Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Usurper Ruminant 2016 Acrylic on gold enamel on board 120cm x 90cm
Clarion call
The sky is blue, the sun is shining and yet, in this era of the Anthropocene, the Earth is in deep shit. Through the activities of a virus, a contagion that infests the planet… that is – the ego, the selfishness of the individual human and, collectively, of the human race – “we are perhaps amongst the first to contemplate not just our own finite existence, but the doomed fate of the Earth itself.”
My friend Dale Cox’s exhibition Inner Logic at Australian Galleries dissects this situation in a most intelligent and imaginative manner. Instead of didactic protest, Cox uses the language of Australian pastoral landscape, iconic edifice and stratigraphic cross section to make ironic comment on popular culture, history and religion. As you dissect the various influences and concepts within the work you chuckle to yourself at the artist’s inventiveness and humour.
Mixing the tight style and formal, classical beauty of Australian colonial painting (with reference in particular to the work of John Glover) with the uncanny sense of reality and precision found in the paintings of Jeffrey Smart, Cox twists his realities and points of view. Shopping trolleys have a strange perspective when filled with Australian colonial landscapes; aircraft stairs seem strangely twisted as they lead to a geological cross-section topped with verdant greenery (a journey through time); clouds in the burning landscape look like that of an atomic bomb; an Uluru-like profile of Elvis in the Australian bush is dotted with tents and encampments; and Australian ute’s of unlikely shape sit at the base of a constructed Elvis edifice, the most prominent thing to my mind in the painting being the four air conditioning units at the base of the construction cabin, sitting in an absolutely barren landscape. The perspicacity of Cox’s (re)marks is exemplary.
My favourite works in the exhibition are the Usurper paintings. Here Cox condenses the customs, traditions and rituals of the human race (colonisation, farming, habitation – power, possession, destruction and modification of the environment and its animals) onto the body of the (b)ovine family, the livestock “genetically modified over time through the artificial selection of desirable traits by humans, with a view to increasing the docility of the animals, their size and productivity, their quality as agricultural products, and other culturally desired features,”1 to serve humans who are substantially dependent on their livestock for sustenance and other purposes. These artificial bodies, these illegitimate usurpers, float on a sea of gold enamel and wood grain form.
Cox’s declamations, his inner logic if you like, document in the most inventive way the liturgy of errors of the human race. His work is a clarion call for humans to be better custodians (for that is what we are) of the Earth. Through his subversive paintings, the artist “challenges the myopic tendency for us humans to fixate on ourselves in a way that bodes poorly for our ability to see the bigger picture and act as stewards for the entire planet rather than as self serving, selfish species.” (Email to the author, 28 July 2018). His humors (basic substances which are in balance when a person, or in this case the Earth, is healthy) add to the raised voices against the naysayers of global warming, the backward looking fossil fuel industry, the power of nations and corporations, and the vested interests of the rich and powerful, mainly men. It’s time for the dreamers, the artists, and the spiritual to confront these dinosaurs of the past, so that they may shape the future. So that the human race can cast aside their shadow and learn to walk on the Earth without leaving tracks.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Dale Cox for allowing me to publish the text and the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Shaman
“There are two kinds of people in this world.
There are those who are dreamers and those who are being dreamed.
There comes a time in every mans life when he must encounter his past.
For those that are dreamed, who have no more than a passing acquaintance with power, this moment is usually played out on their death beds as they try to bargain with fate for a few more moments of life time.
But for the dreamer, the person of power, this moment takes place alone, before a fire, when he calls upon the spectres of his personal past to stand before him like witnesses before the court…
I am not speaking of remembering the past. Anyone can remember the past, and in remembering we frame it to serve and justify the present. Remembering is a conscious act and therefore subject to embellishment. Remembering is easy.
The person of power sits alone before the fire and confronts his past. He hears the testimony of these spectres and he dismisses them one by one. He acquits himself of his past. If you comprehend this, the man of power has no past. No history that can claim him. He has cast aside his shadow and learnt to walk in the snow without leaving tracks.”
Dr Alberto Villoldo
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Usurper Transplant 2016 Acrylic on gold enamel on board 120cm x 90cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Usurper Glover 2016 Acrylic on gold enamel on board 120cm x 90cm
John Glover (England 1767 – Australia 1849, Australia from 1831) The River Nile, Van Diemen’s Land, from Mr Glover’s farm 1837 Oil on canvas 76.4 x 114.6cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1956
John Glover’s colonial landscapes can be divided into two groups: pastoral scenes of the land surrounding his own property, and pre-contact Aboriginal Arcadias. Although the Aboriginal figures are at times generic, they are shown as active participants in the landscape. Such scenes were, however, entirely imagined, as Glover encountered very few Tasmanian Aboriginal people while in the colony. Glover had not experienced the conflict or witnessed the violence between Tasmanian Aboriginal resistance fighters and white settlers during the 1820s. By the time of his arrival in 1831, the Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors had been forced to leave Country and relocate to Flinders Island.
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Tract 38 (Burning landscape) 2012 Acrylic on canvas 102 x 152cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Tract 38 (Burning landscape) (detail) 2012 Acrylic on canvas 102 x 152cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Flight SQ2118 to Thailand 2018 Acrylic on board 81 x 122cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Rewilding II 2018 Acrylic on board 81 x 122cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Anticolonial 2018 Acrylic on board 81 x 122cm
Inner Logic 2018
The motifs and elements in this exhibition are all related to our human predicament; to this era of the Anthropocene and our unique capacity amongst living things to contemplate our own mortality. While we have grappled with our impermanence for thousands of years, we are perhaps amongst the first to contemplate not just our own finite existence, but the doomed fate of the Earth itself. A kind of double death.
It’s a lot to take on board.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, we are well practiced at diversion, denial and a kind of wishful thinking when it comes to our fate. Religion has served us rather well as a kind of ‘soft landing’ into the unknown; furnishing us cradle to grave with a reassuring framework towards a life after death.
It is an intoxicating idea that when we die we go elsewhere. Anything but death seems like a plan. Indeed, many opine that a belief in an afterlife is essential to the very fabric of humanity, that our lives would be meaningless if it simply ended. Perhaps there is an inner logic to this: Is there a point to a life that simply ends?
Our aversion to annihilation runs deep, and in light of some fairly compelling arguments that it is so, humanity is slow to accept the deal. And now that we are facing mounting evidence that we are hurtling towards an environmental collapse of our own making, it seems the all too human ability to simply avert our gaze is once again at play. Desperate times call for desperate measures in collective denial, and so it seems we enter the post-truth era.
There are myriad ways in which we pull off this practised art of self-delusion. Central to it is our unerring fascination with ourselves, our own species. ‘Anthropocentricity’ has served us for millennia as an essential tool of survival by strengthening our ties as family units, tribes, villages and, by extension, nations. The gods we created invariably took a patriarchal form, and we still cling to these heroic manifestations of our own image.
Even our innate altruism appears limited to all things ‘us’. We seem ill-equipped as stewards of the planet of being capable of seeing the bigger picture, of accommodating the survival of all species. All animals are necessarily hardwired to fixate on their own collective survival at the expense of other species, but it is humans alone who can progress that exclusivity to global obliteration.
I generalise, of course. Many manage to stare reality squarely in the face, and many more understand the importance of the broader environment. And it will get harder to remain wilfully ignorant, as the ecological collapse is well underway, overtaking even the gloomiest of predictive models. It is in plain sight and will only become harder to ignore.
The environmental problems we face appear too colossal for individuals to consider; it all seems too overwhelming, too daunting. These are not ‘human-sized’ problems after all. But if we can apply the same collective fervour and inventiveness we applied to bettering our human lot, if we can find a global will to turn our remarkable capacity for enterprise in science, technology and innovation to repairing the planet as a whole, we may have just cause for hope.
Dale Cox
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) The Bungle Bungles 2018 Acrylic on board 122 x 244cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Always on my mind 2018 Acrylic on board 101 x 244cm
Anthropocene definition
Relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.
Evolutionary psychology definition
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach to psychology that attempts to explain useful mental and psychological traits – such as memory, perception, or language – as adaptations, i.e., as the functional products of natural selection.
The purpose of this approach is to bring the functional way of thinking about biological mechanisms such as the immune system into the field of psychology, and to approach psychological mechanisms in a similar way.
In short, evolutionary psychology is focused on how evolution has shaped the mind and behaviour. Though applicable to any organism with a nervous system, most research in evolutionary psychology focuses on humans.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behaviour is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments…
Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviours or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations including the abilities to infer others’ emotions, discern kin from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, and cooperate with others.
A short piece of writing, especially on a religious or political subject, that is intended to influence other people’s opinions; a large area of land; a major passage in the body, large bundle of nerve fibres, or other continuous elongated anatomical structure or region.
Usurper definition
A usurper is an illegitimate or controversial claimant to power, often but not always in a monarchy. In other words, a person who takes the power of a country, city, or established region for themselves without any formal or legal right to claim it as their own. Usurpers are both those who overtake a region by often unexpected physical force, as well as individuals or organisations who overtake a region through political influence and subterfuge – though the word “usurper” denotes a single person; either an individual who acted alone, or the leader of a group which supported their controversial claim.
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Untitled (Lunar lander of wood) 2012 Acrylic on board 51 x 77cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Cold War Reliquary 2014 Mixed media Wood acrylics gold enamel metal rock glass Dimensions variable Created for the Blake Prize
Cold War Reliquary 2015-2016
A reliquary (also referred to as a shrine or by the French term châsse) is a container for relics. These may be the purported physical remains of saints, such as bones, pieces of clothing, or some object associated with saints or other religious figures. (Wikipedia definition)
. My sculpture is a vessel – a craft, a portal, a reliquary. Like many Religious objects its serves as a nexus, a transport between Earth and Heaven. The Apollo Lunar Module carried the first Human to the Moon landing on July 20 1969. I was 3 months old. Russia had landed an unmanned craft safely on the moon ten years earlier. The ‘Space Race’ was chiefly an assertion of Ideological superiority between Communism and Capitalism, and the most symbolic battlefield of the ‘Cold War’.
I have long thought of mans tentative forays into space as a kind of membrane piercing journey into the Spiritual – the body released of its Earthly mass and transcended into the Heavens. The reference to a Religious Relic and object of Art – a reliquary for the precious moon rock it houses within the glass dome, elevates a Mechanical Machine to the status of a Religious Relic and is intended to supplant and parody the Christian Canon that asserts our ascension to Heaven (or Hell) upon death.
The essential role of Science as the facilitator of Space Exploration is significant, and as such the Spacecraft itself is venerated here as a Religious object.
The use of Quasi Religious painted panels directly references early Christian Art, whilst most of the Latin Inscriptions are direct translations of NASA Radio Transcripts between (Earth) Base Command and the Astronauts during the critical stages of the Moon landing, and the first historic moments upon landing. Buzz Aldrins remark as he first set foot on the moon was “Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation.” In Latin Magnificus in desertum.
Dale Cox
Cold War Reliquary
The Cold War Reliquary is a vessel – a spacecraft, and a Holy Relic. Like many Religious objects, it serves as a nexus, a transport between Earth and Heaven. I have long thought of man’s forays into space as a kind of membrane piercing journey into the Spiritual – the body released of its Earthly mass and transcended into the Heavens. This reliquary for the precious moon rock it houses within a glass dome, elevates a Mechanical Machine to the status of a Religious Relic and playfully parodies the Space Race as the era in which Science finally transcended Religion.
Inner Logic continues Dale Cox’s insightful and evocative explorations into environmental, spiritual and anthropological themes; investigating the impact of humankind on this planet and our collective search for meaning.
“The motifs and elements within the current exhibition of my paintings all are in some way or another related to our human predicament and this era of the anthropocene and our unique capacity amongst living things to contemplate our own mortality,” says Cox, “We humans have been grappling with our own mortality for thousands of years. Are we today, however amongst the first generations to contemplate not just our own finite existence, but also the doomed fate of the Earth itself? A kind of double death…”
Inner Logic presents a dynamic series of recent paintings in Dale Cox’s highly distinctive visual language, in which elements from the natural world and icons from popular, religious, industrial and historical culture are assembled in precarious, yet harmonious balance upon a backdrop of the vast unknown. Meticulously executed in acrylic paint, these works are visually intricate and conceptually dense, yet the clarity and significance of their message resonates with immediacy and power.
Dale Cox is equally proficient in sculpture as he is in painting and works across a wide range of media. This exhibition presents the artist’s compelling Cold War Reliquary (Finalist in the 64th Blake Prize); a magnificent recreation of the Lunar Lander spacecraft realised as a gilded religious receptacle, “My sculpture is a vessel – a spacecraft, a portal, a reliquary. Like many religious objects its serves as a nexus, a transport between Earth and Heaven. I have long thought of man’s forays into space as a kind of membrane piercing journey into the spiritual – the body released of its Earthly mass and transcended into the Heavens. This reliquary for the precious moon rock it houses within a glass dome, elevates a Mechanical Machine to the status of a Religious Relic and playfully parodies and challenges the Christian Church.” Dale Cox, 2018
Press release from Australian Galleries
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Art Mart 2018 Acrylic on board 120 x 89cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) Albert 2018 Acrylic on board 160 x 122cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) The wonder of you 2018 Acrylic on board 120 x 90cm
Dale Cox (Australian, b. 1969) The wonder of you (detail) 2018 Acrylic on board 120 x 90cm
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print, hand-painted
Art Blart has been mining a rich vein of (anti-)colonial art and photography over the past few months, and the next two posts continue this trend.
Tonight we have Ethnographic portraits of Indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia (Brazil, 1861-1862) by unknown local photographers, collected and compiled by the Swiss photographer Hermann Kummler in 1888-1891 into an album. These were vintage prints when he purchased them and already had significant historical interest.
Thus, we have unknown sitters photographed by unknown photographers, removed from their original context(s) – the family, business or photographers album perhaps – to be annotated in a foreign hand, the machinations of (colonial, male) power evidenced through the gaze of the camera. And text. Mulatto; Mestizo; Negress.
The underprivileged of society being punished in their men/iality: servile; submissive: menial attitudes; pertaining to or suitable for domestic servants. Mistress punishing a native child. Teacher with a schoolgirl in Bahia in one picture, becomes Native Brazilian lady-in-waiting and young child attend to a veiled aristocrat in another (note the same background curtain).
None of the sitters look happy. Most scowl at the camera, unsmiling at their lot, probably being forced to have their photograph taken. The hand-coloured photographs are even more absurd, the lurid colours creating caricatures of human beings, cut out figures with all semblance of humanity removed. Rather than reinforcing “the sense of individual style associated with these remarkable figures”, the photographs become pure representation of figurative form. The camera enacts the shaping of disputed, contested identities into a particular figure, a particular palatable form.
Why it is valuable to show these photographs is that we must be ever vigilant in understanding the networks of power, dispossession and enslavement that patriarchal societies use to marginalise the poor, the weak, the different for their gain. For it is men that are looking.
“The category of “masculinity” should be seen as always ambivalent, always complicated, always dependent on the exigencies (necessary conditions and requirements) of personal and institutional power … [masculinity is] an interplay of emotional and intellectual factors – an interplay that directly implicates women as well as men, and is mediated by other social factors, including race, sexuality, nationality, and class … Far from being just about men, the idea of masculinity engages, inflects, and shapes everyone.”1
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. “two of the Indigenous women (one of whom wears a cross), simply pose in the studio” – they are not in a studio, a curtain has been drawn over a back wall.
1/ Berger, Maurice; Wallis, Brian and Watson, Simon. Constructing Masculinity. Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 3-7.
These digitally cleaned photographs are published under “fair use” for the purposes of academic research and critical commentary. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Overview
Group of 19 ethnographic portraits of Indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia that were compiled by the Swiss photographer Hermann (Ermano) Kummler (1863-1949). With subjects of Indian and mixed-race descent, including vendors, wet nurses, maids, mothers and children, and merchants, including a mistress punishing a native child. Salted paper prints with trimmed corners, the images measuring 7 x 3 3/8 to 7 1/4 x 4 1/2 inches (17.8 x 8.4 to 18.4 x 11.4 cm).
7 are hand-coloured with gouache; the original mounts, 9 bright blue or green, 6 double mounted, measuring 9 1/4 x 7 to 8 1/4 x 11 1/4 inches (24.1 x 17.8 to 21 x 29.8 cm), most with Kummler’s caption notations, in ink, and each with his red hand stamp on prints (one) or mounts recto. 1861-1862
Kummler was a Swiss photographer who accompanied Als Kaufmann to Brazil, where they traveled extensively from 1888-91. Kummler apparently purchased vintage prints by local photographers (which he stamped and annotated), and eventually set up his own commercial studio in the town of Aarau. During the three year period he was in Brazil with Kaufmann, Kummler apparently made more than 130 photographs. Their journey was the subject of a monograph entitled Als Kaufmann in Pernambuco, Ein Reisebericht mit Bildern aus Brasiilien von Hermann Kummler (Als Kaufmann in Pernambuco 1888-1891. A travelogue with pictures from Brazil by Hermann Kummler), copiously illustrated with his images.
