13 1/2 in. (50.8 Ć 34.3 cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Throughout his career, DeSana befriended and photographed an older generation of pioneering queer male artists and writers who similarly transgressed societal norms through their work and life. Also like DeSana, many subverted pop culture imagery and operated outside of official institutions.
In a group of photographs from 1984 and 1985, DeSana explored America’s obsession with fat and dieting, tying it in with his own interest in consumption and forms of discipline and pleasure. Bubblegum, for example, is a self-portrait with his cheeks puffed out, blowing a bubble, his oversize shirt and pants bursting at the seams from stuffing and his back slightly arched to emphasise his protruding belly. He printed this image in numerous colours, including bright pink and acid green.
With a wink to the commonalities of darkrooms and backrooms, Sawyer built a red-light district for DeSana’s extensive investigations of BDSM, in which piss is expelled and enjoyed, and gimp-masked figures kneel in toilets or near dog bowls. In Party Picks (1981 above), toothpicks stuck into gums between teeth make a crown of thorns around a gasping mouth, or maybe make that mouth St. Sebastian’s wound. Cardboard (1985 below) offers a room with a single, lurid red band of light and corrugated cardboard that slices a bending body. In such a place, you might think of Samuel Steward’s card catalog of his conquests, or if Flavin’s work is really about its shadows, or what to do with that butt. DeSana’s frisky, familiar portraits reject the po-faced posing of Mapplethorpe and the social-climbing sadism of Helmut Newton. He gets that such proclivities are mind games played with bodies and bets you might want to play them too.
In his series of photographs titled Suburban, Jimmy DeSana continued to photograph anonymous nude figures while making a more explicit connection between S-M and everyday life.
Many of the photographs comically equate attachments to the objects and ideals of postwar suburban life in the U.S. (washing dishes, taking a shower, driving a car) with forms of bondage and discipline. In Cardboard, from 1985 (shown here), a nude figure is intersected by sheets of cardboard.
Lit with tungsten lights and candy-coloured gels, his collaborators often turned their backs to the camera or buried their heads in purses, sinks, toilets, etc. rather than wearing leather masks. This not only protected the identity of his nude models, many of whom were friends, but also contrasted with his better-known portrait work during this period. Perhaps most important, these images continued his subversion of subjectivity. While all the photographs in the Suburban series feature nude figures, DeSana did not intend for the work to be erotic.
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Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Spoon 1985 Silver dye bleach print 7 1/2 Ć 9 1/2 in. (19.1 Ć 24.1 cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Socks 1986 Silver dye bleach print 4 3/4 Ć 9 1/2 in. (12.1 Ć 24.1cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled (Self Portrait Sleeping) 1985 Silver dye bleach print 9 1/2 Ć 7 1/2 in. (24.1 Ć 19.1cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Untitled (Male Nude) 1985 Silver dye bleach print 9 1/2 Ć 7 1/2 in. (24.1 Ć 19.1cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Ties & Roses 1986 Silver dye bleach print 14 3/4 Ć 19 1/4 in. (37.5 Ć 48.9cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Balloons 1985 Silver dye bleach print 13 1/4 Ć 10 1/4 in. (33.7 Ć 26 cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990) Cellophane Tape 1985 Silver dye bleach print 13 15/16 Ć 10 1/2 in. (35.4 Ć 26.7cm) Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and PĀ·PĀ·OĀ·W, New York
In a series of “auto-portraits” from around 1985, DeSana assumed the guise of figures in famous portraits, such as Andy Warholās Marilyn Monroe and Leonardo da Vinciās Mona Lisa. This body of work developed from DeSana’s previous experiments with role-playing, performance, and concealment.
Building on his engagement with colour photography, DeSana transformed these black-and-white negatives by enlarging them with dyed gels and colour dials. After exposing the colour photographic paper, he took the prints to a lab to finish the developing process.
The vivid colour profiles of the Suburban series are riotous, yet the scenes are often subdued, serious, even melancholic. These acid-toned prints are more sinister, more surreal, and less eager to please than the images we often associate with the Pictures Generation. It’s easier to draw a line between DeSana and the surrealist photography of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer than to Cindy Sherman’s plucky film tests or the crisp portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe or Peter Hujar. Further distancing his work from that of his contemporaries, DeSana almost never reveals the identity of his sitters. Faces are almost invariably obscured by a prop: a stocking, a helmet, soap suds, or even the camera itself. The viewers’ innate desire to know the subject is stymied by the unrecognisability of these exploded, contorted anonymous bodies. By making chairs, coat hangers, helmets, and even an iguana an extension of the body, the photographs propose a flattening of the hierarchy between prop and actor, blurring the distinction between stage and sitter, foreground and background, organic and artificial. In much the same way that subjugation and compliance are fundamental to BDSM culture, here the camera becomes dominant, imploring the body to perform for the photographer. DeSana uses these bodies are props, stripping them of agency and compelling them serve the needs of the composition.
DeSana made a career of piercing through the realm of the banal and conventional with the queer and radical. His works suggest that the home itself and the objects within it are in themselves a prop to conceal an arena of libidinal play. For DeSana, the camera acts as catalyst and instigator, a tool used to coerce a performance, a device that invites us to subjugate our egos in the service of latent desires.
Bryan Barcena. “Suburban/Submission,” Focus Essay from FOAM exhibition 09.01.2019 on the Salon 94 website [Online] Cited 20/03/2023
In a 1986 interview with Diego Cortez, Jimmy DeSana remarked on the mutability and transgressive potential of photography: “A photograph is how much you want to lie, how far you want to stretch the truth about the object. And, as photography is always based on real objects, it lends itself, by means of technique or manipulation, to explorations of what may appear to be an absence of reality, balancing on an ambiguous line between concrete and abstract space, between reality and illusion, in a way that no other medium is able to do.”
In a series of “portraits” from the mid 1980s, DeSana played with this tension by obscuring and transforming faces through collage and darkroom techniques. His movement into abstraction ā in works that nonetheless address his experience living with HIV / AIDS ā was in part a reaction to dilemmas over representations of sexuality and queer bodies during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, from media bias to conservative censorship to activist demands. Critics recognised DeSana’s masquerades and darkroom experiments in colour as tributes to Surrealist photography of the 1920s and 1930s, which still had the power to confound expectations around photography and realism.
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Skilled in the art of negation, DeSana staged intimate scenes that tease out the erotic ā in Pants, 1984, a model arches his muscular, shirtless back under bold lighting ā yet the artist routinely undermined and lampooned this sexual content: The model’s extremely large pants are filled with stuffing, comically emphasizing his ass and thighs. In this sense, DeSana’s work seems to parody Robert Mapplethorpe’s deadpan oeuvre. In 1979, DeSana published Submission, a photobook poking fun at notions of the body as a sexualized, gendered object. As the title implies, a power dichotomy is at play in the series ā the camera assumes the dominant role, forcing the models into the passive ‘sub’ position. The photos … are black-and-white, giving them a self-serious quality, yet, as in his other work, DeSana punctured that effect with dark comedy. In Masking Tape, 1978, a latex bodysuit is traded for the household adhesive, with which a male model has been mummified head to toe ā scrotum, penis, nipples, and nostrils excluded. Despite occasional comic absurdity, the photographs still retain a beguiling frisson. DeSana also ably mocked the supposed dangers of sexual alterity by allowing it a certain humanity ā a melancholy picture of a hog-tied woman in black lingerie and high heels crouched in a refrigerator (empty save for a dozen eggs) exudes pathos and surprising sophistication. In Television, 1978, real danger in the form of electrocution threatens the supine and masked nude performer (DeSana himself) balancing a TV on his feet. Through this action, DeSana drew out the allure of mass media but underscored its potential for propagating constricting ideologies.
The introduction of beautifully jarring, chromatic lighting to DeSana’s post-Submission scenarios amplifies their urgency and defines his work’s signature aesthetic: slick and otherworldly yet proudly homemade. Thrown against domestic spaces and active bodies, strawberry reds and lysergic greens reverberate wildly. One such multi-hued image, Cowboy Boots, 1984, depicts a nude man in the midst of a one-armed handstand, his four splayed limbs straddling a corner of an apartment, feet and hands covered in tooled-leather cowboy boots. This hybridized body Ć la Hans Bellmer, not quite an object but a morphing being, defies the behavioural dicta of society. Representing a poignant act of shape-shifting, Bubblegum (Self-Portrait), 1985, an image printed with light-pink dye and made five years before the artist’s AIDS-related death, shows DeSana with his cheeks puffed up while blowing a bubble, his oversize shirt and pants bursting at the seams from stuffing. Such a transformation wryly suggests our physical mutability and the unknown extent to which our bodies and selves might evolve ā grossly enlarge, wither away.
Beau Rutland. “Jimmy DeSana,” on the Art Forum website 2013 [Online] 20/03/2023
After his diagnosis with HIV in 1985, DeSana began making a series of still lifes, tackling a genre that for centuries has expressed both the abundance and transitoriness of life and earthly goods.
Like so much of DeSana’s work, this photograph transforms a prosaic object ā a softball, with its associations of sports and American culture ā into something strange through juxtaposition, scale, and colourisation. The image recalls DeSana’s 1984 self-portrait in which the long, curved scar on his torso evokes a baseball’s stitching.
“‘Abstract photography’ not only turns its back on [the] incessant desire to know and see everything ā it seeks to undermine and invert those very intentions,” Jerry Saltz wrote for the catalog that accompanied Jimmy DeSana’s first major curatorial effort at the Emerson in 1989.
The show, which included the work of 26 artists (including: Vikky Alexander, Ellen Brooks, Charlesworth, Morrisroe, Sherman, and Simmons), spoke to how artists were attempting in this era to move beyond the instrumentalisation of representation during a period of intense political divisiveness, and to expand what photography could be as art.
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That uncanny language was shared with Laurie Simmons, known for her staged domestic scenes using dolls and miniature objects that, like the works of DeSana, surrealized suburbia. The two shared a studio until DeSana’s death from AIDS-related illness in 1990. Simmons watched her friend transform after his diagnosis, a change that manifested as both physical degeneration and artistic metamorphosis. “We didn’t want to be painters. We didn’t want to be sculptors,” Simmons recalls. “We wanted that sense of distance and remove. We wanted a tool that we could work with, but that didn’t have anything to do with craft.” Illness forced DeSana to put his camera down and collage. Struggling to make sense of the purpose of the body, and especially the sexualized body, amid a vicious disease that mostly took queer, sexually active bodies like his own, DeSana made sense of his world through chopping and repasting it. The distance and remove that he and Simmons craved, that the camera gave him, was impossible as the reality of death loomed so near. …
The thing that drew us to using a camera was [that] we didnāt want to use our hands. We didnāt want to be painters. We didnāt want to be sculptors. We wanted that sense of distance and remove. We wanted a tool that we could work with, but that didnāt have anything to do with craft. Collage took him to a very intimate, hands-on way of working thatās so much more personal. Yet by rephotographing the collages, he could keep that sense of distance and still see himself as a conceptual artist, which I think was part of how he needed to see himself.
“Collage took him to a very intimate, hands-on way of working that’s so much more personal. Yet by rephotographing the collages, he could keep that sense of distance and still see himself as a conceptual artist, which I think was part of how he needed to see himself.”
“If I could do a show that confused people so much, that was so ambiguous that they didn’t know what to think, but they felt sort of sickened by it and also entertained,” Jimmy DeSana told Laurie Simmons shortly before he passed away from AIDS-related illness in 1990, “then for me that would capture the moment that we’re going through right now.”
For his last major artistic project, DeSana collected his contradictory feelings and images in a book to be titled Salvation. Although he would not complete the volume before his death, he created this maquette. It comprises photomontages of flowers and fragments of male bodies, many recycled from older photographs of DeSana and his partner Darell Bagley. The photographs are black-and-white, but DeSana intended them to be printed with lurid colour through the Cibachrome process.
Ambiguity and opacity became increasingly important to DeSana, especially in reaction to the media’s and other artists’ objectification of queer people living with HIV / AIDS. He also pushed against the expectation that gay artists should somehow counter government inaction and misinformation around the epidemic.
JC: There’s something unrefined about DeSana’s work compared to Mapplethorpe who was more stylistically precise. They must have been aware of each other; their work would feature together in issues of BOMB magazine and such. Of course, back then Mapplethorpe was a lot more famous and upwardly mobile, whereas DeSana seemed more invested in the punk scene. Overall, I appreciate DeSana’s spirit more than his images, many of which strike me as conceptually same-samey. The pictures are cheeky at times though not particularly humorous, so I was as perplexed as you when overhearing someone loudly chuckling at a photograph. To me, there’s too much death-drive going on in the work to laugh. Maybe it’s also because after witnessing Mugler’s flamboyance, finesse, and whimsy, a show like DeSana’s feels like a grim comedown by contrast. I donāt quite know what to make of the “acrobatic” works ā contorted nude figures in backbends and pseudo-tantric / yogic poses that sometimes appear as levitation or a magic trickāand then the constant recourse to the stiletto motif ā they’re somehow cooler in theory than in practice? The marker cone body as landscape is one of a kind, nobody else thought of that, but beyond this, I feel that had DeSana survived beyond those years of experimentation, he might have been making his best work by now. Of course, that’s total speculation and not entirely fairā¦
EC: I meant to mention that visitor laughing before, after which we both turned to each other in confusion. She was guffawing at Pink Furniture, which, if I remember correctly, had a blow-up doll hanging in the corner of the room. I do tend to always chuckle at Dog in the Submission series only because it looks like that furious wee puppy is going to bite the shit out of an erection. With his angry little growling face turned towards the camera, it is the perfect shot. Grrrā¦ But I snicker at it more than a full-throated laugh. Full-throated laughing at DeSana feels like you should be put on some sort of watch list.
I agree with what you’re saying about DeSana’s work being still experimental and somewhat unresolved. A lot of work from that Downtown / East Village scene, though I have a special place in my heart for it in all of its flaws, doesn’t quite translate or age well and so much of that is because many of these artists all died so young. That being said, I like DeSana’s work much more than Mapplethorpe’s. Even Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with a whip in his ass feels so precisely posed. In contrast, DeSana’s work just looks like it smells like ball sweat and assholes (this is a compliment). At least DeSana’s subcultural society pics of figures like Debbie Harry, The Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and William S. Burroughs lighten the mood, as do some of the vitrines of zines that don’t include hanging!
This book is the first monograph to present the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering yet under recognised figure in New York’s downtown art, music, and film scenes during the 1970s and ’80s. The book situates DeSana’s work and life within the countercultural and queer contexts in the American South as well as New York, through his involvement in mail art, punk, and No Wave music and film, and artist collectives and publications. Featuring an original text by Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, it includes his major series that helped create a No Wave aesthetic as well as his portraits of art and music luminaries of the time.
Jimmy DeSana: Submission is the first monograph of this pioneering queer punk photographer whose brief but prolific career helped elevate the medium of photography within the contemporary art world. This publication traces his brief yet prolific career through nearly two hundred works and over twenty years that bridged mail-art networks, New York’s 1970s and ’80s subcultures, the illuminating image-play of the “Pictures Generation,” and various responses to HIV / AIDS.
The book showcases DeSana’s extensive involvement in zines, artist collectives, performance art, experimental film, and club culture. Included are his most famous series ā 101 Nudes (1972), his first major work made during Atlanta’s gay liberation movement; Submission (1977-1979), created with the writer William Burroughs; and Suburban (1979-1984), which showcases his work as an early adopter of colour photography. During the late 1970s and early ’80s, DeSana was heavily involved in New York’s punk and No Wave scenes. Included in this book are his portraits of such art and music luminaries as Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Patti Astor, David Byrne, John Giorno, Debbie Harry, and Richard Hell. Accompanying these works are DeSana’s more abstract efforts from the late 1980s, after he was diagnosed with AIDS, that show an artist who resisted dominant narratives about the body and sexuality in the early years of the ongoing HIV / AIDS epidemic.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum website
Jimmy DeSana Submission content page
Jimmy DeSana Submission Performative Identities and Radical Networks pp. 10-11
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 30-31
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 32-33
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 60-61
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 66-67
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 116-117
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 124-125
Jimmy DeSana Submission pp. 126-127
Brooklyn Museum 200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052 Phone: (718) 638-5000
Opening hours: Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm Closed Mondays and Tuesdays Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Yearās Day
What a fascinating and inspired concept for an exhibition!
In order to understand the myth and construction of the femme fatale stereotype the exhibition investigates, through art and representation, concepts such as sexuality and its demonisation, the male and female gaze, white ideals of beauty, racism, Orientalism, anti-Semitism, power relations, hate, non-binary gaze, gender roles, myth and religion and black feminism. Such areas of breath are needed to examine the myth of the femme fatale.
I just wish the media images had included some photographs from the interwar avant-garde period by photographers such as Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Eva Besnyƶ, Ilse Bing, Lotte Jacobi, Yva, Grete Stern, Ellen Auerbach, Aenne Biermann and Florence Henri for example ā all of whom photographed the “New Woman” of the 1920s, an image which embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. I hope the exhibition contains images by some of these photographers.
PS. I have added further images and bibliographic information about the artists to the posting.
Many thankx to the Hamburger Kunsthalle for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The male gaze places women in the context of male desire, essentially portraying the female body as eye candy for the heterosexual man. By valuing the desires of the male audience, the male gaze supports the self-objectification of women.
According to the Theory of Gender and Power (Robert Connell), the sexual division of power reproduces inequities in power between men and women which are maintained by social mechanisms such as the abuse of authority and control in relationships.
Pages from Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition Femme Fatale. Gaze ā Power ā Gender showing in the bottom posting, the room layout with sections to the exhibition
The “classical” image of the femme fatale feeds above all on biblical and mythological female figures such as Judith, Salome, Medusa or the Sirens, who were widely portrayed as calamitous women in art and literature between 1860 and 1920. Characteristic of the femme fatale figure is the demonisation of female sexuality associated with these narratives. Around 1900, the femme fatale image was frequently projected onto real people, mainly actors, dancers or artists such as Sarah Bernhardt, Alma Mahler or Anita Berber. What is striking here is the simultaneity of important achievements of women’s emancipation and the increased appearance of this male-dominated image of women. In the sense of a counter-image that playfully picks up on aspects of the femme fatale figure, the New Woman, an ideal emerging well into the 1920s, also becomes important for the exhibition. A decisive caesura was set in the 1960s by feminist artists concerned with deconstructing the myth of the femme fatale ā along with the corresponding viewing habits and pictorial traditions. Current artistic positions, in turn, deal with traces and appropriations of the archetypic image or establish explicit counter-narratives ā often with reference to the #MeToo movement, questions of gender identities, female corporeality and sexuality, and by addressing the topic of the male gaze.
To investigate the constellations of gaze, power and gender that are constitutive for the image of the femme fatale and its transformations over time, the exhibition has assembled around 200 exhibits spanning a broad range of media and periods. On display will be paintings by Pre-Raphaelite artists (including Evelyn de Morgan, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John William Waterhouse) alongside Symbolist works (such as Fernand Khnopff, Gustave Moreau, Edvard Munch and Franz von Stuck), works of Impressionism (including Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Ćdouard Manet, Max Slevogt), of Expressionism and New Objectivity (Dodo, Jeanne Mammen, Gerda Wegener, among others). The featured positions of the early feminist avant-garde (including VALIE EXPORT, Birgit JĆ¼rgenssen, Ketty La Rocca, Maria Lassnig, Betty Tompkins) along with current works based on queer and intersectional feminist perspectives (Nan Goldin, Mickalene Thomas, Zandile Tshabalala, among others), build a bridge all the way to the present.
Dangerous waters ā Lorelei and her ‘fatal’ sisters
During the Romantic era, the element of water was often associated with the idea of dangerous femininity. The figure of Lorelei, in particular, was widely and diversely interpreted in numerous works of art, music and literature. Clemens Brentano laid the foundation for the legend of Lorelei with his ballad Zu Bacharach am Rheine…, written in 1801. Here, for the first time, a female figure was linked to the Lorelei ā a large slate rock on the bank of the river Rhine that was known for producing an unusual echo. The broad popular appeal of this legend began with the publication of Heinrich Heine’s poem Die Lore-Ley in 1824 and continued to grow throughout the century. Although neither Brentano nor Heine stylised Lorelei as a femme fatale, many 19th-century artistic representations of this myth reduced the female figure to her siren-like, demonic qualities. The legend of Lorelei also has a remarkable resonance in contemporary art: in her video work “das Schƶne muss sterben!”, for example, Gloria Zein transfers the narrative into the urban present, giving it an ironic twist and reflecting critically on the power of beauty; Aloys Rump traces the myth that surrounds this famous rock in the Rhine back to its material origins, exposing the Lorelei legend as pure invention and projection.
Aestheticized, demonized, sexualized: the femme fatale in the Victorian age
The 19th-century image of the femme fatale was largely shaped by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group of English artists around Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones was founded in 1848. Drawing on ancient myths and works of English literature, the Pre-Raphaelites (as they were later known) established a very specific ideal of beauty. Their depictions above all featured female figures to whom destructive or even fatal qualities had traditionally been attributed, such as Lilith, Medea, Circe and Helen of Troy. The Pre-Raphaelites deliberately emphasised the contrast between the subjects’ mythological demonisation and their visualisation as sensual beings of ethereal beauty. Later artists who were influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites created increasingly eroticised depictions of women, portraying them as both an ideal and a vision of fear. John William Waterhouse’s painting of Circe, for example, explicitly links her power to her both enchantingly and threateningly seductive nature. John Collier’s highly sexualised interpretation of Lilith, meanwhile, presents the mythic figure primarily as an object of male desire. This white, Victorian ideal of femininity and beauty, along with its (re-)presentation in a museum context, is reflected by Sonia Boyce in her video installation Six Acts. This work emerged from a critical intervention she performed at Manchester Art Gallery in 2018.
Sexuality & Demonisation
The term femme fatale originally describes a sensual, erotically seductive woman who puts men in danger and plunges them into their misfortune ā not seldom with deadly consequences. In his painting Lilith, John Collier also illustrated such a prototype of a femme fatale. Here, the woman’s body is excessively sexualised and her sexuality demonised. This narrative also suggests: a woman’s lust is something dangerous. Even today, women are often morally condemned when they live out their sexuality openly. How can that be? Female lust is declared taboo, while male lust is celebrated? That is indeed problematic. However: the figure of the femme fatale is by now often appropriated by women as an instrument for self-empowerment.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
John William Waterhouse RA (6 April 1849 – 10 February 1917) was an English painter known for working first in the Academic style and for then embracing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s style and subject matter. His artworks were known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend.
Born in Rome to English parents who were both painters, Waterhouse later moved to London, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. He soon began exhibiting at their annual summer exhibitions, focusing on the creation of large canvas works depicting scenes from the daily life and mythology of ancient Greece. Many of his paintings are based on authors such as Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Keats. Waterhouse’s work is displayed in many major art museums and galleries, and the Royal Academy of Art organised a major retrospective of his work in 2009.
The male gaze refers to the concept of a predominant masculine perspective; it represents the systematic use of male control in our society and its impact on us. The term was coined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey who in the 1970s drew attention to how women in films were mostly portrayed as objects catering to the fantasies of heterosexual males. It was soon applied to other genres such as fashion, literature, music and art ā and widely adopted in the everyday world. Whether in film, advertising, in novels, on the street, at school, during training or at university: the male gaze is omnipresent. It condemns, objectifies, defines standards and ideals, oppresses and classifies: male= active, female=passive. We all grew up with the phenomenon and are confronted with it on an everyday basis. As a result, all of us, including women and non-binary people, have more or less internalised it. Whether consciously or unconsciously, especially these groups tend to see themselves through a kind of mirror, anticipating the male gaze. But: understanding the male gaze also means being able to unlearn it.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Lilith is an 1889 painting by English artist John Collier, who worked in the style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The painting of the Jewish mythic figure Lilith is held in the Atkinson Art Gallery in Southport, England. It was transferred from Bootle Art Gallery in the 1970s.
Collier portrayed Lilith as a golden-haired, porcelain-skinned beautiful nude woman who fondles on her shoulder the head of a serpent, coiled around her body in a passionate embrace. Against the background of a dark, brown-green jungle, stands a naked female figure, whose pale skin and long blond hair falling down her back form a stark contrast with the forest. The head position and gaze of Lilith are turned away from the viewer, concentrating on the snake’s head resting on her shoulder. The snake encircles her body in several coils, starting around its closely spaced ankles, past the knee, to her lower abdomen, where it thereby conceals. Lilith supports the snake’s body with her hands in the area of āāher upper body, so that the snake’s head can lie over her right shoulder up to her throat. Lilith’s head is bent towards the snake, her cheek nestles against the animal. The brown tones of the snake’s body stand out in contrast with the pale woman’s body, but take up the colour scheme of the surrounding jungle. Collier presented his painting inspired by fellow painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1868 poem Lilith, or Body’s Beauty, which describes Lilith as the witch who loved Adam before Eve. Her magnificent tresses gave the world “its first gold,” but her beauty was a weapon and her charms deadly.
The magazine The British Architect described the work in 1887: “Here is a nude woman, whose voluptuous, round form is most gracefully represented, surrounded by a great serpent, the thickest part of which crosses it horizontally and cuts it in half; her head slides down her chest and she seems to be pulling it in tighter coils. The background is a coarse kind of green, repulsive and abominable.”
Fascinated by women’s physical allure, Rossetti here imagines a legendary femme fatale as a self-absorbed nineteenth-century beauty who combs her hair and seductively exposes her shoulders. Nearby flowers symbolise different kinds of love. In Jewish literature, the enchantress Lilith is described as Adam’s first wife, and her character is underscored by lines from Goethe’s Faust attached by Rossetti to the original frame, “Beware … for she excels all women in the magic of her locks, and when she twines them round a young manās neck, she will not ever set him free again.” The artist’s mistress, Fanny Cornforth, is the sitter in this watercolour, which Rossetti and his assistant Dunn based on an oil of 1866 (Delaware Art Museum).
