Anonymous photographer Ambrotype of a washerwoman for the Union Army in Richmond c. 1865 Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian
Many thankx to the Smithsonian Castle for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“It is very strange that I, a boy brought up in the woods, seeing as it were but little of the world, should be drifted into the very apex of this great event.”
Abraham Lincoln, on the Civil War, July 1864
A box of gun cotton (cotton treated with nitric acid) carrying the brand name “Anthony’s Snowy Cotton,” a photo processing supply that a Civil War-era photographer might use in the field to create collodion photographs. Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian
A sampling of photographic chemical bottles used for wet collodion photography during the Civil War Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian
This Civil-war era photo album of American political and military figures was owned by Karl Schenk, president of Switzerland 1865 Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian
Anonymous photographer A book of illustrated personal portraits from the Civil War era c. 1861-1865 Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian
A photo exhibit to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Experience Civil War Photography: From the Home Front to the Battlefront, opens in the Smithsonian Castle August 1st 2012 and it continues for a year. Advancements in photography brought the conflict close to home for many Americans and the exhibit features a stereoview and a carte-de-visite album of Civil War generals.
During the Civil War the Castle served as a home for the Smithsonian Secretary’s family and a place of learning and collecting. The exhibit displays excerpts from the diary from the daughter of the Secretary Joseph Henry. Mary Henry recorded the comings and goings of soldiers to the Castle use of its towers to observe advancing soldiers and the state of Washington after Lincoln’s assassination.
Also featured are Smithsonian employee Solomon Brown (1829-1906) and the lecture hall that hosted a series of abolitionist speakers; it was destroyed by fire in 1865. Stereoviews, a form of 3-D photography that blossomed during that era, daguerreotypes, tintypes and ambrotypes – all emerging types of photography – are highlighted in the exhibit to explore the ways photography was used to depict the war, prompt discussion and retain memories.
The exhibit features a range of Civil War-era photographic materials from Smithsonian collections, including cameras, stereoviewers, albums and portraits, alongside photographs of soldiers and battlefields. Highlights include an ambrotype portrait of an African American washerwoman, carte-de-visite (a type of small photo) album of Civil War generals, an 11-by-4-inch-view camera and equipment and an examination of the emergence of battlefield photography and photojournalism.
Experience Civil War Photography: From the Home Front to the Battlefront is a joint exhibition produced by the Smithsonian and the Civil War Trust and is sponsored by the History channel.
Press release from the Smithsonian Castle website
Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) [Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Dead Confederate sharpshooter in “The devil’s den”] July 1863
Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) [Antietam, Md. President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers] 3rd October 1862
Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) [Antietam, Md. President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers] (detail) 3rd October 1862
Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaign was one of the first to use photography as a political tool 1860 Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) [Fort Pulaski, Ga. The “Beauregard” gun] April 1862 1 negative (2 plates) : glass, stereograph, wet collodion Two plates form left (LC-B811-0197A) and right (LC-B811-0197B) halves of a stereograph pair Photograph of the Federal Navy, and seaborne expeditions against the Atlantic Coast of the Confederacy – specifically of Fort Pulaski, Ga., April 1862
Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) [Richmond, Va. Grave of Gen. J. E. B. Stuart in Hollywood Cemetery, with temporary marker] Richmond, April-June 1865
James F. Gibson (American, 1828-1905) [James River, Va. Deck and turret of U.S.S. Monitor seen from the bow (ie. stern)] 9th July, 1862 1 negative (2 plates): glass, stereograph, wet collodion
James F. Gibson was probably the least known of the Civil War photographers. He, too, was born in New York City. He learned the art under Brady. Gibson eventually photographed Gen. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, Seven Days Battles, Battle of Gaines’ Mill, and Battle of Malvern Hill. He died in 1905.
A magnified view of a photo looking through a single lens viewfinder of a Civil War-era stereoviewer (featuring an image in the same series as the one above) Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian
Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) [Washington Navy Yard, D.C. Lewis Payne, the conspirator who attacked Secretary Seward, standing in overcoat and hat] April 1865 Glass, wet plate colloidon
Matthew Brady & Co., Petroleum Nasby (David Ross Locke) 1865 Albumen photograph
An 1865 carte-de-visite portrait – a highly collectible albumen photograph on a small card – featuring American humorist Petroleum Nasby, pseudonym of David Ross Locke. Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian
Smithsonian Castle 1000 Jefferson Dr SW Washington, DC 20004, United States
Ernest Cole: Journeys through photojournalism, social documentary photography and art
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Abstract
This text investigates the trajectory of the work of Ernest Cole in order to understand how it developed under the influence of the South African Apartheid system.
Keywords
Ernest Cole, photography, photojournalism, social documentary photography, South Africa, apartheid, The Family of Man, photo book, photo essay, Drum magazine, Life magazine, art, House of Bondage.
“For each individual photographer, there was the struggle to overcome the blind spots resulting from an internalised apartheid ideology. To see what had not hitherto been seen; to make visible what had been invisible; to find ways of articulating through the medium of photography, a reality obscured by government propaganda.”
Joyce Ozynski 1
“The Whites are more oppressed than the blacks in this country. Because they can’t feel. They have lost their humanity.”
Omar Badsha 2
For 43 years (1948-1991) the country of South Africa and its people lived under the racially discriminatory policy of apartheid (separateness), adopted when the National Party (NP) took power and enshrined segregation laws between black and whites into law. Under these laws the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and white supremacy / Afrikaner minority rule was maintained. The population was split into four groups: “native”, “white”, “coloured”, and “Asian”, and residential areas were segregated, sometimes by means of forced removals.3 One man who grew up under this oppressive regime and whose photographic representation of its nature made him a world-renowned photographer was Ernest Cole.
The photographer that we know as Ernest Cole was born Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole on the 21st March 1940 in humble circumstances, the fourth of sixth children, in Eersterust, an Eastern suburb of Pretoria. Cole suffered from malnutrition growing up, was slight of build (he was only 5′ tall as an adult) but was very intelligent. He took a series of menial jobs after leaving school at the age of 16, all he could find as an unskilled labourer. At the weekends during the 1950s, Cole began taking photographs on a black box camera and obtained a job as a dark room assistant to a Chinese photographer, later becoming photographer at Zonk magazine, a competitor to Drum magazine that he eventually joined as page layout designer and photographer in 1958.4
Drum magazine, founded as The African Drum in 1951, was the most influential magazine for black people during the anti-apartheid era, “A Magazine for Africa by Africa” that was loosely based on the template of the American Life magazine. Cole would have been exposed to international photojournalism through its pages; he also studied photography by correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography and was always carrying around photography books that he avidly studied.5 Although few photographs by Cole were published to illustrate photo-essays in Drum (the photographs always appearing with accompanying text), he was exposed to the work of other photojournalists who appeared in its pages; he would also have seen the article that appeared in Drum in May 1958 on the international touring exhibition curated by Edward Steichen titled The Family of Man. This exhibitionopened in Johannesburg in September 1958, and Cole would have certainly have visited the “no colour bar” post-war humanist photography exhibition.6 Darren Newbury’s chapter on the history of Drum in his excellent book Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (2009) situates the magazine, “in the context of developments in international photojournalism and the rise of picture magazines in Europe and the US, while acknowledging the influence that urban black culture had on its style and content, with its concentration on US sportsmen and jazz music as well as stories on crime and poverty.”7
Here we observe the difference between photojournalism and social documentary photography. Photojournalism differs from social documentary photography in the primacy of text, the limited number of photographs, the more rigid conventions of framing, and the more direct form of highlighting injustice and inhumanity in resistance photojournalism.8
“Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism (the collecting, editing, and presenting of news material for publication or broadcast) that creates images in order to tell a news story… [and] is distinguished from other close branches of photography (eg. documentary photography, social documentary photography, or street photography) by complying with a rigid ethical framework which demands that the work is both honest and impartial whilst telling the story in strictly journalistic terms.”9 When compared to photojournalism, social documentary photography, “is the recording of humans in their natural condition with a camera. Often it also refers to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.”10
Cole, eventually unsettled by the piecemeal approach of taking single photographs to illustrate photo-essays in Drum – in other words being a photojournalist – moved towards being a social documentary photographer, inveigling himself of the history of this form of photography through the work of artists such as Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and the photographers of the Farm Security Administration (FSA).11 With his two 35mm Nikon cameras slung over his shoulder, Cole accessed areas that were usually restricted to black people because he had been classified as “coloured.” Being a loner, he could move about the city and country more freely than most black people who required identity passes, or “dompas” (“stupid passes”), to enter white areas. The work was dangerous and fraught with difficulty for when photographing in hospitals, prisons and mines, fear of discovery and arrest was ever present: paranoia and adrenalin were always part of this mix. Cole was frequently arrested and had, on occasion, to bury his negatives to hide them from the Secret Police. “He seemed to be able to get in anywhere and shoot anything, short and neat, in sports coat and slacks, he was the invisible man.”12
In one sense Cole’s photographs can be seen to have a relationship to “scene of the crime” photographs (such as those by Weggee),13 for Cole “steals” his images from the continuum of time, whipping out his camera, framing the image, snatching its import and returning the camera to the dark before anyone has noticed. Unlike Weggee, who used flash to capture his nightmarish scenes (making the presence of the photographer part of the psychology of the picture), Cole eschewed the use of flash. He was also an insider photographing a subject matter that was of great importance to him, not an outsider looking in at the subject, like the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson whose book People of Moscow was a great influence on the construction of his own book (see footnote 15).