Tradeswomen are depicted with a teapot on a table, a comb, a basket laden with bottles or wares carefully balanced on their heads; maids hold embroidered cloth and a wet nurse is shown with an infant. A native lady-in-waiting (and a young child) attend to a gorgeously dressed aristocrat, who wears a long veil. The hand-coloured prints reinforce the sense of individual style associated with these remarkable figures; two of the Indigenous women (one of whom wears a cross), simply pose in the studio with trade womens objects.
Text from an auction house website
Pernambuco and Bahia
Pernambuco is a state of Brazil, located in the Northeast region of the country. Bahia is one of the 26 states of Brazil and is located in the Northeastern part of the country on the Atlantic coast.
Charles Darwin visited Bahia in 1832 on his famous voyage on the Beagle. In 1835, Bahia was the site of an urban slave revolt, particularly notable as the only predominately-Muslim slave rebellion in the history of the Americas. Under the Empire, Bahia returned 14 deputies to the general assembly and 7 senators; its own provincial assembly consisted of 36 members. In the 19th century, cotton, coffee, and tobacco plantations joined those for sugarcane and the discovery of diamonds in 1844 led to large influx of “washers” (garimpeiros = an independent prospector for minerals) until the still-larger deposits in South Africa came to light.
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) Mullatin (Portrait of a Indigenous Brazilian woman wearing a cross) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print, hand-painted
Mulatto
Mulatto is a term used to refer to people born of one white parent and one black parent or to people born of a mulatto parent or parents. In English, the term is today generally confined to historical contexts. English speakers of mixed white and black ancestry seldom choose to identify themselves as “mulatto.” …
Mulattoes represent a significant part of the population of various Latin American and Caribbean countries: Brazil (49.1% mixed-race, Gypsy and Black, Mulattoes (20.5%), Mestiços, Mamelucos or Caboclos (21.3%), Blacks (7.1%) and Eurasian (0.2%).
In colonial Latin America, mulato could also refer to an individual of mixed African and Native American ancestry. In the 21st century, persons with indigenous and black African ancestry in Latin America are more frequently called zambos in Spanish or cafuzo in Portuguese.
According to the IBGE 2000 census, 38.5% of Brazilians identified as pardo, i.e. of mixed ancestry. This figure includes mulatto and other multiracial people, such as people who have European and Amerindian ancestry (called caboclos), as well as assimilated, westernised Amerindians, and mestizos with some Asian ancestry. A majority of mixed-race Brazilians have all three ancestries: Amerindian, European, and African. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics census 2006, some 42.6% of Brazilian identify as pardo, an increase over the 2000 census.
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) Mestize (Portrait of a Brazilian woman) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print, hand-painted
Mestizo: (in Latin America) a person of mixed race, especially one having Spanish and American Indian parentage.
Mixed-race Brazilian
Brazilian censuses do not use a “multiracial” category. Instead, the censuses use skin colour categories. Most Brazilians of visibly mixed racial origins self-identify as pardos. However, many white Brazilians have distant non-white ancestry, while the group known as pardos likely contains non-mixed acculturated Amerindians. According to the 2010 census, “pardos” make up 82.277 million people, or 43.13% of Brazil’s population. …
History
Before the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil was inhabited by nearly five million Amerindians. The Portuguese colonisation of Brazil started in the sixteenth century. In the first two centuries of colonisation, 100,000 Portuguese arrived in Brazil (around 500 colonists per year). In the eighteenth century, 600,000 Portuguese arrived (6,000 per year). Another race, Blacks, were brought from Africa as slaves, starting around 1550. Many came from Guinea, or from West African countries – by the end of the eighteenth century many had been taken from Congo, Angola and Mozambique (or, in Bahia, from Benin). By the time of the end of the slave trade in 1850, around 3.5 million slaves had been brought to Brazil – 37% of all slave traffic between Africa and the Americas.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a considerable influx of mainly European immigrants arrived in Brazil. According to the Memorial do Imigrante, Brazil attracted nearly 5 million immigrants between 1870 and 1953. Most of the immigrants were from Italy or Portugal, but also significant numbers of Germans, Spaniards, Japanese and Syrian-Lebanese.
The Portuguese settlers were the ones to start the intensive race-mixing process in Brazil. Miscegenation in Brazil… was not a pacific process as some used to believe: it was a form of domination from the Portuguese against the Native Brazilian and African populations. …
White/Amerindian
Most of the first colonists from Portugal who arrived in Brazil were singles or did not bring their wives. For that reason the first interracial marriages in Brazil occurred between Portuguese males and Amerindian females.
In Brazil, people of White/Indian ancestry are historically known as caboclos or mamelucos. They predominated in many regions of Brazil. One example are the Bandeirantes (Brazilian colonial scouts who took part in the Bandeiras, exploration expeditions) who operated out of São Paulo, home base for the most famous bandeirantes.
Indians, mostly free men and mamelucos, predominated in the society of São Paulo in the 16th and early 17th centuries and outnumbered Europeans. The influential families generally bore some Indian blood and provided most of the leaders of the bandeiras, with a few notable exceptions such as Antonio Raposo Tavares (1598-1658), who was European born.
White/Black
According to some historians, Portuguese settlers in Brazil used to prefer to marry Portuguese-born females. If not possible, the second option were Brazilian-born females of recent Portuguese background. The third option were Brazilian-born women of distant Portuguese ancestry. However, the number of White females in Brazil was very low during the Colonial period, causing a large number of interracial relationships in the country.
White/Black relationships in Brazil started as early as the first Africans were brought as slaves in 1550 where many Portuguese men starting marrying black women. The Mulattoes (people of White/Black ancestry) were also enslaved, though some children of rich aristocrats and owners of gold mines were educated and became important people in Colonial Brazil. Probably, the most famous case was Chica da Silva, a mixed-race Brazilian slave who married a rich gold mine owner and became one of the richest people in Brazil.
Other mulattoes largely contributed to Brazil’s culture: Aleijadinho (sculptor and architect), Machado de Assis (writer), Lima Barreto (writer), Chiquinha Gonzaga (composer), etc. In 1835, Blacks would have made up the majority of Brazil’s population, according to a more recent estimate quoted by Thomas Skidmore. In 1872, their number was shown to be much smaller according to the census of that time, outnumbered by pardos and Whites. …
Black/Amerindian
People of Black African and Native Brazilian ancestry are known as Cafuzos and are historically the less numerous group. Most of them have origin in black women who escaped slavery and were welcomed by indigenous communities, where started families with local amerindian men.
Modesto Brocos (Brazilian born Spain, 1853-1936) A Redenção de Cam (Ham’s Redemption) 1895 Oil on canvas 199cm (78.3 in) x 166cm (65.3 in) Public domain / Museu Nacional de Belas Artes
The painting shows a Brazilian family each generation becoming “whiter” (black grandmother, mulatto mother and white baby).
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print, hand-painted
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print, hand-painted
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of a maid holding an embroidered cloth) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print, hand-painted
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of wet nurse with infant) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print, hand-painted
Indigenous peoples in Brazil
Indigenous peoples in Brazil (Portuguese: povos indígenas no Brasil), or Indigenous Brazilians (Portuguese: indígenas brasileiros), comprise a large number of distinct ethnic groups who have inhabited what is now the country of Brazil since prior to the European contact around 1500. Unlike Christopher Columbus, who thought he had reached the East Indies, the Portuguese, most notably Vasco da Gama, had already reached India via the Indian Ocean route when they reached Brazil.
Nevertheless, the word índios (“Indians”) was by then established to designate the people of the New World and continues to be used today in the Portuguese language to designate these people, while a person from India is called indiano in order to distinguish the two.
At the time of European contact, some of the indigenous people were traditionally mostly semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering, and migrant agriculture. Many of the estimated 2,000 nations and tribes which existed in the 16th century suffered extinction as a consequence of the European settlement, and many were assimilated into the Brazilian population.
The indigenous population was largely killed by European diseases, declining from a pre-Columbian high of millions to some 300,000 (1997), grouped into 200 tribes. However, the number could be much higher if the urban indigenous populations are counted in all the Brazilian cities today. A somewhat dated linguistic survey found 188 living indigenous languages with 155,000 total speakers.
The rubber trade
The 1840s brought trade and wealth to the Amazon. The process for vulcanising rubber was developed, and worldwide demand for the product skyrocketed. The best rubber trees in the world grew in the Amazon, and thousands of rubber tappers began to work the plantations. When the Indians proved to be a difficult labor force, peasants from surrounding areas were brought into the region. In a dynamic that continues to this day, the indigenous population was at constant odds with the peasants, who the Indians felt had invaded their lands in search of treasure.
Urban Rights Movement
The urban rights movement is a recent development in the rights of indigenous peoples. Brazil has one of the highest income inequalities in the world, and much of that population includes indigenous tribes migrating toward urban areas both by choice and by displacement. Beyond the urban rights movement, studies have shown that the suicide risk among the indigenous population is 8.1 times higher than the non-indigenous population.
Many indigenous rights movements have been created through the meeting of many indigenous tribes in urban areas. For example, in Barcelos, an indigenous rights movement arose because of “local migratory circulation.” This is how many alliances form to create a stronger network for mobilisation. Indigenous populations also living in urban areas have struggles regarding work. They are pressured into doing cheap labor. Programs like Oxfam have been used to help indigenous people gain partnerships to begin grassroots movements. Some of their projects overlap with environmental activism as well.
Many Brazilian youths are mobilising through the increased social contact, since some indigenous tribes stay isolated while others adapt to the change. Access to education also affects these youths, and therefore, more groups are mobilising to fight for indigenous rights.
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Kellnerinnen im Grand Hotel / Waitresses in Grand Hotel) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Lehrerin mit Schülerin im Bahia / Teacher with a schoolgirl in Bahia) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Native Brazilian lady-in-waiting and young child attend to a veiled aristocrat) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Negerin mit dem Knaben in schlechter Stimmung / Negress with a boy in a bad mood) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of Brazilian woman servant and child) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of a young Brazilian woman) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of a Brazilian woman) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of a Brazilian woman) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of a Brazilian woman with two children) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Portrait of a Brazilian mother and child) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) (Mistress punishing a native child) 1861-1862 From Ethnographic portraits of indigenous women of Pernambuco and Bahia Salt paper print
Published in: The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.) : Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5
The North American Indian: List of Large Plates Supplementing Volume Five
On the one hand, it is a privilege to post the complete large plates supplementing Volume Five of Edward S. Curtis’ The North American Indian, together with the complimentary biographical sketches of the subject as they appear in the volume, and supplementary research that I undertook into Native American customs and dress. There is no doubt that these are beautiful and atmospheric photographs of a supposedly “Vanishing Race”.
From a technical point of view we can observe the close cropping, the contextless backgrounds of the portraits, the low depth of field, the beautiful light, the direct gaze of the sitter, and the profile view; and in the exterior shots, the balance between sky and earth, how the horizon line moves up and down, how Curtis often looks up at his subject, and how he crops the negative to obtain different effects (Arikara Medicine Ceremony – The Ducks; Arikara chief).
On the other hand, these photographs can only be viewed as “constructions”, flights of fancy, imagined by Curtis to depict and capture traditional culture, a way of life that had almost disappeared by the time he took these photographs.
Talking to Executive Director Shannon Keller O’Loughlin (Choctaw) of the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA) he observed that,
“There is no one person who can give you one opinion about the Curtis photographs – there is definitely a variety of opinion in Indian Country about them both good and bad. If you find someone in Indian Country that says there is only one way to look at the Curtis photographs, then you have the wrong person!
Personally, I understand those pictures were posed to capture what Curtis and others thought were the vanishing Indian. They do not necessarily represent reality, but a posed amalgamation of pieces of Tribal life and existence at that time. So, like so many cultural items and ancestors that have been stolen and put in museums and in private collections, American society viewed the Indian in that manner too.
Those photos are not who we are but what someone has posed as the story they (Curtis) wanted to tell. On the other hand, they show us today some things that we may no longer have access to and give us a window into eyes of real human beings who were in the process of losing the lives they had known for centuries.” (Email to the author, 1 June 2018)
I thank Shannon very much for his insightful words. His powerful, evocative statement has just as much relevance here in Australia as in America: for these photographs picture ghosts from the past, made manifest as real human beings in the present, together with their commensurate strength and suffering. They give us a window into eyes of real human beings who were in the process of losing the lives they had known for centuries.
Colonisation, and all that it entails – here in Australia, invasion, massacres, religious conversion, Stolen Generation – is so appalling. These “staged” photographs of a “vanishing race” – again, the same photographs taken here in Australia – show the contempt of the invader for centuries of life, culture and tradition even as they document their “existence.” Culture just becomes a circus, a spectacle to be captured, owned and destroyed.
The effects of colonisation are ever present and continuing. The hurt is ongoing.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
These digitally cleaned photographs are published under “fair use” for the purposes of academic research and critical commentary. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Yellow Owl – Mandan c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 148
A face approaching the type of pure Mandan. The neck ornament consists of beads and cylindrical bones, and from the eagle-feather war-bonnet hang numerous weasel-tails.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Spotted Bull – Mandan c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 149
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Bear’s Belly, Arikara Indian half-length portrait, facing front, wearing bearskin c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 150
A member of the medicine fraternity, wrapped in his sacred bearskin.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Four Horns – Arikara c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 151
A biographical sketch of this subject appears in Volume V, page 179 (below)
Born in 1847 near Fort Berthold. At the age of fourteen he accompanied a war-party against the Sioux. Two years later he enlisted as scout at Fort Buford; he served served also at Fort Phil. Kearny, where in a skirmish with Sioux he had a horse shot under him. Returning that summer to the village at Fort Berthold he led a party in pursuit of some Chippewa who had murdered a Hidatsa, and succeeded in killing two of them. Twice he joined in successful pursuit of Sioux horse-raiders. He fasted several times. On the third morning of his first fast three horse-skulls and a buffalo-skull were fastened with rawhide ropes to the muscles of his back. He dragged them a mile to the Hidatsa village, encircled it, and returned to the starting-point, but no vision was experienced. The following summer the Sun Dance was observed, and his father, determined that Four Horns should receive a vision, took him to the burial-ground and fastened him to a post by slits through his back-muscles. From sunset to sunrise he walked around the post, constantly puling on the rope. The next year his father led him to the same place and had another man tie four horse-skulls and a buffalo-skull to his back, and these he dragged some three miles; but the task occupied fully six hours, as the skulls became entangled in the roots of a stump and he had to free them without using his hands. During the Sun Dance of the succeeding year he was fastened, again by his father, to a resilient ash pole, which, springing back when he pulled on the ropes, greatly increased the torture. Thus he remained from mid-afternoon until well after sunset – about six hours – but no vision was vouchsafed him. Four Horns married at the age of fifteen, being eligible by reason of his experience in war gained during the previous year. Portrait, folio plate 151.
Vision Quests
Numerous Native American practiced the rite of Vision Quests, which was often taken by older children before puberty to “find themselves” and their life’s direction. How the rite was taken, its length and intensity, and at what age varied greatly from tribe to tribe. In most cases the vision quest was a “supernatural” experience in which the individual seeks to interact with a guardian spirit, usually an animal, to obtain advice or protection.
Much preparation was often taken before the vision quest was undertaken in order to determine the sincerity and commitment of the person. Sometimes the quest required the individual to go alone into the wilderness for several days, in order to become attuned to the spirit world.