Lady Lilith is an oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti first painted in 1866-1868 using his mistress Fanny Cornforth as the model, then altered in 1872-1873 to show the face of Alexa Wilding. The subject is Lilith, who was, according to ancient Judaic myth, “the first wife of Adam” and is associated with the seduction of men and the murder of children. She is shown as a “powerful and evil temptress” and as “an iconic, Amazon-like female with long, flowing hair.” …
A large 1867 replica of Lady Lilith, painted by Rossetti in watercolour, which shows the face of Cornforth, is now owned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It has a verse from Goethe’s Faust as translated by Shelley on a label attached by Rossetti to its frame:
“Beware of her fair hair, for she excels All women in the magic of her locks, And when she twines them round a young man’s neck she will not ever set him free again.”
Apparently, the ideal is the white woman. She is thought to be pure, innocent and therefore endearing. This racist idea reaches from colonial times all the way to the present day. In 2022 alone, it can be found in several social media trends. One of them is the clean girl look on TikTok.
But what is behind all this and who is the trend actually for? The clean girl aesthetic gone viral is rather minimalistic: simple clothes, subtle make-up with delicate lip gloss and small gold creole earrings. With this look, young women want to represent themselves as so-called “girl bosses”, meaning women who have everything under control. This, however, is no more than a male fantasy. It has nothing to do with real people. The clean girl image also reinforces perceptions of which kind of women are more socially accepted. Namely, those who, like the clean girl, have “smooth and porcelain-like skin”. This Eurocentric ideal of beauty can already be detected in the nineteenth-century work Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Lady Lilith‘s skin is ivory white; she is combing her hair smooth, which is still wavy at the hairline. In the clean girl look hair is also straight, usually tied into a tight braid or chignon. Curly hair is excluded ā and along with it especially Black people with Afro hair. Their natural appearance is thus portrayed as dirty in contrast to the allegedly pure clean girl look ā a racist narrative that continues to try to position Black women in particular as inferior in society. Whereas, some of those characteristics appearing in the clean girl look originally were appropriated from Black Culture and then minimised: big gold creoles and gel-combed hairdos are just two of many examples. The clean girls with the most TikTok views represent this kind of standard beauty: thin, white and wearing expensive clothes. On the social media schoolyard, they are the ones who are considered as cool. But what they are doing while they are at it is bowing to racist, classist ideals that need to be made visible and discussed.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
De Morgan boycotted the Royal Academy and signed the Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage in 1889. Her later works also deal with the themes of war from a pacifist perspective, engaging with conflicts like the Second Boer War and World War I.
Racism means that people are subjected to depreciation exclusion or even to experiencing violence due to their origin, skin colour or religion. Racism comes in many forms. There is, for example, anti-Muslim, anti-Black or anti-Asian racism which is particularly directed against these groups. While such group based hostility was formerly justified above all by the “wrong” religious affiliation, from the 16th century on, allegedly scientific explanations became established. People were divided into different “races” from the time white people started enslaving Black people to then exploit them for economic profit in the new colonies. Today, most people are aware that there is no such thing as different “human races”. Instead, it is the different “social background” or “culture” that now is often used as an argument to racially stigmatise people. The ‘others’ may be described as ‘primitive’ and ‘uncultivated’, sometimes exoticised or sexualised. Men are portrayed as libidinous, women as erotic and, quite often, as their victims. The Indian postcolonialism theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak critically pinpointed this colonial perspective with the sentence: “White men are saving brown women from brown men.” This ironic statement emphasises the sense of civilisational superiority of white colonisers who saw themselves as “saviours”, but often came to the country as rapists and, on top of that, oppressed the female population in their countries of origin.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Jean Delville (Belgian, 1867-1953) The Idol of Perversity (L’idole de la perversite) 1891
Jean Delville, The Idol of Perversity (L’idole de la perversite), 1891. Delville was a Belgian symbolist painter, author, poet and Theosophist, studying mystical and occultist philosophies. Such philosophies concentrate mainly on seeking the true origins of the universe, specifically of the divine and natural kind, believing that knowledge of ancient pasts offers a path to true enlightenment and salvation. Delville was the leading patron of Belgian Idealist movement, specifically in art circa the 1890s, having a belief system that upheld art to higher standards of substance, believing that it should express higher spiritual truth, based on principles of Ideal, or spiritual Beauty. ā¦
The goal of the living body is to spiritualise itself and to refine our material selves, meaning to elevate ourselves to the level of not requiring or wanting things that are just of material value. Without a spiritual path or goal, men and women that walk the earth become slaves to their material possessions, forever destined to succumb to the desires, passions, greed, and egotistic need to always seek power over one another. Under this belief, the physical world we live in becomes the land of Satan, and those without a spiritual goal become merely his slaves. According to Delville, the first step to true enlightenment is to gain power over earthly temptations, such as promiscuity and erotic temptation. Truly enlightened soul is one that can use the power of his mind to rise above the temptations of, what was believed “unquenched bestial desires of a woman”. In late nineteenth century femme fatale embodied the kind of misogynistic idea that women were lower on the evolutionary scale, and female sex was that of animalistic, monstrous and aggressive, hence, the femme fatale characterisation, meaning that women’s grotesque sexual desires led men away from their spiritual goals, and thus driving them to live a life in sin, forever slaves to the Devil. In this painting Delville portrays the femme fatale as an almost demonic entity, with the bellow angel as to show her looming over the viewer, with an almost phallic snake, reminiscent of Franz von Stuck’s Sin, slithering between her pointed breasts. This image is a direct representation of Delville’s esoteric ideologies of material versus spiritual.
Focussing on the body ā interpretations of the femme fatale in Munich
In contrast to the enigmatic dream worlds of French and Belgian Symbolism, the depictions of femmes fatales by artists of the Munich School focus more explicitly on women’s bodies. Carl Strathmann’s large-format interpretations of Gustave Flaubert’s historical novel SalammbĆ“, which was frequently adapted in France, place the titular female figure in an ornamental Art Nouveau setting that is typical of the period. Franz von Stuck and Franz von Lenbach, on the other hand, focus on concrete physical realities; while their paintings are set in mythological and biblical contexts, they are mainly aimed at representing nudity. In Stuck’s interpretation of the Sphinx, for example, the subject is no longer depicted as a hybrid creature, but is a purely human, naked woman. Only the posture of the nude, who is reduced to her physicality and sensuality, recalls a sphinx. This kind of sexualization in images of femmes fatales often involves constructing a supposed ‘otherness’ of the depicted subject. Through the incorporation of orientalising elements and antisemitic attributions such as the stereotype of the ‘beautiful Jewess’, female subjects ā above all Judith and Salome ā are presented as alluring and desirable, but are at the same denigrated as ‘other’.
The term anti-Semitism describes a hostile attitude towards Jews. It manifests itself in various forms, from prejudice, to insults, to violence. Anti-Semitism, which has existed for thousands of years, is the oldest known form of group-specific hatred of people, regardless of gender. Its worst manifestation was during German National Socialism under Adolf Hitler when over six million Jewish people were murdered between 1933 and 1945 in Europe. What distinguishes anti-Semitism from other forms of discrimination is the idea of a cultural and economic superiority of the group being attacked, unlike, for example, racism or Islamophobia, where the counterpart is usually devalued. Instead of labelling Jews as backward, in stereotypes they often appear as representatives of a modern and sophisticated worldview, which is, however, portrayed as ‘decadent’ and ‘threatening’. Conspiracy theories also often contain anti-Semitic elements, as it is imagined that all Jewish people are wealthy, influential and well-connected and thus able to act as secret ‘string-pullers’ in international affairs. Anti-Semitic prejudices often refer to categories such as wealth and power, sexuality or external characteristics.
Carl Strathmann (German, 1866-1939) SalammbƓ 1894 Mixed media on canvas 187.5 x 287cm
Strathmann’s curious work occupies an intermediate position between the art of painting and the crafts. His paintings are strange concoctions studded with colored glass and artificial gems, foreshadowing similar extravagances by the Viennese Jugendstil painter Gustav Klimt. In Strathmann’s painting SalammbĆ“, inspired by Flaubert’s novel, the Carthaginian temptress reclines on a carpet spread out on a flower-strewn meadow. Swathed in veils whose design is as complex as that of the harp beside her head, she submits to the kiss of the mighty snake that encircles her. Lovis Corinth described how Strathmann, while working on the large picture, gradually covered the originally nude model with “carpets and fantastic garments of his own invention so that in the end only a mystical profile and the fingers of one hand protruded from a jumble of embellished textiles. … coloured stones are sparkling everywhere; the harp especially is aglitter with fake jewels.” According to Corinth, Strathmann knew “how to glue and sew” these on the canvas “with admirable skill.”
Anonymous. “Carl Strathmann, SalammbĆ“,” on the Dark Classics website 12/05/2011 [Online] Cited 01/03/2023
Arnold Bƶcklin (Swiss, 1827-1901) Sirens 1875 Tempera on canvas Height: 46cm (18.1 in); width: 31cm (12.2 in) Alte Nationalgalerie Public domain
Arnold Bƶcklin (16 October 1827 – 16 January 1901) was a Swiss symbolist painter. …
Influenced by Romanticism, Bƶcklin’s symbolist use of imagery derived from mythology and legend often overlapped with the aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelites. Many of his paintings are imaginative interpretations of the classical world, or portray mythological subjects in settings involving classical architecture, often allegorically exploring death and mortality in the context of a strange, fantasy world.
Bƶcklin is best known for his five versions (painted 1880 to 1886) of the Isle of the Dead, which partly evokes the English Cemetery, Florence, which was close to his studio and where his baby daughter Maria had been buried. An early version of the painting was commissioned by a Madame Berna, a widow who wanted a painting with a dreamlike atmosphere.
Clement Greenberg wrote in 1947 that Bƶcklin’s work “is one of the most consummate expressions of all that is now disliked about the latter half of the nineteenth century.”
Franz Ritter von Stuck (February 23, 1863 – August 30, 1928), born Franz Stuck, was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, and architect. Stuck was best known for his paintings of ancient mythology, receiving substantial critical acclaim with The Sin in 1892. In 1906, Stuck was awarded the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown and was henceforth known as Ritter von Stuck. …
Stuck’s subject matter was primarily from mythology, inspired by the work of Arnold Bƶcklin. Large forms dominate most of his paintings and indicate his proclivities for sculpture. His seductive female nudes are a prime example of popular Symbolist content. Stuck paid much attention to the frames for his paintings and generally designed them himself with such careful use of panels, gilt carving and inscriptions that the frames must be considered as an integral part of the overall piece.
Gustav-Adolf Mossa (28 January 1883 – 25 May 1971) was a French illustrator, playwright, essayist, curator and late Symbolist painter. …
Symbolist paintings
Mossa’s decade long Symbolist period (1900-1911) was his most prolific and began as a reaction to the recent boom of socialite leisure activity on the French Rivera, his works comically satirising or condemning what was viewed as an increasingly materialistic society and the perceived danger of the emerging New Woman at the turn of the century, whom Mossa appears to consider perverse by nature.
His most common subjects were femme fatale figures, some from Biblical sources, such as modernised versions of Judith, Delilah and Salome, mythological creatures such as Harpies or more contemporary and urban figures, such as his towering and dominant bourgeoise woman in Woman of Fashion and Jockey. (1906). His 1905 work Elle, the logo for the 2017 Geschlechterkampf exhibition on representations of gender in art, is an explicit example of Mossa’s interpretation of malevolent female sexuality, with a nude giantess sitting atop a pile of bloodied corpses, a fanged cat sitting over her crotch, and wearing an elaborate headress inscribed with the Latin hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas (What I want, I order, my will is reason enough).
Many aspects of Mossa’s paintings of this period were also indictive of the decadent movement, with his references to Diabolism, depictions of lesbianism (such as his two paintings of Sappho), or an emphasis on violent, sadistic or morbid scenes.
Though these paintings are the subject of most present day exhibitions, scholarly articles and books on the artist, they were not released to the public until after Mossa’s death in 1971.
Carl Strathmann (German, 1866-1939) Head of Medusa c. 1897 Watercolour and ink 69.8 cm x 69.5cm MĆ¼nchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung CC BY-SA 4.0
Carl Strathmann (11 September 1866, DĆ¼sseldorf – 29 July 1939, Munich) was a German painter in the Art Nouveau and Symbolist styles.
His father, also named Carl Strathmann, was a merchant and manufacturer, who later served as consul in Chile. His mother, Alice, was originally from Huddersfield, England, and was an art enthusiast. From 1882 to 1886, he studied at the Kunstakademie DĆ¼sseldorf, with Hugo Crola, Heinrich Lauenstein and Adolf Schill. After being dismissed for a “lack of talent”, he enrolled at the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School, Weimar where, from 1888 to 1889, he studied in the master class taught by Leopold von Kalckreuth.
When Kalckreuth left, he did as well; moving to Munich, where he lived a Bohemian lifestyle as a free-lance artist, and met the painter Lovis Corinth, who became a lifelong friend and associate. In 1894, he painted one of his best known works: “SalammbĆ“”, inspired by a novel of the same name by Gustave Flaubert. In this monumental painting (6 x 9 feet) SalammbĆ“, a high priestess of the Carthaginians, is shown caressing a snake, as part of a ritual sacrifice. Many were horrified, calling it a “sadistic fantasy”. The scandal made him immediately famous.
Femme fatale, saint and vampire ā the elevation and denigration of women in the art of Edvard Munch
Among the many images of the femme fatale that were created around 1900, Edvard Munch’s ambiguous, both positively and negatively connoted female figures occupy a place of their own. Existential questions and universal themes such as life, death, love, loss and grief are central to Munch’s art. Women are omnipresent in his compositions, appearing in a variety of roles and stereotypical depictions; at the same time, they are inseparably linked to the artist’s personal experience of life and love. The transfiguration of this experience often leads to the opposite extreme. Munch’s painting Madonna illustrates the contradictory aspects of his image of women: the depicted subject can be interpreted as a lustful femme fatale or as a saintly figure. The relationship and tension between the sexes is another leitmotif in Munch’s art. This is illustrated by his painting Vampire in the Forest, which leaves the viewer in doubt as to whether the depicted female figure is a loving woman or a bloodthirsty creature. Demonisations of femininity and female sexuality that threaten male existence appear throughout Munch’s oeuvre. They are as much an expression of his fears as of his self-stylisation as a victim ā and once again reveal Munch’s image of the femme fatale to be a misogynistic projection.
Impressionist digressions ā staged presentations from the theatrical to the nude
The theme of the femme fatale is even addressed in Impressionist art, which aimed to create immediate and realistic depictions rather than idealised representations. Here, however, the image was presented in very different ways. Lovis Corinth’s stage-like scenario shows a dramatically made-up, bare-breasted Salome bending over the head of John the Baptist. The abysmal aspect of her power is visualised above all through the sexualization of her body. The female figures in Max Liebermann’s interpretations of the biblical theme of Samson and Delilah, on the other hand, are far less eroticised. The choice of this subject ā an unusual one for the artist ā reveals his awareness of the popularity of the femme fatale motif. The lack of historicising details and focus on the strength of the austere-looking female figures, however, situate Liebermann’s stark images more decisively in the present than those of Corinth. The French sculptor Auguste Rodin also portrayed a femme fatale figure ā but was evidently using this theme as a justification for an explicit nude. In his drawing, which takes its title from Gustave Flaubert’s novel SalammbĆ“, the female subject is reduced to her sex: the reference to the fictional character is, therefore, merely a pretext.
Power Relations
Smash the Patriarchy! Free the Nipple!
Women and many non-binary people are confronted with various dress codes and rules of conduct in their everyday lives. The skirt should not be too short. Breastfeeding in public is taboo. A woman has to wear a bra in the office, otherwise there may be professional consequences. Above all, bodies perceived as female are being eroticised. The Free the Nipple movement is fighting against this. It’s a matter of choice: whether it’s a long or short skirt, bra or not ā everyone decides for themselves. The breast perceived as female is also censored in social media.
The Free the Nipple movement has been criticised for not paying enough attention to the nuances concerning Black people and People of colour, for not pursuing an intersectional approach, but rather for primarily reflecting a white feminism.
Fighting for Female Freedom
In Spain, it was decided in May 2022 that catcalling should be banned. Catcalling? Many women experience obtrusive looks, being whistled at or hearing disrespectful comments about their appearance on the streets every day. Verbal sexual harassment is harmful and leaves its mark. Yet it still is often presented as an alleged compliment, also in films. In the 1968 performance Tapp- und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema), VALIE EXPORT strapped a ‘scaled-down cinema’ in front of her bare chest. Passers-by had ‘public access’ for thirty seconds at a time during which they were allowed to touch her breasts. Interestingly, it was not VALIE EXPORT and her (upper) body that were thus exposed, but rather the passers-by who accepted this offer in public. Who is being embarrassed here and who is a voyeur? How are power and gaze relationships reversed here?
The Bechdel Test was introduced in 1985 by writer and cartoonist Alison Bechdel, namely with her comic dykes to watch out for. The test focuses on the stereotyping of women in film has only three rules:
1/ The movie has to have at least two women in it, 2/ Who talk to each other, 3/ About something other than a man.
Pretty simple criteria that don’t say much about whether a film is sexist!? Yet many films do not fulfil the criteria of the Bechdel Test.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Otto Greiner (16 December 1869 – 24 September 1916) was a German painter and graphic artist. He was born in Leipzig and began his career there as a lithographer and engraver. He relocated to Munich around 1888 and studied there under Alexander Liezen-Mayer. Greiner’s mature style ā characterised by unexpected spatial juxtapositions and a sharply focused, photographic naturalism ā was strongly influenced by the work of Max Klinger, whom he met in 1891 while visiting Rome.
Where Does All the Hate Come From?
Hatecore
Misogyny is an attitude that refers to hatred of women (Ancient Greek: misos = hate, gyne = woman). It has existed for thousands of years all over the world. It can be seen in many historical works of art, in the extermination fantasies of Otto Greiner, for example, but also in our modern times. Since the emergence of the internet, misogyny has also increasingly manifested itself in the digital space, where people perceived as female are many times more likely than people perceived as male to be targeted, sexualised and threatened.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Lovis Corinth (21 July 1858 – 17 July 1925) was a German artist and writer whose mature work as a painter and printmaker realised a synthesis of impressionism and expressionism.
Corinth studied in Paris and Munich, joined the Berlin Secession group, later succeeding Max Liebermann as the group’s president. His early work was naturalistic in approach. Corinth was initially antagonistic towards the expressionist movement, but after a stroke in 1911 his style loosened and took on many expressionistic qualities. His use of colour became more vibrant, and he created portraits and landscapes of extraordinary vitality and power. Corinth’s subject matter also included nudes and biblical scenes.
Max Liebermann (20 July 1847 – 8 February 1935) was a German painter and printmaker, and one of the leading proponents of Impressionism in Germany and continental Europe. In addition to his activity as an artist, he also assembled an important collection of French Impressionist works.
The son of a Jewish banker, Liebermann studied art in Weimar, Paris, and the Netherlands. After living and working for some time in Munich, he returned to Berlin in 1884, where he remained for the rest of his life. He later chose scenes of the bourgeoisie, as well as aspects of his garden near Lake Wannsee, as motifs for his paintings. Noted for his portraits, he did more than 200 commissioned ones over the years, including of Albert Einstein and Paul von Hindenburg.
Becoming femme fatale: between projection and self-presentation
In the period around 1900, the image of the femme fatale was increasingly projected onto real people. A cult of female actors, dancers and artists emerged, above all in cities such as Paris, Vienna and Berlin. Femmes fatales were now also situated in the realm of theatre, cinema and variety entertainment. Male projection and active self-presentation both played their part in this development, and particular modern media served to disseminate corresponding depictions of women: Alfons Mucha’s posters of Sarah Bernhardt contributed significantly to the fact that in public perception, the image of Bernhardt as a person gradually merged with her theatrical roles ā although the actress herself also cultivated her reputation as an eccentric figure. In the same way, many people in the public eye used the medium of photography to increase their popularity. Portrait photographs taken by Madame d’Ora, for example, were used to publicise Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste’s scandal-ridden show Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy. The composer Alma Mahler was also among those who had their portraits taken at Atelier d’Ora. Her reputation as a femme fatale was, however, mainly shaped by Oskar Kokoschka. The painter developed an obsessive desire for Mahler during their affair and at the same time stylised her as a disastrous, destructive force ā a demonisation that reached its climax in the destruction of a life-size fetish doll he had commissioned in his ex-lover’s likeness.
Madame d’Ora (Atelier d’Ora) Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste 1922 From “The Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy”
Dora Kallmus (Madame d’Ora) (Austrian, 1881-1963), Arthur Benda (German, 1885-1969) Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste in their dance MƤrtyrer [Martyrs] 1922 Gelatin silver print Albertina, Vienna
Dora Philippine Kallmus (20 March 1881 – 28 October 1963), also known as Madame D’Ora or Madame d’Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer.
In 1907, she established her own studio with Arthur Benda in Vienna called the Atelier dāOra or Madame D’Ora-Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym “Madame d’Ora”, which she used professionally. D’ora and Benda operated a summer studio from 1921 to 1926 in Karlsbad, Germany, and opened another gallery in Paris in 1925. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) and it was her intervention that saved the agency’s owner after his arrest by the Nazis, enabling him to flee to Paris from Vienna.
Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.
Arthur Benda (23 March 1885, in Berlin – 7 September 1969, in Vienna) was a German photographer. From 1907 to 1938 he worked in the photo studio d’Ora in Vienna, from 1921 as a partner of Dora Kallmus and from 1927 under the name d’Ora-Benda as the sole owner. …
In 1906, Arthur Benda met photographer Dora Kallmus, who also trained with Perscheid. When she opened the Atelier d’Ora on Wipplingerstrasse in Vienna in 1907, Benda became her assistant. The Atelier d’Ora specialised in portrait and fashion photography. Kallmus and Benda quickly made a name for themselves and soon supplied the most important magazines. The peak of renown was reached when Madame d’Ora photographed the present nobility in 1916 on the occasion of the coronation of Emperor Charles I as King of Hungary.
In 1921, Arthur Benda became a partner in Atelier d’Ora, which also ran a branch in Karlovy Vary during the season. In 1927 Arthur Benda took over the studio of Dora Kallmus, who had run a second studio in Paris since 1925, and continued it under the name d’Ora-Benda together with his wife Hanny Mittler. In addition to portraits, he mainly photographed nudes that made the new company name known in men’s magazines worldwide. A major order from the King of Albania Zogu I, who had himself and his family photographed in 1937 for three weeks by Arthur Benda in Tirana secured Arthur Benda financially. In 1938 he opened a new studio at the KƤrntnerring in Vienna, which he continued to operate under his own name after the Second World War.
Anita Berber (10 June 1899 – 10 November 1928) was a German dancer, actress, and writer who was the subject of an Otto Dix painting. She lived during the time of the Weimar Republic. …
Her hair was cut fashionably into a short bob and was frequently bright red, as in 1925 when the German painter Otto Dix painted a portrait of her, titled “The Dancer Anita Berber”. Her dancer friend and sometime lover Sebastian Droste, who performed in the film Algol (1920), was skinny and had black hair with gelled up curls much like sideburns. Neither of them wore much more than low slung loincloths and Anita occasionally a corsage worn well below her small breasts.
Her performances broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was her public appearances that really challenged taboos. Berber’s overt drug addiction and bisexuality were matters of public chatter. In addition to her addiction to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of Berber’s favourites was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl. This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat.
Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, she was also a heavy alcoholic. In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. She was said to be surrounded by empty morphine syringes.
Anita Berber (1899-1928), and to a lesser extent her husband / dance partner Sebastian Droste (1892-1927), have come to epitomise the decadence within Weimar era Berlin, their colourful personal lives overshadowing to a large extent their careers in dance, film and literature. Yet the couple’s daring and provocative performances are being re-assessed within the history of the development of expressive dance, and their extraordinary book ‘TƤnze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase’ (‘Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy’-1922), is a ‘gesamkunstwerk’ (total work of art) of Expressionist ideology largely unrecognised outside a devoted cult following.
The book
Berber and Droste chose to express themselves almost exclusively through the Expressionist / Modernist ethos, which was in itself filtered through the angst of Germany during the Weimar period.
Expressionism had been in existence before Weimar and, like many art movements, it had no formal beginnings, as opposed to a ‘school’ of artists who might band together under a common technique. It was fundamentally a reaction against the Impressionists who were seen by the Modernists as merely portrayers of ‘reality’ but who had failed to add anything of the artists own interior processes such as intuition, imagination and dream. This new wave of artists found inspiration in painters such as Van Gogh and Matisse but also drew from writers such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and the Symbolists, together with the philosophy of Nietzsche and Freudian psychology.
Expressionists believed the artist should utilise “what he perceives with his innermost senses, it is the expression of his being; all that is transitory for him is only a symbolic image; his own life is his most important consideration. What the outside world imprints on him, he expresses within himself. He conveys his visions, his inner landscape and is conveyed by them”. Herwert Walden: Erster Deutscher Herbstsalaon (1913).
The image is the poem as portrayed in the book by D’Ora. Interestingly, it is doubted whether the dance was performed (at least in Vienna) topless. Once again, this would indicate that the book is to be considered as its own specific entity. The poems cite their inspirations: artists Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Matthias GrĆ¼newald and authors lsuch as Villiers De L’Isle Adam, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Verlaine, E.T.A. Hoffman and Hanns Heinz Ewers.
The New Woman ā a counter-image to the femme fatale?