Cole had a vested interest in recording the injustices and violence perpetrated on his fellow human beings by the white minority, representing in forensic detail as chronicler the travails of his people, for he was working toward a book that would document the condition of black people under apartheid, ultimately to be titled House of Bondage (1967). “He believed passionately in his mission to tell the world in photographs what it was like and what it meant to be black under apartheid, and identified intimately with his own people in photographs. With imaginative daring, courage, and compassion, he portrayed the full range of experience of black people as they negotiated their lives through apartheid.”14
Cole was like a spy, unobtrusively capturing his images and through the subtleties of composition and framing, making them art. “Considered both compositionally and in terms of the moment that is captured on film, what is most remarkable about them… and it is true of much of Cole’s work – is how elusive Cole, as photographer, remains within the unfolding dramas he documents.”15 He gathered the pictures for his meta-narrative in fourteen parts, House of Bondage,16 by photographing in the midst of the subject, registering “that climate of fear and loathing – the bondage – that is the subject of his work at the deepest level, in the way he goes about making his pictures.”17 His images have a level of documentary detail and narrative point that give them an immediate presence and the spaces within have an inescapable discomfort about them. “The sense is of the specific image as just one moment within a continuum of discomfort, resignation and suffering, encircling the photographs from all sides.”18
You feel what he feels, in the midst of, from inside. For example, look at the photograph Penny baas… (1960-1966, below) and just feel the explosive slap on the face of the boy begging, his right leg raised by the force of the casual yet sadistic blow, the other lad at left still holding his hands out pleading for a few tossed coins, enough to buy a small amount of food to ward off starvation. The photograph makes all right minded people angry but it also makes you complicit as well. The distinction between viewer and the subject being photographed is elided, as the viewer is propelled into the maelstrom of oppression and survival that is the apartheid state (of being).
In 1966, Cole was forced to leave South Africa or face becoming an informer or doing prison time, after being arrested with a gang of petty criminals he was photographing. His work was smuggled out of the country by international photojournalists and friends and his book, House of Bondage, was eventually published in New York in 1967. It was immediately banned in South Africa and Cole was never to return, passing away of cancer, homeless, penniless after more than 23 years of painful exile, leaving few negatives and prints of his monumental work. House of Bondage would expose the daily humiliation of the regime and achieve considerable success in the West, despite being banned in South Africa. Darren Newbury notes in Defiant Images that, “the tone of Cole’s book… was distinct from the photographic humanism which dominated Drum. Despite moments of human intimacy and humour, there is a sense of bitterness and anger.”19
Newbury goes on to observe that in House of Bondage Cole moved away from the photographic humanism that took root in South Africa in the 1950s, and which provided the initial context for Cole’s photographs. “House of Bondage moved in the opposite direction, representing the refraction of these ideas through the lens of apartheid South Africa and their return to the West. Read in this way House of Bondage is an antidote to Steichen’s Family of Man.“20 In other words, Cole was a photographer who transformed one visual language into an artistic language all his own – one not abrogated on Western ideals – as an affirmation of his own existence and his ability to create a body of work in spite of persecution, arrest, harassment and the restrictions of apartheid. He then returned that vision to the West.
Working secretively from inside the system, constantly under surveillance but almost invisible to it, Cole’s art explores the cracks, weaknesses, ambivalences, aporias and hypocrisy of the apartheid system, insinuating himself into the inner duplicities of its rationalisms.21 As he moves deftly through the spaces of the city taking photographs, Cole’s art transcends the inhospitality of that setting.22 As Newbury observes, Cole eschewed the romantic image of Johannesburg focusing instead on apartheid’s distortion of African culture. He created a damning visual critique that can also be read as a commentary on international humanist photojournalism itself. His was no naïve record.23
F(r)ame of reference, point of view
“By repositioning [Roman] Vishniac’s iconic photographs of Eastern Europe within the broader tradition of social documentary photography, and introducing recently discovered and radically diverse bodies of work, this exhibition stakes Vishniac’s claim as a modern master.”
International Center of Photography Adjunct Curator Maya Benton 24
With the current global interest in South African photography (which includes Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive Part 1-3, a major exhibition program focusing on late nineteenth / early twentieth century African photography from The Walther Collection; Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life at Haus der Kunst, Munich; and South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art all in 2012-13) – the viewing public has to be made aware of the curatorial interpretation of Ernest Cole’s photographs and seminal work, House of Bondage. As his fame spreads and becomes legendary, we must understand how his photographs can be interpreted across a range of frames of reference – from photojournalism, to social documentary photography and art.
Speaking to Nicholas Henderson, archivist at the Melbourne office of the National Archives of Australia,25 he made the point that the interpretation of Cole’s photographs becomes problematic depending on what frame of reference one applies to them and how their interpretation is negotiated between these multiple, fluid points of view. As can be seen in the quote above by Maya Benton, repositioning an artist’s work within a broader context changes the nature of the interpretation of the work and raises the pertinent question: who is repositioning the work and for what reason(s); who is pushing what agenda and curatorial barrow (in Benton’s case it is because she wants Vishniac’s work to be seen as that of a modern master, to make the import of the exhibition and the artist more than it possibly is).
Personally I believe that Cole’s work moves between all three frames of reference (fields of existence) – photojournalism, social documentary photography and art – with feeling (hence the quote by Omar Badsha at the beginning of this text). His work frames the historical discourse of apartheid in the past, present and future. What we must make ourselves fully aware of is the danger he placed himself in to make the work and the conditions for its initial reception – the era of mid-1960s global politics: the Cold War, civil rights movement in America, Vietnam War, gay liberation, era of free love, etc. “With imaginative daring, courage, and compassion, he portrayed the full range of experience of black people as they negotiated their lives through apartheid.”26
Speaking of the black American photographer Gordon Parks, Dr Henry Louis Gates has said, “Long after the events that he photographed have been forgotten, his images will remain with us, testaments to the genius of his art, transcending time, place and subject matter.”27
The same can be said of the art of Ernest Cole.