Other tribes required the individual to take a long walk, or were confined to a small room. Often the individual was required to fast prior to the quest, and was not allowed to sleep. During this period of sensory deprivation, the individual was to search for a a guardian spirit’s presence or a sign that would be given to them. Once the presence or sign was “seen,” and the individual had realized his/her direction in life, they would return to the tribe to pursue their life’s journey.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) White Shield – Arikara c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 152
A mixed-blood member of the medicine fraternity.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Sitting Bear – Arikara c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 153
A biographical sketch of this subject will be found in Volume V, page 180 (below)
Born in 1844 on the west side of the Missouri, opposite present Washburn, North Dakota. He was eighteen years of age before making his first trial at war, and even then he took no part in the actual conflict with the Assiniboin whom his party encountered. The following year he engaged in the fight when a hunting party near the Fort Berthold village was surrounded by Sioux, and he even acquired some distinction by being first to strike one of the horses of the enemy. In all the was participant in twelve battles, himself being the leader six times, but only twice did he conduct his warriors into the enemy’s country. On the other occasions the encounters were brought on by Sioux attacking the village. The first expedition of which he was chief was made down the Missouri in bull-boats. After travelling for nine night, concealing themselves by day, they killed a woman that came to the river for water, and then made their escape after a minor engagement with the men of the hostile camp. Sitting Bear was the leader of the Arikara in a combined party of Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara into the Sioux country. A camp was raided and Sitting bear captured five horses. The retreat to Fort Berthold consumed six days. Sitting Bear conted a first coup in a fight near Fort Berthold being the first Arikara to strike one of the enemy, although a Hidatsa had already counted coup on him. He married at nineteen, and like his father and grandfather he became the tribal chief. Portrait, folio plate 153.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Bear’s Teeth – Arikara c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 154
A member of the Night order of the medicine fraternity.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Little Sioux – Arikara c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 155
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Bull Neck – Arikara c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 156
A member of the Buffalo order of the medicine fraternity. Bull Neck is portrayed wearing his head-dress of buffalo horns and hide. A biographical sketch is given in Volume V, page 178 (below)
Born in 1836. His first experience in war was gained at the age of sixteen, when with a party of six others he floated down the Missouri into what is now South Dakota. They succeeded in running off some horses from a Sioux encampment, and Bull Neck, the youngest of the seven, was charged with the duty of driving them home, while the others retuned afoot on the other side of the river. His second war experience came while on another expedition down the Missouri. Four Sioux horses were captured, and three of the party turned back with the spoils; but the remaining four, of whom Bull Neck was one, went on southward into a region of heavy timber, where more Sioux horses were taken. On another down-river raid, about twenty-five Arikara, camping one night among the trees, heard the neighing of a horse. They prepared to fight, believing the Sioux were upon them. Bull Neck went out to make a reconnoissance and found a stray horse. The party proceeded on its way and came to a camp of wood-cutters providing fuel for the river steamboats. One of the white men, speaking in Arikara, told them of a nearby camp of Sioux, and the war-party, having found the enemy, made an attack. One Sioux and two Arikara were killed. Bull Neck participated in numerous encounters with the same enemy, some of them being engagements of his own seeking, others the result of attacks upon the Fort Berthold village. He counted a first coup in a winter campaign. Bull Neck was a Buffalo medicine-man in the medicine fraternity. Portrait, folio plate 156.
Fort Berthold Indian Reservation is in the upper-left corner on this map.
The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation is a U.S. Indian reservation in western North Dakota that is home for the federally recognised Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. The reservation includes lands on both sides of the Missouri River.
Created in 1870, the reservation is a small part of the lands originally reserved to the tribes by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which allocated nearly 12 million acres (49,000 km²) in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska and Wyoming.
The population of the reservation was 6,341 as of the 2010 census. The Tribe reported a total enrolment of 15,013 registered tribe members in March 2016. Many members live in cities because there are more job opportunities. Unemployment on the reservation was at 42%. The 2000 census reported a reservation population of 5,915 persons living on a land area of 1,318.895 sq mi (3,415.923 km²).
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Arikara medicine fraternity c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 157
In this group are shown the principal participants in the reenactment of the Arikara medicine ceremony, which was given for the author’s observation and study in July, 1908.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Arikara medicine ceremony – Dance of the fraternity c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 158
After each order has performed its dance about the sacred cedar, the entire fraternity, group by group, emerges from the lodge and dances.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Announcement – Arikara c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 159
Among the Missouri River Indians of the earthen lodges – the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara – the chiefs and priests made their announcements from the housetops. This picture is of Bear’s Teeth standing on the roof of the ceremonial lodge in which occurred the medicine ceremony described in Volume V, pages 70-76.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) The rush gatherer c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 160
The Arikaras, as well as their close neighbours, the Mandan and Hidatsa, made many mats of rushes. These were used largely as floor coverings.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) (Arikara medicine ceremony – the Bears) c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 161
After dancing around the sacred cedar, the members of the Bear order halt and complete their songs before reentering the medicine-lodge.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Arikara medicine ceremony – Dance of the black-tail deer c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 162
The two dark figures are painted in a manner suggesting the elk, the others the antelope.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Arikara Medicine Ceremony – The Ducks c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 163
Three members of the medicine fraternity, painted to represent ducks and holding the rushes among which waterfowl rest, in their dance around the sacred cedar.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Arikara Medicine Ceremony – The Ducks c. 1908 LC-DIG-ppmsca-39866 Library of Congress
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Arikara medicine fraternity – The prayer c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 164
Photograph shows Arikara shamans, without shirts, backs to camera, seated in a semi-circle around a sacred cedar tree, tipis in background. This impressive picture from the Arikara medicine ceremony shows the priests in a semi-circle about the sacred cedar.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Arikara girl c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 165
A type produced by several generations of tribal and racial intermarriage. The subject is considered by her tribesmen to be a pure Arikara, but her features point unmistakably to a white ancestor, and there is little doubt that the blood of other tribes than the one which claims her flows in her veins.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Arikara chief c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 166
The tribal chief, Sitting Bear, is portrayed in full costume of scalp-shirt, leggings, and moccasins, all of deerskin, and eagle-feather war-bonnet and coup-stick. (Curtis)
Photograph shows Sitting Bear, an Arikara chief, in full regalia, with a medallion around his neck. The medallion appears to bear the image of Millard Fillmore and the words: … President of the United States, 1851(?).
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Arikara chief c. 1908 LC-USZ62-136605 (b&w film copy neg.) Library of Congress
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) No Bear – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 167
A biographical sketch of this subject is given in Volume V, page 182 (below)
Born in 1841 near the mouth of Marias river. He counted a third coup when, at the age of fifteen, he first accompanied a war-party. On another raid a solitary Indian was seen. The Atsina charged, and no Bear was the first to reach him. The enemy fired but missed, and No Bear then shot him tomahawked him, took his scalp, medicine bundle, and gun, and counted coup before the rest of the warriors reached the spot. On another occasion, while fighting some Cree who were in the timber, No Bear ran up to one who was pointing an arrow at him and counted first coup. Later another charged him, but he rushed to meet the Cree, who fired and missed, and No Bear then attacked him with his tomahawk, missing the first time, but burying the blade in his opponent’s skull at the next stroke. No Bear tomahawked an enemy during a fight with the Bloods, and counted a second coup. He was in the battle in which the twenty-one Piegan were killed (page 109), and captured a bow and a quiver. In another battle he went back and rescued an unhorsed friend. He married at the age of thirty. Portrait, folio plate 167.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Eagle Child – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 168
A biographical sketch of this subject will be found in Volume V, page 181 (below)
Born in 1862 east of the Little Rockies. He first followed the war-path when twenty years of age, but gained no honours on this occasion. His next experience was in an expedition against the Piegan. Three of the enemy charged a small party of the Atsina, and one, singling him out, came so close that when the Piegan shot, the powder burned Eagle Child. Another Atsina shot the Piegan, and Eagle Child counted second coup and took the scalp. Portrait, folio plate 168.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) The land of the Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 169
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Horse Capture – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 170
A biographical sketch of this subject will be found in Volume V, page 182 (below)
Born near Milk river in 1858. When about fifteen years of age he went with a war-party against the Piegan, but achieved no honour. From their camp at Beaver creek the Atsina sent out a war-party which came upon two Sioux. Remaining hidden in a coulée, the warriors sent an old man out as a decoy. When the Sioux charged him, the rest of the Atsina rushed out and killed them both. During the fight, Horse Capture ran up to one of the enemy, who was wounded, in order to count coup, when one of his companions dashed in ahead of him and was killed by the wounded Sioux. Horse Capture then counted first coup on the enemy and killed him. He married at the age of twenty-five. Portrait, folio plate 170.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Assiniboin Boy – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 171
The head-band, so commonly used by many tribes of the Southwest, notably the Apache and Navaho, is often worn in the Northwest. A biographical sketch of Assiniboin Boy appears in Volume V, page 180 (below)
Born in 1861 in western Montana. He first went on the war-path at the age of eighteen, but gained no honours. During a fight against the Piegan he counted a second coup. He participated in the battle in which the twenty-one Piegan were killed (page 109), and slew one in the pits with the knife of the enemy. On another expedition he killed two horses of the Piegan, and shot a man through both legs. He married at the age of twenty-two. Portrait, folio plate 171.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Atsina chiefs c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 172
Two Atsina chiefs on horseback, one with feathered staff and one with a coup stick.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) On the war path – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 173
These grim-visaged old warriors made a thrilling picture as they rode along, breaking out now and then into a wild song of the chase or the raid. (Curtis)
Small band of Atsina men on horseback, some carrying staffs with feathers, one wearing a war bonnet.
War bonnet
War bonnets (also called warbonnets or headdresses) are feathered headgear traditionally worn by male leaders of the American Plains Indians Nations who have earned a place of great respect in their tribe. Originally they were sometimes worn into battle, but they are now primarily used for ceremonial occasions. They are seen as items of great spiritual and political importance, only to be worn by those who have earned the right and honour through formal recognition by their people.
Native American tribes consider the presentation of an eagle feather to be one of their highest marks of respect. Any honoured person must have earned their feather through selfless acts of courage and honour, or been gifted them in gratitude for their work or service to their tribe. Traditional deeds that brought honour would include acts of valour in battle, but also political and diplomatic gains or acts that helped their community survive and prosper. The esteem attached to eagle feathers was so high that in many cases, such as a warrior (e.g. Dog Soldiers of the Cheyenne), only two or three honour feathers might be awarded in their whole lifetime. Historically, the warrior who was the first to touch an enemy in battle and escape unscathed received an eagle feather. When enough feathers were collected, they might be incorporated into a headdress or some other form of worn regalia. Headdresses were usually reserved exclusively for the tribe’s chosen political and spiritual leaders. …
Plains-style bonnets
Plains Indians normally use eagle feathers as the most significant part of the bonnet to represent honour and respect. Some Plains-style bonnet forms are the “horned” bonnet, “flaring” eagle feather bonnet, and the “fluttering feather” bonnet. The “horned” bonnet can consist of a buckskin skull cap, shaved bison or cow horns, and dyed horsehair with bunches of owl feathers beneath the skull cap. The “flaring” eagle feather bonnet is often made of golden eagle tail feathers connected to a buckskin or felt crown. There are slits at the base of the crown that allow the bonnet to have a “flaring” look. An unusual form of bonnet that is no longer used would be the “fluttering feather” bonnet. This can have golden eagle, hawk, and owl feathers loosely attached to a felt or buckskin cap to make it hang at the sides.
Unknown maker (Native American) Feather headdress from ‘Wolf Chief’, Hidatsa c. 1830 Red-dyed eagle feathers Ethnological Museum, Berlin Copyright free image
Unknown maker (Native American) War bonnet, Plains Indian style c. 1900 Eagle feathers Robbins Museum – Middleborough, Massachusetts Copyright free image
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Atsina Indian, Red Whip, half-length portrait, seated, facing front, wearing feather, beaded buckskin shirt, holding pipe in left hand c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 174
A biographical sketch of this subject is given in Volume V, page 183 (below)
Born in 1858 near Fort McGinnis, Montana. At the age of seventeen he went out on his first war expedition, going against the Sioux. The enemy was camped at Lodepole creek, and the Atsina attacked them at dawn, capturing several horses. Red Whip was in the lead of the charge and took a few of the animals single-handed. During a battle with the Piegan, he rushed in the enemy’s line and captured a gun, counting first coup on the owner. On another expedition the Atsina met a Sioux scout whom Red Whip charged and killed, then counted first coup and took his scalp. Later, the main body of the Sioux charged the Atsina; one singled out Red Whip and fired at him, but missed, and the young warrior shot him down. Red Whip was scouting on Tongue river with General Miles, when the Sioux charged a small body of soldiers, routing them. Red Whip says he stood firm and stopped the onrushing enemy until the troops escaped. His medicine, given to him by an uncle, is a strip of otter-fur. Portrait, folio plate 174.
Counting coup
Counting coup was the winning of prestige against an enemy by the Plains Indians of North America. Warriors won prestige by acts of bravery in the face of the enemy, which could be recorded in various ways and retold as stories. Any blow struck against the enemy counted as a coup, but the most prestigious acts included touching an enemy warrior with the hand, bow, or coup stick and escaping unharmed. Touching the first enemy to die in battle or touching the enemy’s defensive works also counted as coup. Counting coup could also involve stealing an enemy’s weapons or horses tied up to his lodge in camp. Risk of injury or death was required to count coup.
Escaping unharmed while counting coup was considered a higher honour than being wounded in the attempt. A warrior who won coup was permitted to wear an eagle feather in his hair. If he had been wounded in the attempt, however, he was required to paint the feather red to indicate this.
After a battle or exploit, the people of a tribe would gather together to recount their acts of bravery and “count coup.” Coups were recorded by putting notches in a coup stick. Indians of the Pacific Northwest would tie an eagle feather to their coup stick for each coup counted, but many tribes did not do so. Among the Blackfoot tribe of the upper Missouri River Valley, coup could be recorded by the placement of “coup bars” on the sleeves and shoulders of special shirts that bore paintings of the warrior’s exploits in battle.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Atsina Camp c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 175
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) The scout – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 176
The scouts of many tribes, among which were the Atsina, carried a wolf-skin which they used in waving signals to their chief. That which is apparently hair-ornamentation, standing high above the head of the subject, is in reality coarse stalks of grass, indicating that the wearer is a scout. The origin of the custom was in the practice of scouts to wear on their head thick masses of grass, which enabled them to peer over hilltops without being discovered by the enemy.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Head Dress – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 177
A biographical sketch of this subject appears in Volume V, page 181 (below)
Born about 1855, near Marias river, Montana. He first took the war-path when twenty years of age, going against the Assiniboin. One woman was killed by his party, but Head-dress gained no honours. A war-party composed of a few Atsina, Apsaroke, and Assiniboin, went westward and found a Flathead camp, which they charged killing one man; Head-dress was with them, but accomplished nothing. While he and another were scouting in the Piegan country, they found two of the enemy, who took refuge behind a bank. The two Atsina charged and captured both, counting coups on them. While hunting buffalo, the Atsina met a party of Sioux with a band of stolen horses, and, charging them, forced them to abandon their booty. Head-dress captured two horses himself, each with a saddle. He counted a first coup against the Piegan, and while fighting the Sioux he and another struck first coup at the same time. Head-dress has had no visions, nor has he ever fasted, but has the medicine of an eagle down-feather, which was given to him. He married at the age of thirty. Portrait, folio plate 177.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) War party’s farewell – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 178
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Atsina warriors c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 179
Several Atsina warriors on horseback some with feathered staffs and one with a headdress.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Lone Flag – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 180
An eagle-wing fan is held in the hand. A biographical sketch of this subject will be found in Volume V, page 182 (below)
Born in 1854 in northwest Montana. His first experience in war was gained in the great battle with the Piegan (page 109), on which occasion he killed one and captured his medicine bundle. In an engagement with the Sioux near what is now St. Paul’s Mission, in the Little Rockies, he saved a comrade in the thick of the fight. Lone Flag married at the age of thirty-four. Portrait, folio plate 180.
Little Rocky Mountains
The Little Rocky Mountains, also known as the Little Rockies, are a group of buttes, roughly 765 km2 in area, located towards the southern end of the Fort Belknap Agency in Blaine County and Phillips County in north-central Montana. Their highest summit is Antoine Butte ~5720 ft (1743 m). The nearest town is Dodson, Montana.
“Many Indian people believe that spirits dwell in north central Montana’s “island” mountains”: the Sweet Grass hills and the Bears Paw and Little Rocky ranges. Their rugged peaks, clustered like tepees in a camp, offer access to the supernatural and provide a nesting place for eagles, the messengers of the spirits who lived there. Generations of Blackfeet, Gros Ventre [the older name for Hidatsas], Assiniboine, and Chippewa-Cree have used these isolated areas for fasting, prayer and vision questing. Here are the precious gifts of water, plants, animals, and solitude from the Great Spirit. Stories describing the supernatural powers of the Little Rocky Mountains abound. One such story, handed down in many variations, tells of a terrible water-monster called Bax’aa that inhabited the spring on Eagle Child Mountain, frightening or even slaying some who attempted to fast there. Another well known site at the western end of the Little Rockies is a battleground remembered among northern Montana tribes for its spiritual significance. The great Gros Ventre warrior Red Whip won victory there over the Sioux against incredible odds. His success is attributed to a powerful war charm and a vision that foretold the battle.”