Strongly influenced by their experiences during the First World War, the artists associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement focused on present-day themes and realities. Their works reflected a changing society and a new relationship between the sexes: women were no longer only active in the domestic roles of wife and mother, but were now also participating in political and social life outside the home, wearing clothes that would traditionally be read as masculine, and pursuing careers ā as artists and office workers, but also as revue dancers, waitresses or sex workers. With their bobbed hair, painted red lips, trouser suits, hats and cigarettes, they represented a new ideal: the New Woman. The image of the New Woman was omnipresent in illustrated women’s magazines and satirical journals of the time. The artist Jeanne Mammen, whose early work was greatly inspired by Symbolism, articulated womenās growing self-awareness and a new understanding of sexuality and gender in her paintings, while Gerda Wegener’s portraits of Lili Elbe drew attention to the existence of gender identities beyond the binarism of male and female. The motif of the femme fatale was now countered by a contemporary, emancipated ideal of womanhood that replaced traditional gender roles and stereotypes.
Black top hat slanting one way, cigarette slanting the other, red lips, short hair, menās suit, challenging pose: this is how Berlin artist Jeanne Mammen saw the “New Woman” in the wild 1920s, the “garƧonne” (feminine form of the French “garƧon”, boy). She got rid of the corset, and with it the expectations of how women should dress or behave.
Snakes
Snakes are the perfect accessory to signal danger and seduction at the same time. Pure sex appeal! Remember: in the Bible, it is the nasty snake that persuades Eve to nibble from the tree of knowledge, and afterwards Adam and Eve are suddenly ashamed of being naked but also find it somehow exciting … Women are called snakes when they are considered manipulative and use their sex appeal to seduce men who supposedly don’t really want that. The combination of the naked female figure and snakes is particularly popular in the 19th century, when women had hardly any social power or status, but started rebelling against that. Strange coincidence, isn’t it?
Long flowing hair
Long Flowing Hair is considered a symbol of absolute femininity and seduction par excellence in nineteenth-century paintings. If it is shaggy or even made of snakes (beware: Medusa head!), this is supposed to indicate that its wearer is morally depraved. Conversely, in the twentieth century, short hair usually stands for emancipation from outdated gender images and for a free, sometimes queer sexuality.
Mirrors
“Women see themselves being looked at,” wrote the English art critic John Berger. Women looking at themselves (narcissistically) in the mirror in paintings are meant to prove the vanity of the female sex. Yet these paintings rather prove the dominance of the male gaze that turns women into objects through its constant scrutiny or even surveillance. Some say that the mirror in the paintings has now been replaced by computer or smartphone screens, in which especially women are reflected for the male gaze on social media. Do you see it that way too?
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
The non-binary gaze does not exist! As long as we are living in a society dominated by men, there can be no non-binary gaze. Because it is not our own gender identity that decides how we look at others, but the system in which we live. And that, all over the world, is still patriarchy. So as long as we are living in social structures in which humanity is divided binarily into male and female, we cannot escape this gaze. For this, it does not matter where on the gender scale we locate ourselves, whether we characterise ourselves as male, female, non-binary or whatever. To have a female gaze, we would have to live in matriarchy. Therefore, under the global domination of male capitalist structures, there can be no queer, no trans (siehe LGBTQIA), no Black Gaze, because all these identities continue to be marginalised and discriminated against. Gazes, especially in art, are always connected with power, with external determinations, with conditioning. There can be no non-binary gaze for the sole reason that it would not classify living beings into different sexes, would not categorise them. In the required non-binary form of society ā which would be interested in the equality of the different ā this form of exercising power would not even exist.
But there would still be gazing wouldn’t there? Or does it mean that for that reason alone there can be no non-binary gaze?
The non-binary gaze is the future!
The male gaze divides people into men and women, into those who look and those who are looked at, into the active and the passive, into subjects and objects. The non-binary gaze abolishes “gender” as a distinguishing feature altogether because it has no interest in this type of category. Neither living beings nor anything else like colours, styles or smells are assigned to a single gender, but exist only for and from themselves. Individual features such as lipstick, stubble or breasts are not read as indicators of gender, but are perceived impartially and without this filter in their specific properties, such as shape, colour, structure etc. Therefore, this gaze does not exert any power, because it does not classify and evaluate what is being looked at into any existing categories. It does not look from top to bottom, not from bottom to top, not at individual parts or the overall view, but it does all this simultaneously with everyone, the gazers as well as those gazed at. The non-binary gaze has the power to destabilise our entire world order, because qualities and characteristics can now be perceived in a completely new way, without prejudices and evaluations. For this concerns not only human bodies but all forms of being that we can imagine.
Actually, it is interesting that we not only classify people, but also, for example, shapes ā angular vs round ā or smells ā tart vs sweet ā according to gender.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Gender describes the social, lived, perceived sex of a person. Gender is an English term, but is also used in German, precisely when it comes to social characteristics and gender identity. Gender is not limited to what is assigned to us at birth on the basis of physical characteristics (sex) but rather refers to socially constructed attributes, opportunities and relationships.
The teacher who says to you: “Well, your handwriting doesn’t look like that of a girl.” The colour pink is for girls and women, just like dresses and skirts; the colour blue and trousers are for boys and men. The latter should not cry, that would be weak. So, better for them to suppress their feelings? But then there is the saying “Boys will be boys”, meaning that’s just the way they all are. Boys are seen as wild and rebellious, girls as calm and understanding. But these are not biological traits; it’s the way we were brought up in a system of patriarchy. So, boys are allowed to get away with more, while girls are expected to put up with a lot of things. Role stereotypes hurt and reduce us all and press us into categories. Because they say: all people in a group should behave in the same way ā which is pretty absurd.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Black women who are simply portrayed leading their everyday lives, without being reduced to their suffering or racial trauma experiences ā unfortunately, this is a rarely shown image. The woman in the painting Lounging 1: G fabulous [below] is unmistakably depicted as Black. Next to her is a soft bathrobe. She is relaxing in a room with pompous wallpaper, on a fluffy carpet in front of a glamorous couch. Her material possessions, together with the fact that she is resting, are markers of luxury. For in the system of white supremacy, Black women are expected to live in a “hustle and grind culture”, where they continually have to prove themselves and try twice as hard as their white counterparts. Resting as a form of resistance is thus understood as a counter-movement and a radical political practice against social injustice. The slogan “rest is resistance” became famous on social media through the organisation The Nap Ministry. Though the woman in Lounging 1: G fabulous is nude, she is not depicted in a voyeuristic or sexist way ā as Black women are in many works of European and American art history. The power of the gaze no longer lies with a voyeur, but in this case emanates from the sitter. Despite her nakedness, the image is in no way about conforming to a male gaze. The woman in the work simply shows herself as she is.
Likewise, Jenevieve Aken’s series The Masked Woman [below] is about self-fulfilment. Her self-portrayals show everyday scenes from the life of a woman in Nigeria who has decided against the role of the subordinate housewife. Instead, she leads a contented solo life as a “super femme fatale” ā as she writes herself. A decision for a lifestyle that is not nearly as socially prestigious as living in a bourgeois nuclear family. Both works create new self-designations and show how extensive and multi-layered Black female identities are.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
The Masked Woman is a self-portrait series that explores representation of gender in Nigeria society through a performative lens. It attempts to avert the overarching male gaze by facing it head on with the artistās own actions and choices. The images portray the solitary lifestyle of the āsuper femme fataleā character, choosing to achieve pleasure and contentment through self-fulfilment that not dictated by the subservient role as a house wife or defined through a manās affection. While depicting a confident and sexually free woman, the subject’s mask and body language also suggest a nuanced tone of isolation which speaks to her stigmatization in a society that has limiting and strictly defined roles of what the proper woman should be. By diverting the status-quo and exercising freedom of choice, such women are perceived as extreme, eccentric, and outside of polite society in Nigeria. The series personifies a growing number of independent, professional women in Nigeria who at once assert their autonomy while also being ostracized by cultural norms. Rather than waiting for the narrative to be told from the outside, I choose to give birth to my own freedom, in hope that it will inspires other women in Nigeria to express their independence and free-will.
Jenevieve Aken. “The Masked Woman,” on the Jenevieve Aken website Nd [Online] Cited 04/03/2023
Jenevieve Aken (born 1989) is a Nigerian documentary, self-portrait and urban portrait photographer, focusing on cultural and social issues. Her work often revolves around her personal experiences and social issues surrounding gender roles. …
The Masked Woman
This is a black and white, self-portrait series meant to depict women and their social roles in Nigerian culture. The images depict the peace and self-fulfilment of a woman without the stigmatised overarching views of women in a Nigerian culture. The images also explore how women can feel constrained by the stereotypes of what a “proper women” should act like in society. These photos are meant to exemplify women who have broken these stigmas but feel isolated by the norms of the society. In this series Aken hopes to inspire Nigerian women to practice their freedom regardless of external stereotypes.
Lilith was the first in various respects. Apparently, not only the Adam’s first wife who lived equally with him in the Garden of Eden, but also the first feminist, because she simply flew away when he demanded submission from her. Conveniently, as recorded in older Babylonian accounts, she was a hybrid being and had wings. Others imagined her as a hybrid between a woman and a serpent. Unfortunately, as a woman who was sexually independent, she evidently did not have a good image among the patriarchy, for she was said to bring sickness and death, to seduce and kill men, be infertile and kill newborn babies with the poisonous milk from her breast. In Jewish feminist theology, however, she stands for wisdom and strength because she was the first being to convince God to tell her his name ā granting her unlimited power.
Judith
Judith is described in the Old Testament as a beautiful, wealthy and, besides this, pious widow who defended her Jewish homeland against the seizure by the Assyrian general Holofernes. She saved her mountain village of Bethulia by trusting in God completely and impressing Holofernes with her charm and wise speeches, so that she was able to sneak into his confidence. On the 40th day of the occupation, there was a celebration in Judith’s honour at which Holofernes got so drunk that Judith was able to cut off his head with her sword. The Assyrians left in horror and Judith retired to her quiet widowhood. Thanks to her deed, the overall trust in God was so great that no one could shake the Israeli community for a long time. In the Western world, the figure of Judith was often used as a motif in art, from the nineteenth century onwards with an increasingly eroticising, orientalising and anti-Semitic undertone. Judy Chicago, on the other hand, showed her as a feminist icon in her famous installation Dinner Party in the 1970s.
Medusa
Today, Medusa is mainly known for her extravagant hairstyle consisting exclusively of live snakes. How did this come about? There exist several variants of her story in Greek mythology, but the best known says that Pallas Athena happened to witness her husband Poseidon raping the beautiful Medusa. Instead of helping her and imprisoning him, she disfigured the rape victim forever by conjuring up: snakes on her head, pigs’ teeth, scaly skin, arms made of bronze and a tongue hanging out. Anyone who caught sight of her would henceforth turn to stone in horror. The artistic representation of the terrifying snake’s head has fascinated artists since ancient times, and even today it plays a role in films, games or even the logo of the Versace fashion label. It appears to be the perfect antithesis to the Western ideal of women ā evil, tough and ugly ā and, according to some research, could represent the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, which went hand in hand with the demonisation of female strength.
Salome
Salome, who features prominently in the New Testament, albeit without being named, became famous for a dance: she danced so impressively and seductively at a feast that her powerful stepfather Herod assured her that he would grant her any wish in return. Her mother Herodias whispered in her ear what she wanted: the head of her adversary John the Baptist, who had publicly criticised the illegitimate marriage between her and Herod and thus humiliated her. The cut-off head was presented on a platter. In the nineteenth century, art was obsessed with this female figure, generally depicted as a lightly to barely clothed vamp who, because of her enthralling sex appeal, could only cost men their lives.
Madonna
When it comes to the idealisation of femininity, nearly everything conceivable in Christian societies comes together in the image of the Madonna figure. Since the first appearance of Madonna portraits from the second century onwards, the Mother of God has been painted as an absolute symbol of a pure, innocent and self-sacrificing femininity, typically one including and suggesting motherliness. Mostly, she is shown in these pictures with the little Child Jesus in her arms or lap. The figure Mater dolorosa, meaning Mother of Sorrows, refers to the pain of childbirth and the lifelong care of a child (particularly a divine one). But there are also other, sometimes surprising expressions and variations of these representations: for example, the Madonna lactans, a nursing Madonna with visible breast, the Black Madonnas or Madonnas with a body-encompassing, almond-shaped corona shaped like a vulva.
However, a Madonna is not always staged in a supernatural, maternal manner. She can also be depicted somewhere between the extremes of ‘saint’ or ‘whore’.
Doing Feminism ā With Art! booklet to the exhibition
Birgit JĆ¼rgenssen (1949-2003) was an Austrian photographer, painter, graphic artist, curator and teacher who specialised in feminine body art with self-portraits and photo series, which have revealed a sequence of events related to the daily social life of a woman in its various forms including an atmosphere of shocking fear and common prejudices. She was acclaimed as one of the “outstanding international representatives of the feminist avant-garde”. She lived in Vienna. Apart from holding solo exhibitions of her photographic and other art works, she also taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
The “classical” image of the femme fatale was inspired mainly by biblical, mythological and literary figures (such as Judith, Salome, Medusa, Salambo and the Sirens) that were associated in art between 1860 and 1920 with the notion of mortal danger. Combining the feminine ideal with ominous portents, these pictures, often featuring stylised protagonists, convey a demonisation of female sexuality. Around 1900, this female image was increasingly projected onto real people, in particular actors, dancers and artists (such as Sarah Bernhardt, Alma Mahler and Anita Berber). Striking in this context is the simultaneous advancement of women’s emancipation and an upsurge in images of the femme fatale. The exhibition therefore also takes a look at the ideal of the New Woman that emerged in the 1920s as a counter-image that subtly takes up aspects of the femme fatale. Equally telling is the caesura that feminist artists brought about starting in the 1960s by radically deconstructing the myth and, with it, entrenched points of view and pictorial traditions. Contemporary artistic positions in turn address questions of gender identity, female corporeality and sexuality as well as the #MeToo movement and the male gaze. They track the traces and transformations of the image of the femme fatale or in other cases establish explicit counter-narratives.
The exhibition is accompanied by a particularly extensive art education programme: In addition to a diverse range of guided tours including livestreams of curator talks, a chatbot module will debut that lets visitors enter into a dialogue with six femme fatale figures from the art-works on view. A text-based dialogue system using artificial intelligence playfully tells background stories about the works and their artists. Developed jointly with the Stadtteilschule am Hafen, this module specifically addresses a younger target group. The Hamburger Kunsthalle is also offering audio descriptions for the first time. For selected exhibits, supplementary tactile copies are provided, which give people with visual impairments a way of accessing the exhibition independently by feeling contours. More audio tours are available in the Hamburger Kunsthalle app: for adults in German and English, for children from 8 years and older, and in simple language (both German). On the 4th Thursday of each month, a Salon fatal will dedicate itself to socially relevant topics that tie into the exhibition such as sexuality and the construction of beauty ideals. The salon will take the form of a reading, performance, panel discussion, concert or workshop, featuring changing guests. In cooperation with the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Metropolis Kino is showing a film series on the theme of the femme fatale ā from silent films to recent productions.
A free companion booklet, produced in collaboration with Missy Magazine, opens up intersectional and (queer) feminist perspectives on the show. The exhibition theme will also be explored in interdisciplinary depth in the accompanying catalogue (Kerber Verlag), scheduled for publication in early 2023. The catalogue will be available for 39 euros in the museum shop or for the bookstore price of 50 euros at http://www.freunde-der-kunsthalle.de.
Press release from Hamburger Kunsthalle
Birgit JĆ¼rgenssen (Austrian, 1949-2003) Untitled (Self with pelts) 1974/1977
Blickmacht
The exhibition Femme Fatale: Gaze ā Power ā Gender is dedicated to the myth of seductive, ominous femininity ā and its deconstruction. This is an extract from Ina Hildburg-Schneider in conversation with the exhibition organisers Markus Bertsch and Ruth Stamm translated from the German by Google Translate:
Do the artists of the time deal with their fears of the early emancipatory movements in the 19th century by depicting the femme fatale?
Stamm: I believe that the picture has something to do with a growing women’s movement in the 19th century, which became more and more institutionalised from 1865 – right up to women’s suffrage. This is exactly the time when the classic femme fatale images are created. But that’s not all. There are also a number of other aspects, further emancipation movements, but also associated fears and projections. Orientalism and anti-Semitism in particular play a role in the femme fatale image.
Bertsch: And the self-perception of the man has also been very different over time. This is often overlooked. There is the age of decadence in France, in which the male artist sees himself as frail and in this way stylises himself as the victim of the apparently overpowering women. Whether this is a firm conviction or a staging remains to be seen. The structure was immensely complex and allowed very different, sometimes contradictory readings of the femme fatale.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the role models for depicting the femme fatale changed. Now the works of art show “real” women. Who do you think of first?
Bertsch: I’m thinking of Sarah Bernhardt, Alma Mahler, Anita Berber. Suddenly living people were referred to as “femmes fatales”. They sometimes even adopted the characteristics of a femme fatale themselves ā or, as in the case of Alma Mahler, they were the product of an obsession. Yes, Oskar Kokoschka went particularly far with his admiration for Alma Mahler. This is documented by a photo series in the exhibition.
Stamm: Kokoschka had a fetish doll made by the doll maker Hermine Moos after Alma Mahler, according to his very specific, sometimes explicitly physical ideas. However, his wish for a doll that was as lifelike as possible was not fulfilled ā the result disappointed him greatly. The photos in our exhibition show the doll, which served as his model many times, draped in various poses. After Kokoschka had created a number of paintings and drawings based on the doll, some of which brought life to life, the story ended with its violent destruction. Ultimately, in this way, Kokoschka got rid of the figure of Mahler, which he stylised, obsessively sought out and at the same time demonised.
Is the First World War a turning point in the history of the motif?
Bertsch: I think so. Everything that was previously present as a mythical reference dissolves, and art faces the current political and social realities more strongly. Certain images of femininity are being phased out. The classic type of femme fatale is eroding and disappearing.
The “New Woman” developed in the interwar period ā is she the female interpretation of the femme fatale?
Stamm: The New Woman was not a concrete antithesis to the femme fatale, but a new, quite stylised, emancipated image of women that developed with the growing women’s movement. In fact, this ideal was only lived by very few women from rather elitist circles who could afford it. The “type of woman” with bob haircuts and cigarettes that accompanies this has been reflected all the more in art and of course offers a completely different narrative than the femme fatale.
Jeanne Mammen is one of the early 20th century artists on display. She was educated in Paris and Brussels. Some of the sheets shown were created there. Can she create a “Homme fatale” with the heart stabber (Herzensstecher)?
Bertsch: She definitely does. The Herzensstecher is a figure that already fascinated me in the 2016 exhibition in Frankfurt, and that can be read as a counterpart to the overpowering femme fatale motif. Mammen is a very independent artist who brought together many spheres of influence in her work and had important teachers in Brussels in Jean Delville and Fernand Khnopff, both of whom are represented in our exhibition. Both of them addressed the relationship between the sexes in their art and in some cases already created androgynous figures. Mammen dealt productively with this symbolist heritage, but created independent, deviating images of masculinity and, above all, of femininity.
Markus Bertsch heads the 19th Century Collection at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and is curator.
Ruth Stamm is project assistant for the exhibition Femme Fatale: Gaze ā Power ā Gender.
Ina Hildburg-Schneider is an art historian and has been an editor at the Friends of the Kunsthalle since 2022.
Ina Hildburg-Schneider. “Blickmacht,” on the Freunde Der Kunsthalle website Nd [Online] Cited 03/03/2023
Dorothy Iannone (American, 1933-2022) The Statue Of Liberty 1977 ColoUr silkscreen on paper 32 9/10 Ć 23 3/5 in (83.5 Ć 60cm)
Dorothy Iannone (August 9, 1933 – December 26, 2022) was an American visual artist. Her autobiographical texts, films, and paintings explicitly depict female sexuality and “ecstatic unity.” She lived and worked in Berlin, Germany. …
The majority of Iannone’s paintings, texts, and visual narratives depict themes of erotic love. Her explicit renderings of the human body draw heavily from the artist’s travels and from Japanese woodcuts, Greek vases, and visual motifs from Eastern religions, including Tibetan Buddhism, Indian Tantrism, and Christian ecstatic traditions like those of the seventeenth-century Baroque. Her small wooden statues of celebrities with visible genitals, including Charlie Chaplin and Jacqueline Kennedy, especially display with the artist’s interest in African tribal statues.
The term is derived from the English word “able” and denotes discrimination based on physical abilities. People whose bodies are deemed less “able” due to a disability or impairment, are socially and spatially excluded and devalued. An ableist society adopts a ‘healthy’ body as the norm and sees all others as (negative) aberrations. Ableism is, for example, when a person in a wheelchair is dependent on the help of others because buildings aren’t constructed barrier-free. Or when blind students at universities or educational institutions donāt have full access to all teaching materials.
Antisemitism
Hostile attitude toward Jews. It presents in various forms ā from prejudice and verbal abuse to violence and murder. The gravest manifestation of antisemitism was German Nazism under Adolf Hitler, when between 1933 and 1945 more than six million Jewish people were murdered.
BIPoC
BIPoC is a political self-designation and short form for Black, Indigenous and People of Color. The short form BIPoC combines the communities referred to but also underlines their different experiences. Because of this, the term is sometimes used as an alternative for the term People of Color, to make Black people and indigenous identities explicitly visible and to emphasise that not all People of Color have the same experiences.
Black
Black is capitalised and is the politically correct and self-chosen term for Black people. The capital B emphasises social-political positioning within a society principally dominated by white people. The term Black is therefore not about biological characteristics but about socio-political affiliations. Black people are diverse and have completely diverse skin tones. As such, the term is more about highlighting the collective experiences that Black people have in this system and to emphasise their ongoing resistance.
Black Culture
The term Black Culture describes Black popular culture which deals mainly with entertainment, pleasure as well as knowledge and which is expressed via aesthetic codes and genres. It represents the identity and politics of Black cultures according to their beliefs, experiences and values. Although Black Culture encompasses all Black people worldwide, US-American Black pop culture is given the most attention.
Cis- and Transgenderism
Cis and trans are Latin words. Trans means “across” or “beyond” and, in relation to gender, refers to a person who does not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth and who experience themselves “beyond” it. Cis is, in a sense, the opposite. It can be translated as “on this side of” and indicates that someone lives within the boundaries of their assigned sex.
Classism
When recipients of state benefits are depicted as unwilling to work and unintelligent, this is an example of classism. Or when a working-class child is laughed at in university for not knowing certain trends or foreign words. Because people are not only discriminated against due to their gender and skin colour, but also because of the social and economic class they were brought up in. The term classism is even older than sexism and racism, the terms often associated with it: it was already in use in the 19th Century. Those who are poor and / or have less education due to a lack of resources are devalued in a classist society and have more difficulty accessing institutions seen as elitist.
Colonialism
Colonialism refers to a process of subjugation: one group of people goes to another group of people and imposes on it its rules, laws, language, customs, or religions in order to exploit it economically and culturally. When we speak of colonialism today, we mostly mean the process which began with the colonisation of the American continent by Europe’s ruling classes from the 15th century onwards and its negative consequences (such as racism, slavery, and exploitation) which can be still felt today.
Discrimination
Discrimination means the use of supposedly unambiguous distinctions to justify and rationalise unequal treatment. As a result of this unequal treatment, the persons discriminated against experience social disadvantages. Discrimination is an extensive system of social relationships, in which the discriminatory distinctions operate. Discrimination can therefore not be understood as a consequence of individual qualities. A by now very well known example for discrimination on a structural level is the Gender Pay Gap. This is the gap between the salaries of men and women as well as non-binary people for equal work. In 2022, women in Germany are still paid 18 percent less in terms of (gross) hourly wage than men.
Drag
The best-known examples are drag queens. A drag queen portrays, in a performative and artistic way, the appearance and behaviour of women, or rather femininity, a drag king the demeanour and outward appearance of men. This play with (exaggerated) femininity or masculinity is hence a show which is independent from the gender of the performer. The most famous drag practice is the embodiment of drag queens. These are often performed by queer men.
Empowerment
Mostly used as self-empowerment, it means to turn a disempowered situation into a more empowered one through certain actions. Often, this is a group process, for example, racially and sexually discriminated people who unite and fight for their cause and thus gain more confidence and, at best, more rights. This process may also take place symbolically, for example when young girls feel “empowered” by the encouraging writings of a feminist.
Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism means a view of the world that renders European history and so-called European principles as the primary measure of value. The term eurocentrism consequently makes evident global power relations and colonial historical thinking.
Feminism
Feminism is a social movement, which has already undergone several waves with different priorities, for example the achievement of women’s suffrage in the first wave or the legal equality of men and women in the second wave. While in the past many feminists assumed essentialist gender conceptions, meaning a clear distinction between only two genders ā female and male ā contemporary feminism is more inclusive. Often it no longer speaks of women but uses the term FLINTA*, which encompasses Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Trans and Agender and, with the asterisk, all others who identify as feminine. Earlier feminists had often focused on the concerns of middle-class, white, western women. But as part of an intersectional consideration of feminism, queer, PoC, trans and many more feminist voices have gained influence in recent decades. Initially, feminism was understood as the liberation of women from the patriarchy, but today it ideally refers to engagement for a world in which all forms of oppression, discrimination and exploitation will be abolished.
Gender and sex
Gender describes the social, lived, perceived sex of a person. Gender is an English term, but is also used in German, precisely when it comes to social characteristics and gender identity. Gender is not limited to what is assigned to us at birth on the basis of physical characteristics but rather refers to socially constructed attributes, opportunities and relationships.
Heteronormativity
When at day care little girls and boys, who are friends, are asked if they want one day to marry each other, this is an example of heteronormativity: a worldview in which heterosexuality is seen as the norm, as ‘normal’ and so what is desirable for everyone. A heteronormative society divides people into the binary categories of men and women, values men as more important and tends to be hostile towards queerness.
