Exhibition: ‘Czech Photography of the 20th Century’ at the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn

Exhibition dates: 13th March – 26th July, 2009

Jindřich Štreit (Czech, b. 1946) 'Arnoltice' 1985 from the exhibition 'Czech Photography of the 20th Century' at the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, March - July, 2009

Jindřich Štreit (Czech, b. 1946)
Arnoltice
1985
From the Village Life series
Gelatin silver print

Jindřich Štreit (born 5 September 1946 in Vsetín) is a Czech photographer and pedagogue known for his documentary photography. He concentrates on documenting the rural life and people of Czech villages. He is considered one of the most important exponents of Czech documentary photography.

Looks like an interesting exhibition. I wish I had been able to see it. Wouldn’t it be such a grand job flying around the world, reviewing photography exhibitions and bringing you my thoughts. I can only wish…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

František Drtikol (Czech, 1883-1961) 'Wave' 1925 from the exhibition 'Czech Photography of the 20th Century' at the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, March - July, 2009

František Drtikol (Czech, 1883-1961)
Wave
1925
Gelatin silver print

Czech photography produced and produces leading figures in all areas of photography – from classical documentary photojournalism to surrealism, realism or avant-garde works. From 13 March 2009 on, the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany is presenting over 400 photographic works, a historical mosaic of Czech photography from 1900 until the late 20th century that underlines the international reputation enjoyed by Czech photography today. That reputation is not only apparent in the outstanding contributions by such renowned artists as Josef Sudek, Karel Hájek, Václav Jírů, Vilém Reichmann, Jan Reich, Jindřich Štreit, Frantisek Drtikol, Jaromír Funke, Jaroslav Rossler, Josef Koudelka and Jan Saudek, but also in works from a host of younger photographers. The exhibition does not only showcase famous names but also less well-known photographers, providing an overall impression of the variation and innovation in Czech photography.

From Surrealism and other avant-garde experimentation to realism and classic photo reportage, Czech photographers have long played a key role in all areas of photography and continue to do so to this day.

This exhibition is the first in Germany to present the history and development of Czech photography from 1900 to the turn of the millennium. Beginning with Art Nouveau-inspired Pictorialism, the comprehensive survey traces the rise of avant-garde photography and the development of photo montage in the 1920s to the 1940s. It examines the influence of ideological pressure on photography during the Second World War, the Stalinist 1950s and the period of Communist ‘normalisation’ after the occupation in 1968 and introduces the visitor to the multifaceted range of contemporary trends.

Text from the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany website [Online] Cited 10/04/2009. No longer available online

František Drtikol (Czech, 1883-1961)
Nude
1927
Gelatin silver print

František Drtikol (3 March 1883, Příbram – 13 January 1961, Prague) was a Czech photographer of international renown. He is especially known for his characteristically epic photographs, often nudes and portraits.

From 1907 to 1910 he had his own studio, until 1935 he operated an important portrait photostudio in Prague on the fourth floor of one of Prague’s remarkable buildings, a Baroque corner house at 9 Vodičkova, now demolished. Jaroslav Rössler, an important avant-garde photographer, was one of his pupils. Drtikol made many portraits of very important people and nudes which show development from pictorialism and symbolism to modern composite pictures of the nude body with geometric decorations and thrown shadows, where it is possible to find a number of parallels with the avant-garde works of the period. These are reminiscent of Cubism, and at the same time his nudes suggest the kind of movement that was characteristic of the futurism aesthetic.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Eugen Wiskovsky (Czech, 1888-1964)
Lunar Landscape or Collars
1929
Gelatin silver print

The oeuvre of the leading Czech avant-garde photographer Eugen Wiskovsky (1888-1964) is not large in size or subject range, but it is noteworthy in its originality, depth of ideas, and mastery. Wiskovsky’s early New Objectivist works, from the late 1920s and early 1930s, sought artistic effect in apparently non-aesthetic objects: His inventive lighting and cropping allowed their elementary lines to stand out, to lose their worldly associations and take on potential metaphorical meanings. In his dynamic diagonal compositions, Wiskovsky was among the most radical practitioners of Czech Constructivism. His landscape work is similarly distinctive.

Jaroslav Rössler (Czech, 1902-1990)
Untitled
1931
Gelatin silver print

Jaroslav Rössler (25 May 1902, Smilov – 5 January 1990, Prague) was a pioneer of Czech avant-garde photography and a member of the association of Czech avant-garde artists Devětsil (Butterbur).

Rössler was born to the Czech-German father, Eduard Rössler, and a Czech mother, Adela Nollova. From 1917 to 1920, Rössler studied in the atelier of the company owned by renowned Czech photographer František Drtikol. Subsequently, he worked with the company as a laboratory technician. As a 21 years old, he began collaboration with the art theorist Karel Teige, who assigned him to create typographic layout for magazines Pásmo, Disk, Stavba and ReD (Revue Devětsilu). While working on these tasks, Rössler deepened his knowledge of photographic methods. In his works he utilised and combined the techniques of photogram, photomontage, collage and drawing. The beginnings of his photographic work were influenced by Cubism and Futurism, but he also attempted to create the first abstract photographs. In 1923, he became a member of the avant-garde association Devětsil.

In 1925, he went on a six-month study visit to Paris. The same year he began working as a photographer in the Osvobozené divadlo in Prague. Before his second departure to Paris, he co-worked as a commercial photographer with the pictorial magazine Pestrý týden.

In 1927, Rössler moved to Paris together with his wife, Gertruda Fischerová (1894-1976). Initially, he focused on commercial photography. He collaborated with the experimental studio of Lucien Lorell, and worked on commissions for notable companies such as Michelin and Shell. However, later he found an interest in the “street life” of Paris, which influenced his future stay in the city. During a demonstration, he encountered the protesters and took photographs of the event. Shortly after that he was arrested, and after a six-month imprisonment he was expelled from the country, in 1935. The alleged reason for his expulsion was his German-sounding surname.

After his return from Paris, Rössler and his wife resided in Prague, Žižkov. He opened a small photographic atelier, but difficulties associated with the management of the studio caused a significant gap in his artistic work, lasting for almost two decades.

In the 1950s, he resumed his previous activities and again began experimenting with the camera and photographic techniques. He created so-called “prizmata” (prisms), photographs taken through a birefringent prism. Additionally, he experimented with solarisation and explored the possibilities of the Sabatier effect.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Jindřich Štyrský (Czech, 1899-1942)
From the Man with Blinkers series
1934
Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague

Eugen Wiskovsky (Czech, 1888-1964)
Disaster
1939
Gelatin silver print

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'The Last Rose' 1956

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
The Last Rose from the Rose series
1956
Gelatin silver print

Josef Sudek (17 March 1896, Kolín, Bohemia – 15 September 1976, Prague) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague.