Dr Marcus Bunyan July 2013
Word count 2,316
Endnotes
1/ Ozynski, Joyce quoted in Oliphant, Andries and Vladislavic, Ivan. Ten Years of Staffrider. Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1988, p. 163
2/ Badsha, Omar. Transcript of a conversation between Chris Ledechowski and Omar Badsha, 11/1985, 1 on Anon. “Photography and the Liberation Struggle in South Africa,” (academic paper) on South African History Online website [Online] Cited 13/04/2013
4/ Robertson, Struan. “Ernest Cole in the House of Bondage,” in Knape. Gunilla (ed.,). Ernest Cole Photographer. Hasselblad Foundation/Steidl, 2010, p. 23
5/ Ibid., p. 24
6/ Newbury, Darren. “‘Johannesburg Lunch-hour’: Photographic Humanism and the Social Vision of Photography,” in Newbury, Darren. Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2009, pp. 55-56
7/ Lowe, Paul. “Review of Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa,” on Times Higher Education website, 22nd July 2010 [Online] Cited 13/04/2013
12/ Robertson, Struan. “Ernest Cole in the House of Bondage,” in Knape. Gunilla (ed.,). Ernest Cole Photographer. Hasselblad Foundation/Steidl, 2010, p. 35
13/ Powell, Ivor. “A Slight Small Youngster with an Enormous Rosary: Ernest Cole’s Documentation of Apartheid,” in Knape. Gunilla (ed.,). Ernest Cole Photographer. Hasselblad Foundation/Steidl, 2010, p. 41
16/ House of Bondage contains 183 photographs organised thematically into 14 sections, each beginning with between two and five pages of text. The section titles give a sense of the underlying political and sociological analysis: ‘The Mines’, ‘Police and Passes’, ‘Black Spots’, ‘Nightmare Rides’, ‘The Cheap Servant’, ‘For Whites Only’, ‘Below Subsistence’, ‘Education for Servitude’, ‘Hospital Care’, ‘Heirs of Property’, ‘Shebeens and Bantu Beer’, ‘The Consolation of Religion’, ‘African Middle Class’ and ‘Banishment’. How the final decision on the number and titles of sections was arrived at may be unknowable, but the idea for a thematic structure of this kind was undoubtedly Cole’s. This is clear not only from the New York Timespieces, but also reflects the book that Cole cited as one of the determining influences on his photography: Cartier-Bresson’s People of Moscow. Newbury, Darren. “An ‘Unalterable Blackness’: Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage,” in Newbury, Darren. Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2009, pp. 187-188
17/ Powell., p. 41
18/ Ibid., p. 44
19/ Newbury, Darren. “An ‘Unalterable Blackness’: Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage,” in Newbury, Darren. Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2009, p. 174
20/ Ibid., p. 175
21/ Ekpo, Denis. “Any European around to help me talk about myself? The white man’s burden of black Africa’s critical practices,” in Third Text 19(2), 2005, p. 17
22/ See Caldwell, Marc. “Look Again, What Do You See?” in Journal of Southern African Studies 38(1), 2012, pp. 241-243
23/ Newbury Op. cit., p. 207
24/ Press release from the exhibition Roman Vishniac Rediscovered at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, January 18, 2013 – May 5, 2013
25/ Conversation with the author, Sunday 7th April 2013
27/ Dr Henry Louis Gates quoted in the press release from the Gordon Parks: Centennial exhibition at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery, February 21 – April 27, 2013
Ernest Cole (1940-1990), one of South Africa’s first black photojournalists, passionately pursued his mission to tell the world what it was like to be black under apartheid. With imaginative daring, courage and compassion, he portrayed the lives of black people as they negotiated apartheid’s racist laws and oppression. Ernest Cole Photographer – on view at the Fowler Museum from April 7 – July 7, 2013 – brings 113 original, extremely rare black-and-white silver gelatin prints from Cole’s stunning archive to the United States for the first time.
Inspired by the photo-essays of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cole documented scenes of life during apartheid from 1958–66. He captured everyday images such as lines of migrant mineworkers waiting to be discharged from labor, a schoolchild studying by candlelight, parks and benches for “Europeans Only,” young men arrested and handcuffed for entering cities without their passes, worshippers in their Sunday best, and crowds crammed into claustrophobic commuter trains. Together with Cole’s own incisive and illuminating captions, these striking photographs bear stark witness to a wide spectrum of experiences during the apartheid era. Ernest Cole Photographer is the first major public presentation of Cole’s work since the publication of his book, House of Bondage, in 1967. A large majority of the images are shown for the first time in the way Cole had originally intended – uncropped and accompanied only by his minimal remarks. These images of apartheid are astonishing not only for their content but also their formal beauty and narrative power.
About the artist
Ernest Cole was born March 21, 1940, in the black freehold township Eersterust, east of Pretoria. The son of a tailor and a laundry woman, Cole grew up in the countryside where he stayed with an aunt. For high school, he re-joined his parents in the township where he was born. He became interested in photography as a teen, and landed a position in Johannesburg as a darkroom assistant at DRUM magazine in 1958. There he began to mingle with other talented young black South Africans – journalists, photographers, jazz musicians, and political leaders in the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement – and became impassioned in his political views.
In the mid-1960s Cole set out at great personal risk to produce a book that would communicate to the rest of the world the corrosive effects of South Africa’s apartheid system. Working in areas continually patrolled by police forced Cole to become covert in his approach: he smuggled his camera into prisons and mines inside a lunch bag, used a long lens to photograph from a distance, and even fooled the apartheid bureaucracy into reclassifying his racial identity as “coloured,” or mixed race, thus providing more freedom to move around towns and cities.
In 1966 Cole was arrested along with a group of petty thieves whom he had befriended in order to document their lives and means of survival. The police discovered Cole’s fraudulent identity and offered him two options: join their ranks as an informer, or be punished for fraud. Cole quickly left South Africa for Europe and took with him little more than the layouts for his book. His photographs and negatives were separately smuggled out of the country shortly after.
Cole’s project was realised in 1967 when Random House in New York published House of Bondage, a graphic and hard-hitting exposé of the racism and economic inequalities that underpinned apartheid. Although House of Bondage was banned in South Africa, contraband copies circulated and played an important role in shaping South Africa’s tradition of activist photography that emerged in the succeeding decades.
Uprooted from his home and community and divorced from the circumstances that had fired his creative imagination, Cole never found his feet in Europe or America. He died homeless in New York in 1990 after more than twenty-three years of painful exile, never having returned to South Africa and leaving no known negatives and few photographic prints.
Tio fotografer, an association of Swedish photographers with whom Cole had worked when he lived for a short time in Stockholm, received a collection of Cole’s work that was later donated to the Hasselblad Foundation. In 2006 eminent South African artist David Goldblatt received a major award from the Hasselblad Foundation and urged them to make their Ernest Cole collection accessible through a book and an exhibition.
Press release from The Fowler Museum at UCLA website
Drum magazine Shadow over Johannesburg October 1951
Papapetrou curator: Professor Anne Marsh in consultation with the artist
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Drag queen wearing cut out dress 1993 Gelatin silver photograph 28.5 x 28.5cm Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney
Two solid if not overly memorable exhibitions are presented at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.
Polixeni Papapetrou A Performative Paradox is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. While it is wonderful to see early work by this artist – work that features Marilyn and Elvis impersonators, circus people, body builders and drag queens – too many bodies of work are crammed into too small a space with too few images. Some of the later series are represented by just one image giving a hotch potch feel to the whole exhibition ensemble. Perhaps it would have been better to concentrate solely on the early black-and-white images and colour images, work that is rarely seen and informs the staged work that followed. Having said that the black-and-white photographs are a joy to behold, documenting as they do performative identities. The photographs have an intangible presence. There are strong elements of the frontality of Diane Arbus in the photographs of circus performers and drag queens, coupled with a intrinsic understanding of light and texture. The photographs of drag queens are the highlight of both exhibitions and Drag queen wearing cut out dress (1993, below) reminded me of an early black-and-white photograph by Fiona Hall (Leura, New South Wales, 1974) in its use of patterned wallpaper. Let us hope there is a large retrospective of Polixeni’s work (at NGV or Heide for example) in the future, one that can do justice to the depth and complexity of her vision as an artist.