Hustle-Culture/Grind-Culture
Hustle-Culture/Grind-Culture describes a lifestyle, in which an aspiration to success and high-performance take priority. Long working hours and little rest are seen as the benchmarks of success.
Imperialism
Derived from the Latin word “imperium”, it means to pursue extended political and economic power outside one’s own (national) borders. By means of military or economic strategies, but also with the aid of culture and education, it is attempted to gain control over other countries or regions.
LGBTQIA* is an English-language collective term for ways of living and loving outside the heterosexual norm, which is now being used around the world. It is short form for Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Inter and Asexual. The asterisk stands for further identities that are perhaps not or not completely included therein, to leave no one out.
The male gaze
The male gaze is the concept of the male stare and stands for how systematically male control is applied and functions in our society. The term was coined by the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who in the 1970s, brought attention to the fact that women in films were mostly represented as objects of male heterosexual fantasy.
Misogyny
Misogyny literally means “hatred of women” (from the ancient Greek: “misos” = “hate”, “gyne” = “woman”) and has been prevalent around the globe for thousands of years as a derogatory to murderous attitude towards about 50% of the world’s population.
(Non-) Binarity
If something is binary, it functions like a two-part system: there is always only the one and the other, like the two sides of a coin. Both mutually define each other. A binary gender system assumes that there are only men and women, and that everyone must belong to one of these two categories. Non-Binarity (NB) breaks up this rigid structure. Non-binary people, sometimes also called enbies (from NB), identify neither as man nor woman.
Objectification
Objectification describes the dehumanising treatment of certain people as things, hence as objects. The most common example is sexist objectification by men, who reduce women to sex-objects.
Orientalism
The term Orientalism exposes how the world has been divided into two parts: on the one side there is the supposedly modern, enlightened West, the ‘Occident’, which sees itself as the centre and protagonist of world events. The ‘Orient’ finds itself on the other side, depicted by the West as ‘backward’ and ‘unmodern’, yet at the same time as ‘exotic’ and ‘sensual’. According to the Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said, who published his influential book titled Orientalism in 1978, the ‘Orient’ was invented by Europeans in order to better dominate and exploit these regions.
Othering
With othering, a usually more powerful group, or individual, dissociates itself from another group characterising it as ‘alien’ and ‘different’, thus devaluing it and connoting it negatively. The group higher up in the power structure thus discriminates against the people described as ‘different’ who cannot defend themselves against these attributions.
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system predominantly controlled and shaped by hetero-cis men. This means men determine the gender roles within society. Everything in the patriarchy is geared towards cis-men and they profit highly from such a system. Patriarchal structures are firmly established everywhere in our society. For example, for many in a heterosexual relationship it is still a given that the woman takes parental leave after a pregnancy to take care of the child while the father continues to work. Another example of patriarchal structures: the man is supposed to propose marriage. And after the wedding, the woman takes his name. A man’s power is thus always paramount, though emotions are denied to men. To cry, to be shy or insecure, or to take parental leave after the birth of a child ā according to the patriarchy this is not how ‘real’ men behave. In this way men too are restricted by the patriarchy’s toxic masculinity.
People of Color
The term People of Color, PoC for short, is a self-designation and does not describe, like the terms Black and white, any particular skin tones. It is a matter of a position in society and an umbrella term for communities that experience marginalisation due to racism. The experienced racist discriminations vary and are far-reaching. To be asked every day “where are you from?” or be told “but your English is very good” are examples of this, as well as not being invited for a job interview because of one’s name or being threatened or attacked on the train.
Queer
If something is “queer” in English, it is actually peculiar or odd. Since the end of the 19th Century the word has been used derogatively for people who felt sexually attracted to their own gender. From the 1980s, this negative meaning was consciously and provocatively reversed by activists and the term was used positively. Today, many people who do not love heterosexually and / or live cisgendered, describe themselves as queer.
Racism
If people have to endure marginalisation or even violence because of their origin or their appearance, for example because of their skin colour or their religion, that is racism. Racism can take on many forms ā for example anti- Muslim, anti-Black, or anti-Asian racism, that particularly targets these groups.
Sexism
Sexism is the discrimination against people because of their sex. “Blonde jokes”, unequal pay for equal work or unwanted wolf-whistles on the street ā these are all examples of sexism. Since we still live in patriarchal societies in which men dominate, sexism affects people perceived as female. But men too can be restricted by patriarchal gender stereotypes such as “boys don’t cry” or “men donāt know about babies.”
Stereotyping
Stereotyping is the generalisation of a group of people. In the process, individuals and the differences between them are not considered. Instead, all people in this group are reduced to the same, often negative, characteristics.
Stigmatisation
Stigmatisation is a distinctly negative demarcation from other individuals or groups within a society. This may happen in interpersonal relationships, such as bullying in school, or on a structural level, when for example People of Color repeatedly experience rejection when searching for apartments, or when people with specific therapy experience are denied civil servant status. In this last case, derogatory characteristics are attributed to a mentally ill person by large sections of society, denying them full social acceptance.
White
White is the socio-politically correct description for white people. It is not a biological term, rather a position in society. The terms Black, PoC and BIPoC are capitalised because they are self-chosen terms. The term white, on the other hand, is written in lower case and often in italics. The call for concrete labelling of white, hence white people and white privileges, became louder through antiracist movements. Because being white, from a white perspective, is generally the norm. In this way, being white is often made invisible, while all non-white people are made visible and portrayed as supposedly ‘different’.
White Supremacy
White Supremacy is the ideology that white people, and all their ideas, actions and opinions are superior to those of BIPoC. White Supremacy is a self-sustaining system in that it marginalises People of Color though colonialism, exploitation and repression and so guarantees white people a continuous position of power.
This accompanying glossary is a cooperation between Missy Magazine and Hamburger Kunsthalle. It is published on the occasion of the exhibition.
Glossary
Concept and Realisation: Sonja Eismann, Melanie Fahden, Selvi Gƶktepe, Josephine Papke, Ruth Stamm, Andrea Weniger Authors: Sonja Eismann, Josephine Papke Editors: Nanda Brƶckling, Melanie Fahden, Selvi Gƶktepe, Ruth Stamm, Andrea Weniger English translation: Matthew Burbridge
Another exhibition on this wonderful artist with additional photographs… one of four large exhibitions that have take place recently in Europe and America. The other three being:
Many thankx to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing at left, photographs from the Archives from Studio Photo National Photo: Rainer Iglar
Installation view of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing photographs from the series 70’s Lifestyle Photo: Rainer Iglar
Samuel Fosso (Kumba, CM, 1962 – Bangui, CF; Paris, FR) is one of the most renowned African photographers working today. He has been a key innovator in the great tradition of African studio photography since the mid-1970s, developing and successively refining a distinctive form of explicitly theatrical self-portraiture. Fosso’s self-portraits blend photography with performance and intertwine autobiographical themes and conceptions of the self with political and historical perspectives. The works articulate the complexity and diversity of contemporary identities and explore the relations between Africa and the East and West in the era of post-colonialism and globalisation.
Organised by the Generali Foundation at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the retrospective presents a selection from Samuel Fosso’s most important bodies of work. It is the first major exhibition of Fosso’s art in Austria and one of his first solo shows in the German-speaking countries.
Featuring elaborate makeup and lavish costumes, props, and sets, Fosso’s autofictional self-portraits are not so much self-dramatisations as self-transformations. He slips into roles and borrows identities ā from pivotal figures in history as well as social archetypes, many of them with deep roots in the globally networked visual memory. Embodying these icons and representations, he interrogates their impact on media, society, and politics, casting himself as a surrogate and catalyst. Fosso’s self-portraits are highly artificial scenic productions on the stage of the photography studio, where he is photographer, performer, and director in one. With analytical acumen and acting skills, he deftly exposes and undercuts social codes around bodies, attire, poses, facial expressions, and gazes and collective assignments of identity based on gender, sexual orientation, and ethnic and social background.
After a brief apprenticeship, Fosso opened his own studio for portrait photography in 1975, when he was thirteen. His business success rested on his flair for fashion and aesthetics and his talent for encouraging his clients to show off their personal style. Having spent his workday taking portraits of paying customers, he switched to the other side of the camera in the evening: taking inspiration from West African and African-American music, youth culture, and political rebellion, he donned tight shirts, extravagant bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and offbeat props to stage himself in unconventional and unconstrained poses. The result was Fosso’s early series of experimental black-and-white self-portraits now known under the title 70’s Lifestyle (1975-1978).
For many years, he shared his self-portraits only with private audiences. At the initiative of the French photographer Bernard Descamps, they made their public debut in 1994 at the inaugural Bamako Encounters ā African Biennial of Photography. The self-portraits added an important aspect to the tradition of West African studio photography, which garnered considerable attention in the 1990s. In 70’s Lifestyle, Fosso limns an alternative vision of masculinity by playfully subverting conventions concerning the depiction of bodies, gender, and sexuality. Sustained by a newfound self-confidence, Fosso’s self-portraits reflect a search for fresh conceptions of identity after the early period of postcolonial transformation in the 1960s; they are also a gesture of emancipation from the suffering he experienced as a refugee in Nigeria and under the repressive Bokassa regime in the Central African Republic. Artistic aspects such as theatricality and the appropriation of media imagery that Fosso develops in 70’s Lifestyle become constants in his work.
In 1997, Tati, a French department-store chain, commissioned Fosso to conceive a new body of works. Fosso developed a series of self-portraits in bold colours, some of which became iconic. Hewing to his characteristic style of elaborate and meticulously thought-through masquerade, disguises, and sceneries, now laced with an unmistakable penchant for satire, the Tati series shows him alternating between a number of controversial identities. For instance, he impersonates archetypes of African as well as Western societies like the tribal chieftain, the golfer, and the “liberated” African-American woman. The series’ centrepiece, Le Chef (qui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons) (The Chief [Who Sold Africa to the Colonists]), is both a tribute to African tribal leaders and a critique of the temptations of power in the age of European colonialism.
In later series such as African Spirits (2008) and Emperor of Africa (2003), Fosso’s work takes on a more pronounced political edge. In African Spirits, he embodies historic protagonists of the pan-African independence and civil rights movement including Angela Davis, Patrice Lumumba, Haile Selassie, Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali. The large-format self-portraits reenact historic pictures from magazines and newspapers. The satirical-critical element of Tati gives way to a thoroughly serious process of identification: bringing his protagonists to life, Fosso not merely draws a connection between their legacy and his own experience, he seems to positively fuse with them in the strikingly convincing impersonations. The portraits in African Spirits pay homage to the campaigners for civil rights and colonial independence while also suggesting their extraordinary gift for self-dramatisation and media savvy, which helped them frame and disseminate their political ideals.
In the series Emperor of Africa, Fosso grapples with the complexities of the power differential between China and Africa by casting himself in the role of the controversial Chinese revolutionary and Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. In his reenactments, Fosso portrays Mao not only as a liberator, but also as a symbol of a modern imperialism. African leaders initially welcomed China’s growing economic and cultural presence, but the exercise of the power that came with this presence has increasingly prompted concerns. “As a performer, Fosso is both subject and questioner, the man behind the mask, interrogating the imperial and the postcolonial in equal measure.” (Olu Oguibe)
Born in Cameroon, Samuel Fosso spent the first part of his childhood in Nigeria. After the Biafran War, he moved to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. Having completed a brief apprenticeship, the teenaged Fosso opened his own studio for portrait photography in Bangui in 1975, a business he ran until 2014. That year, his home was ransacked during an armed conflict in the Central African Republic, and the photographic archive of his commercial studio was destroyed; some of the material was later reconstructed. The artist lives and works in Bangui, Central African Republic, and Paris, France.
Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Installation view of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing photographs from the series Tati Photo: Rainer Iglar
Installation view of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing at left, photographs from the series Fosso Fashion, 1999; in the centre, photographs from the Archives from Studio Photo National; and at right, photographs from the series Tati 1997
Installation views of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing photographs from the series African Spirits Photo: Rainer Iglar
Installation view of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing photographs from the series Emperor of Africa Photo: Rainer Iglar
Exhibition dates: 11th November 2022 – 2nd April 2023
Co-curated by Skirball curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart and Lara Rabinovitch, renowned writer, producer, and specialist in immigrant food cultures. The exhibition was coordinated at New-York Historical by Cristian Petru Panaite with Marilyn Kushner, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections.
Ei Katsumata (American) Carnegie Deli, New York, NY 2008 Photo by Ei Katsumata /Alamy Stock Photo
Culture and its history ā past, present and future ā is always so fascinating!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the New-York Historical Society for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Our special exhibition examines how Jewish immigrants, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, imported and adapted traditions to create a uniquely American restaurant and reveals how Jewish delicatessens became a cornerstone of American food culture.
Organised by the Skirball Cultural Center, “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli examines how Jewish immigrants, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, imported and adapted traditions to create a uniquely American restaurant and reveals how Jewish delicatessens became a cornerstone of American food culture.
The exhibition explores the food of immigration, the heyday of the deli in the interwar period, delis and Broadway, stories of Holocaust survivors and war refugees who worked in delis, the shifting and shrinking landscapes of delis across the country, and delis in popular culture. On display are neon signs, menus, advertisements, deli workers’ uniforms, and video documentaries. The local presentation is enriched with artwork, artefacts, and photography from New-York Historical’s collection along with restaurant signs, menus and fixtures from local establishments, mouthwatering interactives, and a Bloomberg Connects audio tour. And families: Be sure to pick up a copy of our kid-centric guide to the exhibition in the gallery.
Text from the New-York Historical Society website
2nd Ave Deli // “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli
New-York Historical Society
What makes the 2nd Ave Deli so special? The New-York Historical Society takes a trip to the Midtown landmark to talk to the owner, managers, workers, and customers about the special magic of the decades-old delicatessen where they “prepare the foods that our mothers and grandmothers made.”
James Reuel Smith (American, 1852-1935) Louis Klepper Confectionary and Sausage Manufacturers, 45 E. Houston Street, New York c. 1900 Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
James Reuel Smith (1852-1935) was an American photographer and amateur historian who worked in the late 19th century to early 20th century. He was known for his documentary photographs of historical springs and wells in New York City before they were buried beneath the concrete of the rapidly growing city. Many of these natural water resources disappeared as the New York municipal water system developed.
Smith’s photographs documented a vanishing way of life in urban America. Drawing and fetching water had been an essential activity of daily life prior to the development of the modern municipal water system. In the 1870s New York City undertook efforts to eradicate the natural open wells and springs as they were perceived to be hazardous to health. The official municipal source for city water was the Croton Aqueduct which was endorsed by the NYC sanitation officers, rather than local neighbourhood wells and springs.
Hester Street, Lower East Side c. 1900 Postcard Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Unknown photographer (American) Anne Russ Federman serving customers at New York’s Russ & Daughters, with Hattie Russ Gold in the background 1939 From the collection of Russ & Daughters
Benjamin Segan (American, 1924-2017) Letter to Judith Berman, April 23, 1944 Caserta, Italy Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
Benjamin David “Ben” Segan was born in New York City on 27 August 1924, to Jacob and Lillian Segan, immigrants from Vilnius, Lithuania. Ben attended George Washington High School in Manhattan, where he met his future wife, Judith “Judy” Berman. During his senior year he attended school by night to work in a defense plant by day.
Nineteen-year-old Ben was drafted into the United States Army as a private on 28 April 1943. His initial processing took place at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he began his correspondence with Judy, writing to her almost daily until he left the service. By mid-May 1943 he was at Camp Croft, South Carolina, where he remained in basic training through late September and to operate radio equipment.
By October 1943 he was sent to Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, and from there shipped to Italy to join the 93rd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. In Europe he served in Italy, southern France, and Germany. During the Battle of Monte Cassino (a.k.a. the Battle for Rome), January-May 1944, he worked in the 93rd’s communication section.
The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, but Ben was still there as late as November 10th (the date of his last letter in the collection), when he wrote from the French port of Le Havre, unsure of which ship he’d be on or indeed when it would sail.
Ben was honoured with the American Service Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Service Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.
Once home he married Judy on 10 March 1946 at Temple Ansche Chesed on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They raised two children and worked together for many years in New York City’s Garment District.
Lionel S. Reiss (American born Poland, 1894-1988) Frankfurter and Lemonade from Manhattan Crosstown series c. 1945 Watercolour, black ink, white gouache, and graphite on paper 11 Ć 8 in. (27.9 Ć 20.3cm) New-York Historical Society, Foster-Jarvis Fund, and contribution of Harry Goldberg
Lionel S. Reiss (1894-1988) was a Polish-American Jewish painter born in Jaroslaw, Poland (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he studied commercial art. His family had moved to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. As immigrants to the United States, Reiss’ parents joined the ranks of other Eastern European Jews who were fleeing their native countries at the start of the 20th century. Lionel Reiss’ family settled on New York’s Lower East Side neighbourhood and Reiss himself spent the majority of his life in the city. Reiss worked as a commercial artist for newspapers, publishers, and a motion picture company. Eventually he became art director for Paramount Studios and is credited to be the creator of the Leo the Lion logo of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
Reiss became known for his portraits of Jewish people and landmarks in Jewish history, which he made during his trip to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East in the early 1920s. Being American and Jewish himself, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the Old World. In 1919 Reiss temporarily left the United States to travel to the aforementioned regions, and recorded the everyday life that he encountered in the ghettos. His trip resulted in exhibitions in major American cities.
At the dawn of the Holocaust in 1938, Reiss, who had long returned to the United States, published his book My Models Were Jews, in which he illustratively argued that there is no such thing as a “Jewish ethnicity”, but the Jewish people are rather a cultural group, whereby there is significant diversity within Jewish communities and between different communities in different geographical regions. Reiss was therefore presenting an argument against what he considered to be a common misconception that existed about the Jews. Later works included a 1954 book, New Lights and Old Shadows, which dealt with “the new lights” of a reborn Israel and the “old shadows” of an almost eradicated European Jewish culture. In his last book, A World of Twilight, published in 1972, with text by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Reiss presented a portrait of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
Reuben’s Delicatessen Menu [autographed by Arnold Reuben] 1946 Patricia D Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society
This fall, New-York Historical Society presents “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli, a fascinating exploration of the rich history of the Jewish immigrant experience that made the delicatessen so integral to New York culture. On view November 11, 2022 ā April 2, 2023, the exhibition, organised by the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where it is on view through September 18, examines how Jewish immigrants, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, imported and adapted traditions to create a cuisine that became a cornerstone of popular culture with worldwide influence. The exhibition explores the food of immigrants; the heyday of the deli in the interwar period; delis in the New York Theater District; stories of Holocaust survivors and war refugees who found community in delis; the shifting and shrinking landscapes of delis across the country; and delis in popular culture. On display are neon signs, menus, advertisements, and deli workersā uniforms alongside film clips and video documentaries. New-York Historicalās expanded presentation includes additional artwork, artefacts, photographs of local establishments, and objects from deli owners, as well as costumes from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a mouthwatering interactive, and a Bloomberg Connects audio tour.
“It’s our great pleasure to present an exhibition on a topic so near and dear to the hearts of New Yorkers of all backgrounds,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical. “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli tells a deeply moving story about the American experience of immigration ā how immigrants adapted their cuisine to create a new culture that both retained and transcended their own traditions. I hope visitors come away with a newfound appreciation for the Jewish deli, and, with it, the story of the United States.”
“Whether you grew up eating matzoball soup or are learning about lox for the first time, this exhibition demonstrates how Jewish food became a cultural touchstone, familiar to Americans across ethnic backgrounds,” said co-curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart. “This exhibition reveals facets of the lives of Central and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that echo in contemporary immigrant experiences. It shows how people adapt and transform their own cultural traditions over time, resulting in a living style of cooking, eating, and sharing community that is at once deeply rooted in their own heritage and continuously changing.”
“I’ll Have What She’s Having” is co-curated by Skirball curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart along with Lara Rabinovitch, renowned writer, producer, and specialist in immigrant food cultures. It was coordinated at New-York Historical by Cristian Petru Panaite with Marilyn Kushner, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections. The exhibition explores topics including deli culture, the proliferation of delis alongside the expansion of New York’s Jewish communities, kosher meat manufacturing, shortages during World War II, and advertising campaigns that helped popularise Jewish foods throughout the city.
Unique to New-York Historical’s presentation is a closer look at the expansion of Jewish communities at the turn of the 20th century, not just on the Lower East Side but also in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. In the 1930s, some 3,000 delis operated in the city; today, only about a dozen remain. The exhibition gives special attention to dairy restaurants, which offered a safe meatless eating experience; a portion of the neon sign from the Famous Dairy Restaurant on the Upper West Side is on display. Salvaged artefacts, like the 2nd Avenue Delicatessen storefront sign and vintage meat slicers and scales from other delis, are also on view, along with costumes by Emmy Award-winning costume designer Donna Zakowska from the popular Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Visitors are invited to build their own sandwiches named after celebrities, such as Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker, Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman, and Sammy Davis Jr., in a digital interactive inspired by menu items from Reuben’s Deli and Stage Deli. On the Bloomberg Connects app, exhibition goers can enjoy popular songs like “Hot Dogs and Knishes” from the 1920s, along with clips of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia discussing kosher meat pricing, 1950s radio ads, and interviews with deli owners forced to close during the pandemic lockdown.
In a nostalgic tribute to departed delis that continue to hold a place in the hearts of many New Yorkers, photographs show restaurants that closed in recent years. Eateries include the Upper West Side’s Fine & Schapiro Kosher Delicatessen, Jay & Lloyd’s Kosher Delicatessen in Brooklyn, and Loeser’s Kosher Deli in the Bronx. An exuberant hot dog-shaped sign from Jay & Lloyds Delicatessen, which closed in May 2020, and folk artist Harry Glaubach’s monumental carved and painted signage for Ben’s Best Kosher Delicatessen in Queens, also pay tribute to beloved establishments. The exhibition concludes on a hopeful note, highlighting new delis that have opened their doors in the past decade, such as Mile End and Frankel’s, both in Brooklyn, and USA Brooklyn Delicatessen, located steps from the site of the former Carnegie and Stage Delis in Manhattan.
Support
“I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli is organised and circulated by the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California. Exhibitions at New-York Historical are made possible by Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang, the Saunders Trust for American History, the Evelyn & Seymour Neuman Fund, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. WNET is the media sponsor.
Press release from the New-York Historical Society
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978) Save Freedom of Worship: Buy War Bonds 1943 Poster; offset lithograph 28 x 20 inches Public domain
World War II poster encouraging individuals to buy war bonds. The poster includes an image by Norman Rockwell and was published by the United States Government Printing Office in Washington, DC, in 1943.
The poster depicts men and women of various races and faiths, including a woman with rosary beads, with hands clasped in prayer. Norman Rockwell was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine for more than four decades. The Four Freedoms or Four Essential Human Freedoms is a series of four oil paintings that Rockwell produced in 1943 for reproduction in The Saturday Evening Post alongside essays by prominent thinkers of the day. Later they were the highlight of a touring exhibition sponsored by the Saturday Evening Post and the United States Department of the Treasury. The Four Freedoms theme was derived from the 1941 State of the Union Address by United States President Franklin Roosevelt in which he identified four essential human rights (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear) that should be universally protected. The Office of War Information printed four million sets of Four Freedoms posters by the end of the war. World War II was a massive conflict which involved a majority of the nations of the world, and became the most widespread and deadliest event in human history; it had profound ramifications politically and economically that lasted into the next century. …
Posters were used extensively throughout the war by countries on both sides for purposes such as propaganda, morale, and the broad dissemination of information. The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a U.S. government agency created during World War II to consolidate government information services. It operated from June 1942 until September 1945. It coordinated the release of war news for domestic use, and, using posters and radio broadcasts, worked to promote patriotism, warn about foreign spies and recruit women into war work. The office also established an overseas branch, which launched a large scale information and propaganda campaign abroad. The War Finance Committee was placed in charge of supervising the sale of all bonds, and the War Advertising Council promoted voluntary compliance with bond buying. More than a quarter of a billion dollars worth of advertising was donated during the first three years of the National Defense Savings Program. The government appealed to the public through popular culture. Norman Rockwell’s painting series, the Four Freedoms, toured in a war bond effort that raised $132 million.
Unknown photographer Rena Drexler on the day of her liberation from Auschwitz Poland, 1945 Private collection
Installation view of the exhibition “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli at the New-York Historical Society showing at centre, a photograph by an unknown photographer Rena and Harry Drexler at Drexler’s Deli, North Hollywood, CA (c. 1970s, below)
Unknown photographer (American) Rena and Harry Drexler at Drexler’s Deli, North Hollywood, CA c. 1970s Private collection
Unknown photographer (American) Vienna Beef Factory, inspecting sausages Chicago, IL c. 1950s Vienna Beef Museum
Unknown photographer (American) Vienna Beef Factory, curing pastrami Chicago, IL, c. 1950s Vienna Beef Museum
Paula Weissman’s Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union Books 1958-1983 Courtesy of Paula Weissman
Installation view of ads from the “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye” campaign (1960s). Despite the campaign’s success, the ads relied on both ethnic stereotypes and a narrowly focused white, Eurocentric view of Jewish identity that excluded Jews of Color. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.
With a self-reflection that is arguably as Jewish as its subject, the exhibition doesn’t shy away from an awareness that the deli, created by Eastern and Central European immigrants, is an almost exclusively Ashkenazi institution, and thus limited in its view of Jewish life and culture. Take, for example, the commentary on the posters featuring the famous “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s” series of rye bread ads. Considered progressive for their time because of the diversity of the models, in retrospect the ads suggest that racial diversity among the Jewish community is an anomaly, which is not the case.