A Native American medicine bag or medicine bundle is a container for items believed to protect or give spiritual powers to its owner. Varying in size, it could be small enough to wear around the neck or it could be a large bag with a long strap called a “bandolier.” The size of the bag is determined by how many items need to be carried.
In historic times, medicine men and shamans generally carried a large medicine bundle that could hold numerous items such as seeds, herbs, pine cones, grass, animal teeth or claws, horse hair, rocks, tobacco, beads, arrowheads, bones, or anything else of relatively small size that possessed spiritual value to the bundle’s owner. Warriors also carried bundles that included items that were important to him such as rattles, animal furs, special stones, or anything that meant something to the owner.
Because the medicine bag is considered a very precious possession which represents a person’s spiritual life, it and its contents are generally considered holy by the tribal community and its contents are meant to be kept secret by the owner. The bundle should never touch the ground which is why the bundles are to be securely wrapped. Prayers and rituals usually accompany the manufacture and opening of medicine bundles. …
In many cultures some of the items that would be carried in the bag would often be procured through a vision quest, a right of passage that includes personal sacrifice such as fasting and prayer over several days in an isolated location. The purpose is to make contact with natural spiritual forces that will guide the individual in reaching his or her potential and increase his or her understanding of him/herself, community, and the world. During the vision quest a guardian spirit will generally come to the individual in a dream or a vision, which is afterwards interpreted with the help of a Shaman. Some items within the individual’s medicine bag would represent their guardian spirit.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Awaiting the scouts return, Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 181
The war-party sent scouts in advance, who kept a constant lookout for the enemy. From time to time they returned to the main party to report, and when they were sighted the warriors formed in line and chanted a song of welcome.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Scout’s report – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 182
The Chief of the scouts, returning to the main party, tells in the vigorous and picturesque language so natural to the Indians what he has seen and experienced. While he speaks, the war-leader stands slightly in advance of his men, and carefully listening to the words of the scout, quickly forms his plan of action.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Otter Robe – Atsina c. 1908 Photogravure on vellum The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. (Seattle, Wash.): Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930 suppl., v. 5, pl. 183
A biographical sketch of this subject is given in Volume V, page 182 (below)
Born in 1851 near Fort Benton. When sixteen years of age he joined a war-party against the Piegan, but on this first expedition he gained no honours. On another raid against the same people he counted a first coup. A party of Atsina, of which he was a member, camped one night near a war-party of Sioux, not knowing of their presence. At dawn the enemy charged, but were driven back, and during the skirmish he counted another first coup. A party of Piegan stole some horses; the Atsina followed, overtaking the enemy and forcing them to abandon their booty; during the fight he killed one Piegan. On another expedition against the same tribe Otter Robe killed one with the stock of his gun and counted a first coup. In another battle with the Piegan, he rushed in, pulled a warrior from his horse, and killed him with his knife. When a young man he fasted two days and two nights by a river, and had a vision in which a tree became transformed to a warrior who told him he was to obtain many honours. The faster was instructed to paint as was the spirit – yellow on the temples, with a streak of red across the forehead – and to wear a strip of otter-fur around his scalp-lock. Otter Robe married at the age of thirty. Portrait, folio plate 183.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Paris in film
These photographs were taken on a trip to Paris in 2017 using my Mamiya twin-lens C220 medium format camera shot on Kodak Ektra 100 colour negative film.
It was strange taking these photographs over numerous, adventurous, energised days in Paris. Different from the yet to be sorted 4,000+ digital photographs I took, the act of taking these photographs allowed me to fully concentrate, to immerse myself in the environment, to loose myself in the process – with a commensurate dropping away of ego. I just was in the moment, “in the zone” as athletes would say.
They are reasonable scans of the negatives, full frame, no cropping, and I have colour corrected as best I can, noting that all digital images look different from computer monitor to monitor – one of the perennial hazards of looking at work online. They have not been sequenced at the moment.
The photographs seem to hang well together as a body of work.
Through their clear visualisation, the photographs speak directly to the viewer.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
“The great goal that we must all pursue is to kill off the great evil that eats away at us: egotism.”
“Sometimes I think I love nature just as much, if not more, for not being capable of translation into words… No words can describe some things. The more one says the less one sees. You see… nature is like love, it’s in the heart and you must not talk about it too much. You diminish what you try to describe. As for myself, I have no idea of my own nature when I act unselfconsciously. I only see what there is between the sky and myself. I have no part in it all. If I think of you, in my odd way I am you and I cease to exist.”
George Sand
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Animaux Nuisibles 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Animaux Nuisibles 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Animaux Nuisibles 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Rats Surmulots Captures aux Halles vers 1925 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Saint-Eustache Church 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Saint-Eustache Church 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Saint-Eustache Church 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Saint-Eustache Church 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Saint-Eustache Church 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Saint-Eustache Church 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Saint-Eustache Church 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Dying light, Keith Haring in Saint-Eustache Church 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Paris in film
These photographs were taken on a trip to Paris in 2017 using my Mamiya twin-lens C220 medium format camera shot on Kodak Ektra 100 colour negative film.
They are reasonable scans of the negatives, full frame, no cropping, and I have colour corrected as best I can, noting that all digital images look different from computer monitor to monitor – one of the perennial hazards of looking at work online. They have not been sequenced at the moment.
The photographs seem to hang well together as a body of work.
Through their clear visualisation, the photographs speak directly to the viewer.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cimetière du Père Lachaise 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cimetière du Père Lachaise 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cimetière du Père Lachaise 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cimetière du Père Lachaise 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cimetière du Père Lachaise 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cimetière du Père Lachaise 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cimetière du Père Lachaise 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fontainebleau 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Parc de Sceaux 2018 From the series Paris in film Digital photograph
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) The New Pilgrim 2018 C Type Print 130 x 100cm
It’s time…
As I said to Jacqui recently in an email, her images are magnificent – as always. She has knocked the Debil right out of the park.
We are so lucky to have such a talented group of female artist photographers in Australia at the moment.
You would think one of the big galleries, such as the National Gallery of Victoria or the National Gallery of Australia, would curate a large exhibition on the emergence of these artists, whose work mainly revolves around issues of gender, sexuality, identity, and place.
Here is a list of prospective artists that I can already think of: Hoda Afshar, Jane Burton, Pat Brassington, Rosemary Laing, Anne Ferran, Destiny Deacon, Simryn Gill, Katrin Koenning, Jane Brown, Carolyn Lewens, Clare Rae, Claudia Terstappen, Bindi Cole, Elizabeth Gertsakis, Janina Green, Siri Hayes, Joan Ross, Nicola Loder, Tracey Moffatt, Petrina Hicks, Robyn Stacey, Patricia Piccinini, Jacqui Stockdale and the late Polixeni Papapetrou – to name but a few.
What an illuminating exhibition and research it would be, digging around in the backstories of these amazing artists. Never, ever, in Australia have we had such creative talent amassed in one place at one time.
Someone, anyone, now is the time!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jacqui Stockdale and This Is No Fantasy for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Jacqui Stockdale: Ghost Hoovanah at This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) The Migrant 2018 C Type Print 130 x 100cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) The Donkey Debil 2018 C Type Print 130 x 100cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) The Hoo 2018 C Type Print 130 x 100cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) The L’hybride 2018 C Type Print 130 x 100cm
Hoovanah in the highest: Jacqui Stockdale and the post-colonial lens
Ghost Hoovanah is the title of Jacqui Stockdale’s new exhibition; but neither conventional geography nor modern linguistics will help in its decipherment. Instead, if we are to unpick her cryptic patois, an imaginative leap is required. Hoovanah? The word behooves its sassy Caribbean sister, Havana, that sweaty town of utopias where desires both real and imagined are woven into the fabric of its streets. And what of those spirits that inhabit this Ghost Hoovanah? The articulation of its name conjures a city of the dead; one that slumbers, but where those shouts of fervent praise, hosanna, might awaken the citizen spirits, who in turn come out to play for just one day of the year.
Stockdale is a contemporary Australian artist but her project is the production of a colonial history, albeit one that is conceived and written by all but the colonisers themselves. A classical historian might baulk at the site of a Mexican wrestler at large in the Australian landscape, displaced in time and space even as his status as ‘other’ is entirely suited to the job. This disruption of historical realities has a magical realist quality, but one also that unseats the authority of official histories. After all, how can one know if scenarios such as these were not a part of the local story? And why after all, would their narratives not be important as well?
Stockdale’s take on history – conflated, dark and elliptical – and which already has our attention, is further energised by a palpable sexuality. It pervades much of her imagery. Stockdale’s compositions beckon with sassy visual come-ons and haughty gestures of defiance, rolled together into tightly packed tableaus. This libidinous assertion of figures who are otherwise passively observed, is declarative in its liberating intent. In Stockdale’s photographic piece The Migrant 2018, the upright sitter gazes directly at the viewer, who surveys in turn, the curvaceous female form. The inference: Shove off, for the game is on. But the prerogative, dear viewer, is now mine and not yours, as once you might have thought. This is the crux of the artist’s revisionist position, the reanimation of voices that paternal histories repress. The awakening brings forth mothers, monsters, lovers and the wild folk, known to haunt the colonial scene. Even the tooth fairy is a fiend, as Stockdale reveals in The Donkey Debil 2018, a composition that captures a strange bunyip-like creature that suggests multiple mythic forms.
The question of who speaks for our past depends largely on who is asking the question. In Stockdale’s work that inquiry is the clarion call of the other. Yet in speaking for the past, Stockdale is accounting also for the present, and with it, the presence of those who are new to the local scene. This politicised stance draws strength from the artist’s historical awareness, wherein those who do not fit are simply expunged from the record. In Stockdale’s photograph The New Pilgrim 2018, the first impression is of a Georgian aristocrat set in the saddle, as one might see in a painting by George Stubbs (1724-1806), yet this is eclipsed as our eyes alight on a traditional Burmese skirt. The figure is revealed as a Karen Thai refugee, a friend of the Stockdale family, who arrived most recently on Australia’s distant shores and has now settled in Bendigo, in Northern Victoria.
In Ghost Hoovanah each of Stockdale’s figures is set before a backdrop painted by the artist for the project. The staging is not new to Stockdale, and indeed it is a trope of early studio photography. It enabled that exciting yet gimmicky invention to look like posh old painting. But in Stockdale’s work, the link to painting recalls both her own immersion in the medium and also a self-conscious lineage. It is anchored in the Baroque canvases of Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) and the Romanticised vistas of colonial interloper John Glover (1767-1849). Velazquez confronted his viewers with the unnerving stares of spoilt Spanish Infantas and bilious courtier dwarfs, while Glover, enthralled by his arrival in Tasmania, evoked an idyll where the natives were at one with nature, even as the slaughter was upon them. Flickers of these antecedents emerge in Stockdale’s images and it is not surprising to discover that the scene she chose to paint is a disused gold-mine slag-heap abandoned by Chinese hopefuls who named their promised land as ‘Big Gold Mountain’.
The spectre of failure, as befell those Asian migrants and which dogged almost every colonial adventure, from Captain Cook to Burke and Wills, and our favourite outlaw Ned, is expunged in their unique apotheosis. Raised up as mythic spirits, their inability to triumph is transformed in the telling of their tales. Yet in Stockdale’s work, a subterranean undercurrent, of sub-cultures and those unnamed others who the white-man’s hall of fame passed by, emerge as entirely more enticing as they call us out to play. These are Dionysian dancers, and their haughty disinterest is catnip to our imagination. Even the mule, who appears in L’hybride 2018 seems fresh from Francisco de Goya’s nightmare Los Caprichos etchings. But on an upbeat note, the Sudanese Australian figure who appears in The Rider 2018, sets her eyes on the sky as clouds billow from her mind, as she, like all of Stockdale’s figures take possession of their imaginative space, and refuse in the face of all that surrounds them to be defined in the eyes of another. The promise of Stockdale’s work is the enfoldment of the world and its double, of all that is known and all that is dreamt of, and in that consummation of difference, the emergence of her vision is revealed. For the timid, such scenes may be affronting, but this bestiary is the artist’s presentiment, and in many respects, it is already the world.
Damian Smith, 2018
Dr Damian Smith is a freelance curator, arts writer and academic working in Australia at the University of Melbourne and RMIT, in Asia and Latin America. He is the Director of Words For Art, a member of the International Association of Art Critics and an art historian. He is currently curating Australian participation in the 2019 Bienal de la Habana, Cuba.
Installation views of the exhibition Jacqui Stockdale: Ghost Hoovanah at This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) The Rider 2018 C Type Print 130 x 100cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Duel of the Mount (installation view) 2018 Diptych Dimensions variable
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Duel of the Mount 1 2018 C Type Print 130 x 100cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Duel of the Mount 2 2018 C Type Print 130 x 100cm
This Is No Fantasy 108-110 Gertrude St Fitzroy VIC 3065 Australia Phone: +61 3 9417 7172
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Colony: Frontier Wars (15 March – 2 September 2018) which presents a powerful response to colonisation through a range of historical and contemporary works by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists dating from pre-contact times to present day.
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.
” …what the generality of the white population of the Colony consist of, which is of the most debased and vilest dregs of Great Britain and Ireland… they never look on the Blacks in the light of human beings, but, would just as soon shoot them as they would a crow, or hunt them as they would a kangaroo. Indeed in some districts the dogs used to be thought good for nothing unless they could kill a Black as well as a kangaroo, and they used to teach them to do so, by giving them some of the poor Black’s blood.”
James Graham. ‘Overland Letter’ part of the Graham Bros collection at The University of Melbourne archives quoted in Dr Katherine Ellinghaus. “Criss-Cross History Hidden in a Letter,” on the Pursuit website 12 June 2018 [Online] Cited 16/02/2022
“The bad deeds of some leading frontier politicians, administrators and military men have been almost overlooked; many history books – even more modern online popular resources such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography – diminish, attempt to justify or overlook completely their proven excesses against this continent’s Indigenes. …
“On any occasion of seeing or falling in with the Natives, either in Bodies or Singly, they are to be called upon, by your friendly Native Guides, to surrender themselves to you as Prisoners of War. If they refuse to do so, make the least show of resistance, or attempt to run away from you, you will fire upon and compel them to surrender, breaking and destroying the Spears, Clubs and Waddies of all those you take Prisoners. Such natives as happen to be killed on such occasions, if grown up men, are to be hanged up on Trees in Conspicuous Situations, to Strike the Survivors with the greater terror.”
Lachlan Macquarie, fifth governor of New South Wales quoted in Paul Daley, “Heroes, Monuments and History,” in Meanjin, Autumn 2018
Terror incognita
Firstly, let me state that I am no expert in Australian colonial history, culture or photography. These are very specialised fields. But what I can do is use my eyes, my knowledge and my feelings to provide comment on this exhibition.
This magnificent exhibition at NGV Australia at Federation Square is a fascinating interrogation of the early history of the Australian nation, yet at the same time I found it very disturbing and sad. The exhibition more resembles a natural history exhibition than an art exhibition, a cabinet of curiosities, a Wunderkammer, were encyclopaedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries are yet to be defined are mixed with the first European art made on this continent. The exhibition is a microcosm or theatre of the world, and a memory theatre, for all that has passed since before invasion of this land up until the year 1861. The installation mixes together colonial and Indigenous artefacts from within the allotted time period. There is so much to see that I have visited three times and not got to the bottom of this exhibition it is so dense. Paintings, drawings, sculpture, colonial furniture, clothing, pottery, jewellery, photography, maps, artefacts, etc… are displayed in a melange of techniques, offering a huge range of artists and media. Please see Part 1 of the posting for the installation images of the exhibition.
Some observations can be made. Generally, the paintings and drawings are of a very classical form, very tightly controlled and painted. They set out to document the landscape, firstly the Australian landscape as seen in the European tradition, and then in a more realistic yet romanticised form in later paintings. Early colour aquatints of Aboriginal people depict them climbing trees in an almost reptilian manner while later representations picture “a romantic vision of a vast, silent and forbidding land. Two generic Aboriginal people figures are included in the foreground in the guise of the noble savage.” Of a vanishing race. Other collages (a fictionalised representational technique), such as James Wallis’ View of Awabakal Aboriginal people, with beach and river inlet, and distant Aboriginal group in background (c. 1818), propose “a harmonious relationship between the Awabakal, colonisers and the military. Such a suggestion is at odds with earlier events of April 1816 when Wallis, under the direction of Governor Macquarie, led an armed regiment against Dharawal and Gandangara people south of Sydney, in what is now acknowledged as the first officially sanctioned massacre of Indigenous people in Australia.” (Exhibition text) Further, the romanticised vistas of colonial interloper John Glover (1767-1849) evoke, “an idyll where the natives were at one with nature, even as the slaughter was upon them…” (Damian Smith, 2018). This connection to nature can be seen in Glover’s painting The River Nile, Van Diemen’s Land, from Mr Glover’s farm (1837). But, as the exhibition text notes, “Glover had not experienced the conflict or witnessed the violence between Tasmanian Aboriginal resistance fighters and white settlers during the 1820s. By the time of his arrival in 1831, the Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors had been forced to leave Country and relocate to Flinders Island.” These representations of Aboriginal life are pure fiction constructed in the imagination of the artists and colonisers.