Daniel von Sturmer After Images is an interesting conceptual experiment, one that investigates the splitting of the image (shadow) from its referent (object). “The images propose a kind of transference; the object itself may be insignificant but its subjective meaning carries weight, and its shadow leaves a space the viewer fills with their own reading.” In their black-and-white fuzziness the work looks impressive when viewed in the gallery space (see installation views below) but upon close inspection the individual photographs fail to hold the viewers attention. Personally, I found it difficult to impart any great meaning to any of these works and the investigation certainly does not produce memorable images, ones that will stay with the viewer months and years later. For me the exhibition became an exercise in guessing what shadows were which objects, a game that grew quickly tiresome. The work then became an exercise in the importance of captioning an image, as I constantly looked around the room trying to match the titles of the works with the images themselves. As abstract images they imparted little metaphysical poetry as ghost images (an afterimage or ghost image is an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one’s vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased). As images that investigate the link between text, object, shadow and language they started to become what the artist sought to enunciate: shadow objects bound to the realm of signification in some amorphous play, shadows that have the potential to become ‘Other’.
PS. As an analogy you could see these images as the equivalent of Jung’s human “shadow aspect” where, according to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to projection (as these shadows are projected by their objects). The shadow represents the entirety of the unconscious, ie. everything of which a person is not fully conscious, and is the seat of creativity. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” (Jung, C.G. (1938). “Psychology and Religion.” In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. p. 131).
Hence the potential halo/cination of these images.
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Suzie, Elvis fan at home, Melbourne 1989 Selenium toned gelatin silver photograph 40.7 x 40.7cm Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Indian Brave 2002 Pigment ink print 85 x 85cm Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Three young men paying homage to Elvis on the 13th anniversary of Elvis’ death, Elvis Memorial Melbourne 1990 Selenium toned gelatin silver photograph 40.7 x 40.7cm Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney
This exhibition focuses on the performative in the work of Polixeni Papapetrou, from her early documentary work through to her directorial work with her children since 2002, regarded internationally as some of the most powerful and provocative works in the field of perfomative photography. Papapetrou’s enduring interest is in how the ‘other’ is represented and how the ‘other’ performs in reinforcing our own identity.
Polixeni Papapetrou is one of Australia’s leading contemporary photomedia artists. She has been exploring relationships between history, contemporary culture, landscape, identity and childhood through her photographic practice since the mid-eighties. In this exhibition, selected by Professor Anne Marsh in consultation with the artist, a particular thread has been selected across Papapetrou’s practice – that of the performative – from her early documentary work through to her directorial work with her children from 2002 to the present.
Her images are informed by her own experience as ‘other’, growing up as a Greek immigrant in a white, Anglo-Saxon, male-dominated culture in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. Marilyn Monroe impersonators, Elvis Presley fans, body builders, circus performers and drag queens have all taken their turn in front of Papapetrou’s camera. All of these people are, one way or another, performing identities.
In 2002 Papapetrou turned her focus to the experience of childhood, using her children as the performers in her pictures. There is a challenging confusion between fantasy, mythology, archetype, animism and theatricality present in these works, ranging from the playful to the transgressive, wrangling with the question of identity and stressing the embodied nature of experience.
Text from the CCP website
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Fortune teller (detail) 1989 From the series Ashton Circus, Silvers Circus 1989-1990
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Levitation, Silvers Circus (detail) 1989 From the series Ashton Circus, Silvers Circus 1989-1990
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Ashton Circus, Silvers Circus series (installation view) 1989-1990 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of Polixeni Papapetrou A Performative Paradox at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Daniel von Sturmer (New Zealand, b. 1972) Production Still for After Images Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney
In After Images the shadows of a set of subjectively ‘important artefacts’ (a business card, a phone, a letter…) are presented alongside generic objects from the studio, for example: a bin, some tape, a ruler… Presented at 1:1 scale, the images propose a kind of transference; the object itself may be insignificant but its subjective meaning carries weight, and its shadow leaves a space the viewer fills with their own reading.
Photographed using a specially constructed ‘set’ to enable the separation of an object from its shadow, the resulting image stands alone, separated from its object yet inextricably bound to the realm of signification from which it has been cast.
Text from the CCP website
Installation views of Daniel von Sturmer After Images at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) Venus 2013 Pigment print, Edition of 8 100 x 100cm
“They’re thoughtful pictures that arouse curiosity rather than desire.”
Robert Nelson
A stunning, eloquent and conceptually complex exhibition buy Petrina Hicks at Helen Gory Galerie. It seems churlish to repeat writing about the themes and mythologies exhibited in the work after they have been so excellently delineated in the catalogue essay by Dan Rule. Everything that you need to know about the work is in that concise piece of writing.
I am just going to add that the photograph Venus (2013, above) is one of the most beautiful photographs that I have seen “in the flesh” (so to speak) for a long time. Hicks control over the ‘presence’ of the image, her control over the presence within the image is immaculate. To observe how she modulates the colour shift from blush of pink within the conch shell, to colour of skin, to colour of background is an absolute joy to behold. The pastel colours of skin and background only serve to illuminate the richness of the pink within the shell as a form of immaculate conception (an openness of the mind and of the body). I don’t really care who is looking at this photograph (not another sexualised male gaze!) the form is just beauty itself. I totally fell in love with this work.
Forget the neo-feminist readings, one string of text came to mind: The high fidelity of a fetishistic fecundity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Helen Gory Galeries for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) The Birth of Venus 2013 Pigment print, Edition of 8 100 x 133cm
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) Birdfingers 2013 Pigment print, Edition of 8 100 x 100cm
Beauty and Artifice
Catalogue Essay by Dan Rule
“There’s a particular acuteness to the various strands, cues and counterpoints informing Petrina Hicks’ by now extensive body of work. Her highly keyed brand of hyperrealism is at once incisive in tenor and rich in historical, referential and allegorical depth.
An obvious vantage has long been that of the advertised image. Hicks’ subjects, palette and props are enveloped in a slickened and stunningly sickening sheen that is all too familiar. Augmented, buffed and polished, her works are traces of the highly aestheticised and fetishistic images that proliferate throughout the popular visual language. The skin, hair, clothing, surface and light assume an all but unsettling patina. The index is set askew amid the insidious markers of style and desire.
But Hicks’ highly constructed images aren’t mere transgressions of what has become a gleaming vernacular form. Every encroachment into the frame, every flat, luridly coloured backdrop has an implication and a consequence. In previous works, she has broached creation mythologies; she has recast religious subplots and in gloss and saccharine. Her 2011 series Hippy and the Snake – which comprised a painstakingly realised 25-minute video work alongside a collection of large-scale photographs – might have been read as a flirtation with Eve’s dalliance with the serpent in a re-imagined Garden of Eden.
Sex, birth and death also lurk amid Hicks’ latest series of images, presented as the central strand of her Selected Photographs exhibition. Set against a muted, neutral backdrop, these large-format photographs broach both the portrait and the still life, teasing out a taxonomy of sensuous allegories and sinister omens. In the somewhat aptly titled Bird Fingers, a young girl intently studies her fingertips, each of which is adorned with a tiny bird’s skull, as if a finger puppet or a jewel. That the girl’s expression is neither one of fear nor admiration – but rather, a measured intrigue – gives this work a fascinating twist. Her reaction to death is unlearned; she studies and surveys and pieces together the evidence. Another work, The Hand That Feeds, sees another young protagonist calmly offering her palm to a crow – an avian so often cast with the pall of death.