Howard Zieff (photographer) You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye [New York : s.n., 1965?] Photomechanical print (poster): offset, colour Library of Congress Public domain
Howard Zieff (photographer) You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye [New York : s.n., 1965?] Photomechanical print (poster): offset, colour Library of Congress Public domain
Menu from 2nd Avenue Delicatessen (outside cover) New York City, 1968 Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York. Historical Society
Menu from 2nd Avenue Delicatessen New York City, 1968 Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York. Historical Society
Katz’s Delicatessen Napkin 1980-2000 Paper Overall: 5 Ć 5 in. (12.7 Ć 12.7cm) Gift of Bella C. Landauer
Unknown photographer (American) Abe Lebewohl with hero, from the 2nd Ave Deli, New York, NY c. 1990
Unknown photographer (American) Snack at Manny’s Delicatessen Chicago, IL, 2010 Image Professionals GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo
New-York Historical Society 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street) New York, NY 10024 Phone: (212) 873-3400
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Seated man in a bra and stockings, N.Y.C. 1967 Gelatin silver print
Since the demise of my old website, my PhD research Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (RMIT University, Melbourne, 2001) has no longer been available online.
I have now republished the third of twelve chapters, “In Press”, so that it is available to read. More chapters will be added as I get time. I hope the text is of some interest. Other chapters include Historical Pressings which examines the history of photographic images of the male body; Bench Press which investigates the development of gym culture, its ‘masculinity’, ‘lifestyle’, and the images used to represent it; and Re-pressentation which alternative investigates ways of imag(in)ing the male body and the issues surrounding the re-pressentation of different body images for gay men.
Dr Marcus Bunyan March 2023
“In Press” chapter from Marcus Bunyan’s PhD research Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male RMIT University, Melbourne, 2001
Through plain language English (not academic speak) the text of this chapter investigates the photographic representation of the muscular male body in the (sometimes gay) media and gay male pornography. In the title of the chapter I use the word ‘press’ to infer a link to the media.
Keywords
photography, muscular male body, muscular male body in the media, appearance, lifestyle, narcissism, advertising, media, appearance, consumer capitalism, visible bodies, gay male, gay male pornography
Sections
1/ Consuming the Appearance 2/ Consumer Capitalism and Narcissism 3/ Visible Bodies 4/ Gay Male Pornography 5/ Alternatives to American gay male pornography 6/ Alternative bodies
Word count: 6,884
In Press
“Not only do the media shape our vision of the contemporary world, determining what most people can and cannot see and hear, but the very images of our own body, our own selves, our own personal self worth (or lack of it) is mediated by the omnipresent images of mass culture…”
Douglas Kellner1
From the fervent explosion that saw the birth of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s there emerged a period of amazing freedom and growth for many gay people. Sexualities that were previously hidden behind a veil of secrecy were now being expressed and fought for out on the streets. Sex, especially the desire of gay men for casual sex, was now out in the open. A new body image emerged from this revolution, one that was neither male nor female, but androgynous. This new androgynous body image can be seen as a reflection of societal changes that were happening during the swinging Sixties, the era of “free love.” You could swing, i.e., move both ways sexually. The joining together of male and female, gay men and lesbians was a very positive force in the formation and acceptance of new identities.
But the honeymoon was soon over.
The idealism of the early gay liberation movement did not last long. Gay men, long persecuted for their camp and feminine ways sought images to combat the long held stereotype of the limp-wristed pansy who had abdicated his male power to others through his effeminacy. Manliness came out of the closet of the physique magazines to express the longed for power of patriarchy that gay men sought. There was an enormous surge in the production of homoerotic imagery and gay men responded by imitating heterosexual masculinity in an ironic way; the ‘clone’ image was born: boots, tight fitting jeans, check shirts, short hair and usually a moustache to top off the image. Anybody could go out and purchase such an outfit. It did not discriminate along class or social boundary lines and the ‘look’ was relatively ageless. This clone image extended to other identities that included the leather man, the sailor, the construction worker & the cowboy. But the image was still ‘butch’; skinny or fat guys really need not apply.
The pop group ‘The Village People’ are a perfect example of the camp irony that infused the gay scene at this time. Their song “Macho Man” echoes the desire for gay men to be seen as butch: “I wanna be a macho, macho man ā I wanna be, a macho man,” they sing parading around in their tight fitting and revealing outfits. By making their stereotypical cloned images of the cowboy, construction worker, cop, etc., … incredibly camp they undermined the credibility of traditional masculinity. But soon this camp ironic comment was devoured by the dichotomy of existing sex and gender differences. As Dennis Altman has said,
“In the early days of the movement, both women and men saw the process of gay liberation as intimately related to the blurring of sexual and gender boundaries, a move toward androgyny … Our biggest failure was an inability to foresee the extent to which the opposite would happen and a new gay culture / identity would emerge that would build on existing male / female differences.”2
The body and its visibility became increasingly important as a site of construction that was and is crucial to a persons identity and self-esteem. Appearance is critical to this construction.
I suggest that in contemporary gay culture the muscular body of the gay male has stopped being a ‘camp’ ironic comment on ‘normal’ masculinity and instead the body and photographic images of it have become a marketable asset, a commodity3 in a selling and surveillance exercise. Men advertise for sex by displaying their muscular body for admiration and desire by others and observe themselves and others reactions to it. Identity is now mediated by acceptance of their image and by ‘measuring up’ to a perceived image ideal. Media started to make use of this new availability of the male body as an objectified image of desire as it opened up new markets to companies. It encouraged men to undertake face lifts, tummy tucks, pectoral implants and hair removal, to purchase underwear, toiletries, clothes and all manner of goods so that they too could approach the archetypal ‘ideal’ of the masculine male.
David Lloyd Untitled Nd Cover of Naked Men of San Diego calendar Santa Monica: The Phenomenon Factory, 1998
Today images of the smooth, muscular, white male body are everywhere in advertising, encouraging us to purchase more, to help us get closer to the ideal. As David Kellner has said in the quotation at the beginning of the chapter, the images of mass culture have become omnipresent. Naked men now adorn calendars containing full frontal nudity of smooth muscular white bodies all sporting the latest in designer erections! You can have your man any time of the day, any time of the year, when you get poked in the eye with this calendar.
The muscular Billy Doll, complete with huge anatomically correct penis, (read ‘scientifically’ or how big a gay man’s penis should be) is the contemporary idealisation of earlier stereotypical gay fantasy images, a kind of male Barbie doll on steroids for gay men. I believe that in today’s incarnation of the gay male body the camp ironic comment present in the fantasy images of an earlier generation has disappeared.
Behavior Saviour Untitled ‘Billy postcard’ 1998
“Born to love you!! Billy is an anatomically correct adult doll standing 32 cm tall, weighing 320g. Choose from ā Master Billy, Sailor Billy, Cowboy Billy and San Francisco Billy! Billy, the world’s first out and proud gay doll, comes beautifully packaged in a high quality presentation case with photographic backdrop.”
Billy Doll c. 1997
It has been replaced by a desiring consumerism, in this case the desire for a muscular form complete with jaw dropping penis, the envy of every gay man. And after all, consumerism is a form of self-obsession. Makes you feel a little insecure, eh? Billy doesn’t have an inch of fat or any body hair, is perfectly proportioned (particularly his huge endowment) and is made of plastic. No fear of infection here! Women have been fighting this kind of body stereotyping with the Barbie Doll for years and now the gay male has his own equivalent.
Oh but Billy ā he’s born to love you!!
Consuming the Appearance
Sex sells. The appearance and image of hard bodies sells. They are consumed by individuals and societies eager to attain what they offer; individuality, success, popularity and ‘lifestyle’. But these images are not individual, they are ‘the same’, to be consumed by every-body. Below are three examples of the current genre of male body photography; all bodies are of the same homogenised type. Only the photographers are different, but they might as well have been the same.
Michael Childers Untitled Nd Blue Magazine Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 68
Jason Lee Untitled Nd Blue Magazine Sydney: Studio Magazines, April 1997, p. 108
Rob Lang Untitled Nd Blue Magazine Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 93
These “types” of photographer (ie. ones who take generic photographs of the muscular male body) and many more like them feature heavily in Blue Magazine, a glossy publication aimed at the gay ‘lifestyle’ demographic. Of course most photographers would like to think that their work contains a deep revealing: mystery, sensuality, emotional bonds, etc., … but speaking as a photographer myself, I believe that this type of body photography (with its self-absorption and narcissism), isolates the body from communication with others. The bodies are complete(d) within their own sensual gratification. The construction of these images is formulaic, the body forming a masturbatory landscape endlessly repeated by different photographers in slightly different poses that appeal to a gay erotic consumerism. There is no individual identity present in photographer or subject contrary to what Jason Lee would like to think.
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd Yves Saint Laurent advertisement Blue Magazine Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 9 1999
I suggest that these images are no longer just a fashion, but that they are here to stay. I believe that the problems associated with the idealisation of these male images (for example steroid abuse, low self-esteem, body dysmorphia), can be compared to the eating disorders that women have succumbed to in their attempts to attain the waif like super-model look of many contemporary women fashion models.
Some social commentators have argued that the multiplicity of images available to the public (in consumer culture) open up new identities and new areas of becoming, deconstructing the hierarchy of what is seen as valuable in body image types. Central to this hierarchy is the ability of dominant groups (such as supermodels or muscular mesomorphs) to prove that their lifestyle7 and body type are desirable, are superior and worthy of emulation. Chris Schilling has observed that,
“The rapid internationalization and circulation of consumer and ‘lifestyle’ goods threatens the readability of those signs used by the dominant to signify their elite physical capital. These issues raise doubts about the continuing management and control by the dominant class of those fields in which physical capital is recognized and valorized. If fields become saturated with increasing body images and social practices which are presented as constituting valuable forms of physical capital, then their structure may change. Unless dominant sections of society are able to classify these styles into existing hierarchies, and have these classifications recognized as valid, then the logic of differences in which taste in cultural and consumer goods and lifestyle activities are held to be oppositionally structured is threatened. In contemporary consumer society, then, we may be witnessing processes which will make it extremely difficult for any one group to impose as hegemonic, as worthy of respect and deference across society, a single classificatory scheme of ‘valuable bodies’.”8
I disagree with this argument.
It is still all too easy for the dominant group within a subculture or society to impose and identify a ‘valuable’ body. This can be seen in any of the above images and the way they are used by all types of artists, media & advertisers to attract ‘value’ status. The body of the muscular mesomorph attracts a projected desire that media and advertisers rely on. It is still very difficult to put forward alternate body images that can be seen as fantasies, both desirable & ‘valuable’. Since most males would like to have a muscular mesomorphic body shape this body type does have social status. Covers of gay magazines such as Outrage (below) sell far more copies when they have an attractive, muscular smooth young man on the front of them.
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd 2(x)ist underwear advertisement in Blue Magazine. Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p.15
Darren Tieste Geoff Nd Outrage Magazine cover, “Making Porn” play and underwear feature in Outrage Magazine No. 189. Melbourne: Bluestone Press, February 1999. Front cover / p. 63
Here Outrage kills three birds with one stone. Firstly, they have their attractive semi-naked cover model to help sell the mag. Secondly, there is an article on the play in which the model / actor is acting (different photographs). This promotes both the play and fills the magazine. Thirdly, the image is repeated inside the magazine with other models / actors in designer underwear as part of a photographic feature. Nice one Outrage!
This and other contemporary images of muscular male bodies are unlike the clone image of an earlier generation because the ‘look’ is now ageist, elitist and requires great sacrifices in order to come close to possessing the ‘ideal’. Great value is put on appearance, youth, beauty, and lifestyle to the possible detriment of everything else.
Consumer Capitalism and Narcissism
Consumer capitalism encourages the consumption of items that promote a socially valued model. This encourages narcissism9 in the individual as each seeks to tailor their appearance through the consumption of such items. The individual reflexively watches how they ‘measure up’ to the model of a socially valued self and modulates what they consume so that they can be seen as popular, attractive & possessing a good ‘lifestyle’. Anthony Giddens notes,
“Consumption addresses the alienated qualities of modern social life and claims to be their solution: it promises the very things the narcissist desires ā attractiveness, beauty and personal popularity ā through the consumption of the ‘right’ kinds of goods and services. Hence all of us, in modern social conditions, live as though surrounded by mirrors; in these we search for the appearance of an unblemished, socially valued self.”10
I suggest that looking at the self in a mirror may not be the same as seeking the truth of the Self in reality; after all, a mirror image is only a reflected surface, seen in reverse. This reflection, this appearance, dominates your social ‘value’ in contemporary society. Appearances are marketable, and the more unblemished a product you have the better. Across the many spectrums of life it is a buyers and sellers market, whether it is the body, the underwear or the aftershave. They have what you want; you might have what they want. What price a sale? Maybe it’s all an illusion with mirrors?
(Please see the Eye-Pressure chapter for more information on the gaze).
Anonymous photographer Fresh, Pure, Cool ā It’s milk Nd Style Council milk advertisement in Large Magazine Issue No.8. Melbourne: Large Publications Pty Ltd., 21st March 1997, back cover
Anonymous photographer Fresh, Pure, Cool ā It’s milk Nd Style Council milk advertisement in Large Magazine Issue No.8. Melbourne: Large Publications Pty Ltd., 21st March 1997, pp. 1-2
The surface of such an identity construction hides the cost of its production. Seemingly, no effort is required to possess such a socially valuable body and ‘lifestyle’. Advertising promotes these socially valued bodies and lifestyles; this can be seen in the imagery and advertising message of the two milk advertisements. In the above advert the (phallic) glass of milk is linked to the smooth muscular body of the man holding it, who is the only person dressed in white. The milk and the man who is about to drink it are both, by association, fresh, pure, cool. The surrounding crowd is not staring at the milk, they are staring at, and desiring, him. On the left well-heeled matrons eye him with open desire and behind a group of (gay) men, all of a similar smooth, muscular body-type stare with open mouths and obviously lust after his sculptured torso. This tableaux reinforces the message that such a body is fresh, pure and cool, and is seen as a ‘valuable’ status symbol by society. It’s possible that by drinking milk you too can acquire such a possession!.
In the second advert a women and two men are again surrounded by ‘others’, people that could be regarded as freaks, with most of them having strange hair, over the top make-up and wearing dark clothes. They are not ‘normal’. When the advertising agency was casting for this campaign in Melbourne I went along ā they wanted the weirdest looking people they could find. In contrast the male model at right reveals his smooth sculptured torso to the desiring gaze of an admiring viewer, much as in the first advertisement above.
This is the desirable body and the desirable ‘lifestyle’ to which we should all aspire!
Visible Bodies
“Visible bodies are caught in webs of communication irrespective of individual intentions and these systems can exert a considerable influence on the behaviour of those involved.”
Tom Burns11
Media advertising makes use of these webs of communication to reinforce it’s system of consumer control. Sometimes advertisers do not openly deploy these lines of communication. In the example below Sheridan sheets has, perhaps subconsciously perhaps deliberately, targeted the gay ‘lifestyle’ demographic without making it too obvious. In the first photograph a beautiful, smooth, tanned young man lies in bed happily smiling at the camera …
Anonymous photographer ‘Sheer Poetry’ by Sheridan Nd in Sheridan Australia brochure. Mordialloc: DDI Adworks, 1998, pp. 17-20
On turning the page we find that this image is followed by a double page spread of towels in assorted colours. On the next page we find another gorgeous smooth, tanned young man reclining in bed smiling at the camera. Funny isn’t it that the sheets on both beds are identical, that one boy is photographed from one side of the bed and the other boy from the opposite side. They couldn’t be in the same bed could they, heaven forbid!
Instead of showing the boys in bed together which would not appeal to the wider heterosexual male or female purchaser, the designer of the brochure has cleverly suggested the possibility of homosexuality through the use of visible bodies in a disguised web of communication. The symbolic representation of such photographs (with their implicit language of sexual contact) can be recognised by gay men without the overt nature of homosexuality being thrust in the face of the general public. It took me some time to realise what the designers had done. I wonder how many gay men have consciously realised this association? I think most would only perceive and understand this message projection, this web of communication on a subconscious level. Still this subconscious recognition only serves to reinforce societal values of what is seen as worthy of esteem, what is desirable in a lifestyle, through visible bodies, possessions and in this case, sheets. It is the insidious nature of media advertising that it evens out the bumps of difference, that is, it standardises and shapes levels of diversity, style and taste into what is socially acceptable and desirable.
The advertising media that targets consumers are not the only one’s guilty of promoting a limiting desirability of ‘ideals’ through photographic imagery, the representation of valuable male bodies. Equally to blame are some well known health organisations, both gay and straight, that use ‘the same’ stereotypical muscular mesomorphic bodies to illustrate their health campaigns.
Stephen Paul Are Men from Mars? c. 1998 ‘Momentum’ Postcard Bristow and Prentice Response Advertising Melbourne: Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Mens Health Centre Inc. c. 1998
Stephen Paul Loves me, Loves me not c. 1998 ‘Momentum’ Postcard Bristow and Prentice Response Advertising Melbourne: Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Mens Health Centre Inc. c. 1998
Anonymous photographer Now I’m immune! Nd ‘Get Vaccinated’ Postcard Australian College of Sexual Health Physicians 1997
To be fair, there is an awareness amongst quite a few people at The Victorian AIDS Council / Gay Mens Health Centre in Melbourne, Australia, of the need for the imaging of a broader cross section of body-types in health promotions. Still, this does not stop the images on postcards such as the two above (designed by an advertising company), appearing with regular monotony. The back of “Are Men from Mars?” asks you to discover for your yourself what makes men tick by joining one of the many VAC courses. From the card image it would seem that what makes men tick is a muscular well defined body, clenched hands (symbol of phallic masculinity)12 and beer!
Once introduced to the VAC young gay men may attend the ‘Young and Gay’, ‘Boyant’ or ’18 and under’ courses. In an interview with Jim Sotiropolous13 I asked him about the courses, media advertising and body image commodification:
MAB: OK, so one example I heard about as that you looked at people’s underwear to see whether they were wearing Calvin Klein.
JS: The only thing I can relate that too is that in the first week we use autograph sheets as an icebreaker. A sheet has 6 questions on it and one of these questions is who owns a pair of CK underwear.
MAB: Why is that there? This is interesting to me because of the commodification of the body and consumer culture ā if you can’t have the body you can buy the underwear!
JS: Because people talk about it. It is something that we know will get people saying “Well, yeah I do.” So they will sign it. Its no use asking very vague questions and you won’t get a response, so you have to ask very specific questions because we just know they will respond. They know about it. I think it is stronger than a gay focused strategy. You can’t miss the billboards and the advertising.
MAB: So they have been attracted by those images of men and gone out and bought this underwear pre-knowing about the gay community and what’s expected of a gay image?
JS: Yes ā the images are very erotic in the CK ads. I was in New York recently and there is a billboard that stretches 2 blocks with the range of CK underwear, its amazing!
MAB: Is this self-reflective narcissism good for how people feel about their own bodies?
JS: No ā I think that there a lot of people who know they will never achieve that ideal but I’m not sure …
MAB: … whether that’s a bad thing
JS: Up to a point, yeah.
MAB: I’m not positing it as a totally bad thing.”
I suggest that the very presence of this kind of question (whether it elicits a response or not), still smacks of a certain elitism and the promotion of a particular ‘lifestyle’ as desirable. Calvin Klein models are, after all, the epitome of the clean cut, well groomed, tanned, successful visible male body promoted by an advertising web of communication. This is how bodies unintentionally get caught up in webs of communication which affects the behaviour of all bodies, in this case through the proposition of such a question. This enmeshment causes problems not only for the gay male but also for the heterosexual male; increased levels of body dissatisfaction, eating disorders and steroid abuse have been noted by researchers.14 This may be due in part to the desirability and valued social status of muscular mesomorphic body images such as those used in the Calvin Klein advertisements.
I believe that the search for self-identity through consumption is, in the end, a self defeating exercise. It is like looking into a thousand mirrors at an image of infinite regress never able to find the original image, that essence of inner Self that is ours only in the most insightful of moments. WE are the ones that create the images in the media, the mirror images of how we would like to be. As Lakoff and Scherr have said,
“Who, in the first place, are these faceless hordes? Who is ‘society’ but you and me? And the ‘media’ are not active, it is well known, but reactive; what they discern that their viewers / hearers / readers want, they provide. If we, the viewing public, are not stimulated to buy by the blandishments dangled before us, the media will be instantly responsive ā there will be a whole new set of blandishments dangled faster than the eye can blink. So if the same tired messages, the same recycled pictures, pass across our weary retinas year after year, we cannot in all honesty blame the media.”15
We can only blame ourselves.
Gay Male Pornography
“If one were to write the ultimate cliched Australian coming out story, it would be about a boy born in a hick town who has the lithe body of a ballet dancer. Engaged to be married, he instead becomes a flight steward. The scales of heterosexuality drop from his eyes and he moves to Sydney to reinvent himself via the Yellow Brick Road of pumping at the City Gym, over-tanning at Tamarama, pulling beers at the Albury, and joining that bare-chested Roman garrison who shoulder their way across dance party floors. There is only one thing for him left to do: preserve the dream forever by becoming an American (which means the world) video sex icon.”
Peter Jordaan16
Following on from the previous text we might be able to say that we have only ourselves to blame if the media reinforce images of traditional ‘virile’ masculinity in a consumer society. It is we who have created these erotic male fantasy images, images that express our desires, not the media. But it is also true that capitalism and consumerism rely on the sale of product and constantly enlarge and amplify product appeal by advertising, thrusting these fantasy images into our faces until they become an overpowering omnipotent archetype. The male body in the contemporary gay porn industry is a prime example of such an archetype, the (re)enforcement of masculine power in the desirable image of the muscular mesomorphic body. How did this (re)enforcement of masculine power in the body image of gay porn stars come about?
Anonymous photographers Solo Man Nd Super 8mm pornography films advertisement in Super Star Studs No. 2. New York: No publisher, Nd (early 1970s) Back cover Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
During my research at The One Institute in Los Angeles I investigated the type of body images that appeared in the transitional phase from physique magazines of the mid-late 1960s into the early gay pornography magazines of 1969-1970 in America which occurred after the Supreme Court ruling on obscenity. I wanted to find whether there had been a crossover, a continuation of the muscular mesomorphic body image that was a favourite of the physique photographers into the early pornography magazines. From the evidence of the images in the magazines I would have to say that there was a limited crossover of the bigger muscular bodies but most bodies that appeared in the early gay porn mags were of the youthful, smooth, muscular ephebe-type body image.
As can be seen from the images (above) most of the men featured in the early gay pornography magazines and films have bodies that appear to be quite ‘natural’ in their form. Models are mostly young, smooth, quite solid with toned physiques, not as ‘built’ as in the earlier physique magazines but still well put together. Examining the magazines at the One Institute I found that the bodies of older muscular/hairy men were not well represented. Perhaps this was due to the unavailability of the bigger and older bodybuilders to participate in such activity? In the male bodies of the c. early-1970s Super 8 mm pornography films (above) we can observe the desirable image of the smooth youthful ephebe (males between boy and man) being presented for our erotic pleasure.
We can also observe in the bodies of Mark Hammer, Mike Powers and Bob Noll the presence of a bigger more muscular body. These bodies are an early indication of the later development that was to take place in the body images of men in gay pornography ā a shift to older more ‘masculine’ bodies, probably as a reaction to the stereotype of the effeminate limp-wristed pansy and also the fear of being seen as a pederast, that is a person who has sex with underage boys.
In the late 1970s another revolution started to take place; towards the end of the decade porn films became more widely available on videocassette. This made porn much more accessible to the gay consumer and allowed the expansion of the gay pornography industry. Instead of having to buy Super 8 movies and use home projectors that took an age to set up gay men could now have their ‘hit’ of pornography in a quick, convenient package.
Anonymous photographer Perfect Room Service c. 1976 Homo Action 14 Color-Climax Corporation Copenhagen: Peter Theander, 1976 Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Not all male bodies (especially those that appeared in the early European pornography films and magazines), conformed to the ‘ideal’ of the hairless muscular ephebe, as can be seen in this magazine ‘still’ photograph taken from a Danish Super 8 mm gay pornography film. Curiously the magazine is printed in Australia.
Early gay male pornographic films have a distinctly ‘underground’ flavour but some managed to capture the frenzied passion that drives such erotic encounters where the people really want to have sex with each other. In the early 1980s the amateurism of the early films was replaced by the professionalism (and money making power) of such directors as Steve Scott, Matt Sterling, John Travis and William Higgins who still managed to capture this sexual frenzy. Gone are the really youthful body types of the earlier magazines and films ā smooth, white, older muscular bodies now dominate.
William Higgins is one of my favourite directors for his unique shooting style. He makes use of oblique angles, incredible distorted close-ups of blood engorged penises (Sailor in the Wild, 1983), slow motion repeats of cum shots from many angles, and jump cuts from one carnal scene to another without a break (Class Reunion, 1982). This surreal celluloid confusion adds to the mystery and excitement of the scenes and the participants really seem to enjoy their sex; they wince as the cock goes up their arse and there is a certain ‘reality’ about the whole sex thing.
Even in these early 1980s films the star has numerous sexual partners and fucks his way through the whole video having multiple ejaculations within the space of a few minutes running time. At the drop of a hat muscular men drop their pants and their loads all over the place and some of the scenes are really horny!
As with any pornography though, you have to trawl through heaps of dross before you find the gems that get you going. Multiple orgasms by the stars of pornographic videos help reinforce compulsive sexual behaviour17 that is learnt by gay men to be a societal performance ‘norm’.18 Withdrawing before cumming enabled the director to capture the ‘money shot’ (ejaculation) for the viewer; gay male sex on video became not a passionate intimate union between two men but a performance, a display of shooting skills (both physical and pictorial) which presents the body to best advantage. Later in his career William Higgins also pioneered the shaved bum which epitomises the pumped up, perfectly groomed young white male available for plumbing lessons.
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd Cover image from The Devil and Danny Webster pornography video Champions Video of Australia catalogue Issue 31. Canberra: No publisher, 1997, p. 12
“Unable to compete with the ‘sun-bronzed gym gods’, Danny spends his nights alone watching old movies ā hoping for a miracle … “
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in Take it All! They Ate the Whole Thing! Vol. 1 No. 1. American: No place or publisher, Nd Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Rare image of thin bodies in gay male pornography.