Sudek was originally a bookbinder. During the First World War he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front until he was wounded in the right arm in 1916 which led to the limb being amputated at the shoulder. After the war he studied photography for two years in Prague under Jaromir Funke. His army disability pension gave him leeway to make art, and he worked during the 1920s in the romantic Pictorialist style. Always pushing at the boundaries, a local camera club expelled him for arguing about the need to move forwards from ‘painterly’ photography. Sudek then founded the progressive Czech Photographic Society in 1924. Despite only having one arm, he used large, bulky cameras with the aid of assistants.

Sudek’s photography is sometimes said to be modernist. But this is only true of a couple of years in the 1930s, during which he undertook commercial photography and thus worked “in the style of the times”. Primarily, his personal photography is neo-romantic.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Josef Sudek was a Czech photographer best known for his elegiac black-and-white images of Prague, interiors, still lifes, and the landscapes of Bohemian forests. Many of Sudek’s most memorable images were taken from the window of his small studio, documenting his humble courtyard during changing weather and light conditions. “Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations,” he explained, “so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.”

Text from the artnet website [Online] Cited 10/01/2019

Jan Saudek (Czechoslovakia, b. 1935) 'Life' 1966

Jan Saudek (Czech, b. 1935)
Life
1966
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech, b. 1938)
France
1987
Gelatin silver print

The Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany
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Exhibition: ‘William Kentridge: Five Themes’ at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Exhibition dates: 14th March – 31st May, 2009

Curator: Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling and Mark Rosenthal, adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Norton Museum of Art

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Drawing for the film Stereoscope [Felix Crying]
1998-1999

One of my favourite artists in the world. His technique – the palimpsestic nature of his practice where the history, memories and spaces of previous drawings are overwritten again and again on a single piece of paper without their ever being lost (unlike traditional animation techniques) – is amazing. His use of drawing, animation and the camera to record narratives of connection always has personal and archetypal themes – love, loss, bigotry, big business, persecution, reconciliation and social conflict in the stories of his homeland South Africa. His perspective on the world, his knowledge of books and philosophy, his understanding that stories exist as faint, legible remains completes the perception that he is an artist drawn to the line of the world. His work is moving and compassionate as all great art should be.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting.

Combining the political with the poetic, William Kentridge’s work has made an indelible mark on the contemporary art scene. Dealing with subjects as sobering as apartheid and colonialism, Kentridge often imbues his art with dreamy, lyrical undertones or comedic bits of self-deprecation, making his powerful messages both alluring and ambivalent. Perhaps best known for his stop-motion films of charcoal drawings, the internationally renowned South African artist also works in etching, collage, sculpture, and the performing arts, opera in particular. This exhibition explores five primary themes that have engaged Kentridge over the last three decades through a comprehensive selection of his work from the 1980s to the present. Concentrating on his most recent production and including many pieces that have not been seen in the United States, the exhibition reveals as never before the full arc of his distinguished career.

Text from the SFMOMA website [Online] Cited 01/04/2009. No longer available online

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
“Invisible Mending” from 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
2003
35-mm and 16-mm animation film

William Kentridge: Five Themes, a comprehensive survey of the contemporary South African artist’s work, will premiere at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on March 14, 2009. Featuring more than 75 works in a range of media – including animated films, drawings, prints, theater models, sculptures, and books – the exhibition is co-organised by SFMOMA and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. The San Francisco presentation, overseen by SFMOMA Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling, will be on view through May 31, 2009.

Curated by Mark Rosenthal, adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Norton Museum of Art, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition explores five primary themes that have engaged Kentridge over the past three decades. Although the exhibition highlights projects completed since 2000 (many of which have not been seen in the United States), it will also present, for the first time, Kentridge’s most recent work alongside his earlier projects from the 1980s and 1990s – revealing as never before the full arc of his distinguished career.

Following its debut at SFMOMA, the survey will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Norton Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Plans for the European tour – which will tentatively include Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem – are being finalised. Accompanying the exhibition is a richly illustrated catalogue, complete with a DVD produced by the artist for this special occasion. The San Francisco presentation of William Kentridge: Five Themes is made possible by the generous support of the Koret Foundation and Doris and Donald Fisher.

William Kentridge is one of today’s most influential artists, and with this exhibition, SFMOMA continues its commitment to bringing such groundbreaking artists as Olafur Eliasson, Richard Tuttle, and Jeff Wall to local and international audiences,” says SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra, who co-curated the last major retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States in 2001. “Although Kentridge is primarily recognised for his animated films, he has devoted most of his time to making works on paper. The drawn line is completely inseparable from his work in other media, informing everything he creates. His transformation of drawing into animated film reflects his deep interest in how content evolves from process, how meaning accrues through making.”

Exhibition curator Rosenthal adds, “Even as Kentridge has established his reputation as a master draftsman, printmaker, and one of the preeminent artist–filmmakers of our time, he has also expanded the traditional notion of political art, evolving the genre from a conventional depiction of horrors to a more nuanced portrayal of the psychological effects of political events upon those who observe them, whether they be perpetrators, victims, or onlookers.”

Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, where he continues to live and work, Kentridge has earned international acclaim for his interdisciplinary practice, which often fuses drawing, film, and theater. Known for engaging with the social landscape and political background of his native South Africa, he has produced a searing body of work that explores themes of colonial oppression and social conflict, loss and reconciliation, and the ephemeral nature of both personal and cultural memory.

Kentridge first gained recognition in 1997, when his work was included in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, and in the Johannesburg and Havana Biennials, which were followed by prominent solo exhibitions internationally. His art was widely introduced to American audiences in 2001 through a traveling retrospective – co-curated by Neal Benezra when he served as deputy director of the Art Institute of Chicago – which primarily included works made before 2000. William Kentridge: Five Themes brings viewers up to date on the artist’s work over the past decade, exploring how his subject matter has evolved from the specific context of South Africa to more universal stories. In recent years, Kentridge has dramatically expanded both the scope of his projects (such as recent full-scale opera productions) and their thematic concerns, which now include his own studio practice, colonialism in Namibia and Ethiopia, and the cultural history of post-revolutionary Russia. His newer work is based on an intensive exploration of themes connected to his own life experience, as well as the political and social issues that most concern him.

Although his hand-drawn animations are often described as films, Kentridge himself prefers to call them “drawings for projection.” He makes them using a distinctive technique in which he painstakingly creates, erases, and reworks charcoal drawings that are photographed and projected as moving image. Movement is generated within the image, by the artist’s hand; the camera serves merely to record its progression. As such, the animations explore a tension between material object and time-based performance, uniquely capturing the artist’s working process while telling poignant and politically urgent stories.

Concerning the artist’s innovative film installations of the past ten years, Rudolf Frieling adds: “Kentridge has been considered primarily as an artist who draws for projections. Yet his recent installation-based films explore an expanded cinema space and question the very foundation of what it means to produce and perceive a moving image.”