Venus, meanwhile, sees a woman hold a glossy, pink conch shell – fleshy and open – before her face as if a beacon. The accompanying Birth of Venus is a still life comprising a conflation of symbologies and references. An overfilled champagne glass perches beside the aforementioned shell, a string of pearls draped across and within its span. It delves deep into both art and socio-feminist history. While the pearl has long invoked purity and femininity throughout mythology, the conch engenders that of fertility. But these works also echo with a more contemporary resonance – one perhaps found in second-wave feminism. While the champagne might be read as an allusion to upward mobility and financial independence, the string pearls almost resemble birth control pills (perhaps an allegory for the emancipation of the female reproductive organs?). In New Age, a jagged crystal takes the place of pubic hair, resting hard and sharp against the softness and fragility of the flesh. This symbol for healing only works to amplify the vulnerability of the body. That Hicks’ engages with such themes in 2013 points to the folly of complacency. The notion that we can sleep in the wake of feminism is bogus, null and void.
Indeed, Hicks’ retrieval and reinterpretation of mythologies and social precedents suggests that history repeats. While her images of children suggest minds unsullied by the scourge of learned prejudices and social mores, Venus and her like describe the continuum of the sexualised male gaze. That Hicks’ co-opts a visual language so often used to hock products and desires serves as the ultimate repost. Human complexity can continue to exist, even amid the cycle and the cynicism of the commercial artifice.
Installation views of Petrina Hicks: Selected Photographs, 2013 at Helen Gory Galerie Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) Enigma 2013 Pigment print, Edition of 8 100 x 100cm
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) The Hand That Feeds 2013 Pigment print, Edition of 8 100 x 220cm
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) The Beauty of History 2010 Pigment print, Edition of 8 85 x 85cm
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) New Age 2013 Pigment print, Edition of 8 100 x 220cm
Curator: Dr. Troy Ruffels alongside accompanying catalogue text written by arts writer and curator Marguerite Brown
Troy Ruffels (Australian, b. 1972) Cicada 2013 Archival solvent based inkjet print on composite aluminium 120 cm x 240cm Edition of 3
This scratching away at reality. Abstractness of becoming.
Tension. Music. Light. Undertow.
1/ A current below the surface of the sea moving in the opposite direction to the surface current.
2/ An implicit quality, emotion, or influence underlying the surface aspects of something and leaving a particular impression.
Imagined, chthonian (of or relating to the underworld, from Greek khthonios, of the earth) landscape.
(Dis)possession of the land, as though the land is rebelling against subjective gaze of the viewer.
Prosaic titles (Bracken, Cinder, Rift) with a poetic zest (remains of the day).
Spaces of isolation / human marking (thumbprints on work) / absence / presence.
Manifestations of the mind.
The landscape as Other.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to James Makin Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877) The Wave c. 1869
Troy Ruffels (Australian, b. 1972) Sea #3 (remains of the day) 2013 Archival solvent based inkjet print on composite aluminium 107 cm x 107cm Edition of 12
Troy Ruffels (Australian, b. 1972) Bracken 2013 Archival solvent based inkjet print on composite aluminium 107 cm x 107cm Edition of 12
Troy Ruffels (Australian, b. 1972) Cinder 2013 Archival solvent based inkjet print on composite aluminium 107 cm x 107cm Edition of 12
Troy Ruffels (Australian, b. 1972) Sea #4 (Second Winter) 2013 Archival solvent based inkjet print on composite aluminium 107 cm x 107cm Edition of 12
This exhibition sees photo media artist Troy Ruffels employ innovative techniques to create his evocative imagery, which is heavily informed by the natural world. Ruffels has developed a unique process of drawing from multiple photographic source images to create each final work, which is subsequently printed using solvent based inks onto composite aluminium sheets, as opposed to standard archival papers. By utilising the reflective qualities of the aluminium Ruffels illuminates his intriguing landscape imagery with shifting light effects.
“Photo-media artist Troy Ruffels extends the boundaries of traditional photography towards a realm of limitless creative possibilities. Observing and recording sites within the Tasmanian wilderness and beyond, Ruffels draws from multiple source images to arrive at his final works. In doing so the artist weaves a highly personal and emotive response to various locations within the natural world that have remained lodged in his imagination. His process allows for a range of atmospheres and moods to be evoked, from a dreamlike softness, to a densely weighted gravity.
Overall the works in Cinder reflect a highly personal response to place, as in the process of revealing nature’s secrets the artist reveals a part of himself. Ruffels displays his impressive technical and creative prowess in transfiguring and reassembling the elements, blending fact with fiction to tell the understory of the night.” (Marguerite Brown, Cat. Essay JMG Journal, 2013)
Press release from the James Makin Gallery website
Installation views of Troy Ruffels: Cinder at James Makin Gallery Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Troy Ruffels (Australian, b. 1972) Etude No.9 2013 Archival solvent based inkjet print on composite aluminium 107 cm x 107cm Edition of 12
Troy Ruffels (Australian, b. 1972) Rift 2013 Archival solvent based inkjet print on composite aluminium 107 cm x 107cm Edition of 12
Troy Ruffels (Australian, b. 1972) Understory 2013 Archival solvent based inkjet print on composite aluminium 107 cm x 107cm Edition of 12
Troy Ruffels (Australian, b. 1972) Sea #1 (Arc) 2013 Archival solvent based inkjet print on composite aluminium 107 cm x 107cm Edition of 12
PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN
Many thankx to the Ludwig Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Tibor Gyenis (Hungarian, b. 1970) Hommage á Ana Mendieta 1999 From the series Hommage á Ana Mendieta Courtesy of the Artist
While the naked female body or nude is an accepted theme in art, the unclothed male body has appeared over the centuries, ever since classical antiquity, solely through depictions of the hero or martyr. Today however, the naked male body, provocatively revealed in contemporary art, is far from a heroic figure. The exhibition The Naked Man examines the ways in which the appearance of the naked male body has changed and been transformed over the last century. The changes in the male image from the end of the nineteenth century till today are traced through eight thematic areas.
The chronological starting point of the exhibition is the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when not even the traditional values of masculinity were spared by the crisis of identity, as manifested in the work of such artists of fin de siècle Vienna such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. For modern artists, the stripped down, naked male body was a bearer of revelation, self-knowledge and renewal. From this starting point, the exhibition follows the naked man through 20th and 21st century history, presenting challenges to the hegemonic model of male identity through the work of close to 100 artists, from questioning traditional male role models to the search for alternatives, from facing up to weakness and fragility to exploring the desiring gaze, body worship and the erotic pose.
In the depiction of the undressed male body there are also clues as to the changing social role of men, the formation of male identity, which is inseparable from both changes occurring in society and the workings of power. Power defines the gaze, which for centuries has been in the possession of men, while women have been merely the objects of the gaze. This division of roles between men and women in society was held to mirror the eternal or ‘natural’ order. The exhibition reassigns the roles, since the object of the gaze is no longer women, but men. How far this signifies the loss, sacrifice or transfer of possession of the gaze can be considered in depth with the help of thematically organised artworks.
The stripped down male body is defined by particular points of crisis. In that sense, the very spirit of the life reform movement that appeared at the turn of the century was one in which the naked male body was seen as a harmonious part of nature and a symbol of the desire to renew society. The naked man appears completely differently in relation to homosexuality. The homoerotic gaze eroticised the male body and examined it as an object of desire. The influence of feminism can be felt in artistic approaches that involve putting on make-up, the hiding of the sexual organ, as well as its ‘relocation’ or symbolic loss, all ways in which male artists have called attention to the arbitrariness of the designation of gender boundaries. Indefinable sexual identity, which is adaptive to the role of the opposite sex, is a revolutionary affront to the conventional expectations of traditional notions of masculinity and femininity. Heroic, hard masculinity, the healthy, body radiating physical strength, is a particularly important symbol for dictatorships. The disciplined body that conforms to the rules symbolises dominance over bodies. It is opposite to the anti-hero, the defenceless, vulnerable male body, that of the man who deliberately suffers pain in the desire to get back his lost power.