Gay men wanted to be seen as virile ‘real’ men in reaction to the stereotype of the effeminate pansy. This emphasis on the possession and display of a muscular body became even more prevalent in pornography with the onset of the HIV / AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s.
Driven by the fear of disease and the anxiety, insecurity and dis-ease of being thin and being seen as possibly infected gay men started going to the gym and ‘pumping’ up in ever increasing numbers. A big, healthy, muscular body couldn’t possibly be infected with the virus! Body hair was out as it was a sign of experience and maturity and therefore of disease according to Michelangelo Signorile.19
Healthiness was in. Gay men with thin bodies (such as those above) or bodies like that of Danny Webster (above), hoped for a miracle otherwise they would be left on the shelf, never having any sex! Either that or they went to the gym and capitulated to the emerging stereotype. There was apparently no hope if you didn’t ‘fit’ the ideal. But this is not the real world, this is a fantasy! Many gay men gave in to this fantasy becoming ‘simulations’, carbon copies if you like, of their porn star heroes. Lots take illegal steroids to get close to their ‘ideal’.
Other gay men have carried on as they have always done; living their lives as positively as they can; incorporating their sexuality as part of their identity; coping with feelings of inadequacy that such bodily facades can generate. Perhaps if these bodies were seen as ‘unnatural’ gay men would get over some of their attraction towards them. Perhaps if they accepted them as an artifice, a deception; that the material (steroid abuse20 and possible HIV virus contraction to name two) and psychological (high / low self-esteem leading to depression and anxiety) cost of their production is hidden behind the rose coloured lens of the camera or the surface of the body, then their erotic power would be lessened. I suggest that gay men DO realise that these images are fantasies but still strive to attain the fantasy in themselves and in the bodies of their partners.
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd Image from The Big Thrill pornography video Nd Cover of Champions Video of Australia catalogue Issue 46, 1998
“… when a dozen handsome young college guys arrive at the Kingsley Institute, the first thing they do is have a big pillow-fight, get incredibly horny, take their clothes off and have an all-in jerk off. After that, things get increasingly out of hand. All the young men are exceedingly cute and built like young gods, so they can link up in any combination they care to and make a very handsome couple. And they do care to. The viewer soon loses track of who’s doing what with who, or indeed of who is who, but it doesn’t really matter. These boys fit together like parts of a well-lubricated machine. They appear to have been selected for something more than their writing skills, then waxed and polished till they glow.” (My italics)
~ Rod Pounder21
In the above quotation we can see how the bodies in contemporary male pornography have become interchangeable, replaceable one with another. The image above is also a good example of the phenomenon of the homogenised body stamped out of the same mould. I believe that in contemporary gay male erotica it is not so much the sex that matters but the display of the body for admiration. There is a certain stiffness (pardon the pun) of performance now. The frenzied passion of sex has gone replaced by the surface, the positioning of the body for the benefit of the camera. It’s all to a formula. Big pricks have become even more important and stars have their dicks cast in rubber so the viewer at home can purchase and enjoy the satisfaction of taking their heroes prick (or a ‘simulation’ of it) up his own arse whilst watching the video at the same time.
Gay pornography depicts gay sex as ‘manly’ because gay men want to see themselves that way even though one man is fucking another man, supposedly queering ‘normal’ heterosexual masculinity. I believe this is not gay men ironically challenging traditional masculinity but the confirmation it’s power over them. As noted earlier, the body becomes a phallus ā hard as granite and as tough as steel ā signifying and embodying a mythological power. These bodies are built ‘tough’ despite the fact that you could probably drive a semi-trailer up their rear end and they probably wouldn’t feel a thing! Now, in contemporary male pornography, the range of body types is much narrower. Of course there are still specialist videos catering to the leather subculture, shaving fetishists, young men fantasies (mainly videos from Germany), wrestling, hairy men, toys, black men, etc., … but these form a small specialist minority group of the video market. In the main the videos that fill the Champions catalogue, for example, feature models that are constructed of smooth, prime white beef.
John Travis Untitled Nd Cover image from Billy 2000: Billy Goes to Hollywood pornography video Studio 2000, 1999
Recently I watched a video called Billy 2000: Billy Goes to Hollywood, directed by John Travis. The video features 4 couples and one solo performance. The story, as far as it goes, is that gay men go into a shop and sees the Billy doll (discussed earlier) and starts fantasising about meeting a man who looks exactly like the doll, including having his large ‘anatomically correct penis’. Low and behold we fade out into dream sex scenes between different men and different versions of the doll which has now come to life, wearing exactly the same clothes as the doll does. What follows are, I think, four of the most boring gay sex scenes I have ever seen. There is no passion in the sex and all four couples copy exactly (deliberately?) the same positions by rote: man sucks dolls dick, man sits on dolls dick, man gets fucked from behind by dolls dick, doll ejaculates all over mans back. This is formulaic sex. As we can see in the above image the muscular male body is now simulating the ‘ideal’ embodied in a doll! Great marketing ploy to link the sale of the doll and the video together…
As Peter Jordaan has observed,
“There is a desperate need for more gay romance. A video like 1992’s Matt Sterling effort ‘Scorcher’ stands out simply because one of the couples in it actually look with pleasure into each other’s eyes while they are fucking … dick-tugging videos which also tug at the heart remain rare delights indeed.”22
I most certainly agree.
Alternatives to American gay male pornography
As an alternative to American videos three names stand out in the pantheon of porn directors. The first is Kristen Bjorn was has made a reputation for himself and his videos by photographing men from all over the world in apparently natural, spontaneous sexual situations. His videos feature large casts of men from different ethnic backgrounds but all his actors are power- fully built, masculine men. The second is Jean-Paul Cadinot. His videos, usually set in reform schools, school dormitories, scout troops and army barracks feature young ephebes having their way with each other with a lusty abandon not usually present in American videos. Lastly there is George Duroy, pioneer of EuroAmerican videos such as Accidental Lovers (1993) and Sauna Paradiso (1994) that have been shot (using American money) in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain using East European men.
His videos include a combination of athletic, young performers who are all smooth; from the slim and toned ephebe to the more muscular built lad. And well built they are. The images below are a good examples of both body types. The boys, for they are not men in the American sense of the porn video word, really do seem to enjoy having sex and ‘making it’ with each other in a loving and intimate way. Which is great!
George Duroy Untitled Nd Image from Sauna Paradiso pornography video Falcon International Collection 1994 in Douglas, Jerry (ed.,). Manshots: The Firsthand Video Guide Vol. 7 No. 2. Teaneck, N.J.: FirstHand Ltd., December, 1994, p. 46.
Milan Demko, Victor Gravek, Pavol Zurek and Thomas Novak compare stiff dicks
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd Image from Lucky Lukas pornography video Blue Diamond Video Services advertisement in ‘Meetmarket’ section in Outrage Magazine No. 189. Melbourne: Bluestone Press, February 1999, p. 1
Dean Durber, in an article for Blue Magazine called “New Wood” observes,
“Even if the innocence of much cuter and younger faces is forced off the shelves, the recent interest in intimacy and tenderness cannot be ignored. We might yet see older men on screen who actually appear to enjoy what they do. Especially if there’s money to be made and pleasure to be had.”
Why forced off the shelves? Apparently because of concerns over pederasty (love of young boys) and the perceived age of the ephebes involved. But here’s the rub ā it’s all in the name of money in the end. It’s all about selling product even if you do have a good time. The fantasy scenarios are just that ā idealised fantasies. They are set up to sell product and use body image to do so. These EuroAmerican videos just use the fresh new faces and bodies of muscular young men to appeal to a different market demographic.
Let me comment on just one more thing that happens in a lot of porn videos. I have noticed that it is usually the bigger guy (either dick or body size) that fucks the smaller guy therefore marking him as the man ā no matter who is making the video. Commenting, unwittingly, on this disparity in body size Stan Ward in his review of Sauna Paradiso says that when the boys in the above photograph have a fourway, “Soon enough the boys are separated from the men. Novak and Demko continue the oral action while Gravec gives Zurek a royal screw up the arse … For the money shots, the boys and men come together …”23
Does that mean that if you have a smaller body that you are not a man? Does it mean that to be a gay man you have to partake in anal sex? It would seem that a big cock or its substitute, a big body, will always classify you as a man and not a boy and to participate in anal sex will make you a man not a boy. But whether its boys or men, gay pornography is there for one major reason ā to make money within a media driven, image conscious consumer society.
Alternative bodies
There are, however, one group of photographs that have appeared in some porn mags that do not represent the ideal of the perfect muscular mesomorph or the smooth, young ephebe. These are photographs that accompany the messages of ordinary gay men wanting to meet other men for sex and companionship. These are the images of themselves they want to show to the general public. How they perceive themselves. How they are posed reveals small contexts of identity, even though their actual identity is hidden because of the masking of the face (No. 3 is ingenious in this regard; it uses the flash of the camera in the mirror to obliterate the facial features). The backgrounds and attire (when present) can tell a lot about a person.
(left to right)
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No. 104. Enmore: No publisher, 1984, p. 48. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No.100. Enmore: No publisher, 1984, p. 46. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No.121. Enmore: No publisher, 1985, p. 48. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No. 101. Enmore: No publisher, 1984, p. 47. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No. 118. Enmore: No publisher, 1985, p. 47. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Numbers 1 and 3 remind me of the photographs of Diane Arbus, shot in that person’s lounge room and bedroom respectively (see the photograph at the beginning of the chapter and below). In the background of No.3 we can see an ironing board, a wooden bed head and the bed itself. In the foreground we can see a full cup of tea or coffee sitting on the dressing table to which the mirror is attached.
No.’s 2, 4, and 5 feature men who are obviously into leather, cock rings, boots and whips; a poster of a man stares over the shoulder of the figure in No. 2 adding to the menacing air ā I’m watching you! Note in all the images the bodies are of an everyday, ‘natural’ type. Types that we can see down the beach or at the sauna that are not toned and tanned but older, plumper, taller or skinnier, and for this reason they have an attractiveness which is solely their own.
These bodies have been lived in, they have earnt every wrinkle and crease, have survived their life experiences and are still sexually valuable in their own individuality and difference. These bodies are not fantasy material in the ‘normal’ understanding of what a contemporary male fantasy body should look like. This is because in the buyers and sellers market of contemporary gay society big, buff, and beautiful is the perfect dish of the last two decades and will continue to be so as long as gay men continue to desire this ‘ideal’.
Dr Marcus Bunyan 2001
Bodies are unstable … and how frightening, that can be, and how those two emotions comprise desire.”
Jesse Dorris. “Jimmy DeSana’s Transgressive Vision of Life and Desire,” on the Aperture website December 14, 2022 [Online] Cited 19/12/2022
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968 Gelatin silver print
Footnotes
1/ Kellner, D. “Critical Theory, Commodities and the Consumer Society,” in Theory, Culture and Society 1, 3: 1983, p. 66, quoted in Evans, David. Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1993, p. 48.
2/ Altman, Denis. The Homosexualisation of America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982, p. 211, quoted in Chapkis, Wendy. Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance. Boston: South End Press, 1986, p. 136.
3/ This is not a new concept and the lament that the gay body is used as a commodity and marketable sexual tool and not exclusively joined in affection and love has been around since well before Stonewall within the gay community. Of course sex and love are NOT mutually exclusive but some people seem to think that they are:
“Not too many years ago it was unheard of to dress in a “gay” manner or to act in any way which might lead others to suspect that you were a homosexual. Now, almost overnight, we have “gay” bars “gay” dance clubs, “gay” books, even business firms openly soliciting the business of homosexuals.
While this is good in the sense that it gives the homosexual a right to live like the rest of humanity, it has led to problems which were heard of in the past. Perhaps a slave needs his chains let loose slowly if he worn them for many years. Perhaps the “gay” world was not ready for this freedom or maybe it came to quickly. However, the homosexual now finds himself in a position where his “public image” is not that it should be. The blame for this lies mainly with those who flaunt their homosexuality in the faces of the general public.
A homosexual, as defined by most medical authorities, is one who seeks love and sexual satisfaction from his or her own sex. The majority of today’s homosexuals (or so it seems to the general public) could best be described as persons who look for as much sexual satisfaction from as many of their own sex as they can, without giving their love to any of them. This has come about because of the so-called “emancipation” mentioned previously. A homosexual can gratify his passions so easily now that the finer things in life seem to be cast aside … Inside the “gay” bars, the tourist or outsider can walk in, and with no effort, behold the spectacle of people openly trying to make a one-night stand with each other. Outside the bar, the same tourist or outsider can hear those who failed in their mission inside the bar bargaining with someone on the street for the use of his body for the night … This is the image today’s homosexual is giving to the general public …
Why not get back to caring for one another? Hurt each other if you have to ā you can start over again and learn from your mistake. Stop chalking up your conquests as if sex were a commodity.
Why not see how long you can stay with one person? Put love back into homosexual life.
Stop poking fun at the person who seeks love and friendship instead of one-night stands.
Let the love that is locked away and going to waste inside yourself be let loose and given to someone who will return it with interest. Don’t be afraid of your emotions. Get back to making the “gay” life what it should be ā two people living together who need love of their own kind.”
Lady Beesborough. “The Public is Watching,” in The Greyhuff Review. 1st Edition. Minneapolis, Minn: Directory Services Inc., 1965, pp. 24-25. Sourced at The Kinsey Institute, University of Indiana, USA.
Even at this date (1965, which is pre-Stonewall), some people obviously saw gay male sex (and inherently the gay male body) as being a promiscuous commodity, which is quite amazing because nothing much has changed today. It is still a sellers market and gay men still go for it! The advice not to be afraid of your emotions is a good one ā but that will naturally open gay men up to experiences, including many sexual interactions and not just love! As I comment elsewhere in the Re-Pressentation chapter, gay men are paradoxically both seeking sexual release and intimate connection whilst at the same time being afraid of that connection and revealing themselves to others.
4/ Swift, Michael. “Darkside,” in Blue Magazine. Sydney: Studio Magazines, April 1997, p. 106.
5/ Parry, Tracey. “Access All Areas,” in Blue Magazine. Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 66.
6/ Massengill, Reed. “Sand Man,” in Blue Magazine. Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 90.
7/ “Lifestyle refers to a relatively integrated set of practices chosen by an individual in order to give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity. The more tradition loses its ability to provide people with a secure and stable sense of self, the more individuals have to negotiate lifestyle choices, and attach importance to these choices.”
Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, pp. 181-183. See also Giddens, A. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p. 2, 5, pp. 80-81.
8/ Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 143. See also Featherstone, Mike. “Perspectives on Consumer Culture,” in Sociology 24(1). 1990, pp. 5-22.
9/ Below are four quotations about the definition and effects of narcissism. “Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints [especially gay men] does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power and charisma. For the narcissist the world is a mirror…” (My italics)
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978, p. 10.
“Central to the narcissistic personality is an orientation to the body as youthful, enduring and constitutive of the self. The narcissistic body is open to new experiences, but only as long as they can be easily appropriated and consumed to reinforce its own sense of self as sacred and immortal.” (My italics)
Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 194.
“Narcissism presumes a constant search for self-identity, but this is a search that remains frustrated, because the restless pursuit of ‘who I am’ is an expression of narcissistic absorption rather than a realisable quest … Narcissism treats the body as an object of sensual gratification, rather than relating sensuality to communication with others.”
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. California: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 170.
“According to what I said about the nature of love, the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.”
Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, p. 118.
10/ Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. California: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 172.
11/ Burns, Tom. Erving Goffman. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 38, quoted in Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 85.
12/ “The penis can never live up to the mystique implied by the phallus. Hence the excessive, even hysterical quality of so much male imagery. The clenched fists, the bulging muscles, the hardened jaws, the proliferation of phallic symbols ā they are all straining after what can hardly ever be achieved, the embodiment of the phallic physique.” (My italics)
Dyer, R. Only Entertainment. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 116, quoted in Stratton, Jon. The Desirable Body. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 195.
13/ Interview with Jim Sotiropolous, Melbourne. 23/09/1997. Co-ordinator of 3 different programmes at The Victorian AIDS Council / Gay Mens Health Centre, Melbourne, Victoria.
14/ For a discussion of these issues please see Mishkind, Marc, Rodin, Linda, Silberstein, Lisa and Striegel-Moore, Ruth. “The Embodiment of Masculinity: Cultural, Psychological and Behavioural Dimensions,” in Kimmel, M. (ed.,). Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1987, pp. 37-47. An extract from this paper can be found in Appendix A of the Bench Press chapter.
15/ Lakoff, Robin and Scherr, Raquel. Face Value: The Politics of Beauty. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 292-293.
16/ Jordaan, Peter. “The Naked VCR,” in Outrage Magazine No. 131. Melbourne: Bluestone Media, 1994, p. 45.
17/ “Some people are so horny and desperate to have a connection that they will do anything to have sex, especially with someone who they find attractive. Sometimes sexually they even step over the line of physical attraction … and this can indicate compulsive sexual behaviour. I’M SO HORNY I JUST HAVE TO HAVE SEX!”
Interview with Greg Adkins. Melbourne. 02/10/1997. Outreach Beats Education Officer at The Victorian AIDS Council / Gay Mens Health Centre, Melbourne, Victoria.
18/ “We find it more important to preserve and foster the myth of sexuality as mechanical process than we do to develop any kind of detailed or sensitive phenomenology of sexual experience (ie., establishing how in fact people experience their sexual needs and feelings). I suspect that a vast proportion of people live in secret unhappiness about their sexuality because they are unable to meet what are in truth entirely mythical ‘norms’ of ‘performance’.”
Smail, David. Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984, p. 113.
19/ Signorile, Michelangelo. Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997, p. 68.
20/ “Big Ears has heard of at least two cases of ‘roid rage in Sydney this week as the countdown to Mardi Gras and bodily perfection reaches its climax. One Big Ears associate minding his own business in a well known Oxford St. venue this week was set upon by an incredible hulk wielding a broken bottle after he tried to help up the hulk’s substance affected, brick shit-house of a friend who had toppled over and landed on top of him, all but crushing him to death. Meanwhile, in an inner Sydney gym, another Big Ears associate witnessed a similar savage and unprovoked attack this week. Enraged that someone was using a machine he wanted to use, brick shit-house #3 dragged off the poor girl in question, threw her against the wall and all but choked her until gym staff managed to pull him off. Hello? Mardi Gras is supposed to be a party not a battle to the death. Gone, it seems, are the days when all you needed to get yourself through an all night party were a jazzy pair of shorts and a bubbly personality…”
Big Ears. Melbourne Star Observer. Melbourne: Bluestone Media, 26th February, 1999, p. 15.
21/ Rod Pounder. “Video Review: One Hot Summer,” in Brother Sister Magazine. Melbourne, 9th May, 1997, p. 29.
22/ Jordaan, Peter. “The Naked VCR,” in Outrage Magazine No. 131. Melbourne: Bluestone Media, 1994, p. 50.
23/ Ward, Stan. “‘Sauna Paradiso’ review,” in Douglas, Jerry (ed.,). Manshots: The Firsthand Video Guide Vol. 7 No. 2. Teaneck, N.J.: FirstHand Ltd., December 1994, p. 46.
tongue, long flickering tongue drenched in blood scours inside the cup rapacious for more blood thirsty luck sucks souls of men thorn and star spirit of insect bizarreāunique cannibal
“A lot of humans forget we are organic entities, the same as every other creature on the planet, and we’ve only been here for a short time. I am very pessimistic about the plight of beings. We don’t learn much, I mean, we’ve been wreaking havoc as they did in the Middle Ages. We also have bigger weapons. One thing I am not pessimistic about is the ability of nature to heal itself.”
Peter Booth quoted in Ashley Crawford View from the Booth blog 29 November 2003
PETER BOOTH at TarraWarra Museum of Art
Introductory wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Painting 1974, and at centre Painting 1975 1975 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
While the TarraWarra survey features a collection of Booth’s works from the 1970s to the 2000s, it opens with a work in the ‘Doorway’ series: Painting, 1974. It’s a canvas covered with shades of black. As the curator says, “Just near the top, there’s this very thin horizon line of red, and it feels like there’s this massive magma just behind the surface that’s starting to seep through.” I’m told that written on the back of some ‘Doorway’ paintings is an instruction: “Never hang more than six inches from the floor.” As Fitzpatrick explains, “If you hang the work a little lower for the viewer … it becomes more immersive, and this painting is the opening work in the exhibition with the idea of the doorway as a threshold.”
This minimalism is compelling. “The ‘Doorway’ series could be about nothingness, or it could be a void,” says Fitzpatrick, “but voids are also where things are generated from ā so they could be about an idea of fullness … you could almost see them as a kind of dark mirror.” In a rare interview with Australian artist, writer and curator Peter Hill, Booth humbly discusses how the ‘Doorway’ series was “influenced by what was going on in the art world at the time, in reduction, minimalism and colour field painting”.
With its shrouded figure standing before a highly volatile and fiery landscape, Painting 1977 conveys a forceful and undeniably apocalyptic vision. The painting finds a literary counterpart in the work of one of Booth’s favourite writers at the time, the novelist Doris Lessing with whom he found an affinity in their shared dystopian outlook. With its powerful blend of fantasy and reality, her 1971 novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell recounts the tale, vividly narrated in the first person, of a psychiatric patient’s hallucinatory journey through a dangerous and disturbing world of environmental despoliation, societal collapse, violent conflict and cosmic cataclysm.
Wall text from the exhibition
Doris Lessing (British-Zimbabwean born Iran, 1919-2013) Briefing for a Descent into Hell 1971 Vintage book cover published 1981
Peter Booth (Australian born England, b. 1940, Australia from 1958) Untitled (Daughters) c. 1976 Ink on paper 11 x 12.5cm Private collection
Untitled (Daughters), c. 1976, is a composition which originated in Booth’s visits to an inner-city park in Melbourne where he would take his young daughters to play. Here, through the intense rhythms of his lifework and cross hatching in black ink, and the introduction of symbolic forms such as a whirlpool and arrowhead, this everyday scene is imaginatively transformed into a mysterious, nocturnal realm. While his daughters play in the foreground, the artist has turned to face a rising moon on the horizon and there is a sense that he is being magnetically compelled to embark on the path which leads in its direction.
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at centre, Painting 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Peter Booth Painting 1978 from the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Peter Booth became known for his black, minimal ‘doorway’ paintings of 1970-74. Yet by 1977 he had given up this style and begun to record the world of his dreams and nightmares in a series of apocalyptic, visionary landscapes. Booth’s paintings suggest that we are on the edge of another dark age. His paintings are brutal representations of his bleak dreams and fantasies. In an age of nuclear threat Booth’s work has a monumentality which is evocative of the final conflagration mentioned in The Book of Revelations. Painting 1978, challenges and disturbs the viewer by the artist’s choice of colour and method of painting. The dramatic black and red, yellow and white composition suggests both an industrial and a natural wasteland. The heavy impasto paint texture describes, with vigour and intensity, flames, explosions, and unidentified nightmarish images. Contradictory forces pull us into the central inferno below the glacial mountain peaks, and showers of rock explode towards us. Is it the artist himself who stands with his back to us, mesmerised by the scene, while grotesque metamorphosing figures stare out at us?
Booth’s subject matter largely concerns the Australian landscape, both urban and rural, and the relationship between environment and individual, as well as the individual’s capacity to create and destroy. And also what the world will be like in the future, humans as mutants.
Booth’s landscapes are charged with emotion and symbolic meaning. Memories of his childhood in the blackened industrial landscape of Sheffield seem to infuse the work, especially his well-known apocalyptic figurative paintings, which look like images of the end of the world; illustrations for The Book of Revelation. These images contain an intense image of anxiety, evoking the aftermath of some terrible destruction, vividly pictured with menacing forms and agitated, heavily applied brushstrokes.
An example is Painting 1978 which has been described as challenging and disturbing the viewer by the artist’s choice of colour and method of painting. “The dramatic black and red, yellow and white composition suggests both an industrial and a natural wasteland”. The heavy impasto paint texture describes, with vigour and intensity, flames, explosions, and unidentified nightmarish images. Contradictory forces pull us into the central inferno below the glacial mountain peaks, and showers of rock explode towards us.
Is it the artist himself who stands with his back to us, mesmerised by the scene, while grotesque metamorphosing figures stare out at us?” Peter Booth has centred many of his paintings around his childhood in Sheffield England where he grew up during the war years and their aftermath.
Anonymous. “Peter Booth,” on the Art History Essay website Nd [Online] Cited 07/02/2023
Peter Booth (Australian born England, b. 1940, Australia from 1958) Drawing (Figure with Insect Tail) 1982 Pastel and casein on paper 17.3 x 12.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchase, Victorian Foundation of Living Australian Artists, 2010
More than just figures of fantasy, Booth’s curious amalgams and mutated figures often express his personal insights into the interrelatedness of all living beings. With his closed eyes and restful expression, the metamorphic figure in Drawing (Figure with Insect Tail) appears contented with his hybrid condition, affirming the artist’s belief that humans “share something with these creatures … we are part of the same thing.”
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Ghost of a Flea c. 1819 Tempera heightened with gold on mahogany 214 x 162 mm Tate Bequeathed by W. Graham Robertson 1949
Another physiognomic “vision” ā “the stuff of delirium and nightmare, [which] taps into the unconscious, internalised sublime” ā was the painting The Ghost of a Flea (c. 1819) used to illustrate John Varley’s Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828). In studying the work of Blake for this posting, I found it instructive to look at Blake’s preparatory sketches for his works which can be found online. They give you a good idea of the spontaneity of the drawing and the ideas that arise, transformed into the finished work. Here in the graphite on paper drawing of The Ghost of a Flea we can see Blake’s initial vision, a more static, pensive figure with serrated wings which morphs into a muscular, blood sucking monster set on a cosmic stage, of life framed by curtains and a shooting star. As the vision appeared to Blake he is said to have cried out: ‘There he comes! his eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hand to hold blood, and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green.’