By way of contrast, the portraits of landed gentry, such as Thomas Bock’s four paintings of Captain William Robertson and his family (1830s-1850s), are elegant and flattering. They are portraits executed in the grand Georgian manner fashionable in England and were greatly prized by colonists. Here is a family who has made it, and they want everyone to know about it. The roots of their representation are in the old country, their allegiance there also, to the mother country. Australia is a colony, part of the British Empire, an outpost of all that is right and proper in the world. Imagine just for a second that you are back in the 1850s. No electricity, only candle power. Now imagine arriving at a home with these portraits, or the landscapes of John Glover, lit by candle light. The skin would be luminescent, the golden frames glowing in the light; the trees in the Glover paintings would have writhed, seeming almost alive in the flickering light. A forbidding landscape indeed.
In portraiture, the same disposition can be seen in the early daguerreotype and ambrotype photographs of Aboriginals and colonists.
“Within a decade of the arrival of European colonists in the Port Phillip District a number of professional photographers had established studios in Melbourne, and prominent among these was Douglas Kilburn. Around 1847, Kilburn made a series of portraits [see below] of people thought to be from the Kulin nation. The images testify to the power of photographs to record kin and define identity. They also show Aboriginal people who had experienced a decade of dispossession following the arrival of settlers. It is believed Kilburn’s subjects were among the numbers of First Nations people who had few choices other than to return to Melbourne because they had been driven out of their Country.” (Exhibition text)
If we look at these small, personal, one-off photographs housed in leather cases that can be closed off from the world, when opened to reveal the Aboriginal sitters … we notice how frontal they are, how they face straight on to the camera, how grouped they are, how they fill the picture plane with little negative space around them, how the camera seems to press in on them, as though to capture every last detail of their countenance and clothing. Their visage. The aspect of their being. These are ethnographic documents as much as they are portraits, for they map the condition of the captives. If, as Michael Graham-Stewart states in his book Bitter fruit: Australian photographs to 1963, “photography operates not only as an instrument of oppression, but also as a means of connecting with people of the past,” what do contemporary Indigenous Australians make of these images. Do they find evidence of wrongdoing and suffering but also of resistance, adaptation, and continuity? Are they also angry and sad at what they have lost, as in a thriving and incredibly diverse culture? I would be.
Again, by way of contrast we look at how the colonists viewed themselves in these personal treasures. Here, we must remember that these early photographs would have been relatively expensive for a family to have commissioned them, almost as expensive say, in contemporary terms, as buying a plasma television when they first came out. Only the well-to-do would have been able to afford to have their portrait taken. Two examples of this providence and bounty can be seen in this posting. The portrait of The Lashmar family by William Millington Nixon (1857-58, see below) shows a family who were pioneering pastoralists on Kangaroo Island in the 1850s. “Despite the relative remoteness of their home, and the harshness of the environment, the family evidently prospered. Thomas Young Lashmar not only had the means to travel to Adelaide with his wife and family, but was also able to commission photographic portraits at a time when it was still a relatively expensive exercise.” (Exhibition text) While Aboriginals while forced from their land and massacred, pastoralists were making money and prospering from the confiscated lands.
Nothing better shows the sense of entitlement that the early pastoralists had (and still do today, with their illegal land clearing) towards their possession of the land and their identity that arose from that possession, than the commissioned set of five portraits by daguerreotype portraitist George Goodman of the daughters of prominent local land holder William Lawson II in the town of Bathurst, north-west of Sydney. Dressed in their finest, the young daughters, arms covered, clutch flowers and either look away from the camera or directly at it. The camera is placed directly at eye level, or slightly below it, and the space around the sitter is open and amorphous, a plain background which isolates the figure in space. Unlike the claustrophobic portraits by Douglas Kilburn of the Aboriginals from the Kulin nation, here the sitters seem to possess the space of the photograph, they inhabit and can breathe in the pictorial plane. In particular, the portrait of Susannah Caroline Lawson (1845, below) pictures a young woman with an incredibly determined stare and haughty demeanour. She seems to radiate a perfect sense of entitlement within the physical presence of the photograph.
Other photographs reinforce this vision of the world that the colonists enacted. Thomas Bock’s Portrait of two boys (1848-50, below) “shows that he was a skilled photographer by 1848… Any parent would have been thrilled by such a vivid image of their sons, especially as, like many colonial sons, they might be getting ready to be sent ‘home’ to the United Kingdom for schooling. The image of the boys was a memento for their parents as well as proof for relatives in Britain that colonial society could produce the same well-dressed and well-bred young boys as the old country.” (Gael Newton)
There is the rub. For migrants who were a long way from home, photography was proof that they were alive, successful, flourishing… and could live up to the expectations of their family back home and the standards of the old country. “Photography served several interrelated roles associated with the experience of migration and colonisation. For those European migrants transplanted halfway across the world, often without family or friends, the most immediate and heartfelt use for the camera was portraiture. Some of Australia’s earliest surviving photographs are small, sturdily cased portraits which provided ‘likenesses as if by magic’ of those depicted and were sent back ‘home’, thus providing an emotional connection to family members.” (Exhibition text) An emotional connection for people living in a far off land to those back “home”, and an emotional connection to family in a forbidding land, to remind themselves of their strength and unity in the face of the unknown.
What this exhibition does not show, because they are later photographs, is evidence of the overt oppression of Indigenous peoples that photography documented. While terra nullius is a Latin expression meaning “nobody’s land” usually associated with colonising Australia, the British Government using this term to justify the dispossession of Indigenous people, there is also another term, terra incognita, a term used in cartography for regions that have not been mapped or documented. In many ways the terror that Indigenous people experienced during invasion is still being mapped and explored. Much of it is still not known or is unaccepted, as a terror incognita. Dr Katherine Ellinghaus in her article “Criss-Cross History Hidden in a Letter,” notes that, “Reconciliation Australia’s own biennial survey [2016 Australian Reconciliation Barometer survey 5 September 2016] has found that more than one in three Australians don’t accept that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were subject to mass killings, incarceration, and forced removal from their lands.”
This is the terror that still exists in the Australian psyche. The terror of cutting ties to the motherland, the terror of an incognita, an “unknown land”, and the hidden terror prescribed and enacted on the cultural body of the Aboriginal, unacknowledged by some even today.
Robert Lyall was a successful Tasmanian publican and businessman whose interests extended to horse racing. In 1851 his prized horse Patience won the New Norfolk Cup and Lyall was the recipient of a handsome silver presentation cup. Not only evidence of his success and standing, the cup was apparently also of great personal significance to Lyall as he included it as a decorative element when this large-scale ambrotype was commissioned. Unlike more intimately scaled cased images, this photograph was framed so that it could be prominently displayed on the wall.
Within a decade of the arrival of European colonists in the Port Phillip District a number of professional photographers had established studios in Melbourne, and prominent among these was Douglas Kilburn. Around 1847, Kilburn made a series of portraits of people thought to be from the Kulin nation. The images testify to the power of photographs to record kin and define identity. They also show Aboriginal people who had experienced a decade of dispossession following the arrival of settlers. It is believed Kilburn’s subjects were among the numbers of First Nations people who had few choices other than to return to Melbourne because they had been driven out of their Country.
Exhibition text
Douglas T. Kilburn (attributed to) (England 1811 – Australia 1871, Australia from 1846) No title (Group of Koori men) c. 1847 Daguerreotype; leather, wood, velvet, brass National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased from Admission Funds, 1983
Kulin
The Kulin nation is an alliance of five Indigenous Australian tribes in south central Victoria, Australia. Their collective territory extended around Port Phillip and Western Port, up into the Great Dividing Range and the Loddon and Goulburn River valleys. Before British colonisation, the tribes spoke five related languages. These languages were spoken in two groups: the Eastern Kulin group of Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung, Taungurong and Ngurai-illam-wurrung; and the western language group of just Wathaurung.
The central Victoria area has been inhabited for an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 years before European settlement. At the time of British settlement in the 1830s, the collective populations of the Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung and Wathaurong tribes of the Kulin nation was estimated to be under 20,000. The Kulin lived by fishing, hunting and gathering, and made a sustainable living from the rich food sources of Port Phillip and the surrounding grasslands.
Due to the upheaval and disturbances from British settlement from the 1830s on, there is limited physical evidence of the Kulin peoples’ collective past. However, there is a small number of registered sites of cultural and spiritual significance in the Melbourne area.
Douglas T. Kilburn (attributed to) (England 1811 – Australia 1871, Australia from 1846) No title (South-east Australian Aboriginal man and two younger companions) (installation view) 1847 Daguerreotype National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2007
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Douglas T. Kilburn (attributed to) (England 1811 – Australia 1871, Australia from 1846) No title (Two Koori women) (installation view) c. 1847 Daguerreotype, brass, glass, gold, velvet National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 2004
As a way of attracting attention to his newly opened business Douglas Kilburn took at least eight daguerreotypes of Aboriginal people in the lands of the Kulin nation. As a result of the nineteenth-century belief that the Aboriginal people were doomed to annihilation, Kilburn intended the images as ethnographic studies rather than individual portraits; nevertheless, his unnamed sitters project a proud and dignified presence. His photographs were popular with local artists such as Eugene von Guérard and John Skinner Prout, who copied them, and they also reached an international audience when they were used as the basis for wood engravings in William Westgarth’s Australia Felix in 1848, Nordisk Penning-Magazin in 1849 and the Illustrated London News in 1850.
Exhibition text
George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851)
Left
Maria Emily Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented 1993
Middle
Susannah Caroline Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype; leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960
Right
Eliza Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype, leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960
Caroline and Thomas James Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype, leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented 1991
Middle
Sophia Rebecca Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype, leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960
Right
Sarah Ann Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype, leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960
George Goodman arrived in Sydney in 1842 and established the first professional photography studio in Australia. Although he is known to have made photographs of Tasmanian street scenes, his stock-in-trade was portraiture. Goodman travelled to regional towns where he advertised his services as a daguerreotype portraitist. In 1845 he visited the town of Bathurst, north-west of Sydney, and was commissioned to photograph the family of prominent local land holder William Lawson II. The resulting series includes five individual portraits of Lawson’s young daughters and a charming, and surprisingly informal, image showing his wife Caroline Lawson and their young son.
Exhibition text
George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851) Susannah Caroline Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype; leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960
George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851) Eliza Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype, leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960
George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851) Caroline and Thomas James Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype, leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented 1991
George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851) Sophia Rebecca Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype, leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960
George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851) Sarah Ann Lawson 1845 Daguerreotype, leather, velvet Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960
Freeman Brothers Studio, Sydney (1854-1900) James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s) William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s) No title (Mother and children) 1855-1856 Daguerreotype, oil paint; leather, gold, paint, glass, velvet, metal, wood (case) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gerstl Bequest, 2001
One of the largest and most celebrated Sydney photographic studios was run by the Freeman Brothers, whose skilful portraits were much admired. This pair of entrepreneurial photographers used the latest processes, building a large, well-appointed studio and actively promoting their work through display in international exhibitions. James Freeman was also extremely well versed in the potential uses of the medium, delivering a comprehensive lecture on the topic to a Sydney society in 1858.
Professor Robert Hall (active in Australia mid 19th century) No title (Portrait of a gentleman with check pants) 1855-1865 Stereo ambrotype, colour dyes 8.8 x 17.1cm (overall) Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide R. J. Noye Collection Gift of Douglas and Barbara Mullins, 2004
Right
Thomas Glaister (England 1824 – United States 1904, Australia 1850s) George Coppin c. 1855 Daguerreotype, hand tinted, gilt-matted and glazed 5.2 x 12.7cm Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
George Selth Coppin (8 April 1819 – 14 March 1906) was a comic actor, entrepreneur and politician, active in Australia. For more information see the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry.
Meade Brothers Studio, Melbourne (studio active in Australia 1850s) Thomas Glaister (attributed to) (photographer England 1825 – United States 1904) No title (Gentleman) c. 1854 Daguerreotype, colour pigments; gold, leather, velvet, brass, glass (case) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of T. H. Lustig and Moar Families, Governor, 2001
Left
Thomas Bock (attributed to) (England 1790 – Australia 1855, Australia from 1824) William Robertson Jnr. c. 1852 Daguerreotype, hand coloured case: 9.2 x 8.0cm, image: 7.0 x 5.5cm National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Gift of Fiona Turner (nee Robertson) and John Robertson, 2001 Donated through the Australia Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Right
Thomas Bock (attributed to) (England 1790 – Australia 1855, Australia from 1824) Margaret Robertson c. 1852 Ambrotype, hand coloured case: 9.3 x 8.0cm, image: 7.0 x 6.0cm National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Gift of Fiona Turner (nee Robertson) and John Robertson, 2001 Donated through the Australia Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
News of scientific discoveries reached Australia via the flotillas of ships plying the southern trade routes. The first demonstrations of photography occurred in England and France in 1839. News of this reached Australia that same year and was described in an account in the Tasmanian newspaper The Cornwall Chronicle on 19 October 1839. Former convict Thomas Bock was one of the earliest Tasmanian photographers, first advertising his studio in September 1843. His daguerreotype portraits resemble his paintings and drawings in their composition and use of hand-colouring.
Exhibition text
Thomas Bock (Australian born England, 1790-1855)
Thomas Bock, artist, printmaker and photographer, is believed to have been born at Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, in 1790. He completed an apprenticeship as an engraver with Thomas Brandard in Birmingham and in 1814 established his own business there, advertising himself as an ‘Engraver and Miniature Painter’. In April 1823, Bock and a woman named Mary Day Underhill appeared at the Warwickshire Assizes charged with ‘administering concoctions of certain herbs to Ann Yates, with the intent to cause a miscarriage.’ Both were found guilty and sentenced to transportation for fourteen years. At the time of his conviction, Bock was thirty-two, married and father to five children. Bock arrived in Hobart aboard the Asia in January 1824. His convict record stated he had ‘served an apprenticeship to the Engraving Business’ and described him as ‘well connected and very orderly.’ The colonial authorities found immediate use for Bock, some of his earliest Tasmanian works being bank notes engraved for the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land and a drawing of executed cannibal, Alexander Pearce, made in July 1824 at the request of the Colonial Surgeon. Bock worked as a printmaker during the 1820s, engraving stationery along with illustrations for publications such as the Hobart Town Almanack while also producing portraits. He received a conditional pardon in 1832 and free pardon a year later, thereafter establishing a highly successful practice as Hobart’s most sought-after portrait artist. Bock was particularly known for his portrait drawings utilising watercolour, pencil, chalk and pastel (or ‘French crayon’), but his practice was diverse, incorporating printmaking and oil painting as well as photography. On his death in Hobart in March 1855 he was described as ‘an artist of a very high order’ whose works ‘adorned the homes of a number of our old colonists and citizens.’
Thomas Bock (attributed to) (England 1790 – Australia 1855, Australia from 1824) William Robertson Jnr. c. 1852 Daguerreotype, hand coloured case: 9.2 x 8.0cm, image: 7.0 x 5.5cm National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Gift of Fiona Turner (nee Robertson) and John Robertson, 2001 Donated through the Australia Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
William Robertson (Australian, 1839-1892)
William Robertson (1839-1892), barrister and politician, was the third of the seven children of pastoralist William Robertson (1798-1874) and his wife Margaret (née Whyte, 1811-1866). Robertson was born and educated in Hobart and then at Wadham College, Oxford. He is believed to be the first Australian to row in an Oxford eight, his team victorious against Cambridge in the Boat Race of 1861. Robertson graduated with a BA in 1862 and was married and called to the bar the following year. On his return to Australia, Robertson practised law in Hobart before heading to Victoria in 1864. He worked as a barrister in Melbourne and then assisted in the management of the family property, Corangamarah, which he and his three brothers jointly inherited on the death of their father in 1874. Robertson served as a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly between 1871 and 1874 and again from 1881 to 1886; he was also President of the Colac Shire council in 1880-81. After the dissolution of the partnership with his brothers in 1885, Robertson became sole owner of Corangamarah, later called The Hill, and in retirement enjoyed the lifestyle of an ‘hospitable and sports-loving country gentleman.’