In light of SFMOMA’s history with Kentridge – in 2004 the museum acquired the artist’s landmark film Tide Table (2003) and a set of related drawings – and the rich holdings of his work in private Bay Area collections, the occasion to present the first major exhibition of his work in San Francisco has particular resonance and reflects the museum’s ongoing commitment to his art. In conjunction with the exhibition, SFMOMA will bring the artist’s multimedia opera The Return of Ulysses to San Francisco for performances at Project Artaud Theater from March 25 through 29, 2009. Kentridge will also present his lecture-format solo performance I am not me, the horse is not mine at SFMOMA on March 14, 2009.

The Five Themes

“Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio”

The first section of the exhibition examines a crucial turning point in Kentridge’s work, one in which his own art practice became a subject. According to the artist, many of these projects are meant to reflect the “invisible work that must be done” before beginning a drawing, film, or sculpture. This theme is epitomised by the large-scale multiscreen projection 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003), an homage to the early French film director, who, like Kentridge, often combined performance with drawing. The suite of seven films – each depicting Kentridge at work in his studio or interacting with his creations – has only been shown once before in the United States and will be accompanied by a rarely seen group of related drawings, forming an intimate portrayal of the artist’s process.

“Thick Time: Soho and Felix”

A second section of the exhibition is dedicated to Kentridge’s best-known fictional characters, Soho Eckstein, a domineering industrialist and real estate developer whose troubled conscience reflects certain miens of contemporary South Africa, and his sensitive alter ego, Felix Teitlebaum, who pines for Soho’s wife and often functions as a surrogate for the artist himself. The centrepiece of this section, an ongoing work entitled 9 Drawings for Projection, comprises nine short animated films: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), Monument (1990), Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (1991), Mine (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), History of the Main Complaint (1996), WEIGHING … and WANTING (1998), Stereoscope (1999), and Tide Table (2003). These projections, along with a key selection of related drawings, follow the lives of Soho and Felix as they struggle to navigate the political and social climate of Johannesburg during the final decade of apartheid. According to Kentridge, the Soho and Felix films were made without a script or storyboards and are largely about his own process of discovery.

“Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession”

In 1975 Kentridge acted in Ubu Rex (an adaptation of Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry’s satire about a corrupt and cowardly despot), and he subsequently devoted a large body of work to the play. He began with a series of eight etchings, collectively entitled Ubu Tells the Truth (1996), and in 1997 made an animated film of the same name, as well as a number of related drawings. These works also deal with the South African experience, specifically addressing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings set up by the nation’s government in 1995 to investigate human rights abuses during apartheid. Other highlights in this grouping include the film Shadow Procession (1999), in which Kentridge first utilises techniques of shadow theatre and jointed-paper figures; the multi-panel collage Portage (2000); a large charcoal-and-pastel-on-paper work entitled Arc Procession (Smoke, Ashes, Fable) (1990); and some of the artist’s rough-hewn bronze sculptures.

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Act IV Scene I from Ubu Tells the Truth
1996-1997

“Sarastro and the Master’s Voice: The Magic Flute”

A selection of Kentridge’s drawings, films, and theatre models inspired by his 2005 production of the Mozart opera The Magic Flute for La Monnaie, the leading opera house in Belgium, will be a highlight of the exhibition. The artist’s video projection Learning the Flute (2003), which started the Flute project, shifts between images of black charcoal drawings on white paper and white chalk drawings projected onto a blackboard, forming a meditation on darkness and light. Preparing the Flute (2005) was created as a large-scale maquette within which to test projections central to the production of the opera. Another theatre model, Black Box/Chambre Noire (2006), which has never been seen in the United States, addresses the opera’s themes, specifically through an examination of the colonial war of 1904 in German South-West Africa, and of the genocide of the Herero people. What Will Come (has already come) (2007), a consideration of colonialism in Ethiopia, presents an anamorphic film installation in which intentionally distorted images projected onto a tabletop right themselves only when reflected in a cylindrical mirror. This work was recently acquired, under the guidance of Rosenthal, by the Norton Museum of Art.

“Learning from the Absurd: The Nose”

The fifth section comprises a multichannel projection made in preparation for Kentridge’s forthcoming staging of The Nose, a Metropolitan Opera production that will premiere in New York in March 2010. The Nose – a 1930 Dmitri Shostakovich opera based on Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist short story of 1836 – concerns a Russian official whose nose disappears from his face, only to turn up, in uniform, as a higher-ranking official moving in more respected circles. Kentridge’s related work, I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008), on view in the United States for the first time, is a room-size installation of projected films that use Gogol’s story as the basis for examining Russian modernism and the suppression of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s.

Related Performances

Acknowledging the profound importance of theatrical work in Kentridge’s oeuvre, SFMOMA will bring the artist’s opera The Return of Ulysses to San Francisco in conjunction with the exhibition. First performed in Brussels in 1998, Kentridge’s acclaimed reinterpretation of Claudio Monteverdi’s classic 1640 opera (based on Homer’s epic poem) is transposed to a mid-20th-century Johannesburg setting. This limited-engagement performance features live actors and musicians, as well as 13 life-size, artisan-crafted wooden puppets and projections of Kentridge’s animated charcoal drawings. The Return of Ulysses will run at Project Artaud Theater from Tuesday, March 24, through Saturday, March 28 (preview March 24, opening March 25), and is a production of Pacific Operaworks, in Seattle, incorporating puppeteers from Kentridge’s longtime collaborator, the Handspring Puppet Company of Cape Town, in South Africa.

In a special opening-night event on March 14, Kentridge will present a lecture-format solo performance of I am not me, the horse is not mine, which premiered at the 16th Biennale of Sydney in June 2008 (and shares the same title of the related multichannel projection making its U.S. debut with the exhibition). This live performance focuses on the development process of Kentridge’s upcoming opera production, The Nose.

Definitive Publication with Companion DVD

To coincide with the exhibition, SFMOMA and the Norton Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, will publish a richly illustrated catalogue (hardcover, $50). In the catalogue’s principal essay, exhibition curator Mark Rosenthal presents a portrait of the artist, showing the interrelationship between aspects of Kentridge’s character and the protagonists that populate his work. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, examines the artist’s themes and iconography in closer detail, addressing Kentridge’s working methods as he moves freely between disciplines. Rudolf Frieling demonstrates that although Kentridge is not typically discussed as an installation artist, there are compelling reasons to consider him as such. Cornelia H. Butler, Judith B. Hecker, and Klaus Biesenbach, curators at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, explore the subject of performance in Kentridge’s work. Finally, a conversation between Kentridge and Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, focuses on the artist’s drawing practice. In addition, the artist has written texts to introduce each of the book’s five plate sections.