Marcus Bunyan. “Visions of divine damnation” on the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Part 2, February 2020 on the Art Blart website [Online] Cited 09/02/2023
Artist and astrologer John Varley encouraged Blake to sketch the figures, called ‘visionary heads’, who populated his visions. This image is the best known. While sketching the flea, Blake claimed it told him that fleas were inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men, confined to the bodies of insects because, if they were the size of horses, they would literally drain the population. Their bloodthirsty nature is shown by the eager tongue flicking at the ‘blood’ cup it carries. This intense disorientating image, the stuff of delirium and nightmare, taps into the unconscious, internalised sublime.
William Blake, “The Ghost of a Flea c. 1819-20,” in Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding (eds.), The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, January 2013
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing from left to right, Painting Two 1984, Painting 1984 and Leadman 1986 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the blasted landscape of Painting Two we are presented with a vision of a volatile world in the process of unnatural mutation. As an artist who has always been keenly attuned to what’s happening environmentally and politically, this painting forcefully conveys the fallout of a colossal act of destruction, reflecting widespread concerns in the 1980s over the dramatic escalation of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union and the threat of atomic warfare.
In this work a hulking grey figure, with his fierce determination and body braced for battle, appears to be biologically adapted for survival in a desolated terrain. As the title suggests, this unrelentingly bleak and polluted atmosphere has eventuated from the unbridled destructive ambitions of the toxic Leadman who has transformed the world in his own image.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing from left to right, Leadman 1986, Painting 1984 and Painting 2012 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) Thenot Remonstrates with Colinet Thenot Under a Fruit Tree Thenot Remonstrates with Colinet, Lightfoot in the Distance Colinet Departs in Sorrow, a Thunder-Scarred Tree on the Right Blasted Tree and Blighted Crops The Good Shepherd Chases Away the Wolf Sabrina’s Silvery Flood Colinet’s Fond Desire Strange Lands to Know 1821 From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921 Wood engravings on thin, white handmade wove paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1960 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) Blasted tree and blighted crops 1821 From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921 Wood engraving on thin, white handmade wove paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1960
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) The Good Shepherd Chases Away the Wolf 1821 From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921 Wood engraving on thin, white handmade wove paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1960
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) Colinet’s Fond Desire Strange Lands to Know 1821 From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921 Wood engraving on thin, white handmade wove paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1960
Cabinet text from the exhibition Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A survey exhibition of the work of the renowned Australian artist Peter Booth
With a remarkable career spanning several decades, Melbourne-based Booth is a unique voice in Australian art. This new survey of paintings and works on paper is the first major public gallery exhibition of Peter Booth’s work since the NGV retrospective in 2003 and features a number of the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to 1990s, alongside important recent works from the past two decades.
The exhibition is presented thematically, honing in on and highlighting particular motifs, subjects and moods which have become hallmarks of Booth’s expansive oeuvre: stillness and turbulence, alterity and alienation, mutation and hybridity, the absurd and the grotesque, the road and the ruin, and the despoliation and the resilience of nature.
A small group of abstract paintings from the mid-1970s at the start of the exhibition provide a prelude to an important series of gestural paintings which mark the beginning of the artist’s journey into the highly expressive landscape and figure subjects which have characterised his practice since that time.
The exhibition progresses through Booth’s vivid imaginings of an apocalyptic world characterised by grotesque, unsettling, and at times absurd scenes of human and hybrid figures in varying states of apprehension, aggression and conflict. These works will be accompanied by a small selection of prints by William Blake, James Ensor, Francisco Goya, and Samuel Palmer, visionary artists who have been important touchstones for Booth and with whom he shares a number of affinities.
This survey also brings together important works from the past three decades to convey humanity’s often fraught and ambiguous relationship to the natural world, revealing Booth’s extraordinary capacity to transmute his intensely personal perceptions of the mysteries and forces of nature and the folly and hubris of human endeavours, into exceptional and deeply compelling paintings and drawings.
PETER BOOTH, curated by Anthony Fitzpatrick, is generously supported by The Balnaves Foundation.
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art website
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing from left to right, Untitled 1997, Painting 1982 and Painting 1981 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In Doris Lessing’s 1974 novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor, in the aftermath of an unspecified disaster, civilisation gradually disintegrates into anarchy as hordes of people form ad hoc tribes in the city streets to increase their chances of survival. In this dystopian narrative, Lessing describes the irrational and aggressive behaviour that can be unleashed within the safety and obscurity of a large group. This same sense of apprehension is one that Booth shares in many of his depictions of crowds. In Untitled, 1997, a large throng of men forms a single, impenetrable wall, gathered together to cheer on the spectacle of a violent struggle. Disturbing and absurd in equal measure, this work graphically portrays the violent actions that can be incited by a mob.
Wall text from the exhibition
Doris Lessing (British-Zimbabwean born Iran, 1919-2013) The Memoirs of a Survivor 1974 Penguin Random House book cover published 1988
Another scene of demonic possession enacted under the spell of a fiendish presence, Painting 1982, confronts the viewer with a deeply disturbing vision of human cannibalism. With its visceral imagery of mutilation and dismemberment, parallels have been drawn to the atrocities depicted in Goya’s series of etchings The Disasters of War, 1810-1815, while the highly theatrical quality of the painting suggests a more recent connection to George A. Romero’s cult zombie film Night of the Living Dead, 1968. When the work was first exhibited critics responded to what the painting conveyed about the current state of western mass culture, finding in its brutal imagery a powerful metaphor for greed and material consumption. Whichever way one choses to interpret this work, one thing remains clear, whenever a large group of men get together in Booth’s painting, there is always the potential for danger.
Wall text from the exhibition
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Saturn Devouring His Son c. 1819-1823 Mixed media mural transferred to canvas 143.5 cm Ć 81.4cm (56.5 in Ć 32.0 in) Museo del Prado, Madrid
Saturn Devouring His Son is a painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. It is traditionally interpreted as a depiction of the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus (known as Saturn in Roman mythology) eating one of his offspring. Fearing a prophecy foretold by Gaea that predicted he would be overthrown by one of his children, Saturn ate each one upon their birth. The work is one of the 14 so-called Black Paintings that Goya painted directly on the walls of his house sometime between 1819 and 1823. It was transferred to canvas after Goya’s death and is now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. …
Various interpretations of the meaning of the picture have been offered: the conflict between youth and old age, time as the devourer of all things, the wrath of God and an allegory of the situation in Spain, where the fatherland consumed its own children in wars and revolution. There have been explanations rooted in Goya’s relationships with his own son, Xavier, the only of his six children to survive to adulthood, or with his live-in housekeeper and possible mistress, Leocadia Weiss; the sex of the body being consumed cannot be determined with certainty. If Goya made any notes on the picture, they have not survived, as he never intended the picture for public exhibition.
In Painting 1981 a blindfolded boor is accompanied by a red-eyed, pointy-eared imp who appears to have just whispered a cosmic joke or secret in his ear. Situated in a bleak and desolate terrain, this disquieting scenario recalls the German legend of Faust in which, following the protagonist’s pact to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge, Mephistopheles appears as his demonic guide. In this light, Booth’s painting can be seen as a powerful reimagining of this cautionary tale of how blind ambition and human hubris can lead to inner corruption and the unleashing of dangerous, irrational impulses.
A survey exhibition of the work of major Australian artist Peter Booth will be held at TarraWarra Museum of Art, 26 November 2022 – 13 March 2023.
With a remarkable career spanning several decades, Melbourne-based Booth is a unique voice in Australian painting and is considered by many to be one of the most significant contemporary artists working in Australia today.
This new survey of paintings and works on paper will be the first major public gallery exhibition of Peter Booth’s work since the NGV retrospective in 2003 and will feature a number of the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to 1990s, alongside important recent works from the past two decades.
Curated by TarraWarra’s Anthony Fitzpatrick, the exhibition will be presented thematically, honing in on and highlighting particular motifs, subjects and moods which have become hallmarks of Booth’s expansive oeuvre: stillness and turbulence; alterity and alienation; mutation and hybridity; the absurd and the grotesque; the road and the ruin; and the despoilation and the resilience of nature.
“This exhibition will reveal Booth’s extraordinary capacity to transmute his intensely personal perceptions of the mysteries and forces of nature, and the folly and hubris of human endeavours, into exceptional and deeply-compelling paintings and drawings,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.
A small group of abstract paintings from the mid-1970s at the start of the exhibition provide a prelude to an important series of gestural paintings which mark the beginning of the artistās journey into a neo-expressionist figurative style.
The exhibition progresses through Booth’s vivid imaginings of an apocalyptic world characterised by grotesque, unsettling, and at times absurd scenes of human and hybrid figures in varying states of apprehension, aggression and conflict.
These works will be accompanied by a small selection of prints by William Blake, James Ensor, Francisco Goya, and Samuel Palmer, visionary artists who have been important touchstones for Booth and with whom he shares a number of affinities.
This survey will also bring together important works from the past three decades to convey humanity’s often fraught and ambiguous relationship to the natural world.
“Initially Booth’s highly visceral paintings of fiery, turbulent environments were the stage for confronting and, at times, violent human encounters. Since the 1990s, many of the scenes he has painted have become increasingly depopulated, implicating the viewer who is called to contemplate and navigate their own subjective relationship to these vivid landscapes.
“Most recently, the artist has returned to the apocalyptic imagery that characterised his first forays into figuration, with large-scale paintings of desolate and devastated scenes of a world in a cataclysmic state of collapse. This is art for a time of ecological and existential crisis in which anthropogenic impacts have driven the planet, and its intricate web of ecosystems, to the brink of utter catastrophe,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.
Press release from the TarraWarra Museum of Art
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at second right, Painting 2022 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Acheron Way is named after a long snaking road which rises steeply through the rainforest of the Yarra Ranges between Narbethong and Warburton. Pictured beneath a clear blue sky, this scene of animated trees backlit by a soft, yellow light evokes a sense of energy, growth and even hope. The swaying trunks and tentacular forms of the sprawling limbs of the trees painted in thick swathes of impasto, imbue them with a powerful emotional charge. However, there is a more ambiguous aspect to this work alluded to in its title which not only refers to a real location, but also to an infernal realm of the imagination: Acheron (‘river of pain’) one of the rivers of the Underworld in Greek mythology over which the souls of the dead were ferried. From this perspective, the tangled and twisted forms of these sentinel-like trees seem to be denying us access to the light suffused landscape in the distance, forcing us to linger in their shadow, begging the question: are we in the realm of the living or the dead?
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Untitled 1998 (below), and at right Painting 2017 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Peter Booth (Australian born England, b. 1940, Australia from 1958) Painting 2017 Oil on canvas 193.4 x 81.3cm Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
In Painting 2017, as the sun begins to rise over the horizon, new epicormic growth spouts from the pruned limbs of a tree; a potent symbol of resilience and renewal. Peter Booth’s ‘Garden of Eden’ paintings vividly convey his feeling for the elemental and generative qualities found in nature and his fervent empathy for other nonhuman lifeforms. ‘Everything is connected. All life comes from the same source.’
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Acheron Way 1993, at third right Painting 2022, and at right Painting 2014 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at second left Winter 1993 (below), and at right Mount Donna Buang 1991 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Winter 1993 (below), and at right Mount Donna Buang 1991 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In discussing Winter when it was first exhibited in 1994, Booth revealed: it’s about my childhood, about taking walks with my brothers in the woods in Yorkshire. Triggered by a recent return to Sheffield, this memory is transformed into a richly textured landscape of open forest which has been stilled and silenced by a thick blanket of snow. As the artist later revealed, his younger twin brothers died in tragic circumstances adding particular poignancy to this painting and suggesting that the two very similar trees which occupy the centre of the work, could be seen as symbolic representations of his siblings. In this light, Winter becomes a powerful and deeply personal expression of remembrance and cathartic release.
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Painting 2018 (below), and at right Untitled 1995 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Painting (Figure with bandaged head) 2004 (below), and at right Painting 1998 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The strength and power of Painting (Man with Bandaged Head), 2004 … is palpable. But like so many of Booth’s images, formulated over years of development, the strength lies not so much in the initial ‘shock’, but with the ensuing waves of other possible readings it evokes…
The tension between our first confrontation with the bandaged figure and the subsequent sensations of pathos for, even some recognition of sensitivity within, the character makes this such a successful work. And as we look upon the painting, venturing into the space behind the bandages, the focus of the work internalises: in reading the mind of the figure we are offered a portal to see within ourselves.
This notion of the mirror to one’s soul, with themes of the nature of power and frailty, desire and control, so deftly captured within Painting (Man with Bandaged Head), 2004 adds a further dimension to the history of this particular painting.
The figure in Untitled, 2007 has averted eyes and stoically sealed lips, suggesting that he has endured great hardship. This feeling is amplified by the rich tonal contrasts and paint texture built with swathes of impasto which transform his wizened face into a blustery landscape. Having taken the troubles and turmoil of the world into himself, this austere figure is imbued with a powerful sense of inner fortitude and resilience.
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
Australian Airliners Across the Pacific exhibition dates: 4th March, 2021 – 28th November, 2022
International Terminal: Aviation Museum & Library
Airmail Down Under exhibition dates: 4th March, 2021 – 2nd December, 2022
International Terminal: Aviation Museum & Library
Flying the Southern Cross Route: Seventy-Five years of Australian Commercial Air Service to North America exhibition dates: 8th January, 2022 – 5th March, 2023
International Terminal: Aviation Museum & Library
Australian Airliners Across the Pacific
Anonymous photographer British Commonwealth Pacific Airways (BCPA) Douglas DC-4 R.M.A. Resolution at Nadi Airport, Fiji 1948 Gelatin silver photograph Courtesy AussieAirliners.org and Whites Aviation via Sheehan Collection
The first leg of a flight from Australia to the United States was from Sydney to Nadi, in Fiji. The journey was just under two thousand miles and took about nine hours.
I wholeheartedly commend the SFO Museum for the exhibitions they put on. The themes of their exhibitions are always interesting, eclectic and memorable.
While two of the exhibitions in this posting have already finished, the exhibition Flying the Southern Cross Route: Seventy-Five years of Australian Commercial Air Service to North America continues until 5th March 2023. Viewing the history of air routes across the Pacific Ocean to the United States recorded through photographs, objects, posters and attire makes you realise ā back in those early days of trans-Pacific flight ā how long it took to get anywhere; how glamorous, class-orientated and exclusive flying was in those days; and how precarious and dangerous flying in twin turbo-prop aircraft or seaplanes could be.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the SFO Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Anonymous photographer British Commonwealth Pacific Airways (BCPA) Douglas DC-6 R.M.A. Endeavor on approach to San Francisco 1952 Gelatin silver photograph Courtesy AussieAirliners.org and W. Larkins Collection
Anonymous photographer Qantas Airways Boeing 707 City of Canberra on inaugural Sydney to San Francisco flight 1959 Gelatin silver photograph Courtesy Qantas Heritage Collection
In the wake of World War II, Australian airline companies embarked on the task establishing an air route across the Pacific Ocean to the United States. Initially, the long, island-hopping journey stopped at several wartime airfields along the way. Australians dubbed this transpacific airway the Southern Cross Route, named after Charles Kingsford-Smith’s aircraft the Southern Cross, the first to make the long flight between the two countries in 1928. Smith had named his aircraft after one of the signature constellations of the southern hemisphere. The first passenger flights in the late 1940s lasted almost two days and made three stops along the way. In the decades that followed, faster and longer-ranged aircraft improved the experience of the flight. Today, non-stop air travel between the two countries requires only fifteen hours of flight. This exhibition illustrates the evolution of the aircraft and the passenger service through images drawn from the collections of the Qantas Heritage Collection and AussieAirliners.org.
Text from the SFO Museum website
Anonymous photographer Qantas Airways first class “Blue Ribbon Service” aboard Boeing 707s c. 1960 Courtesy Qantas Heritage Collection
Anonymous photographer Qantas Airways Boeing 747-400ER Fraser Island at San Francisco International Airport 2018 Courtesy AussieAirliners.org and G. Snyder
Although a common and beloved site for decades, Qantas is taking advantage of the lull caused by the COVID pandemic to accelerate the retirement of their 747 fleet. The aircraft will be replaced by more efficient and economical twin-engine wide-body models.
Flying the Southern Cross Route: Seventy-Five years of Australian Commercial Air Service to North America
Qantas Empire Airways advertisement 1950s Paper, ink Collection of SFO Museum Gift of Qantas Airways Limited
Following the historic first flight from North America to Australia by Charles Kingsford Smith and crew in 1928, the transpacific “Southern Cross” route ā named after the aircraft they flew, the Fokker F.VIIb/3m Southern Cross ā received worldwide fame. After World War II, BCPA (British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines) and ANA (Australian National Airways) commenced commercial air services on their branded “Southern Cross Route” between Australia and San Francisco via Fiji and Hawai’i. When Qantas Empire Airways acquired BCPA in 1954, the airline assumed operations of the route. Since then, Qantas has continuously offered premier air service between the two continents on the most advanced airliners of the day. Through a diverse collection of airliner models, promotional items, meal service wares, cabin crew uniforms, and photographs, Flying the Southern Cross Route presents a legacy of Australian air service on this long celebrated route that connects two diverse regions and both hemispheres.
Text from the SFO Museum website
Anonymous photographer BCPA (British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines) stewardess Daughne Kelpe on the stairs next to a BCPA Douglas DC-4 Late 1940s Gelatin silver photograph Qantas Heritage Collection
BCPA (British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines) coaster and ashtray c. 1950 Wood, paint, paper, metal, ink SFO Museum Coaster: gift of Thomas G. Dragges Ashtray: gift of Walton F. Kemmerle
Anonymous photographer Qantas Empire Airways Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation at San Francisco International Airport c. 1958 Gelatin silver photograph Collection of SFO Museum
Qantas Empire Airways Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation model aircraft 1950s Raise Up, Rotterdam, Holland Scale 1:72 Metal, paint Courtesy of Anthony J. Lawler
Qantas Airways Boeing 707 model aircraft c. 2006 Scale 1:200 Corgi Classics Metal, paint SFO Museum
Emilio Pucci (Italian, 1914-1992) (designer) Qantas Airways flight hostess dress 1974 Polyester, wool SFO Museum Dress gift of Margaret Bowen-Jones
Emilio Pucci (Italian, 1914-1992) (designer) Qantas Airways male service director uniform 1974 Polyester, wool, cotton SFO Museum Jacket, pants, and tie gift of Juris Turmanis
Wedgwood, England (manufacturer) Qantas Airways “Alice Springs” first-class meal service set 1970s Ceramic, glaze SFO Museum Gift of Thomas G. Dragges
Qantas Airways flatware set 1970s Metal SFO Museum Knife gift of Adam Wong Spoon and fork gift of Thomas G. Dragges
Yves Saint Laurent (French, 1936-2008) Qantas Airways female flight attendant uniform 1986 Polyester, cotton, plastic SFO Museum Gift of Suzanne de Monchaux
Qantas Flight Service Director uniform c. 1987 Wool, cotton, polyester, metal, plastic Collection of SFO Museum Gift of Ron Reyn
Wedgwood, England (manufacturer) Qantas Airways first class meal service set 1990s Ceramic Collection of SFO Museum
Peter Morrissey (Australian, b. 1968) (designer) Qantas Airways female flight attendant dress and name tag 2003 Polyester, plastic Collection of SFO Museum Gift of Suzanne de Monchaux
Qantas Airways Boeing 787 Dreamliner model aircraft c. 2019 Scale 1:140 Plastic resin, metal, ink Collection of SFO Museum
Airmail Down Under
Anonymous photographer Pan American Airways Martin M-130 Hawaii Clipper in Honolulu c. 1935 Gelatin silver photograph SFO Museum, Gift of the Pan Am Association
Pan American Airways, Honolulu-San Francisco airmail flight cover March 16, 1939 Paper, ink SFO Museum
In the 1920s, aviation visionaries imagined how the nations of the Pacific Rim could be linked by a new mode of transportation, the aircraft. Governments encouraged the development of new air routes with lucrative airmail contracts and the Pacific arena was no exception. One of the key obstacles to this endeavour was the vast 2400-mile water gap between the coast of California and the Hawaiian Islands. To successfully traverse this distance and open the rest of the Pacific region for air travel, the U.S. Navy attempted a flight using two Naval Aircraft Factory PN-9 flying boats in 1925. One plane turned back, but the other, led by Commander John Rodgers, continued, only to run out of fuel about four hundred miles from Hawai’i. Commander Rodgers managed to complete the journey by stripping fabric off the wings and fashioning improvised sails. In 1928, an aircrew led by Australian Charles Kingsford Smith flew the modified Fokker F.VIIb Southern Cross to Hawai’i, then continued on to Fiji and, finally, to Brisbane, Australia. In the 1930s, the U.S. Navy developed a practical flight route to Hawai’i with a squadron of Consolidated P2Y patrol aircraft. making the journey. In 1935, Pan American Airways opened the first regularly scheduled air service flying the Sikorsky S-42 and Martin M-130 flying boats. With this obstacle surmounted, planners trained their eyes on a commercial air route to Oceania.
In the early 1940s, Pan American Airways established regular service to Auckland, New Zealand, with their Boeing 314 Clipper flying boats. Although this service was halted by the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific Ocean theatre, the war years were transformational for transpacific air travel. Not only were new and improved aircraft developed, but a network of airfields were built across the Pacific basin as part of the war effort. In the late 1940s, land-based aircraft, like the Douglas DC-4 and the larger DC-6, made regularly-operated commercial air routes between the United States and Australia a reality for airmail and cargo, and for passengers as well. Pan American was also finally able to obtain permission for their service to extend all the way to Australia. Pan American was joined in flying these routes by Australian airlines like Australian National Airways (ANA), British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines (BCPA) and, later, Qantas Empire Airways. The route flown was the same as that pioneered before the war, using New Caledonia, Fiji, Canton Island, and Hawai’i as stepping-stones between Australia and the west coast of the United States. This route persisted through the propeller airliner era, even as newer aircraft like the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser were introduced.
In the late 1950s, jet airliners began to enter service for airlines around the world. These new aircraft revolutionised transpacific air travel with their high speed and longer range. Pan American World Airways and Qantas favoured the Boeing 707 airliner for their long-range international routes. These planes did not need to stop as frequently and layovers in New Caledonia and Canton Island were no longer required. Regular, same-day air travel between the United States and Australia had been realised.
Today, these rare surviving airmail flight covers document how the air route across the Pacific Ocean was established during the 1920s and 30s, and then strengthened in the post-war era with the introduction of more advanced aircraft making non-stop travel between the United States and Australia a reality.
Text from the SFO Museum website
First U.S. Navy Flight Squadron VP-10, San Francisco-Honolulu airmail flight cover January 10, 1934 Paper, ink SFO Museum, Gift of Jon E. Krupnick
Pan American Airways, Honolulu-Canton Island airmail flight cover September 5, 1939 Paper, ink SFO Museum, Gift of Jon E. Krupnick
Qantas Empire Airways, First Boeing 707 Flight, Honolulu-Sydney airmail flight cover August 1, 1959 Paper, ink SFO Museum, Gift of Mrs. Siusiadh Rasmussen
Pan American World Airways, First Jet Clipper Air Mail, Sydney ā Los Angeles airmail flight cover December 17, 1959 Paper, ink SFO Museum, Gift of the Captain John B. Russell Family
SFO Museum San Francisco International Airport P.O. Box 8097 San Francisco, CA 94128 USA Phone: 650.821.6700
“While human truth may be ephemeral qualities like justice are not; the struggle is to define justice and to live it. And for artists to display it.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Another fascinating exhibition that extends the remit of “documentary” photography back to the earliest days of the medium and the “the empire of photography”: the rise of a new visual regime that became an instrument for the system of bourgeois, industrial and colonial culture in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In other words in the hands of the powerful (both national and personal) photography became an instrument which reinforced the entitlement and social position of the privileged while depriving the disenfranchised of a visual voice, and thus legitimacy and recognition of their plight. Photography also became the means to form a taxonomic ordering of supposed genetic deficiencies, ethnicities, criminals, homosexuals and revolutionaries, amongst others.
“The democratic promise of photography was long unfulfilled and remained, for over almost a century, an instrument in the hands of bourgeois culture and its means of representation. Thus, the portraits of the working and subaltern classes were an accidental and marginal incursion, an involuntary presence inside pictures with another intention.” (Press release)
Here I would disagree with the assertion that portraits of the working classes were an accidental and marginal incursion, an involuntary presence inside pictures with another intention. “Incursion” means an invasion or attack. “Involuntary” means done without will or conscious control. So images of the poor appear, without any conscious control, as an attack inside / against images that reinforce their prerogative meaning?
Perhaps the poor are just human beings that lived and breathed the same air as the photographer, that perchance appeared through serendipity in the images with no ulterior motive attached to their being … other than those that have been attached to their representation at a later date. Interpretations of photographs change over time and we have to think how these photographs would have been read when they were first taken.
The terms accidental and marginal are critical. In the work of politically engaged now called social documentary photographers ā for example Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, John Thomson, Hill and Adamson, O.G. Rejlander and Paul Martin ā these artists captured photographs of the working classes that are neither accidental nor marginal. They are deliberate and provocative photographs taken to raise awareness of social conditions and injustice in order to bring about a change in the law (such as the anti-slavery laws and child labor laws in the United States) or a change in social conditions of the poor such as the state of slum housing or tenement house evils for example.