Thomas Bock (attributed to) (England 1790 – Australia 1855, Australia from 1824) Margaret Robertson c. 1852 Ambrotype, hand coloured case: 9.3 x 8.0cm, image: 7.0 x 6.0cm National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Gift of Fiona Turner (nee Robertson) and John Robertson, 2001 Donated through the Australia Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Margaret Robertson (Australian, 1811-1866)
Margaret Robertson (née Whyte, 1811-1866) was the daughter of settlers George and Jessie Whyte, who emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land from Scotland in 1832. In September 1834, Margaret married Scottish-born entrepreneur and landowner William Robertson (1798-1874), who had arrived in the colony in 1822 and who, in the decade leading up to his marriage, had acquired land nearby to a property owned by Margaret’s family. The first of Margaret and William’s seven children – four sons and three daughters – was born in 1835. The family resided in Hobart until the early 1860s, when Roberston relocated to his Victorian estate, where Margaret died in February 1866.
The daguerreotype was first demonstrated in Australia in Sydney in May 1841. Late the following year, London’s George Goodman set up the first commercial studio in Sydney, claiming to have an exclusive license to use the daguerreotype in the colonies. Goodman was working in Hobart in August 1843, where he came in direct competition with British convict artist Thomas Bock.
Although an engraver by trade, Bock had a keen interest in photography and, in the Hobart Town Advertiser of 29 September 1843, he advertised that ‘in a short time he would be enabled to take photographic likenesses in the first style of the art’. Infuriated, Goodman threatened legal action and Bock promptly withdrew until five years later when he opened a portrait photography studio in Hobart.
Bock’s stepson Alfred assisted him in the photography-side of the studio business. They had seen daguerreotype portraits brought from London by Reverend Francis Russell Nixon in Hobart in June 1843 – before Goodman’s arrival in Tasmania – and had purchased a camera from a Frenchman in Hobart so that they could learn the new art form using photographic formulas published in English magazines. Their lack of proper training, however, shows in Hobart dignitary GTYB Boyes’s records of August 1849, in which he comments, ‘Bock understands the nature of his apparatus but very imperfectly!’ Despite this and other unfavourable remarks between 1849 and 1853, Boyes continued to visit Bock’s studios for daguerreotype portraits.
Bock’s portrait of two freckle-faced boys dressed in matching outfits shows that he was a skilled photographer by 1848 – a year before Boyes’s initial disparaging remark. Any parent would have been thrilled by such a vivid image of their sons, especially as, like many colonial sons, they might be getting ready to be sent ‘home’ to the United Kingdom for schooling. The image of the boys was a memento for their parents as well as proof for relatives in Britain that colonial society could produce the same well-dressed and well-bred young boys as the old country. The sitters are as yet unidentified but the daguerreotype has been dated by comparison with several identified examples of double portraits of children that have survived out of the hundreds of images made by the Bock studio.
Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography in artonview, issue 61, autumn 2010
Shortly after his arrival in Adelaide in 1855, William Millington Nixon began making daguerreotypes, and quickly become a skilled daguerreotypist. By 1858 he had built a reputation as a portraitist and established a studio in King William Street, Adelaide.
The Lashmar family were pioneering pastoralists on Kangaroo Island in the 1850s. Despite the relative remoteness of their home, and the harshness of the environment, the family evidently prospered. Thomas Young Lashmar not only had the means to travel to Adelaide with his wife and family, but was also able to commission photographic portraits at a time when it was still a relatively expensive exercise.
Jabez Bunting Waterhouse (Australian born England, 1821-1891)
WATERHOUSE BROTHERS: Jabez Bunting (1821-1891), Joseph (1828-1881), and Samuel (1830-1918), Wesleyan ministers, were the fifth, ninth and tenth children of Rev. John Waterhouse (d. 1842) and his wife Jane Beadnell, née Skipsey. In 1838 their father, a prominent Yorkshire Methodist, was appointed general superintendent of the Wesleyan Methodist Mission in Australia and Polynesia with a roving commission. With his wife, seven sons and three daughters, he reached Hobart Town in the James on 1 February 1839.
Jabez was born in London on 19 April 1821, educated at Kingswood School in 1832-35 and apprenticed to a printer. In Hobart, A. Bent’s printing premises were purchased and worked by Jabez. In 1840 he became a local preacher extending his ministry to convict road menders. Received as a probationer in 1842, he returned to England to enter Richmond (Theological) College and in 1845 was appointed to Windsor circuit. After his ordination at the Methodist chapel, Spitalfields, he was sent to Van Diemen’s Land in 1847, and ministered successively in the Hobart, Westbury, Campbell Town and Longford circuits. In 1855 the first conference of the Wesleyan Church in Australia appointed him to South Australia; he served at Kapunda, Willunga and Adelaide, his ministry marked by his business acumen and his role as secretary of the Australasian Conference at Adelaide in 1862.
In 1864 Waterhouse was transferred to New South Wales and was appointed successively to Maitland, Goulburn, Orange, Waverley, Parramatta, Newcastle and Glebe. In 1874-1875 he was secretary of the New South Wales and Queensland Annual Conference and president in 1876; he was elected secretary of the first three general conferences of the Australasian Wesleyan Methodist Church: in Melbourne 1875, Sydney 1878 and Adelaide 1881. In 1882 he retired as a supernumerary, but remained on committees such as those of the Sustentation and Extension Society and the Missionary Society, frequently looking after missionary interests during the absence of George Brown. He supported the Wesleyan Church in Tonga in the dispute with S. W. Baker and published The Secession and the Persecution in Tonga … (Sydney, 1886). Regarded as a gifted preacher by his denomination and as the architect of most of the conference legislation, he died of heart disease and dropsy at Randwick on 18 January 1891 and was buried in the Wesleyan section of Rookwood cemetery. He was survived by his wife Maria Augusta, née Bode, whom he had married at Windsor, England, on 13 August 1847, and by seven sons; his second son John was headmaster of Sydney High School.
Freeman Brothers Studio (Sydney 1854-1900) James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s) William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s) Jemima Jane Davis c. 1860 Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, velvet, glass and gilt metal (case) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Warwick Reeder, 1991
Right
Freeman Brothers Studio (Sydney 1854-1900) James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s) William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s) Walter Davis c. 1860 Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, velvet, glass and gilt metal (case) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Warwick Reeder, 1991
Freeman Brothers Studio (Sydney 1854-1900) James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s) William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s) Jemima Jane Davis c. 1860 Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, velvet, glass and gilt metal (case) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Warwick Reeder, 1991
Freeman Brothers Studio (Sydney 1854-1900) James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s) William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s) Walter Davis c. 1860 Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, velvet, glass and gilt metal (case) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Warwick Reeder, 1991
Unknown photographer Jemima, wife of Jacky with William T. Mortlock c. 1860 Daguerreotype Ayers House Museum, National Trust of South Australia, Adelaide
Right
Unknown photographer Jacky, known as Master Mortlock c. 1860-1865 Daguerreotype Ayers House Museum, National Trust of South Australia, Adelaide
The Mortlock family were wealthy pastoralists in South Australia. Along with the daguerreotypes of family members they commissioned around 1860 are two portraits of their domestic servants known as Jemima and Jacky. Each member of the Mortlock family has been named in these images, but the identity of the two Aboriginal sitters has been lost – initially with the assignment of European first names and then the addition of the surname ‘master Mortlock’, which identified them as servants of the pastoralists who employed them.
Unknown photographer Emily Spencer Wills c. 1859 Daguerreotype, coloured dyes; brass, glass, leather, wood 1/6th plate daguerreotype with applied colour in al brass matt (without original leather case) Frame: 8.5 x 7.2cm, sight: 6.6 x 5.4cm National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Gift of T S Wills Cooke 2014 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Photography served several interrelated roles associated with the experience of migration and colonisation. For those European migrants transplanted halfway across the world, often without family or friends, the most immediate and heartfelt use for the camera was portraiture. Some of Australia’s earliest surviving photographs are small, sturdily cased portraits which provided ‘likenesses as if by magic’ of those depicted and were sent back ‘home’, thus providing an emotional connection to family members.
This group of family portraits shows members of the Wills family, including Thomas Wentworth Wills, who was a prominent sportsman and one of the authors of the rules of the game that later became known as Australian Rules.
Exhibition text
Left
Unknown photographer No title (Group of people in front of a crushing plant on a goldfield) (installation view) 1860s Ambrotype; embossed leather, wood, velvet, brass, gilt metal National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 2007
Right
Henry King (Australia 1855-1923) Henry Kay (installation view) 1855-1860 Ambrotype, coloured dyes 2 photographs: ambrotypes with hand-colouring ; 8.9 x 6.5cm (oval, sight, f.1) in pinchbeck and gilt brass mount 10.9 x 8.3cm and 9.6 x 7.0cm (oval, sight, f.2) in gilt brass mount 10.9 x 8.2cm, in brown union case 12.0 x 9.4cm Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs W.G. Haysom 1964
The discovery of gold in 1851 led to extraordinary change in the colonies as migrants flooded in and previously unknown wealth enabled expansion and development. Across the colony mines were dug and small towns and settlements were established. This ambrotype shows a working mine in central Victoria and also reveals the environmental damage that resulted from the scramble for gold.
The desire to make a fortune on the goldfields brought about significant social change. Migrants such as Henry Kay, who arrived from Penang in the 1850s, came seeking gold but stayed on in various other roles, including that of court interpreter.
Exhibition text
Henry King (Australia 1855-1923) Henry Kay 1855-1860 Ambrotype, coloured dyes 2 photographs: ambrotypes with hand-colouring ; 8.9 x 6.5cm (oval, sight, f.1) in pinchbeck and gilt brass mount 10.9 x 8.3cm and 9.6 x 7.0cm (oval, sight, f.2) in gilt brass mount 10.9 x 8.2cm, in brown union case 12.0 x 9.4cm Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs W.G. Haysom 1964
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square Corner of Russell and Flinders Streets, Melbourne
Much as I love the grittiness and stark contrast of Japanese photography of the 1960-70s – its reaction against the pro-American optimism of The Family of Man exhibition that went to Tokyo in the 1950s, its rejection of journalistic illustration, its I-reality that is not a objective record but a personal story, “a poem composed in photography”, its spirit of ennui, a state of dissatisfaction with the status quo – there is also another, less edifying side to Japanese photography of this period.
Basically, it’s a male view of the world, any world, any reality, but always with the “I” at the front of it, the world of the male ego. A world where women are objectified, bound and gagged in pretty gruesome “erotic” sex scenes (not in this posting, but you can Google them online). No matter that the photographer had permission, these photographs are about male power and the male gaze. Nothing more, nothing less. A world where cameras pry on people having anonymous sex in the park in the dark. Let’s call it what it is, it’s misogynistic and voyeuristic.
The obverse of a concern for the sitter, or the landscape, or the object, can be observed (did you see what I did there… obverse / observe), in that there is a concern with the minutiae of life in extremis, rather than an empathy for it. Maybe that is the Japanese culture. Perhaps this microscopic analysis comes about because of the fast pace of their life, their mixture of state, religion, culture and capitalism, their violent history and the submissive place of women within that society (The traditional role of women in Japan has been defined as “three submissions”: young women submit to their fathers; married women submit to their husbands, and elderly women submit to their sons ~ Wikipedia)
There is something I cannot put my finger on about the power of the photograph to capture a dominance over women, the landscape, people, protests – a suppressed violence against the self?
I’m just thinking out loud here…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The collections of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg include an outstanding and sizeable ensemble of Japanese photographs from the 1960s and 1970s. These works will be on view for the first time in many years in a series of exhibitions. The opening presentation is dedicated to the depiction of humans and perceptions of postwar Japanese society in transformation. A future second exhibition will focus on images of city and countryside.
In the history of Japanese photography, the idea of the “I-photo” is a kind of photographic adaptation of the literary convention of first-person narrative. The photographic image is conceived and employed as a medium articulating the photographer’s self as well as an instrument with which to scrutinise reality. A pioneer of postwar photography, Masahisa Fukase in the late 1960s created photographic series mixing documentary and fictional elements. His central motifs and models were his wife Yoko and their family. Nobuyoshi Araki, the best-known, most prolific, and probably also most provocative Japanese photography artist, launched his career as a fashion and advertising photographer in 1963. The collection contains highly personal photographic notes by him and his wife Yoko, who died early. Fukase, Araki, and the other Japanese “I-photographers” such as Issei Suda, Shin Yanagisawa, and Daidõ Moriyama regard the “I-photo” as a blend of truth and falsification that can elicit an emotional response and disconcert. The aesthetic of the pictures is characterised by hard black-and-white contrasts and lacerated abstract structures. It signals the artists’ rejection of the tradition of classical art photography while also probing the potentials of the medium itself. The Japanese photography scene is highly controversial; the spectrum of themes ranges from erotic depictions of bodies to political statements.
Daidō Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Untitled (l. a. r.) c. 1970 Lips from a Poster 1975 3 gelatin silver prints on Baryte paper Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Daidō Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Stray Dog, Misawa (installation view at right) 1971 From the series Hunter Untitled c. 1970 9 gelatin silver prints on Baryte paper Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Daidō Moriyama is one of Japan’s leading contemporary photographers. He studied design and photography in Kōbe before moving to Tokyo in 1961 and deciding to focus entirely on photography. After a stint as Eikō Hosoe’s assistant, he went into business for himself as a photographer in 1964.
Like the art critic Kōji Taki and the photographers Yutaka Takanashi, Shōmei Tōmatsu, and Takuma Nakahira, Moriyama was a member of the group around the influential magazine Provoke (1968-1969). Although no more than three issues appeared in print, its importance in the history of the medium in Japan can hardly be overstated. The Provoke Manifesto declared that photography was capable of registering what could not be expressed in words. The visual style of the photographs Provoke would run was to be are-bure-boke, Japanese for “grainy, blurry, and out of focus” – a specification that still aptly describes Moriyama’s photographs; the same style is evident in his work for magazines such as Camera Mainichi, Asahi Journal, and Asahi Camera.
Moriyama’s inexhaustible signature theme is the city of Tokyo, but he has also worked elsewhere. In an interview, he once said: “For me cities are enormous bodies of people’s desire.” He still prowls the streets day after day, taking pictures of appealing or striking sights, never peering into his small compact camera’s viewfinder. Shots of traffic, of pedestrians and shop windows, of posters and details such as lips, eyes, or plants are recurrent motifs. Hard black-and-white contrasts lend his prints a strangely alien and otherworldly allure, but the depictions always remain anecdotal, as though from a dream. Moriyama’s photobooks may accordingly be read as photonovels of a sort. Japan A Photo Theater (1968) was the first book in this vein he published; his oeuvre has now grown to several hundred photobooks.
The Photographic Society of Japan, whose purpose is to promote photography in Japan, elected him its photographer of the year in 1983. In 2012, he received the Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement of the International Center of Photography, New York, which honours outstanding accomplishments in photography and visual art.
Masahisa Fukase (Japanese, 1934-2012) Untitled 1971 From the series Yoko 9 gelatin silver prints on Baryte paper (Vintage prints) Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Masahisa Fukase completed a PhD at the Institute of Photography at Nihon University, Tokyo, in 1956. He worked as a photographer for advertising agencies and various publishing houses until 1968 and then as a freelance photographer until his death in 2012. His work was included in the 1974 group exhibition New Japanese Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, followed by numerous solo and group shows all over the world. In 1976, he received the annual Ina Nobuo Award, which has been given out by the Nikon Salon in Tokyo since 1976. At the 1992 Higashikawa International Photo Festival, his exhibition Karasu (Ravens) earned him a Higashikawa Photography Award in the Special Award category.
In the 1960s, his photography is largely focused on his own life and that of his wife Yoko. She stars in pictures that show her in all sorts of situations in life, private as well as public. Fukase captures Yoko as his bride, in the nude, during sex, or as a tourist in the street. He is also interested in the passage of time and ageing in general. After separating from Yoko, Fukase started photographing ravens as symbols of loneliness and loss. The photobook Karasu (Ravens) became one of the most coveted works of its kind in postwar Japan; it was first reprinted just last year.
Bishin Jumonji (Japanese, b. 1947) Untitled 1971 3 gelatin silver prints on Baryte paper Museum der Moderne Salzburg
After studying at the Tokyo College of Photography, Bishin Jumonji became an assistant to the photographer Kishin Shinoyama, who had risen to renown with publications about Kabuki theater, erotic depictions in photography magazines, and work in unusual book formats such as flipbooks. Since 1971, Jumonji has worked both freelance and as an advertising photographer. This was also when he began to take pictures for the series on view, Untitled. Shot around Tokyo, the works portray families, day-trippers, a quartet of rock musicians, dancers, or bodybuilders – in short, representatives of modern Japan. The details are chosen so that the heads and faces do not appear in the prints. This underscores the subjective quality of photography as such while also conveying the anonymity of life in the megalopolis.