For the first time, Kentridge will produce a DVD for distribution with the publication, making the catalogue unique among existing literature on the artist. Combining intimate studio footage of the artist at work with fragments from significant film projects, the DVD offers a fascinating look at how Kentridge’s ideas evolve from raw concept to finished work.

Press release from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Johannesburg
1989

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Drawing for the projection Felix in Exile
1994

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Felix in Exile
1994

More videos of William Kentridge’s work are available on You Tube

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco CA 94103
Phone: 415.357.4000

Opening hours:
Monday 10am – 5pm
Tuesday and Wednesday Closed
Thursday 1pm – 8pm
Friday – Sunday 10am – 5pm

SFMOMA website

William Kentridge on Wikipedia

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Opening 1: ‘Territories’ at Project Space/Spare Room, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 1st May, 2009

Curator: Shane Hulbert
Opening: Thursday 2nd April, 2009

Group photography show with artists: Shane Hulbert (Aus), John Billan (Aus), So Hing Keung (HK), Stephanie Neoh (Aus), Darren Sylvester (Aus), Ming Tse Ching (HK), Kellyann Geurts (Aus), Andrew Guthrie (HK), Kim Lawler (Aus), Law Sum Po Jamsen (HK), and Lyndal Walker (Aus).

Sculptor Fredrick White in front of Lyndal Walker's 'The Time to Hesitate is Trough, no Time to Wallow in the Mire' 2009

Sculptor Fredrick White in front of Lyndal Walker’s The Time to Hesitate is Through, no Time to Wallow in the Mire 2009

Great to catch up again with John Billan, Shane Hulbert and Les Walkling!

Marcus

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Lyndal Walker (Australian, b. 1973)
The Time to Hesitate is Through, no Time to Wallow in the Mire
2009

“The images in this show all reflect on an exploration of intersecting territories within Australia and the Chinese Special Administration Region [SAR] of Hong Kong. Central to this exploration are the cultural linkages between claimed and reclaimed territories, social territories and psychological territories and the way this in turn influences national identity. The claim is that these things of importance, and the way we respond to the notion of territory, have recurring similarities between different cultures.

Despite the broadness of the title, the notion of territories is becoming increasingly relevant in a global community, as the traditional borderlines and barriers that define who we are and what we stand for as a culture change in response to internal and external shifts.”

Shane Hulbert 2009

Territories opening night crowd at Project Space/Spare Room, Melbourne

Ming Tse Chong (Chinese, b. 1960)
City Still Life II
2008

Project Space/Spare Room

PROJECT SPACE and SPARE ROOM closed in March 2022

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Photograph: The Passing of Memory: resurrecting a photograph for the series ‘The Shape of Dreams’

March 2009

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958)
Oakland, 7-’51 from the series The Shape of Dreams (restored)
2009

“Fragments of harmonic lines assemble and collapse as the meaning of each interval must be continually revised in light of the unfolding precession of further terms in an ultimately unsustainable syntax. The mind’s ear tries to remember the sum of passing intervals, but without the ability to incorporate them into larger identifiable units each note inevitably lapses back into silence, surrendered to the presence of the currently sounding tone, itself soon to give way to another newly isolated note in its turn.”

Craig Dworkin1

The Passing of Memory

Thinking about this photograph

I bought an album on Ebay that contained an anonymous aviator with snapshots of his life: photographs of him in Oakland, California, Cologne in Germany and flying out of Italy – photos of his buddies and the work they did, the places they visited, the fun they had.

This one photograph has haunted me more than the rest.

Who was he? What was his life like? Do he get married and have children? Is he still alive?

When scanned the image was so dirty, so degraded, that I spent 7 weeks of my life cleaning and restoring the photograph working all hours of the day and night. I was obsessive almost to the point of obstinacy. Many times I nearly gave up as I thought the task impossible – thousands of dots and hairs inhabited the surface of the image and, surely, it was just another photograph one of millions that circle the world. Why expend so much energy just to resurrect this one particular image?

Some things that can be said about this photograph

It is small measuring only 9cm high by 7.5 cm wide

It is printed on cheap glossy photographic paper which now has a slight yellow tinge to it.

The image is creased at top left.

The back is annotated ‘Oakland, 7-’51’

The dark roundel with the wing on the side of the aircraft has faint text that spells out the words ‘AERO ACE’.

There is no engine in the aircraft and it looks from the parts lying on the ground that the aircraft is being broken up or used for spares.

The man is wearing work overalls with unidentifiable insignia on them, a worker on the aircraft being dismantled or just a fitter on the base.

Someone standing on the ground has obviously called out the man’s name and he has turned around in response to the call and lent forward and put out his hand in greeting – a beautiful spontaneous response – and the photograph has been taken.

Some other things that can be said about this photograph, in passing

The sun splashes the man’s face. He smiles at the camera.

His arm rests gently on the metal of the aircraft, shielded from the sun.

Perhaps he wears a ring on his fifth finger.

He is blind.

This photograph is an individual, isolated note in the fabric of time. It could easily pass into silence as memory and image fade from view. Memories of the individual form the basis for remembering and photographs act as an aide-memoire both for individual memory and the collective memory that flows from individual memory. Memory is always and only partial and fragmentary – who is remembering, what are they remembering, when do they remember, what prompts them to remember and how these memories are incorporated into the collective memory, an always mediated phenomenon that manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals, are important questions.

Images are able to trigger memories and emotional responses to a particular time and place, but since this photograph has no personal significance what is going on here? Why did I cry when I was restoring it? What emotional association was happening inside me?

“To remember is always to give a reading of the past, a reading which requires linguistic skills derived from the traditions of explanation and story-telling within a culture and which [presents] issues in a narrative that owes its meaning ultimately to the interpretative practices of a community of speakers. This is true even when what is remembered is one’s own past experience… [The] mental image of the past … becomes a phenomenon of consciousness only when clothed with words, and these owe their meaning to social practices of communication.”2

His blindness stares at us while underneath his body walks away into his passing.

I have become the speaker for this man, for this image.

His brilliant face is our brilliant face.

In this speaking, the phenomenon of making the image conscious, the gap between image and presence, between the photo and its shadow has collapsed. There is no past and present but a collective resonance that has presence in images.

“Such reasoning questions the separation of past and present in a fundamental way. As a consequence it becomes fruitless to discuss whether or not a particular event or process remembered corresponds to the actual past: all that matters are the specific conditions under which such memory is constructed as well as the personal and social implications of memories held.”3

‘The personal and social implications of memories held’. Or not held, if images are lost in passing.

It is such a joyous image, the uplifted hand almost in supplication. I feel strong connection to this man. I bring his presence into consciousness in my life, and by my thinking into the collective memory. Perhaps the emotional response is that as I get older photographs of youth remind me of the passing of time more strongly. Perhaps the image reminds me of the smiling father I never had. These are not projections of my own feelings but resonances held in the collective memory.