There is nothing marginal about these photographs, no margin in which to ostracise, nor any accident of inclusion, for the human beings in them are placed front and centre before the public ‘in order’ to expose an immorality or injustice that was supposed to be hidden from view.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĆa for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“During the 1830s, a period covered by [the novel] Middlemarch, much was changing in terms of class/social structure. During the Victorian era, the rates of people living in poverty increased drastically. This is due to many factors, including low wages, the growth of cities (and general population growth), and lack of stable employment. The poor often lived in unsanitary conditions, in cramped and unclean houses, regardless of whether they lived in a modern city or a rural town. Victorian attitudes towards the poor were rather muddled. Some believed that the poor were facing their situations because they deserved it, either because of laziness or because they were simply not worthy of fortune. However, some believed it was up to personal circumstances. It is important to note that many charities have their roots from this era in English history, because of how overwhelming the issue of poverty became at this time.”
At centre, Lewis Hine exhibition panels 1913-1914 (see below)
At left rear, pages from Carl Dammann’s [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men 1876 (see below)
Wounded men from the American Civil War
Pages from the book Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance by N.D. Thompson Publishing Company, 1894, photographs by unknown artists, with at centre left an image of Bachibonzouk, a Greek wearing traditional Turkish needlework and embroidery reminiscent of the uniforms worn by the Sultan’s officers, as seen at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, 1893 (see below)
Installation views of the exhibition Documentary Genealogies: Photography 1848-1917 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĆa, Madrid
Documentary Genealogies. Photography 1848-1917 starts from Walter Benjamin’s remark in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936) on the parallel emergence of photography and of socialism. Following such parallel allows the hypothesis that the ideas and iconographies used to represent the everyday life of the working class ā which is the constitutive impulse for the rise of documentary discourse and practices in the 1920s, as a specific form of filmic and photographic poetics ā were already latent or active in 1840s visual culture. The seminal figure of the bootblack on Boulevard du Temple [Boulevard of the Temple, 1838], one of Louis Daguerre’s first daguerreotypes, is the first appearance of the worker in photography: the root of the historical narrative around class relations and conflicts, an axis for the documentary discourse to come.
Documentary Genealogies. Photography 1848-1917 closes a series that began in 2011 in the Museo Reina SofĆa with the exhibitions A Hard, Merciless Light. The Worker Photography Movement, 1926-1939 and continued in 2015 with Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, both of which offered an alternative narrative of the rise and evolution of documentary discourse in the history of photography, based on case studies at key moments in the twentieth century. This final exhibition contributes to this narrative from a different, proto-historical perspective: an observation of the early promises and potential of photography contained in the fact that the documentary idea and function are as old as photography itself.
Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĆa website
Louis Daguerre (French, 1787-1851) Boulevard du Temple Between 24 April 1838 and 4 May 1838 Daguerreotype Public domain
This image is not in the exhibition
Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 3rd arrondissement, Daguerreotype. Made in 1838 by inventor Louis Daguerre, this is believed to be the earliest photograph showing a living person. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure lasted for 4 to 5 minutes (see shutter speed Daguerre photo explained) the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one apparently having his boots polished by the other, stayed in one place long enough to be visible. As with most daguerreotypes, the image is a mirror image.
Unknown photographer Rahlo Jammele. (Jewish Dancing Girl.) c. 1894 From the book Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance N.D. Thompson Publishing Company, 1894
Unknown photographer Jeanette Le Barre. (French Peasant Girl.) c. 1894 From the book Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance N.D. Thompson Publishing Company, 1894
Unknown photographer William. (Samoan.) c. 1894 From the book Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance N.D. Thompson Publishing Company, 1894
Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance
N.D. Thompson Publishing Company, 1894
Putnam, F. W. (Frederic Ward), 1839-1915/ Oriental and occidental, northern and southern portrait types of the Midway Plaisance: a collection of photographs of individual types of various nations from all parts of the world who represented, in the Department of Ethnology, the manners, customs, dress, religions, music and other distinctive traits and peculiarities of their race: with interesting and instructive descriptions accompanying each portrait, together with an introduction. St. Louis : N.D. Thompson, 1894.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Blind Woman Camera Work 49/50, July 1917 Photoengraving on paper 23.3 x 16.7cm Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĆa
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Making Human Junk Exhibition panel from the National Child Labor Committee Facsimile reconstruction 1913-1914 Image courtesy of Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Children’s Rights vs States’ Rights Exhibition panel from the National Child Labor Committee Facsimile reconstruction 1913-1914 Image courtesy of Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
George Bretz (American, 1842-1895) Miner using coal auger, Kohinoor Colliery, Eastern Pennsylvania c. 1884 Albumen paper 19.5 x 23cm Photography Collection, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
George M. Bretz (1842-1895) was an American photographer who is best known for his photographs of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Coal Region and its coal miners.
A collection of Bretz’s original glass plate negatives from the Kohinoor Mine at the Shenandoah Colliery were recently rediscovered at the National Museum of American History. Taken circa 1884, this was one of the earliest fully illuminated photo shoots in an underground mine. These photographs were displayed at the 1884 World Cotton Centennial in New Orleans, and again at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Bretz is also known for his photos of alleged Molly Maguires, radical coal miners who fought against unfair labor practices in the coal fields. For the rest of his life, Bretz was considered an authority on coal mining, and articles about his photography were widely published.
Coal mining was central to the lives of the people in Eastern Pennsylvania especially during the era of 1870 to 1895 when photographer George M. Bretz (1842-1895) lived and worked in Pottsville, the gateway to the Anthracite Coal Mining Region. Bretz achieved distinction if not fame for his photographs related to coal mining and the people who depended upon coal for their livelihood.
Born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Bretz worked at local businesses in Carlisle before heading to New York City where he worked successively for two companies in 1859. Letters of reference indicated that he had become a fine young businessman. He worked briefly in 1862 for a photographer before receiving an appointment as a clerk in the quartermaster’s department of the Union Army in Tennessee during the Civil War. Although he was not on the front lines, he was close enough to the war that being captured was often on his mind. He even wrote a will describing the disposition of his body in case he was killed. Serious illness rather than capture or death took him away from the war in 1863. He was sent home to Carlisle to recuperate, and did not rejoin the service until the next year when he became a clerk in the provost marshal’s office, a job that he held until the end of the war.
Photography became Bretz’s focus after the war. He and a friend opened a studio in Newville, Pennsylvania, and continued in operation until 1867 when Bretz went to work in the studio of A.M. Allen in Pottsville. In 1870, Bretz opened his own studio in Pottsville, and made sculptures as well as photographic portraits and landscape views. Among the portraits that Bretz made were images of the alleged Molly Maguires, radical coal miners who turned to violence against unfair labor practices in the coal fields. Bretz made portraits of the alleged Mollies in 1877 on the day before the ten men were to be hanged. Such iconic photographs became the rule rather than the exception for Bretz. In 1884 at the request of the Smithsonian Institution, Bretz descended into a coal mine to photograph miners at work. Using a dynamo that had been set up in the mine, electric light was generated to provide illumination. One critic at the time wrote: “Even in direct sunshine one would hardly undertake to photograph a heap of anthracite coal.” So successful were Bretz’s photographs in the mines, that he gained notoriety for his accomplishment. The photographs were displayed at the New Orleans World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884, and again with additional images at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For the rest of his life, Bretz was considered an authority on coal mining and articles about him were periodically published in newspapers and photography magazines.
Anonymous. “George Bretz Collection,” on the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) website Nd [Online] Cited 02/02/2023
Unknown photographer Work scenes from the Krupp Works at Essen: wheel tire transport Nd Silver chloride gelatin 22 x 18cm Historisches Archiv Krupp, Essen
The historical narrative begins with the earliest photographic images of a revolution, namely the European revolutionary cycle of 1848. Contemporary historiography cites this “Springtime of the Peoples” as the moment when the proletariat acquired class consciousness, and as the starting point of working-class political struggles. A contradictory starting point, indeed. In January 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels released The Communist Manifesto with the famous diagnosis that the specter of communism was haunting Europe ā to be confirmed a month later with the uprisings in Paris. However, shortly after in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx would offer a critical interpretation of 1848 as a parody of the 1789 French Revolution: great world-historic events happen twice, first as tragedy, then as farce.
Image of the People
Beginning in the 1850s, photographic campaigns documenting national monuments, such as the Heliographic Mission in France, were one of the defining drives behind the rise of the “empire of photography”. The Heliographic Mission is a paradigm of how the discourse of national historic monuments was instrumental for the ideology of the nation-state and for nationalist discourses throughout Europe. Several European countries launched their own such campaigns, the pioneer in Spain being Charles Clifford. Clifford retraced Queen Isabella II’s travels in album form, which constitute the earliest photographic statement on the Spanish nation and its heritage. However, the bourgeois nationalist ideology underlying these campaigns and albums was countered by the appearance of certain figures of alterity around the periphery of these images: servants in palaces, the Roma in the Alhambra, small trade and work scenes, beggars, and picturesque street characters who appear spontaneously alongside the architecture.
The Other Half
A second catalyst for the “empire of photography” was the spatial reorganisation of historic urban centres according to the logic and demands of industrialisation. The expansions and reforms, undertaken around 1860 in cities such as Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, and Madrid, gave rise to photography campaigns of both the old streets and medieval city walls that were being demolished, as well as of the new avenues and urban infrastructure. Most emblematic of this process was Charles Marville’s documentation of Georges-EugĆØne Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, which also included images of construction workers and labourers.
As a counterpoint to these photographs of grand urban redevelopments, we find the first images of the urban proletariat. In the New York of the 1880s, muckraking journalist Jacob Riis photographed the miserable conditions of the Lower East Side working-class tenements. He used the images as slides in his public lectures and published the foundational book How the Other Half Lives (1890). With a similar focus and use at public slide lectures, in 1904 Hermann Drawe photographed the Viennese underworld of vagrants and the poor, in collaboration with journalist Emil KlƤger. Their reportage was also published as a book. The turn-of-the-century urban peripheries, the terrains vagues [The French term ‘terrain vague’ is used by architects and urban planners to describe forgotten spaces which are left behind as a result of post-industrial urbanisation] created by the razing of the old city walls, and their poor inhabitants, or subproletarians, were photographed by EugĆØne Atget in Paris, by Heinrich Zille in Berlin, and by Ferdinand Ritter von Staudenheim in Vienna.
Men at Work
The promotion of the new industrial processes, and the grand feats of engineering and infrastructure ā another facet of the mid-nineteenth-century construction of the modern nation-state ā were also the target of the nascent photographic visual regime. World’s fairs were the mass events that closely followed and helped spread industrialisation. They were also a means for photography to burst into the public sphere. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London was, in this sense, a key moment. In Spain, Charles Clifford was once again a pioneer, documenting such works as the Isabella II Canal ā inaugurated in 1858 to definitely solve the issue of Madrid’s water supply. It is also in this context that the first images of factory labor and industrial workers appeared. The 1890 photographic studies of workers and machinery in the Krupp steelworks in Essen are possibly the pioneering images of the kind. They laid the basis for the most influential iconographies of industrial labor of the twentieth century.
Forced labour was often employed in the grand infrastructure projects, which attests to how industrial capitalism prospered upon the radical exploitation of the working class. In fact, some images of public works and penal colonies may easily be mistaken for one another. In the daguerreotypes of the works led by engineer Lucio del Valle, a pioneer in Spain for photographic documentation of public works, we see prison labourers in chains. Convicts and enslaved labourers are to be found, as well, in images of railroad construction and other work sites during the Civil War period in the United States, and also at the turn of the century in the mines of the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin Island. As part of his production for the Fortieth Parallel Survey, Timothy O’Sullivan reported underground mining using an innovative system of lighting. It is interesting to relate these images to the enigmatic scenes of the Paris catacombs taken by Nadar, souvenirs from a hellish underworld.
The Body and the Archive
Another subtext in photography’s rise during the colonial era is its inscription in modern technologies of social discipline and governance. Photography as a technology of industrialisation was part of a new episteme in the natural and social sciences, and contributed to a new archival unconscious that was symptomatic of the hegemony of positivism. While photography in service of geological exploration had its early golden age in the surveys of the US Western territories that began in the late 1860s after the Civil War. The first such survey was of the Fortieth Parallel, led by geologist Clarence King, with Timothy O’Sullivan as lead photographer.
The immense encyclopaedic catalog of human races by German photographer Carl Dammann, published from 1874 onward, is one of the great monuments to the aspirations of positivism in the study of human diversity. Photography changed the methodology of the human sciences. Another example is the art historian Aby Warburg’s study of Hopi Indians in the US southwest in 1895, which he thought of as a journey into the ancient pagan world and led to a famous slide conference in 1923. The trip and conference were instrumental for the emergence of Warburg’s iconological method, which would change the historiography of art by introducing a cultural or anthropological approach. However, it was the work on the Trobriand Islands, by BronisÅaw Malinowski and his collaborators around 1900, when the use of photography in fieldwork would finally reach maturity. A series of the Trobriand people photographs would later be published, in 1922, in a book that would be essential for modern ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
The 1871 Paris Commune stands as a foundational experiment in working class self-government. It would become a legendary reference for the political culture of the workers’ movement. The Commune was also the first event to generate an extensive photographic market of a revolution, one which grew from the seeds of the 1848 Parisian daguerreotypes. As a consequence, a visual grammar for the future of revolutionary iconography was set ā even if the multiple images of the uprising, produced industrially as albums and souvenirs, had in fact a counterrevolutionary focus. The visual catalog of the barricades, the destruction of monuments such as the VendĆ“me Column, and the burning of major institutional buildings such as the Paris city hall creates a dystopian, undisciplined image of the city in ruins ā as corresponds to the time of uncertainty following the dissolution of the established governmental order.
Social Photography
Following the different revolutionary outbursts and the organisation of the workers’ movement throughout the nineteenth century, some improvements in social rights came about, as well as new public policies to ease the living conditions of the working class within a fledgling welfare state. Lewis Hine was a pioneer in the articulation of photography and social reform politics. Begun in 1907, his photographic work for the National Child Labor Committee “(NCLC)” makes him a founding figure.
Lewis Hine was a professor of photography at the Ethical Culture School in New York City. One of his students was Paul Strand, rendered the founder of photographic modernism because of his work begun in 1916. Influenced by the reception in New York of the Paris pictorial avant-garde, Strand published two portfolios in the modernist magazine Camera Work (1916 and 1917), jointly shaping a sort of manifesto for the future of photography. The 1930s were a time of ideological awakening for Strand, and he would become involved with the Photo League, the New York branch of the international Worker’s Photography Movement. His role as a link between an era that was coming to an end and another that was about to begin make him both the symbol and the most significant symptom of the ambiguity between factuality and idealisation that the documentary idea will carry throughout twentieth-century photography.
Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĆa
This daguerreotype is part of a series of two exceptional views of the barricades taken during the popular insurrection of June 1848. Disseminated in the form of woodcuts in the newspaper L’Illustration at the beginning of the following July, these photographs were realised by an amateur named Thibault, from a point of view overlooking the Rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt, June 25 and 26, before and after the assault. The first photographs reproduced in the press, they show the value of proof given to the medium in the processing of information since the middle of the nineteenth century, well before the development of photomechanical reproduction techniques. The inaccuracies and ghostly traces caused by a long exposure time limit the accuracy lent to the medium. Also the engraver allowed himself to “rectify” the views for the newspaper, adding clouds here and there and specifying the posture or the detail of the silhouettes. The remarkable interest of these daguerreotypes, however, resides in their indeterminate aspect. In fact, they reveal the singular temporality of these events: both short (since each second counts during the confrontations) and at the same time extended (in the moments of preparation and waiting). The temporalities proper to events and photography are thus combined in order to offer the perennial image of an invisible uprising and therefore always in potentiality.
Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by Google translate
The first photo of an insurrectionary barricade
This photo was taken by a young photographer, by the name of Charles-FranƧois Thibault, at the level of no. 92 of the current rue du Faubourg-du-Temple on the morning of Sunday June 25, 1848. The insurrection is coming to an end, and only the last defences of the working-class districts of eastern Paris resist.
These are the first pictures showing an insurrection and complete barricades. This scene is also regarded as the first photographic illustration of a report in the newspapers, since it was published a few days later in the form of engraving (one could not reproduce at the time directly the daguerreotype in a printed document) in the newspaper L’Illustration, with the caption “The barricade on rue Saint-Maur Popincourt on Sunday morning, from a plate daguerreotyped by M.Thibault.”
On the Rue du Faubourg du Temple in June 1848. The shot is said to be the first photographic illustration of a newspaper report. The scene captured by this famous daguerreotype is the Rue du Faubourg du Temple during the bloody days of June 1848. The picture shows a barricade on an empty street at 7.30am, Sunday 25 June. On the following 8 July the newspaper L’Illustration published two of these shots as woodcuts. Against the backdrop of insurrection, they celebrated the return to order. Yet even though two of Thibault’s plates have been kept at the Orsay Museum, and another at the Carnavalet Museum, little is known about their author. The plates are nevertheless considered to be one of the founding events of the history of photography. Manifestly, the place photographed, the operator’s identity, the motive behind the shot: everything here is indeed enigmatic.
Commune of Paris, also called Paris Commune, French Commune de Paris, (1871), was an insurrection of Paris against the French government from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It occurred in the wake of Franceās defeat in the Franco-German War and the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852-70).
The National Assembly, which was elected in February 1871 to conclude a peace with Germany, had a royalist majority, reflecting the conservative attitude of the provinces. The republican Parisians feared that the National Assembly meeting in Versailles would restore the monarchy.
To ensure order in Paris, Adolphe Thiers, executive head of the provisional national government, decided to disarm the National Guard (composed largely of workers who fought during the siege of Paris). On March 18 resistance broke out in Paris in response to an attempt to remove the cannons of the guard overlooking the city. Then, on March 26, municipal elections, organised by the central committee of the guard, resulted in victory for the revolutionaries, who formed the Commune government. Among those in the new government were the so-called Jacobins, who followed in the French Revolutionary tradition of 1793 and wanted the Paris Commune to control the Revolution; the Proudhonists, socialists who supported a federation of communes throughout the country; and the Blanquistes, socialists who demanded violent action. The program that the Commune adopted, despite its internal divisions, called for measures reminiscent of 1793 (end of support for religion, use of the Revolutionary calendar) and a limited number of social measures (10-hour workday, end of work at night for bakers).
“Commune of Paris” 1871 on the Britannica website [Online] Cited 03/02/2023
Bronislaw Malinowski (Polish-British, 1884-1942) The tasasoria on the beach of Kaulukuba: stepping the masts and getting the sails for the run Plate from the book Argonauts of the Western Pacific 1915-1916 Gelatin silver print LSE Library, The British Library of Political and Economic Science
Ballell’s photographic work is important due to its volume, the quality of his photographs and the wide range of topics covered. He was one of the founding members of the Barcelona Daily Press Association, where he participated until 1940. The work he did after the 1920s is little known. Reliable information on Ballell is not available again until 1944, when he contacted the Barcelona City Council , concerned about the future of his collection of negatives, which, in July 1945, would end up in the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona.
His work has been exhibited on various occasions: thus, in April 2000 his first anthology was presented with the title “Frederic Ballell, photojournalist” at the Palacio de la Virreina. The figure of the photographer was presented with a selection of copies of the time to show the different photographic procedures used, in addition a thematic selection was presented again in large enlargements, which allowed showing the great thematic diversity treated by the photographer throughout of his trajectory. The same year a part of his production related to marine disasters was exhibited in the exhibition hall of the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona with the title “Disaster”, organised by the Photographic Archive of Barcelona. These exhibitions were later exhibited in other places outside of Barcelona.
In 2010, an exhibition of a unique set of photographs was held at the headquarters of the Barcelona Photographic Archive, entitled “Frederic Ballell. La Rambla 1907-1908”. In this exhibition it was possible to see more than one hundred original photographs that offered a vision of La Rambla and the different characters that made it up. In this set of images, Ballell captured the daily evolution of one of the most important communication centres of the early 20th century.
Photographic background
Frederic Ballell’s photographic collection contains a wealth of information on life in Barcelona, āāmainly in the first quarter of the 20th century. His participation in the important public acts of the moment make him a faithful follower of the evolution of citizen events, both urban and social. His constant presence led him to generate a corpus of some 2,600 photographs published only in IlustraciĆ³ Catalana and Feminal between 1903 and 1917. Also in the magazine Actualidades since its creation in 1908.
He was a correspondent for Blanco y Negro, Nuevo Mundo, 1 āABC and La Esfera, where we found many images also published in this period.
His collection was acquired between June and July 1945 and the set of negatives entered the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona. Subsequently, a selection of negatives was made that was taken to be printed in Francisco Fazio’s photographic workshop and made available to the public, those that were not printed were stored in the Archive depository. In 2000, after documentary research and physical conditioning of the negatives and positives, the entire collection was left for public consultation at the Photographic Archive of Barcelona .
Carl Dammann (German, 1819-1874) publisher Amazonenstrom-Gebiet (Amazon River area) 1873-1876 From [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men 1876 Albumen, paper, cardboard Museo Nacional de Antropologia MNA FD 4325
Carl Dammann (German, 1819-1874) publisher Australian 1873-1876 From [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men 1876 Albumen, paper, cardboard Museo Nacional de Antropologia MNA FD 4350
Carl Dammann (German, 1819-1874) publisher Brazilian Neger 1873-1876 From [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men 1876 Albumen, paper, cardboard Museo Nacional de Antropologia MNA FD 4324
Carl Dammann (German, 1819-1874) publisher Indischer Archipel (Indian archipelago) 1873-1876 From [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men 1876 Albumen, paper, cardboard Museo Nacional de Antropologia MNA FD 4340
Carl Dammann (German, 1819-1874) publisher Kaukasien (Caucasian) 1873-1876 From [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men 1876 Albumen, paper, cardboard Museo Nacional de Antropologia MNA FD 4344
Carl Dammann (German, 1819-1874) publisher Malaischer Archipel (Malay Archipelago) 1873-1876 From [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men 1876 Albumen, paper, cardboard Museo Nacional de Antropologia MNA FD 4341
Carl Dammann (German, 1819-1874) publisher Mittel-Aegypten (Central Egypt) 1873-1876 From [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men 1876 Albumen, paper, cardboard Museo Nacional de Antropologia MNA FD 4310
Carl Dammann (German, 1819-1874) publisher Ostkuste von Afrika (Eastern coast of Africa) 1873-1876 From [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men 1876 Albumen, paper, cardboard Museo Nacional de Antropologia MNA FD 4308
Carl Dammann
Photographer based in Hamburg Author of “Ethnological photographic gallery of the various races of men.”
C. Dammann F.W. Dammann
Collectors of anthropological photographs and some were published in C. & F.W. Dammann, 1876, [Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men, (London: Trubner).
24 pages of plates: illustrations, portraits; 32 x 43cm Cover title:Races of mankind
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĆa Sabatini Building Santa Isabel, 52 Nouvel Building Ronda de Atocha (with plaza del Emperador Carlos V) 28012 Madrid Phone: (34) 91 774 10 00
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Articles of China Before 1844 Salt print from a paper negative The Lane Collection
The world is a reality, not because of the way it is, but because of the possibilities it presents.
Frederick Sommer
A small but vibrant posting. Beautiful still life photographs my favourite being those by Mather, Sommer, Weston, Cunningham, Sudek and Morrell.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Margrethe Mather (American, 1886-1952) Water Lily 1922 Palladium print The Lane Collection
This exhibition presents nearly 60 innovative photographs ā all departures from the traditional still life ā drawn from the MFA’s Lane Collection. Grouped thematically, the works on view span the entire history of photography, from its first introduction in England during the 1840s by William Henry Fox Talbot to the work of contemporary artists such as Adam Fuss, David Hilliard, Kenro Izu, Abelardo Morell, and Olivia Parker. Works by American modernists are prominently featured, with unexpected takes on the still life by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Weston ā photographers better known for capturing vast landscapes and portraits of people.
One of the largest gifts in the MFA’s history, the Lane Collection was promised to the Museum in 2012. This exhibition is the latest in a series that has celebrated the single most important donation to the Museum’s photography holdings.
Text from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965) Still Life Early 1920s Gelatin silver print The Lane Collection
Loosely organised by subject from messy desktops, kitchen utensils, and flora to empty chairs or found objects, the exhibit revels the mid-twentieth century strengths of the collection with works by modernists such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and especially Charles Sheeler. Sheeler pays homage to the painter Morandi with two still lifes featuring a simple ewer and ceramic vase and to Cezanne in a composition of apples. Often overlooked among the modernist masters are women such as Margaret Mather and Imogen Cunningham. Mather’s wispy pine needles and delicate water lily classically weave light, form and abstraction while Cunningham brings a geometric edge to the aloe plant she photographed on her window sill.
Olivia Parker’s green and purple artichoke dangling from a string is a nod to the Spanish painter Juan SĆ”nchez CotĆ”n whose vegetable paintings depict foodstuffs hung high to keep rodents at bay. Her work is installed near two surrealist pictures by Frederick Sommer. His jarring but beautiful compositions of chicken heads and innards brim with the tension between the life sustaining nourishment the chicken may have provided and the stark reminder of our mortality. And in an ironic twist, David Hilliard’s ebullient polyptych, Perennial, features an aisle of plastic Walmart flowers that were his mother’s favorites, in striking contrast to the ephemeral flowers featured in countless still life paintings in the galleries of the museum.
!['Reuben's Delicatessen Menu [autographed by Arnold Reuben]' 1946](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/reubensdelicatessenmenu.jpg "'Reuben's Delicatessen Menu [autographed by Arnold Reuben]' 1946")
![Installation view of the exhibition 'Documentary Genealogies: Photography 1848-1917' at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĆa, Madrid showing at left rear, pages from Carl Dammann's '[Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men' 1876](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/documentary-genealogies-installation-d.jpg "Installation view of the exhibition 'Documentary Genealogies: Photography 1848-1917' at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĆa, Madrid showing at left rear, pages from Carl Dammann's '[Races of Mankind]: Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Men' 1876")
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