Otto Breicha had seen the series as early as 1974, when it was featured in New Japanese Photography, a group exhibition John Szarkowski organised at the MoMA in New York. Breicha decided to include it in Neue Fotografie aus Japan, the follow-up show he mounted in Graz in 1977.
In 1990, Jumonji receives the Domon Ken Award, one of the most important Japanese photography prizes. The work of the honourees is showcased at the Ginza Nikon Salon, Tokyo, and the Domon Ken Museum of Photography, Sakata, the first museum in Japan dedicated to photography. Some of Jumonji’s pictures are published in international magazines including the German newsweekly Stern.
Akihide Tamura (Japanese, b. 1947) Yokohama, 1966 (l.) Yokosuka, 1969 (r.) 7 gelatin silver prints on Baryte paper From the series Base Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Akihide Tamura studied at the Tokyo College of Photography and got his degree in 1967. Even before he graduated, the academy’s director, the photography critic Shigemori Koen, recognised his unusual approach. In 1974, the MoMA in New York featured Tamura’s House series in its group exhibition New Japanese Photography and acquired it for the museum’s collection. Taken over the course of a year – from July to July – the pictures show houses in abandoned landscapes. The alternation of day and night and the cycle of the seasons play a prominent part in the series.
Tamura’s life was defined by the wrenching changes Japan underwent after World War II. His work is an astute photographic record of these metamorphoses. For the series Base (1966-1970), he captured landscapes, people, and combat aircraft and other military planes at several American bases south of Tokyo. In retrospect, he wrote: “When I was a photography student, I knew that the military base existed in a territory that had been created due to the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and the possibility of a nuclear war. I was shaken by the incredibly beautiful and yet insane fighter jets before my eyes. The contradiction between my fear that the world would vanish in an instant if someone were to push the nuclear button and the exotic and eerie spell the military base cast over me left me perpetually torn.”
The works on view are part of the major cycle Erehwon – the title is the word “nowhere” read backwards – that Tamura worked on between 1967 and 1973. The series combines combat aircraft taking off and hurtling off into the sky, their engines a pair of glowing eyes, with ghostly portraits of children that gradually fade into the dark. The composition reflects the photographer’s mindset, a hard-to-pin-down blend of admiration and fear.
Diverse and controversial, sometimes mysterious and often at odds with stereotypical ideas about Japan: there is much to discover in Japanese photography from the 1960s and 1970s. The Museum der Moderne Salzburg now presents its extensive and singular collection in a two-part exhibition series.
For the first time in many years, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg puts its collection of c. 600 original prints of Japanese photography from the 1960s and 1970s, which was purchased in the museum’s early years, on display. The series of two shows begins with IPhoto. Japanese Photography 1960-1970 from the Collection, which presents works that focus on the depiction of the human being and the changes in postwar Japanese society.
“In this exhibition, my vigorous efforts to undertake a thorough review of our collections are bearing fruit, and so I am especially pleased that we are able to present our holdings of Japanese photography – a sizeable ensemble of outstanding works – which have not been seen by the public in a long time. The show also spotlights a chapter in the history of the museum, which started collecting and conserving photography early on. Otto Breicha, the museum’s first director, personally traveled to Japan to meet many of the artists and select works for the projected exhibition,” Sabine Breitwieser, Director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, observes. Curator of Photography and Media Art Christiane Kuhlmann emphasises that “this effort to champion Japanese culture and acquire Japanese art for the nascent collection constitutes a pioneering achievement.” “At the time, the primary media in which Japanese photographers presented their pictures were photobooks and magazines,” Kuhlmann notes, “so that vintage prints in the quality and form at our disposal are now hard or impossible to come by. Breicha’s initiative to build a centre for contemporary photography in Austria was in part motivated by his experiences in Japan.”
In the early 1960s, Japan enters a period of fast-paced economic growth, becoming a leading technology manufacturer. A quarter-century after the end of the war and the nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan hosts Expo’70, the first world’s fair to be held in an Asian country. Tokyo grows into an enormous megalopolis; construction on an international airport that will connect it to the entire world begins in 1971. These developments mark the definite end of the island nation’s decades-long isolation from the West, bringing rapid changes that affect Japanese society as well. In the 1960s, millions of Japanese citizens rally to protest against educational and land reforms and the security treaty with the former enemy, the United States of America. The Japanese photography scene devises a new and dynamic visual language that reflects the country’s more expansive self-image. Distinctive features include the reflection on perception, the quest for novel ways to express the self, and a revised definition of the photographic medium. Hard black-and-white contrasts and lacerated abstract structures are characteristic of the aesthetic of these pictures.
The idea of the “I-photo” is an adaptation of the term “I-novel,” which designates a genre of first-person narrative fiction in Japanese literature. Conceiving of themselves as authors, the photographers understand the “Iphoto” as the instrument of an exploration of reality. Japan’s photography scene is often highly controversial, with themes ranging from erotic depictions of bodies to political statements. Western observers are bound to find some pictures enigmatic and unsettling; they run counter to how Japan is generally imagined abroad. Yet it was Western art institutions that, in the 1970s, first included Japanese contemporary photography in their programming. Neue Fotografie aus Japan (New Photography from Japan) was the title of the first exhibition in Europe that Otto Breicha mounted in Graz in 1977; with I-Photo. Japanese Photography 1960-1970 from the Collection, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg brings back the exhibits from that historic show, though with different emphases. The presentation includes works by the photographers associated with the magazine Provoke (1968-1969) in which reality seems to be dismantled into its constituent elements, as well as by artists such as Nobuyoshi Araki and Masahisa Fukase who pursued their own highly individual creative agendas. Also on display are pictures by the members of the Kompora group, who sought to render a lucid and accurate portrait of everyday life in a clinical visual idiom.
Yoshihiro Tatsuki was born in 1937 in Tokushima, where his family had long run an established portrait studio. He studied at the Tokyo College of Photography (today’s Tokyo Polytechnic University) and graduated in 1958. Initially joining the advertising agency Adcenter in Tokyo as a photographer, Tatsuki went freelance in 1969, working for clients in the advertising, fashion, and publishing industries. In 1965, his series Just Friends and Fallen Angels, which had appeared in the photography magazine Camera Mainichi, earned him the emerging photographer’s award of the association of Japanese photography critics. The works garnered wide attention in Japan. Among his best-known creations are GIRL, EVES, Private Mariko Kaga, Aoi Toki, My America, and Portrait of Family.
Tatsuki has long focused on nude photography, combining traditional Japanese compositional templates with the characteristic poses of Western models. It is hard to tell whether he wants to debunk or cater to the – primarily Western – fantasy of the Geisha as concubine.
Nobuyoshi Araki (Japanese, b. 1940) Untitled 1971 From the series Sentimental Journey 7 gelatin silver prints on Baryte paper Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Nobuyoshi Araki studied photography and film studies at Chiba University from 1959 until 1963. After completing his degree, he joined an advertising agency; in the spare time left by his work as a commercial photographer, he started developing his own photographic ideas.
1970, the artist declared, would be “The First Year of Araki.” Increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo that prevailed in established photography, he launched a variety of creative experiments. The popular photography that dominated the market in Japan at the time, he thought, traded in illusions and dishonesty, and so he proposed to change the situation and create a new kind of photography that would reveal the true face of a society undergoing rapid change.
In 1971, he was married to Yoko. His documentation of their honeymoon was published as the small photobook Sentimental Journey. The travelogue – several pictures from it are in the Museum der Moderne Salzburg’s collection – opens with a portrait of Yoko on the train. The title and this picture are a reference to Doris Day’s 1945 worldwide hit. The series continues with shots of places, sights, and, again and again, pictures of Yoko, in the street, nude, or having sex. As Araki sees it, the book is a new form of reportage about life. Taking photographs and living, to his mind, are synonymous. In a statement accompanying Sentimental Journey, he writes: “The I-novel comes closer to photography.” The title of our exhibition, I-Photo, alludes to this Japanese literary genre, in which the author’s experiences, rendered in as much realistic detail as possible, form the material out of which a fictional story is wrought.
In 1992, Camera Austria, Graz, hosted Araki’s first solo exhibition in Europe. He is famous for his widely debated photographs of erotic bondage, but also for his photobooks, which now number almost six hundred.
Takashi (Lyu) Hanabusa was born in Osaka in 1949. After graduating from the Kuwasawa Design School, Tokyo, he joined the staff of the publishing house that produced the magazine Nippon Camera. In 1971, he became an assistant to the photographer Yutaka Takanashi, whose well-known series Tôshi-e (Towards the City) surveyed Tokyo as the Japanese began to embrace modern metropolitan life.
Hanabusa’s works build on this influence, documenting the city as a mysterious place defined by jarring contrasts between tradition and modernity, high tech and nature. His photographs are marked by deliberately ambiguous particulars, as when faces are obscured by shadows. The shots are framed so as to render bodies in fragments or bring out details in classic Japanese fabric patterns that European beholders cannot place.
Hanabusa has been a freelance photographer and member of the Japan Professional Photographers Society since 1973.
Masaaki Nakagawa completed his studies of Japanese literature at Kōnan University, Kōbe, in 1966. He then worked for various advertising agencies and created fashion shots and reportages for magazines. From 1969 until his death in 2005, he was a freelance photographer in Tokyo and taught at the Kuwasawa Design School.
Otto Breicha described Nakagawa as a storyteller and compared him to the American photographer Duane Michals, whose notion that “things are queer” seems to inform his Japanese colleague’s work as well. Created in series, Nakagawa’s sequences of pictures, rather than aiming for an obvious punch line, appear to move in circles. In the series Self-Portrait against Wall of My Home, the photographer’s shadow looms on the wall, as do things the title identifies as his possessions. Yet the pictures remain vague, almost ghostly, and it is not clear what the focus is on. In this respect, Nakagawa joins the ranks of those conceptual photographers who employ photography as a tool of pictorial analysis, scrutinising the medium’s intrinsic technical-visual potential.
Masaaki Nakagawa was one of the photographers who assisted Otto Breicha during his research in Japan in preparation for the exhibition Neue Fotografie aus Japan.
Issei Suda was trained at the Tokyo College of Photography, from which he graduated in 1962. From 1967 until 1970, he worked as a stage photographer for the avant-garde theater ensemble Tenjō Sajiki, which was led by the writer and filmmaker Shūji Terayama.
In the late 1960s, Suda and others opposed to the style championed by the magazine Provoke founded the group Kompora. The label is a typical Japanese compound, a contraction of the English terms “contemporary” and “photography.” The group’s key point of reference was Contemporary Photographers: Toward a Social Landscape, an exhibition held at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., in 1966. Their goal was to create lucid and accurate portrayals of everyday life in a clinical visual idiom. Despite the aspiration to cool objectivity, however, some of their pictures strike Western beholders as no less enigmatic and unsettling.
That is certainly the impression one gets from the works we present, a selection from the series Fûshi Kaden (1975-1976), which was published as a photobook – Suda’s first – by Asahi Sonorama in 1978. The series proposes a visual discourse on tradition and modernity. The enormous tension between Japan’s hyper-modern cities and the deep-rooted traditions lingering in rural areas is a theme that preoccupies Suda throughout his life. For Fûshi Kaden, he crisscrossed the country; many pictures were taken at the traditional festivals known as matsuri. The title is difficult to translate. It is a tribute to a theoretical disquisition on Nō theater penned in the early fifteenth century by one of its leading practitioners, the grand master Zeami Motokiyo. Sketching his vision of the beauty and style of drama, the author compares it to a flower that has not yet fully blossomed. But he also examines questions of inward perception and outward expression in theatrical performance. Issei Suda translates this vision into his mode of photography. The figures in his pictures sometimes seem to be involved in some kind of stage action and yet utterly unaware of it, as though only the photographer knew the director’s script.
Suda was a professor at the Osaka University of Arts and received the Domon Ken Award in 1997.
Shin Yanagisawa, who was born in Tokyo in 1936, was a member of the eminent generation of Japanese photographers who, in the 1960s and 1970s, saw contemporary life in their country with fresh eyes, discovering themes for photography that still inform how we imagine Japan between tradition and modernity. Yanagisawa studied at the Tokyo College of Photography in Shibuya and then worked as a freelance photographer.
He was interested in the changing face of the landscape and the raw reality of nature as well as the many facets of life in the big city. The series Traces of the City (1965-1970) reflects the worldview of an entire generation; as early as 1979, it was the subject of a solo presentation in Tokyo. Yanagisawa also contributed work to numerous group shows, including the famous 15 Photographers Exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art (1974), which featured work by Daidō Moriyama und Yutaka Takanashi as well.
The shots we present are a selection from the series In the Street (1972) and show a group of dancers and performers in costumes that would seem to fit in seamlessly with our vision of traditional Japanese culture. Upon closer inspection, however, dissonant notes creep in, especially when individuals turn to face the camera directly or a flashlight illuminates the situation. They reveal Yanagisawa’s presence as the photographer or, more properly, author of the picture. He has abandoned the position of the uninvolved observer, and although he is not visible in the picture as such, he becomes an active participant in the action before the camera. This approach may be regarded as characteristic of the principle of I-photography.
After concluding his active career as a photographer, Shin Yanagisawa wrote about various aspects of photography.
A grandson of the Japanese painter Kawai Gyokudō, Shunji Ōkura graduated from Dokkyo High School, Tokyo, in 1956. In 1958, he became an assistant to the photographer Akira Satō while also starting out as a freelance photographer, creating fashion shots for the magazines Fukuso, Wakai Josei, and So-en. Numerous photographs appeared in periodicals such as Camera Mainici, Hanashin No Tokushu, and Sunday Mainichi.
In the photographs in the Museum der Moderne Salzburg’s collection, Ōkura devotes himself to a classic subject of photography: the children’s portrait. These are situation-bound snapshots taken a playground; no posing was involved. It is interesting to note how the photographer embraces the way children see the world. Some parts of the scene are invisible in the low-angle shots or obscured by other objects, while Ōkura’s portraits suggest profound empathy; we feel we get a sense of these children’s fears and anxieties.
Museum der Moderne Salzburg Mönchsberg 32 5020 Salzburg Phone: +43 662 842220
When I think of Australian photography, I invariably think of four themes / concepts / era: Pictorialism, Modernism, contemporary (mainly talented female artists) … and street photography. In the latter category, the artist John Williams is an Australian classic. Personally, I have never had the facility or confidence to be a street photographer. It takes a particular kind of person with a very special “eye” to be successful in this genre of photography. Williams had that “eye” in spades.
This retrospective of his work at Magnet Galleries in downtown Melbourne Central Business District is fascinating. You know that you are having a good time at an exhibition when you walk around looking at image after image and chortling to yourself. And laughing out loud. While the quality of some of the prints might not be the best in the world, the aesthetic, fun and irony which the images contain more than make up for it. To actually see these compositions in a spilt second and recognise them for what they are, in that instant, is incomparable.
The paper seller with the woman top right, the woman half appearing at left, the table in the distance and the vanishing point far left. The woman in Paddington with her hand on her hip, looking at the camera and thinking to herself, “what the hell do you think your doing”. The man at Clovelly Beach sunning himself in all his masculinity, not knowing that there is another man with his legs spread in shot behind him. Oh the irony! My particular favourite is the photograph Anzac Day, Melbourne (1965, below) in which what looks like a homeless man, fag in hand, casts a disparaging look towards a veteran in suit and tie displaying all his medals. You can just hear him thinking: “what a tosser”. There are many more: the hand and expression on the face of the women second from the right in Rocks Pub Crawl, Sydney (1973, below) and the disparaging grimace of the man on the left in St Kilda (1975, below). The look on the attendant’s face in front of the Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa is an absolute cracker.
Williams’ street photography emerged out of the culture that inspired it. In his photographs we can observe the White Australia policy, the remains of British Empire in the stiff upper lip of ANZAC veterans, powerful white men sitting behind desks with nameless female secretaries, rebellious youth culture, the informality of beach culture and the larrikinism of pub crawls everywhere in Australia. While “Williams embraced the ‘element of chance’ or the ‘decisive moment’ (Cartier-Bresson) … to socially document the raw character of Australia”, in so doing investigating the myth of national identity, his photographs are much more complex than traditional street photography.