As Susan Sontag has observed,

“Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us – grandparents, parents, teachers and older friends.”4

Remembering is an ethical act. It is also a voluntary act. We can choose not to remember. We can choose to forget. In this photograph I choose to remember, to not let pass into the dark night of the soul. My mind, eyes and heart are open.

This is not a simulacra of an original image but an adaptation, an adaptation that tries to find resonances between past and present, between image and shadow. As such this photograph is no longer an isolated tone that inevitably lapses back into silence but part of a bracketing of time that is convulsingly beautiful in it’s illumination, it’s presence. The individual as collective, collected memory present for all to see.

The form of formlessness, the shape of dreams.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Dworkin, Craig. “Grammar Degree Zero (Introduction to Re-Writing Freud)” (2005) [Online] Cited 23rd March, 2009 (no longer available online)

2/ Holtorf, Cornelius. “Social Memory,” part of a doctoral thesis Monumental Past: The Life-histories of Megalithic Monuments in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Germany) submitted 1998 [Online] Cited 23/03/2009

3/ Ibid.,

4/ Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003, p. 103

Before

After

Before

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After

Before

Marcus Bunyan. 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009

After

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Exhibition: ‘Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Rooms’ at Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney

Exhibition dates: 24th February – 8th June, 2009

Curators: Jaap Guldemond (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim (Le Consortium, Dijon)

MCA Curatorial Liaison: Judith Blackall

“Discover the work of internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama with this major exhibition that spans decades of her artistic practice.

Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years demonstrates the enduring force of Yayoi Kusama. Renowned early installations such as Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (1965) along with recent immersive environments including Fireflies on the Water (2000) and Clouds (2008) provide insight into the creative energy of this extraordinary artist and her lifelong preoccupation with the perceptual, visual and physical worlds.

Working across different media and forms that include painting, collage, sculpture, installation and film, as well as performance and its documentation, Kusama creates works that reveal a fixation with repetition, pattern and accumulation. Describing herself as an “obsessive artist”, her work is intensely sensual, infused with autobiographical, psychological and sexual content.”

Text from the MCA website [Online] Cited 12/03/2009. No longer available online

Many thanks to Ed Jansen for the use of his installation photographs of this exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 2008. See the whole set of his photographs on Flickr. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field
1965

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field
1965
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2008
Photo: Ed Jansen

Rewind 1960

Visual hallucinations of polka dots since childhood have inspired the most significant works of this avant-gardist, who says creating art “saved” her during her lifelong battle with mental illness.

Interview by Natalie Reilly

This photograph [see above, top, for the image of her in 1965] shows a creative work that I made in New York in 1960. I was 31 years old at the time and my inspiration was the inundation and proliferation of polka dots. The work represents the evolution of my original formative process. Of all the pieces I have made, I like this one the best. It was my intention to create an interminable image by using mirrors and multiplying red polka dots.

I was born in Nagano Prefecture , a mountainous region in Japan. The youngest of four children, I have one sister and two brothers.

Since childhood, I have loved to paint pictures and create art forms. [Kusama has suffered from obsessive thinking and visual hallucinations since early childhood. the hallucinations – often of polka dots, or “nets” as she calls them – have become the inspiration for much of her work.] I did many artworks in great numbers in my younger days.

I went to Seattle in 1957 where I had my first solo exhibition in the US. I moved to New York in 1958. Japan in those days was too conservative for avant-garde art to be accepted. [By 1961, Kusama was an active participant in the avant-garde movement in New York. Her art, which often included performance and controversial themes such as nudity and protests against the Vietnam War, drew acclaim for art critics and other artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.]

I was deeply moved by the efforts the artists in New York were making then to develop a new history for art. I owe what I am today to many people in the art circles in Japan, the US and Europe who enthusiastically supported my art and gave me a boost into the international art scene.

Artists Georgia O’Keefe and Joseph Cornell were among the many friends who helped me, including Donald Judd and [writer and activist] Lucy Lippard who appreciated the originality of my art. [In 1962 at the height of her success in New York, Kusama’s mental health began to suffer as she grew more paranoid about other artists copying her work. Late that year, she covered up all the windows in her studio in an attempt to “shut out the world”, and by November she was hospitalised after suffering a nervous breakdown.]

I came back to Japan in 1973, because my health had deteriorated. I wanted to create art in a quiet atmosphere. I once said, “if it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago” an that’s still true. I do art in order to pursue my philosophy of life seeking truth in art.

Reilly, Natalie. “Rewind 1960,” in Boleyn, Alison (ed.,). Sunday Life: The Sunday Age Magazine. Melbourne: Fairfax Magazines. February 15th 2009, p. 30.

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929) 'Clouds' 1999 and 'Love Forever' 2005 from the exhibition 'Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Rooms' at Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, Feb - June, 2009

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
Clouds 1999 and Love Forever 2005
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2008
Photo: Ed Jansen

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929) 'Clouds' 2008 (installation view at MCA)

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
Clouds (installation view at MCA)
2008
Image courtesy the artist, Yayoi Kusama Studio, Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo and © the artist

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929) 'Stars Infinity (A.B.C)' 2003 (installation view MCA)

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
Stars Infinity (A.B.C) (installation view at MCA)
2003
Image courtesy and © the artist

This exhibition explored the extraordinary work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. It revealed the coherence of her practice over many years and highlighted the freshness and innovation she brings to themes investigated throughout her life. Describing herself as an ‘obsessive artist’, her work is intensely sensual, infused with autobiographical, psychological and sexual content.

Kusama was born in 1929, in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. She demonstrated a passion for art from an early age and went on to study Nihonga painting, a formal Japanese technique using ground pigment and animal glues. Excited by the promise of the post-war international art scene, Kusama moved to New York in 1958. Her first New York solo exhibition a year later was an outstanding success and she became renowned as an innovative and adventurous young artist with her large Infinity Net canvases; Accumulation sculptures of everyday objects completely covered with soft, sewn and stuffed protuberances; environments such as the Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field (1965) and performances and Happenings. In 1966 she exhibited Narcissus Garden, a field of mirrored spheres in the gardens of the Venice Biennale, creating a sensation with an extraordinarily beautiful and compelling new version of her accumulations.

Kusama was energetic, talented, strategic and courageous at a time of fervent development in the art world, in a city that was exciting and notoriously competitive. During the ‘60s and ‘70s she was an active presence in Europe as well – in 1962 she was the only female artist to take part in the widely acclaimed Nul (Zero) international group exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. She returned to Tokyo in 1973.

Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years juxtaposed seminal works from the 1960s with more recent installations, films, paintings, floor pieces and silkscreen prints on canvas, and included major new works. The exhibition reflected Kusama’s lifelong obsession with repetition, pattern and aggregation, and her perceptions – visual, physical and sensory. It demonstrated her originality, creativity and uncompromising vision across many different techniques. Her work has been highly influential to new generations of artists and designers and she remains one of the most respected artists working today.