The man who belongs to a sexual or racial minority, along with the chubby or ageing male, is forced out of public space and confined to the private sphere, cut off from the connection of the male body to power. The body symbolises power, which can only truly be possessed if its nakedness is not completely revealed, if the sexual organ remains hidden. One of the last taboos of the cultural sphere of Christianity is the sight of the male sexual organ. After all this, what remains an interesting question is whether the female gaze can be an instrument of power. In addition, how do we view the nude studies that were once an indispensable part of academic artistic training, along with earlier and more recent attempts at depicting naked male models? How do we see the relation between artist and model in the self-portrait, in which the artist uses his own naked body as a terrain for the merciless exploration of the self?
The new masculinity does not view cultural roles as naturally given, but rather revolts against them, smashing taboos and unveiling fetishes. In the region of Central and Eastern Europe the body of the naked man is enriched with further layers of significance. In the art of former socialist countries, the naked male body was seen as an expression of enslavement to the patriarchal system, while gender roles are also worthy of examination in this context. After the collapse of the system, the changed geopolitical order, old and new desires and power relations were inscribed onto the body, shaping the new masculinity.
Press release from the Ludwig Museum website
Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) Young Arab with foxtail lilies, Hammamet, Tunisia 1935 Münchner Stadtmuseum
Jimmy Caruso (Canadian, 1926-2021) Arnold Schwarzenegger 1978 Münchner Stadtmuseum
“Gilbert & George seem to have become a pastiche of themselves, cartoon cut-outs hovering in contextless backgrounds with staring eyes and gormless faces.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
I used to think that Gilbert & George’s work was inventive and relevant, that it had something important to say about contemporary culture. These days I am not so sure. It seems all to easy to rip headlines from the tabloid newspapers. Who cares about dog, death, money, school, cute kids, etc… as commented on by these pulp editions.
Gilbert & George seem to have become a pastiche of themselves, cartoon cut-outs hovering in contextless backgrounds with staring eyes and gormless faces. “I am contextless, unhappily spinning in the vacuum of my own indolence,” the work seems to be saying. We already know that we are becoming a society of shortened, fractured words and sentences on mobile phones and in newspaper headlines, of absence/presence where people absent themselves from their surroundings while on mobile devices, we know that already. I don’t think it takes average art to point that out.
I think Gilbert & George need a good boot up the bum to get them back to making work that takes the viewer somewhere, that actually challenges people’s belief systems, not some pulp driven comment on contemporary culture. Take a look at their early work (below) if you don’t believe what I am saying: look at how alive the pictures were, how much vitality and energy they had, and how challenging the work was!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch) (English born Italy, b. 1943) and (George Passmore) (English, b. 1943) Lick 1977
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch) (English born Italy, b. 1943) and (George Passmore) (English, b. 1943) Queer 1977
Completed in 2011, “London Pictures” is the title of the cycle created by the London-based artists Gilbert & George, to which the eponymous exhibition in the MKM from March 20, 2013, is dedicated. Taking as their theme the countless newsagent posters collected by the artists themselves over a period of six years, the artists compile a detailed inventory of quotidian human behaviour, which they then submit to their hallmark humanistic gaze, and in so doing, furnish their own perspective on the psycho-social condition of our Western societies. What emerges is an extensive series of images from which the MKM is, for the first time, showcasing 70 individual pictures and affording visitors the opportunity to intensively explore this new phase from the oeuvre of Gilbert & George.
In their “London Pictures” Gilbert & George have collated the newspaper posters, which, not only in London, but across England, garnish the sales stands of the newspaper dealers. Their explicit allusions to the most titillating, violent and bizarre stories of the day are designed to entice potential customers to buy the newspapers. These simple statements of facts promise tales of love and sex, violence and death, wealth and power -themes, which have fascinated humanity since time immemorial, and which expose our endless appetite for sensation, disaster and excess. Gilbert & George have taken 3712 images of these advertising posters, processed the material, arranged it according to themes and fashioned it into 292 carefully-created pictures. Not only are the artists documenting a commonly-used device within the marketing strategies of the Western press, they are also exploring its impact on both the individual and society as a whole, and applying artistic means to articulate their own response to, and perception of, this social phenomenon. “The “London Pictures” should not in the first instance be read as a critique of the media, but perhaps as a critique of ourselves”, explains MKM Director Walter Smerling, adding that: “Gilbert & George borrow the language of the media, place it in a different context and in so doing transform these newspapers posters into a new entity vested with an entirely new content. The careful collation and arrangement of hundreds of headlines (…) forges a platform for reflection which casts the spotlight on to our own complicity, intrigues and problems of existence.”
“The artists of course feature in their pictures: in the background as a pair of quizzical, piercing eyes or as a ubiquitous, immaculately besuited presence, appearing” (…) “as though the artists were psychic manifestations of the city itself, its sense of place and history. The “London Pictures” comprise both a directory of quotidian urban human behaviour – revealing and shocking and violent, in all its sluggish or volatile momentum – and as such the city’s moral portrait: an unflinching audit of modern western society’s relationship to itself, stripped of rhetoric or intellectual disguise.” (Michael Bracewell, author of the catalogue). Yet beyond focussing on the city of London itself, Gilbert & George also cast themselves directly as integral constituents of our society’s media landscape and its psychic condition. Their unrelenting gaze interrogates not only the message of the posters, but is trained at the observer who also becomes an essential part of each and every picture.
Gilbert & George are seeking to portray the “grandeur, mystery and drama” of our Western world. From competitions to find the cutest child to gruesome tales of murder and mayhem – the whole gamut of human experience is represented here and exercises an equally ineluctable fascination on readers in Germany: For as the artists themselves remark, the “London Pictures” and “London Problems” could just as easily be “Duisburg Pictures” and “Duisburg Problems”.
Biography
Gilbert (born in 1943 in St. Martin in Thurn, Italy) studied at the Wolkenstein School of Art in South Tyrol, the Hallein School of Art in Austria, and the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, before attending St. Martin’s School of Art in London. There, in 1967, he met George (born in 1942 in Plymouth, UK), who had previously been a student at Dartington Hall College of Art and Oxford Art School. During the 1960s, Gilbert & George expanded the concept of sculpture by making themselves the materials for their art, as Living Sculptures. They declared everyday activities to be art, and provoked opposition by using faeces, urine and sperm as principal motifs in their picture series. They were awarded the 1986 Turner Prize, exhibited in the British Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale, and has held exhibitions in venues ranging from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1971 and 1996) to Guggenheim Museum, New York (1985), Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris (1997) and London’s Tate Modern (2007). Other major public exhibitions have been mounted in Russia (1990) and China (1993).
Press release from the MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst website
The British artists George Passmore (L) and Gilbert Prousch (R) pass in front of one of their art work ‘London Pictures’ as they arrive for a press conference at the museum Kueppersmuehle in Duisburg, western Germany, on March 14, 2013. AFP PHOTO / CAROLINE SEIDEL
MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst Philosophenweg 55, 47051 Duisburg Germany Phone: +49 (0)203 30 19 48 -10/-11
Opening hours: Wed 2.00pm – 6.00pm Thurs – Sun 11.00am – 6.00pm Bank Holidays 11.00am – 6.00pm Closed Mondays and Tuesdays
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) Mine 2013 Hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper 40 x 60cm Edition of 3
The claiming of things The touching of things The digging of land The tagging of place The taking over of the world
Tag and capture. Tag and capture. Shop, dig, spray, destroy.