Organised by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Presented in association with City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand.

Anonymous. “Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years,” on the MCA website Nd [Online] Cited 13/06/2022

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
Fireflies on the Water
2000

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
The Moment of Regeneration
2004

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
The Moment of Regeneration (installation view at MCA)
2004
Image courtesy the artist, Yayoi Kusama Studio, Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo and © the artist

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929) 'Walking on the Sea of Death' 1981 (installation view at MCA)

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
Walking on the Sea of Death (installation view at MCA)
1981
Image courtesy the artist, Yayoi Kusama Studio, Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo and © the artist

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929) 'Narcissus Garden' 1966

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
Narcissus Garden (at the Venice Biennale, Italy)
1966

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929) 'The Earth in Late Summer' 2004 (installation view MCA)

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
The Earth in Late Summer (installation view MCA)
2004
Image courtesy the artist, Yayoi Kusama Studio, Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo and © the artist

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929) 'I'm here but nothing' 2000- (installation view MCA)

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
I’m here but nothing (installation view MCA)
2000-
Image courtesy the artist, Yayoi Kusama Studio, Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo and © the artist

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929)
Invisible Life
2000

Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)
140 George Street
The Rocks, Sydney, Australia

Opening hours:
Daily 11am – 5pm

Yayoi Kusama website

Museum of Contemporary Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Overpainted Photographs’ by Gerhard Richter at Centre de la Photographie, Geneva

Exhibition dates: 20th February – 12th April, 2009

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
9.4.89
10.1 x 14.8cm
Oil on colour photograph

There is something unsettling in Richter’s serendipitious interventions. Using his own prosaic 10 x 15cm colour photographs that have been commercially printed as the basis of the works, Richter overlays the surface of the photograph with skeins of paint that disturb the reflexivity of each medium. Dragging the photograph through the paint or using a palette knife to apply layers of colour, the surfaces of paint and photograph no longer exist as separate entities. The process produces punctum like clefts rent in the fabric of time and space. If the intervention is judged unsuccessful the result if immediately destroyed.

In 5.Juli.1994 (below) blood red fingers of paint strain upwards as they invade the solidity of a dour suburban home, echoing the invading trees branches at top right of picture. In 11.2.98 (below) green paint slashes across the mouth and forehead of a woman in a floral dress, her eyes seemingly bloodshot and pleading stare into the distance to the left of our view, the silent scream strangled in her throat by the vibrations of paint. These are the instantaneous responses of the artist to the photograph, a single mood expounded in irreversible gestures, the actions of the painter’s hand disturbing the indexical link of the photograph and it’s ability to be ‘read’ as a referent of the object it depicts. Richter’s interventions challenge the concept of momentary awareness and offer the possibility of a space between, where the image stands for something else – access to Other, even a contemplation of the sublime.

“The colour of paint applied corresponds or contrasts the tonalities of the underlying photograph but link the two through formal relationships of the layers … Often a tense relationship, the results run the gamut of the surreal to the beautiful to the disturbed. It is all the more surprising that each in its perceived completeness was in essence accomplished by chance and trial and error.”1

“Richter’s painterly gestures bounce off the [photographs] content in peculiar ways, sometimes interacting with it, sometimes overlaying it and sometimes threatening to eclipse it altogether. The final effect is to cause both photography and painting to seem like incredibly bizarre activities, disparate in texture but often complicit in aspiration.”2

I love the violence, the sometimes subversive, sometimes transcendental ‘equivalence’ of these images: where a Steiglitz cloud can stand for music, where a Minor White infrared photograph posits a new reality, Richter offers us an immediacy that destroys the self-reflexive nature of everyday life. His spontaneous musings, his amorphous worlds, his bleeds and blends crack open the skin of our existential life on earth. Here, certainly, are ‘the clefts in words, the words as flesh’.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ “Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs,” on the 5B4 blog, February 9, 2009 [Online] Cited 13/06/2022

2/ Hatje Cantz. “Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs,” on the Artbook website Nd [Online] Cited 13/06/2022

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) '11.4.89' from the exhibition 'Overpainted Photographs' by Gerhard Richter at Centre de la Photographie, Geneva, Feb - April, 2009

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
11.4.89
10 x 15cm
Oil on colour photograph

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
11.3.89
10 x 14.9cm
Oil on colour photograph

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
5.Juli.1994
10.2 x 15.2cm
Oil on colour photograph

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
11.2.98
10 x 14.7cm
Oil on colour photograph

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
22.2.96
9.6 x 14.7cm
Oil on colour photograph

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
11.Febr.05
10.1 x 14.9cm
Oil on colour photograph

The exhibition presents 330 of Richter’s largely unknown overpainted photographs, a technique he has been using since 1982.

The exhibition UERBERNALTE FOTOGRAFIEN / PHOTOGRAPHIES PEINTES (OVERPAINTED PHOTOGRAPHS) at the Centre de la photographie Geneva (CPG) presented a side of the work of Gerhard Richter largely unknown up till now. Only a few collectors and gallerists close to the artist were aware of the practise that Gerhard Richter, one of the most important artists of our times, had developed systematically since 1982. It is only because of this exhibition that more than 1000 of his over-painted photographs will enter into his catalogue raisone. The CPG presents approximately 330 of them in this show.

“By placing paint on photographs, with all their random and involuntary expressiveness, Gerhard Richter reinforces the unique aspect of each of these mediums and opens a field of tension rich in paradoxes, as old as the couple – painting / photography – which has largely defined modern art.”

Text from Centre de la Photographie website

Gerhard Richter is justly famed for the photorealism of his early canvases, but it is less well known that he has also painted directly onto photographic prints. These (mostly small-format) pieces were reproduced in books as early as the first Atlas, but practically all of the works themselves are housed in private collections and rarely exhibited in public. Overpainted Photographs gathers this body of work, which unites the labor of the hand with the work of mechanical reproduction to produce a kind of art as conceptually rich as Richter’s better-known paintings, neutralizing the expressive powers of each medium to reach an indifference to their potency. In an overture to Duchamp’s “degree zero” found objects, the original photographs are frequently bland in content – an empty office, a ball, a beach scene or tourist snapshot – and Richter’s painterly gestures bounce off that content in peculiar ways, sometimes interacting with it, sometimes overlaying it and sometimes threatening to eclipse it altogether. The final effect is to cause both photography and painting to seem like incredibly bizarre activities, disparate in texture but often complicit in aspiration. This monograph offers a unique opportunity to savour what had previously been a neglected but copious aspect of Richter’s work.