An ironic critique of the pastoral, neo/colonial world, tagged and captured in the 21st century.
Excellent work. The construction, sensibility and humour of the videos is outstanding. I also responded to the two works Tag and capture and Shopping for butterfly (both 2013, below).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Bett Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs and videos in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) I dig your land 2013 Hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper 31 x 50cm Edition of 3
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) Lassie come home 2013 Hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper 32 x 50cm Edition of 3
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) Tagging 2013 Hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper 33.5 x 60cm Edition of 3
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) Shopping for butterfly 2013 Hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper 51.5 x 50cm Edition of 3
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) Tag and capture 2013 Hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper 50 x 47cm Edition of 3
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) The naming of things 2013 Hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper 40 x 70cm Edition of 3
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) Together we can take over the world 2012 found ceramic and fluorescent reflector tape 50 x 24 x 20cm
Bett Galllery 369 Elizabeth Street North Hobart Tasmania 7000 Australia Phone: +61 (0) 3 6231 6511
PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Stained glass, cracked 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) White door 1 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Damien, 1994 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Night repair 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Jerry holding a brush, South Yarra 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Jerry behind safety screen, Punt Road, South Yarra 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Presence 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nautilus shell in cup 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Jerry with shaved head 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Undergrowth 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) White door 2 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Damien sitting outside his flat, South Yarra, 1994 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Trees, capstone, shadows 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Damien with snake 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Glass bird, Punt Road, South Yarra 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Easter Sunday 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Capstone, night, Windsor train station 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Paul, cock on anvil 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
“Johsel photographs the world not to reveal a specific place but a particular state of mind.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
June 2013
Published by Cosgrove Editions, Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective is a collection of one hundred exquisite images selected from a remarkable career in photography spanning six decades.
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Big Meadow, Washington Pass, Washington September, 2000 2000
“I like to give my viewers questions, not answers. Let them find beauty in the most mundane things, like roadside wildflowers and tumbled weeds.”
Johsel Namkung
“When we can find the abstract in nature we find the deepest art.”
Mark Tobey
“Photographs give us information; it seems that they give us information that is very packaged and they give us the information that we are already prepared to recognise obviously. It’s as if the words don’t have the weight they should have, so that one of the statements being made by any photograph is: “This really exists.” The photograph is a kind of job for the imagination to do something that we should have been able to do if we were not so disturbed by so many different kinds of information that are not really absorbed. Photographs have this authority of being testimony, but almost as if you have some direct contact with the thing, or as if the photograph is a piece of the thing; even though it’s an image, it really is the thing.”
Susan Sontag. Excerpt from a speech, Wellesley College photographic symposium, April 21, 1975
This is a superlative book by Cosgrove Editions that celebrates the sixty-year life in photography of the now 94-year-old Johsel Namkung. Rather than a retrospective I see this book as testimony to Johsel Namkung’s vision as an artist and the photographs, as Susan Sontag observes above, as testaments that allow the viewer to have some direct contact with the things that Johsel photographed, to see and feel with him the places that he visited and the things that he saw.
Some of the photographs in this book take your breath away. Taken with a large format camera Johsel’s compositions are heavily influenced by music and are almost fugue-like in their structure. They vibrate and sing like few other landscape photographs that I have ever seen. There is the absence of a horizon, so that his photographs seem to agree with the picture-plane rather than with the world at large.1 Rather, Johsel lets his images flow and in that flow he creates patterning that distinctly creates layers of landscape. The juxtaposing of lines on the landscape is reinforced in the sequencing of the book, where binary opposites are paired on facing pages: feminine / masculine, yang / ying, macro / micro. For example Rainy Pass, Washington July, 1989 is printed opposite Picture Lake, Mount Baker, Washington July 1979 (feminine / masculine); Steptoe Butte, Washington January, 1989 is printed opposite Oak Creek, Washington March, 1991 (yang / ying); and the vast Denali National Park, Alaska September, 1987 is printed opposite the almost Japanese-like delicacy of Arrigetch, Alaska September, 1980 (macro / micro). Although there are links to Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Toby and photographers Ansel Adams, Minor White and Eliot Porter this work is wholly Johsel’s in its compositional structure – the position that the photographer puts himself in, both physically and mentally, to obtain these most beautiful of images.
Johsel has a love of small triangular shapes within the pictorial frame. They act like small punctum or pizzicato in musical terms and these given details are intended as such by the photographer. The little punctum in Johsel’s individual works become an accumulation of small punctum that resonate throughout the whole testimony of his work – through the placement of rocks and twigs, the use of triangles and layers whose presence Johsel so loves within the photograph. In this sense (that the photograph is written by the photographer), these are photographs of the mind as much as they are of the landscape. Working in the manner of Minor White (photographing in meditation, creating a pathway from the self to the object, from the object through the camera and back to the self, forming a circle), harmonising all elements (visual, physical, elemental, spiritual), Johsel exposes himself as much as the landscape he is photographing. This is his spirit in relation to the land, to the cosmos, even. Like Monet’s paintings of water lilies these photographs are a “small dreaming” of his spirit with a section of the land not necessarily, as in Aboriginal art, a dreaming and connection to the whole land.
As Minor White observes of the “recognition” of such dreaming when working with the view camera,
“First, there is a store of images, experience, ego problems, ideals, fears, which the man brings to his seeing at the start. Second, during the activity of seeing they are matched against the images in the visual world, like matching colours. This is done with some conscious effort and a great deal of unconscious participation. At the moment of matching or “recognition” there is a feeling of important at least, and sometimes a merciless impact. This in turn is secured by exposure – like a sudden gust of wind drops a ripe apple. So we can say “recognition” is the trigger of exposure. In view camera work the lapse between recognition and exposure may be relatively long. There is time for analysis and criticism of image and idea, and exposure sums up the entire experience.”2
Like the sudden gust of wind drops the ripe apple.
Oh the joy Johsel must have found when he recognised such invocations, by being aware of his surroundings and his relationship to the earth. I know from my own experience that when you find such a place and recognise it for what it is, it is then an entirely different matter to capture it on film for the camera imparts its own perspective. It is almost as if Johsel and the camera are one, and that the camera itself has disappeared into the landscape (I like the way that you can nearly see his camera but it is actually hidden in the photograph at the bottom of the posting). I get the feeling that Johsel is quite consciously working within an adopted aesthetic – sort of like a tea ceremony – and just making things purposefully and having faith that it is some sort “of way” of doing things. At no point is there any sense of difficulty here – it has all been removed. Yet there was so much physical effort: climbing, walking, waiting, patience, no trace of it. What a heroic act this is!
Johsel approaches a metaphysics of the Real, creating authentic visualisations of the world – an idealised, abstracted Real tending towards a (mental) s(t)imulation. In other words, he photographs the world not to reveal a specific place but a particular state of mind. Is the link to indexicality broken? No, but there is no ultimate truth or origin here, for his is an art of transformation (theatricality) through structure (modernism) which is the essence of aesthetic arts.
“This strategy rejects the search for an origin or ultimate Truth and instead interprets reality as composed, contingent and intersubjective; reality is, therefore, theatrical… Theatricality is made of this endless play and of these continuous displacements of the position of desire, in other words, of the position of the subject in process with an imaginary constructive space.”3
In Johsel’s photographs desire is displaced, ego is removed and his photographs become images of the mind as much as they are of the landscape. This is Johsel at play recognising, becoming these imaginary, constructive spaces. He is in the zone, he becomes the zone, even. Finally we can say: his photographs and his life are transformational; his imagination is the representation of possibility; his work is testimony to that representation.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Adapted from Robert Nelson commenting on the painting of Monet. “Impressionist’s ode to beauty trips into light fantastic,” The Age newspaper, Wednesday May 22nd 2013, p. 42
2/ White, Minor. “Exploratory Camera,” 1949 in Bunnell, Peter C. (ed.,). Aperture Magazine Anthology – The Minor White Years 1952-1976. Aperture, 2013, p. 64
3/ Féral, Josette. “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified,” in Modern Drama 25 (March) 1982, p. 177
Many thankx to Johsel Namkung, Dick Busher and Cosgrove Editions for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Dick Busher allowed me to pick the photographs that I wanted to illustrate this posting and for that I am most grateful. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The book has recently taken top honours in two different award competitions among independent publishers for photography books: The Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benny Awards, and the Independent Publishers IPPY Awards.