Text from the Amazon website

“The public scenes, whether on the beach or the ski slope or children’s theatre, are beset with sudden surges of colour that tend to resemble interventions of the sky or elemental forces, more than the moods of a decorative or ornamental painter annotation. Sometimes they seem like catastrophic visions. Blood-red snowflakes dance above the white fern. The photo shows skyscrapers in the urban morning sun – and the oil paint adds to the sulpherous fire that pours over the city from the sky”

Botho Strauss in Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs (Hardcover)

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
22.1.2000 (Firenze)
12 x 12cm
Oil on colour photograph

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
21.1.2000 (Firenze)
12 x 12cm
Oil on colour photograph

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
22.4.07
12.6 cm x 16.7 cm
Oil on colour photograph

Centre de la Photographie
28, rue des Bains,
CH – 1205 Genève
Phone: + 41 22 329 28 35

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11.00 – 18.00

Centre de la Photographie website

Gerhard Richter website

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Exhibition: ‘Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 3rd February – 25th May 2009

Unknown Artist. 'Front Street, Looking North, Morgan City, LA' 1929 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard' at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Feb - March, 2009

Unknown artist (American)
Front Street, Looking North, Morgan City, LA
1929
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (8.9 x 14 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

This looks a very interesting exhibition – I wish I could see the actual thing!

Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs and art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

This exhibition will focus on a collection of 9,000 picture postcards amassed and classified by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), now part of the Metropolitan’s Walker Evans Archive. The picture postcard represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development. The dynamic installation of hundreds of American postcards drawn from Evans’s collection will reveal the symbiotic relationship between Evans’s own art and his interest in the style of the postcard. This will also be demonstrated with a selection of about a dozen of his own photographs printed in 1936 on postcard format photographic paper.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Street Scene, Morgan City, Louisiana' 1935 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard' at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Feb - March, 2009

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Street Scene, Morgan City, Louisiana
1935
Film negative
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

“Sold in five-and-dime stores in every small town in America, postcards satisfied the country’s need for human connection in the age of the railroad and Model T when, for the first time, many Americans regularly found themselves traveling far from home. At age twelve, Walker Evans began to collect and classify his cards. What appealed to the nascent photographer were the cards’ vernacular subjects, the simple, unvarnished, “artless” quality of the pictures, and the generic, uninflected, mostly frontal style that he later would borrow for his own work with the camera. Both the picture postcard and Evans’s photographs seem equally authorless – quiet documents that record the scene with an economy of means and with simple respect. Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard proposes that the picture postcard represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development.”

Text from the Steidl website

The American postcard came of age around 1907, when postal deregulations allowed correspondence to be written on the address side of the card. By 1914, the craze for picture postcards had proved an enormous boon for local photographers, as their black-and-white pictures of small-town main streets, local hotels and new public buildings were transformed into handsomely coloured photolithographic postcards that were reproduced in great bulk and sold in five-and-dime stores in every small town in America. Postcards met the nation’s need for communication in the age of the railroad and Model T, when, for the first time, many Americans often found themselves traveling far from home. In the Walker Evans Archive at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a collection of 9,000 such postcards amassed by the great American photographer, who began his remarkable collection at the age of 10. What appealed to Evans, even as a boy, were the vernacular subjects, the unvarnished, “artless” quality of the pictures and the generic, uninflected, mostly frontal style that he later would borrow for his own work. The picture postcard and Evans’ photographs seem equally authorless, appearing as quiet documents that record a scene with both economy of means and simple respect. This volume demonstrates that the picture postcard articulated a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’ artistic development.

Text from the Amazon website

Unknown artist (American)
Main Street, Showing Confederate Monument, Lenoir, N. C.
1930s
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (8.9 x 14cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

Walker Evans was the progenitor of the documentary style in American photography, and he argued that picture postcard captured a part of America that was not recorded in any other medium. In the early 20th century, picture postcards, sold in five-and-dime stores across America, depicted small towns and cities with realism and hometown pride – whether the subject was a local monument, a depot, or a coal mine.

Evans wrote of his collection: “The very essence of American daily city and town life got itself recorded quite inadvertently on the penny picture postcards of the early 20th century .… Those honest direct little pictures have a quality today that is more than mere social history .… The picture postcard is folk document.”

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard is the first exhibition to focus primarily on works drawn from The Walker Evans Archive. The installation is designed to convey the incredible range of his collection and to reflect the eclectic and obsessional ways in which the artist organised his picture postcards. For example, Evans methodically classified his collection into dozens of subject categories, such as “American Architecture,” “Factories,” “Automobiles,” “Street Scenes,” “Summer Hotels,” “Lighthouses,” “Outdoor Pleasures,” “Madness,” and “Curiosities”.

Marty Weil. “Walker Evans’ Picture Postcard Collection on the ephemera: exploring the world of old paper website Feb 24, 2009 [Online] Cited 12/06/2022. No longer available online

Unknown artist (American)
Tennessee Coal, Iron, & R. R. Co.’s Steel Mills, Ensley, Ala.
1920s
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (8.9 x 14cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
View of Easton, Pennsylvania
1935
Postcard format gelatin silver print

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
View of Ossining, New York
1930-1931
Gelatin silver print
4 1/8 x 7 13/16 in. (10.5 x 19.8cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999

Unknown artist (American)
Holland Vehicular Tunnel, New York City
1920s
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

Unknown artist (American)
Santa Fe station and yards, San Bernardino, California
c. 1910
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

Unknown artist (American)
Men’s Bathing Department, Bath House, Hot Springs National Park, Ark.
1920s
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

In 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, the US Postal service handled 700 million picture postcards. Evans would later recall his fondness for those “honest, direct, little pictures that once flooded the mail.” By the age of twelve he was a collector and through his lifetime, an obsessive. “Yes, I was a postcard collector at an early age. Every time my family would take me around for what they thought was my education, to show me the country in a touring car, to go to Illinois, to Massachusetts, I would rush into Woolworth’s and buy all the postcards.” For Evans, the addition of hand-colouring added a great deal of aesthetic value. …

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard reproduces hundreds of cards from his collection including the three magazine features mentioned above. Also the fine addition of an “illustrated transcript” of his now famous Lyric Documentary lecture at Yale in 1964 makes this a bit more interesting than the title may suggest. …

Later in life Evans had friends around the country while on photo trips keeping an eye for postcards that might interest. He had a particular love for ones produced by the Detroit Publishing Company which were considered the “Cadillac” of postcards. Lee Friedlander related the following from a recent interview: “The Detroit Publishing Company had a formula. If a town had 2,000 people or so, it got a main street postcard; if it had 3,500, it got the main street and also a courthouse square. Walker liked the formula. He had everyone looking for this or that. He told me once in Old Lyme, “If you run across any ‘Detroits,’ get them for me.” I found sixty or seventy cards for him. He loved them.”

“Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard by Jeff L. Rosenheim,” on the 5B4: Photography and Books blog, March 1, 2009 [Online] Cited 12/06/2022

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Stable, Natchez, Mississippi
March 1935
Gelatin silver print
10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005

Unknown artist (American)
Future New York, The City of Skyscrapers
1910s
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

Unknown artist (American)
Woolworth and Municipal Buildings from Brooklyn Bridge, New York
1910s
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

Unknown artist (American)
Curve at Brooklyn Terminal, Brooklyn Bridge, New York
1907
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

Unknown artist (American)
Empire State Building, New York
1930s
Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction
3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
Phone: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm
Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm
Closed Wednesday

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard (Hardcover)
by Jeff Rossenheim and Walker Evans

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Reading the modern photography book: changing perceptions’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exhibition dates: 18th January – 26th April, 2009

Looks a great exhibition for fans of photography books!

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art, Washington for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

foto-auge (photo-eye)
Edited and with an introduction by Franz Roh, cover design by Jan Tschichold
(Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, Dr. Fritz Wedekind & Co., 1929)

“Also produced in conjunction with Film und Foto, this book showcases a wide variety of photographic practices as a way of examining the social importance of the medium’s ability to construct visual knowledge.”

Held in conjunction with Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” this exhibition examines a variety of artistic and thematic approaches to the modern photography book, displaying examples that span the period from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. The photography book, more than simply a book containing photographs, is a publication composed by the careful sequencing and editing of photographic material. Often produced by a photographer, they present visual narratives through creative page design that frequently integrates photographs with text and graphic elements.

This focus exhibition organises 21 books from the Gallery’s library into four themes: “New Visions,” “Documented Realities,” “Postwar Scenes,” and “Conceptual Practices.” It highlights diverse projects from individual photographers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Yasuhiro Ishimoto as well as collaborative projects from the Hungarian Work Circle (Munka Kör) and Andy Warhol’s Factory, revealing that the photography book is both a significant conveyer of contemporary experience and a witness to historical events.

The modern photography book, more than simply a book containing photographs, is a publication composed by the careful sequencing and editing of photographic material. Often produced by a photographer, these books present visual narratives through creative page design that frequently integrates photographs with text and graphic elements. Popular across the political spectrum, photography books have been published both as art objects and as documentary records. Through their organisation they foster a critical examination of the visual world, and as works of historical witness they have helped to construct cultural memories. Photography books have been a primary format for the arrangement and display of photographs, making them a vital but commonly overlooked component of the history of photography. Today they continue to provide an important forum for photographers to convey their work to a wide public audience.

Photographs have appeared in book format since their inception. For example, William Henry Fox Talbot’s commercially published The Pencil of Nature (1844) was one of the earliest explorations of photography’s narrative capabilities. Like all early photography books, Talbot’s photographs were printed separately from the letterpress text. It was not until the 1880s, with the development of the halftone plate and printing process, that mass-produced newspapers, magazines, and books regularly featured photographs. This invention, which allowed type and photographic images to be mechanically reproduced on the same press, dramatically changed the means by which the general public viewed and had access to photographs. By the 1920s the number of photographically illustrated publications had increased exponentially, and photographs regularly recounted events without explanatory text. As people began to see more and more photographs on a daily basis, they became far more visually literate. Set within this context, the modern mass-produced photography book challenged not only traditional narrative structures but also popular habits of reading and seeing.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website [Online] Cited 06/03/2009. No longer available online

Yasuhiro Ishimoto (Japanese-American, 1921-2012)
Aruhi Arutokoro (Someday, Somewhere)
Preface by Tsutomu Watanabe, design by Ryuuichi Yamashiro (Tokyo: Geibi Shuppan, 1958)

“This engaging publication juxtaposes photographs taken by Ishimoto in Chicago and Tokyo. Born in the United States, Ishimoto spent his childhood in Japan and later returned to the U.S. to attend school at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Finally settling in Tokyo, he influenced a new generation of postwar Japanese photographers interested in producing books.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
The Decisive Moment
(New York: Simon & Schuster, in collaboration with Éditions Verve, Paris, 1952)

“An important presentation of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, this large-format book helped to popularise his work, in which a distinctive documentary approach transforms ordinary moments into remarkable photographic visions.”

National Gallery of Art
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Opening 2: ‘New work’ by Richard Grigg at Block Projects, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 5th March – 28th March, 2009

Opening: Thursday 5th March, 2009

Richard Grigg. 'New work' opening night crowd at Block Projects, Melbourne

Richard Grigg (Australian)
New Work exhibition
Opening night crowd at Block Projects, Melbourne

Moving down Flinders Lane we ascended to the fourth floor and entered the beautiful light filled gallery space at Block Projects to view the ‘new work’ of Richard Grigg. An eclectic mix of sculpture, painting, drawing, and collage was presented. Preparatory drawings for one of the sculptures, a pencil drawing of two old men debating, a canvas of a camera in tempera, gold leaf and gesso vie for attention with the two standout pieces of the show: No more songs at funerals/hero today gone tomorrow (2007) and He can’t read well because of his horns (2009), surrealist sculptures both made of compressed cardboard (below).

These two sculptures are fantastic: the first forming a skull made out of birds perched on a cross surmounted by a bird holding an olive branch, the title deliciously ironic; the second a stooped gargoyle like creature with a massive extrusion for a nose, hanging tongue dripping saliva and phantasmagorical protrusions emerging from it’s head making it impossible for the creature to ‘read well’ in both the metaphorical and literal sense. This is a beautiful but grotesque primordial fantasy with the horns putting roots down in the soil like the roots of a mangrove tree, a gold leaf flower blooming at their outer reaches, the creature exhausted by the effort of trying to keep his head up.

Unfortunately the rest of the exhibition lacked core strength: conceptually the show is not strong. Evidence of beauty in decay and concerns about the process of ageing vie with environmental contexts; slippages in time (The Moment Between) contrast with cameras and their sight lines; Pinocchio lies under a shroud with a camera trapped in the back of a horse drawn cart (Dream of Rest). Apparently, the cameras do not signify the capturing of the frozen moment of beauty but they are there because the artist’s father collected cameras. To me they seemed to be defining the nature of our interaction with the world, the surface of the image controlling the interface between technology and earth.

One of the problems with undertaking an exhibition titled New Work is the assumption that the new work being produced hangs together holistically and tells a not necessarily linear narrative story but one that the viewer can investigate, question, and tease the pertinent concepts from – something the viewer can hang their hat on (perhaps the horns of a dilemma!) This was not the case here. The bits n bobs approach of this exhibition falls slightly flat but go see the show for the two sculptures – they alone are worth the effort!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Richard Grigg (Australian)
No more songs at funerals/hero today gone tomorrow
2007-2009
Layered boxboard, wood dowel, glue, pine, black gloss enamel, Perspex

Richard Grigg (Australian)
He can’t read well because of his horns
2009
Layered boxboard, gold leaf, wood dowel, glue, pine, black gloss enamel, wood stain