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Cougar Lake, Oregon June 1991 1991
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Picture Lake, Mount Baker, Washington July 1979 1979
In his photography Johsel brings attention and importance to elements of nature that most people pass by on their way to the grand vistas. One of my favourite locations in Washington is the Palouse as seen from Steptoe Butte; Johsel’s interpretations of the undulating wheat fields just greening with new growth are sensuous and impressionistic. One feels the slope of the earth, the texture of the tilled fields rather than seeing it. The sophisticated simplicity of his vision is highlighted in a simple composition of a dark pond surface, afloat with delicate grasses; the fine lines flowing this way and that give a sense of constant movement, yet it is a still photograph. In a twig reaching out of the snow, the subtle reflection on a pond in late afternoon light, delicate frozen ripples of ice clinging to river rock, the geometric chaos of tree branches covered in snow, the rich patina of weather-beaten stone, Johsel celebrates the minute in a grand way; it becomes the symbol for the greater whole. Textures, rhythm of line and movement become the foremost elements in his work. Some of Johsel’s images are quiet and abstract, singing a single note, while others are full-out symphonies in a celebration of the rhythms. In particular I find his Korean landscapes extraordinary. In winter the alpine hillsides bare their architecture; ridge after ridge, speckled with leafless birch and pyramidal conifers, they overlap in a crescendo of natural beauty.
Art Wolfe, Introduction to Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective
Photography as a medium is still relatively young. Introduced publicly in 1839, its definition has remained complicated in discourse and practice, oscillating between practical application – whether scientific illustration, family record, or aid to commerce – and aesthetic or expressive concerns. Debates that arose shortly after its invention, contesting whether photography could be an artistic medium, remained heated a century later and beyond, resolving only after Photoshop and other types of photographic manipulation became commonplace. Questions about the role of the photographer, the relative merits of colour versus black-and-white, truth to the original shot versus darkroom manipulation, investigations about canon, hierarchy, and genre have continued to multiply, as have the social organisations – art schools, technical assistance and supplies, professional and amateur societies, regular shows and publications – that foster photographic work. Becoming a photographer in the middle of the twentieth century, Johsel Namkung emerged at the intersection of all these social and conceptual shifts. Taking advantage of this opening, he made several unconventional choices: deciding to work in colour although it was black and white that signified art photography until the 1970s or later; working abstractly, but hewing to the dictates of straight photography: available light, no darkroom manipulation, print the full negative.
From the acquisition of his first camera, Namkung developed high standards for his photographic practice, recalling to interviewer Alan Lau, “I always had a confidence in myself… I had a sort of a vision toward my photographic future. I knew I was going to be something.”1 Trained first as a musician, from the beginning Namkung defined photography in abstract terms, approaching his motifs in terms of rhythms, tonal relationships, pattern, and texture. Individual works reveal specific affinities. The calligraphic grasses in Lizzard Lake, Stampede Pass, WA, August 1976 suggests Harry Callahan’s images of reeds, which are associated with Abstract Expressionist photography. The lichen-covered stone in Blue Mountain, Olympic National Park, WA, September 1976 resembles Jackson Pollock or the famed White Paintings of Namkung’s friend Mark Tobey. The screen of regular tree trunks in Sherman Pass, WA, August 1993, recalls the hatched lines representing driving rain in modern Japanese printmaking. Like limpid watercolor strokes, the rolling hills of the Palouse – distinct in each version of Steptoe Butte, of 1976, 1977, and 1983 – allude to Morris Louis’s colour field paintings.
Namkung’s preface here recounts how successive unusual jobs supplied him with professional training as a photographer. Seattle in the postwar boom years also provided a rich and supportive context for his art. Skilled artists from the ranks of first- and second-generation immigrants, from Japan, China, Korea, and the Philippines, gathered in the International District but worked and showed farther afield. Art photography had a popular following and many innovative practitioners; Pictorialism – promoted by annual exhibitions like those organised by the Seattle Camera Club – encouraged aesthetic and technical exploration with cameras. The so-called Northwest Mystics represented only one of several artistic communities exploring abstraction, some emphasising its expressive potential, others seeking formal invention. Creativity was equally celebrated beyond fine art. Rarefied technical challenges were tackled and mastered at The Boeing Company as well as the scientific laboratories of the University of Washington. The richness of this cultural ecology fostered the unique development of Namkung’s career. In return, his thoughtful production has nourished local and international audiences for over four decades.
Elizabeth Brown, Former Chief Curator, Henry Art Gallery, Introduction to Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective
1/ Alan Chong Lau interview of Johsel Namkung conducted in Seattle, Washington, on October 5, 1989, for the Archives of American Art Northwest Asian American Project.
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Shi Shi Beach Buoy, Olympic National Park, Washington August, 1981 1981
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Bissell, Washington December, 1981 1981
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Alaska Lichens, Date Unknown Nd
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Blue Mountain, Olympic National Park, Washington September, 1976 1976
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Weston Beach, Point Lobos, California May, 1988 1988
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Frenchman Coulee, Washington May, 2002 2002
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Kalaloch Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington October, 1984 1984
Joshel Namkung on Hurricane Ridge, photographed by his friend Ken Levine
Cosgrove Editions is an independent publisher of books on photography. We also provide production and printing assistance for artists who self publish their work. Many of our projects have won some of the highest international awards for printing quality.
![Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Dead Confederate sharpshooter in "The devil's den."]' July 1863](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/gardner-sharpshooter-web.jpg "Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Dead Confederate sharpshooter in \"The devil's den.\"]' July 1863")
![Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Antietam, Md. President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers]' 3rd October 1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/abraham-lincoln-and-generals-web.jpg "Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Antietam, Md. President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers]' 3rd October 1862")
![Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Antietam, Md. President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers]' (detail) 3rd October 1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/abraham-lincoln-and-generals-detail.jpg "Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Antietam, Md. President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers]' (detail) 3rd October 1862")
![Timothy H. O'Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) '[Fort Pulaski, Ga. The "Beauregard" gun]' April 1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/big-gun-web.jpg "Timothy H. O'Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) '[Fort Pulaski, Ga. The \"Beauregard\" gun]' April 1862")
![Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Richmond, Va. Grave of Gen. J. E. B. Stuart in Hollywood Cemetery, with temporary marker]' Richmond, April-June 1865](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/general-stuart-web.jpg "Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Richmond, Va. Grave of Gen. J. E. B. Stuart in Hollywood Cemetery, with temporary marker]' Richmond, April-June 1865")
![James F. Gibson (American, 1828-1905) '[James River, Va. Deck and turret of U.S.S. Monitor seen from the bow (ie. stern)]' 9th July, 1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/james-river-va-deck-and-turret-of-uss-monitor-seen-from-the-bow-web.jpg "James F. Gibson (American, 1828-1905) '[James River, Va. Deck and turret of U.S.S. Monitor seen from the bow (ie. stern)]' 9th July, 1862")
![Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Washington Navy Yard, D.C. Lewis Payne, the conspirator who attacked Secretary Seward, standing in overcoat and hat]' April 1865](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/payne-a-web1.jpg "Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882) '[Washington Navy Yard, D.C. Lewis Payne, the conspirator who attacked Secretary Seward, standing in overcoat and hat]' April 1865")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.