There is a much more formal, classical aesthetic going on in these photographs than in other street photography, for example the work of the Americans Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Here is an artist who, while working with a necessary immediacy, implicitly understands the formal composition and structure of the image plane. Williams loves his off-centre vanishing points, he loves spatially layering the image, and understands how the eye of the viewer wanders across the surface of the image. Look at the two images of the beach, Bondi Beach, Sydney (1964, below) and Clovelly Beach (1964, below) and just let your eye play over the diagonals and verticals, the negative and positive spaces, the ways of escape that the eye has out of each image. The shadow of the two heads ground the first image, while the space either side of the lying man at the top of the image allows your eye to escape the strong diagonal below; while in the second image the horizon line is breached by the sitting woman. If she were not there the image would not work.
Williams’ photographic work deserves to be better known. Here is a talented man who as a historian wrote many books on the First World War; a far sighted man who (with film maker Paul Cox and Rod McNicol), established one of the first commercial fine art photography galleries in Melbourne (The Photographers’ Gallery, Punt Road, South Yarra) in 1973; and a man who took damn good photographs that held a mirror up to Australian culture at that time, which question Australian identity through humour and irony balanced by a complex, classical aesthetic.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to John Williams’ widow Jean Curthoys, curator Merle Hathaway, Michael Silver and Magnet Galleries for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sydney photographer, lecturer and historian John F. Williams has a long and personal interest in the ramifications of the Allies’ commitment to and sacrifice in the First World War which he later explored in his 1985 series From the flatlands. Williams became an amateur street photographer, inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith. He read The family of man catalogue and saw the exhibition in 1959 but he rejected its “saccharine humanism and deliberate ahistoricism” choosing instead to socially document the raw character of Australia.1
When interviewed in 1994 Williams said: “After the [First World War] you had a range of societies which were pretty much exhausted, and they tended to turn inwards. In a society like Australia which had a poorly formed image of itself, where there was no intellectual underpinning, the image of the soldier replaced everything else as a national identity.”2
Sydney expresses the ‘Anzac spirit’ born in the battlefields of Gallipoli, the Somme and Flanders, a character study of an independent, introspective soldier. With an air of grit, determinedly smoking and wearing his badge, ribbons and rosemary as remembrance, Sydney stands apart from the crowd, not marching with his regiment. Williams embraced the ‘element of chance’ or the ‘decisive moment’ as he documented the soldier in a public place observing the procession. Taken from a low angle and very close up the man is unaware of the photographer at the moment the shot was taken, apparently lost in his own memories. The old soldier represents a generation now lost to history but portraits such as these continue to reinforce the myth of national identity.
1/ Jolly, M. “Faith sustained,” in Art Monthly, September 1989, pp. 18-19
2/ “John Williams – photographer and historian: profile,” in Sirius, winter, Macquarie University, Sydney, 1994, p. 5
Melbourne’s best photographic gallery, Magnet Galleries, will feature the work of two major Australian photographers, John Williams and Ingeborg Tyssen.
John Williams always wanted to hold an exhibition with his photographer wife, and sadly it did not occur during either of their lifetimes. Magnet Galleries, at 640 Bourke Street now fulfils this wish with a double exhibition running from 14 June to 7 July 2018.
The two exhibitions, “My last 60 years on the streets: John Williams Retrospective (1933-2016)” and “Swimmers: Ingeborg Tyssen (1945-2002)” feature their superb black and white photography. Both artists were keen observers of people in their environments and preferred the black and white format.
On the day she was fatally injured in an accident Tyssen was in Holland, learning to use her new digital camera. She died two days later with John at her side. Williams’ work was also darkroom generated until 2002 when he became concerned at the effects of chemicals on photographers. From then on he only used the digital format, and increasingly played with the effects of overlaying images and stitching multiple images.
Williams became well known for his 1960s and 1970s Sydney street scenes, and Anzac Day marches over the decades. He described himself as a photographer who wrote history and a historian who took photographs. He wrote seven books and many articles about World War 1. This exhibition will show the full extent of his legacy.
The exhibition at Magnet Galleries is organised by John Williams’ widow Jean Curthoys and curator Merle Hathaway.
Artists: Pamela Bain and Carolyn Lewens Curator:Stephanie Sacco
Installation view of gallery one at the exhibition Deeper Darker Brighter at Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn Arts Centre, Melbourne Photo:Christian Capurro
It is a great pleasure to be able to post on my friend Carolyn Lewens’ joint exhibition with Pamela Bains, DEEPER DARKER BRIGHTER at Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn Arts Centre, both Visiting Fellows at Swinburne University’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.
I have known Carolyn since we were both studying photography at Brighton Tech under the tutelage of Peter Barker in 1989. Nearly 30 years later, we are both still making art and writing about art, which says a lot for our perseverance and perspicacity as both artists and human beings. There are not a lot of us left from those days, photographers who are still being creative, still following the path of enquiry with dedication and insight into the condition of (our) becoming.
In this latest iteration, an exhibition which investigates our place in the universe, Carolyn and Pamela offer a “creative response to an astrophysics program that is searching for the fastest explosions in the universe… an immersive and stimulating space wherein fresh awareness of the cosmos and science is mediated via aesthetic and conceptual means.” As the catalogue essay by Associate Professor Christopher Fluke observes, “Science and Art are both highly creative endeavours, that cannot succeed without research, experimentation, and an acceptance that some ideas will not work.” And so with this exhibition also. Some ideas work, some ideas do not.
The highlight for me in the first two galleries were the model telescopes, observatories and types of star made by research staff and postgraduate students in weekly workshops with the two artists. It was fascinating to see how modern astronomers see their own building blocks, fantastical human creations, architectural marvels made specifically to capture faint electromagnetic signals from the sky; and stars that can only be “captured” on photographic plates which record features invisible to the human eye. Akin to naive or “outsider” art (I hate that term but there is no better one at present to describe the work), these sculptures possess an essential presence in the “hands on” nature of their construction. Only in the darkened third gallery does the work of the two main artists coalesce, cosmogrify (I know that’s not a real word, but we are “out of this world”, as in cosmography, the branch of science which deals with the general features of the universe) into a satisfying whole. And what an out of this world gallery it is!
Pamela’s wondrous paintings, full of colour and paint splatters, transmogrify their earthly origins into music from the stars, while the paintings themselves are physically transformed and printed as digital photographs: in other words, there is a double transmogrification of concept and aesthetics going on here, moving from hand to universe and from analog to digital. As Fluke states, “The death event and the life giving properties shared between supernovae and our own physical outcome often reside in the subtext of Pam’s work, offering scope for the contemplation of ourselves as celestial entities.” These “creations” are illuminated by spotlights on one side of gallery three, and their multi-hued presence play off Carolyn’s blue cyanotype photogram images digitally printed on cotton rag on the other side of the long gallery – the exchange of constructed cosmos’ making for a truly immersive, quite moving experience.
Carolyn’s camera-less photograms use cyanotype photography, a process invented by astronomer Sir John Herschel in the early 1840s, so this process is entirely appropriate for her investigation into the “metaphors of light and the mysteries of shadows.” As Fluke notes, “The creations that emerge are a direct response to the presence or absence of light, generating a shadowy imprint of more complexity than we can perceive. Links to photosynthesis via the cyanotype process mean her work is more about life than death.” Carolyn uses objects and materials which are often dense – folded and layered – which she then over exposes in order to get detail in some areas of the image. The resultant cyanotypes are then digital remastered (but not manipulated) in Photoshop, so that the resultant prints do not loose that beautiful blue that is the signature of the cyanotype process. Here again, transmogrification becomes a happening concept – an idea, a concept uses photosynthesis, the light of the sun, to create images in an early photographic process which are then scientifically remastered into digital photographs.
In both artists work, there is evidence of the ineffable, the unknowable, which is what makes this exhibition so special. These works have been created out of the explosions of human imagination and creativity (like little big bangs) after observing light from stars millions of miles away, light that may no longer exist since it takes millions of years to reach us here on Earth. The light that these artists and astronomers observe may no longer exist, it is just an after image of a physical presence that may be long gone. To then create these universal emanations as intimations of the retina of the eye, being underwater, in the womb, or being a plant (think the tactile qualities of Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs); or cells of the brain and spermatozoa, is a special thing. The nexus between the works and the universe make these associations quite breathtaking.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Pamela Bain, Carolyn Lewens and Town Hall Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Conveying the wonder of science through art, Pamela Bain and Carolyn Lewens explore the universe with Swinburne University’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, resulting in an odyssey of aesthetic and sensory experiences.
DEEPER DARKER BRIGHTER is a creative response to an astrophysics program that is searching for the fastest explosions in the universe. The artists, present for real-time space observations, were stimulated by bombardments of astronomical imagery, data and technology that inspired these new bodies of work. The exhibition offers an immersive and stimulating space wherein fresh awareness of the cosmos and science is mediated via aesthetic and conceptual means.
Carolyn Lewens in front of her work In the Photic Zone 2017 at the opening of the exhibition Photo:ImagePlay
Pamela Bain in front of her work Electric Cosmic 2018 at the opening of the exhibition Photo:ImagePlay
THG Artist Interview: Carolyn Lewens & Pamela Bain – DEEPER DARKER BRIGHTER, 12 May – 1 July 2018
Installation views of gallery one at the exhibition Deeper Darker Brighter at Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn Arts Centre, Melbourne Photos:Christian Capurro
Installation view of Pamela Bain’s work Candidate Light Collective 2018 (watercolour on cotton rag) Photo:ImagePlay
Installation views of gallery two at the exhibition Deeper Darker Brighter at Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn Arts Centre, Melbourne Photos:Christian Capurro
Augmented visions: the art of the dynamic universe
Associate Professor Christopher Fluke
The consistency of the night sky was important for the development of astronomy: a science of observation, record-keeping and prediction. Across human lifetimes, the stars maintained their positions with respect to an imagined celestial sphere. The planets – literally wandering stars – moved with respect to the fixed stars in their own regular cycles.
Much rarer, and sometimes a cause for alarm, were the unexpected events – an eclipse of the Sun or the sudden appearance of a new star in the immutable heavens. On 4 July 1054, Chinese astronomers recorded a bright light appearing in the constellation Taurus. So luminous that it was visible in the daylight for 20 days, it faded from view over the next two years. The cause of this transient celestial event was the explosion of a star 6500 light years away: a supernova event in our own Galaxy. Today, astronomers search the sky for other exploding stars – but in galaxies far beyond our own. Sophisticated telescopes capture the brief yet spectacular death throes of some of the biggest stars, revealing valuable information about the origin and evolution of all stars. The spark of inspiration for artists Pamela Bain and Carolyn Lewens was the Deeper Wider Faster project: a systematic search for short-lived, transient explosions. Led by Swinburne University of Technology’s Associate Professor Jeff Cooke and PhD student Igor Andreoni, Deeper Wider Faster requires the coordination of multiple observatories distributed around the Earth, all watching the same regions of the sky, waiting to catch a cosmic cataclysm.
While signalling the death of a star, a supernova is also a source of new life. At the heart of the explosion, nuclear processes create gold, silver, and other elements. Billions of years ago, supernovae created the elemental mixture that would collapse and coalesce into our Solar System: the raw materials for life. As Carl Sagan noted “we are made of star-stuff”.
The mutual composition shared by humans and the Universe has influenced Pamela’s work for some time. Her paintings capture the essence of the explosion and the aftermath. The interplay between light and dark and the shadowy in between also reveals a human presence via daubs of colour, paint splatters and brushstrokes amalgamating the artist with the Universe. While technical processes are later integrated, evidence of an organic origin remain. The death event and the life giving properties shared between supernovae and our own physical outcome often reside in the subtext of Pam’s work, offering scope for the contemplation of ourselves as celestial entities.
Many of the great astronomers of the Renaissance were also great artists, perhaps none more so than Galileo Galilei. Although not the first to draw the Moon through a telescope, Galileo’s sketches of the craters and shadows of the Moon were an essential step in overturning the conception that the Moon was a perfect object. Through drawing and illustration, astronomers could share, discuss and debate what was seen via the augmentation of lenses and mirrors. As telescopes grew in size, the increased level of detail they revealed challenged the skills of many astronomers. The quality of the interpretation was only as good as the talents of the astronomer-artist. During the 19th century, a move from subjectivity to objectivity in astronomical imaging took place. While not without their own challenges, photographic plates could record features invisible to the human eye, and the era of the astronomer-artist came to an end. The longer the exposure, the DEEPER and DARKER elements of the Universe could be seen.
The cyanotype photography used by Carolyn was invented by astronomer Sir John Herschel in the early 1840s. While Herschel created the process to make blueprint copies of his notes, Carolyn’s camera-less photograms allow her to “investigate the metaphors of light and the mysteries of shadows.”
Physical engagement with processes of light and materiality is central to Carolyn’s work. The creations that emerge are a direct response to the presence or absence of light, generating a shadowy imprint of more complexity than we can perceive. Links to photosynthesis via the cyanotype process mean her work is more about life than death. There has always been a close connection between art and astronomy. Depictions of the night sky, accompanied by stories of the origin of the Universe, appear throughout human history. Complex motions of the celestial objects were often encoded in architecture. In Peru, the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo encode the Sun’s motion on the horizon throughout the year.
Modern astronomers build architectural marvels to capture faint electromagnetic signals from the sky. Large white domes huddle together on the tops of mountains far from the light pollution of cities, holding mirrors with diameters measured in metres. Elsewhere, an enormous parabolic dish sits incongruously in the Australian countryside, surrounded by sheep and the occasional poisonous snake.
The orchestration of observatories at the heart of Deeper Wider Faster is depicted in an animation in the Gallery, conceived by Pamela and Carolyn, and animated by James Josephides. Connections are made between geographical locations of observatories and their place in the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves, X-rays, infrared, ultraviolet and visible light are all the same phenomena. Yet each holds its own secret about the transient, dynamic Universe.
In a return to astronomy’s artistic roots, Pamela and Carolyn led weekly workshops with research staff and postgraduate students from Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing. The opportunity to make model telescopes with Carolyn or learn to paint supernova with Pamela was taken up enthusiastically. Science and Art are both highly creative endeavours, that cannot succeed without research, experimentation, and an acceptance that some ideas will not work. The creative outputs of Swinburne’s astronomers are shown alongside the primary works of the exhibition.
Science and Art are both iterative experiences – it can be hard to say when either has come to an end. DEEPER DARKER BRIGHTER is an aesthetic and sensory response by Pamela Bain and Carolyn Lewens to Deeper Wider Faster. It implores us to reconsider the nature of the Universe, the light and the dark, and the augmented visions that astronomers use to capture the art of the dynamic Universe. This is the era of transient astronomy: the heavens are immutable no more.
Installation views of gallery three at the exhibition Deeper Darker Brighter at Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn Arts Centre, Melbourne Photos:Christian Capurro
![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women14-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman]' 1861-1862")
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![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women15-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman]' 1861-1862")
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![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a maid holding an embroidered cloth]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women13-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a maid holding an embroidered cloth]' 1861-1862")
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![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women3-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of Indigenous Brazilian tradeswoman]' 1861-1862")
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![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Negerin mit dem Knaben in schlechter Stimmung / Negress with a boy in a bad mood]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women10-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Negerin mit dem Knaben in schlechter Stimmung / Negress with a boy in a bad mood]' 1861-1862")
![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of Brazilian woman servant and child]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women18-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of Brazilian woman servant and child]' 1861-1862")
![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a young Brazilian woman]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women17-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a young Brazilian woman]' 1861-1862")
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![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a Brazilian woman]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women19-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a Brazilian woman]' 1861-1862")
![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a Brazilian woman with two children]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women16-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a Brazilian woman with two children]' 1861-1862")
![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a Brazilian mother and child]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women9-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Portrait of a Brazilian mother and child]' 1861-1862")
![Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Mistress punishing a native child]' 1861-1862](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ethnographic-portraits-of-indigenous-women7-web.jpg "Hermann Kummler (compiler) (Swiss, 1863-1949) '[Mistress punishing a native child]' 1861-1862")
![Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) '[Bear's Belly, Arikara Indian half-length portrait, facing front, wearing bearskin]' c. 1908 from 'Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) – The North American Indian' List of Large Plates Supplementing Volume V](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/edward-s-curtis-1868-1952-the-north-american-indian-portfolio-v-1907-photogravure-on-vellum1-web.jpg "Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) '[Bear's Belly, Arikara Indian half-length portrait, facing front, wearing bearskin]' c. 1908 from 'Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) – The North American Indian' List of Large Plates Supplementing Volume V")
![Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) '[Arikara medicine ceremony - the Bears]' c. 1908](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/edward-s-curtis-1868-1952-the-north-american-indian-portfolio-v-1907-photogravure-on-vellum6-web.jpg "Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) '[Arikara medicine ceremony - the Bears]' c. 1908")
![Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) '[Atsina Indian, Red Whip, half-length portrait, seated, facing front, wearing feather, beaded buckskin shirt, holding pipe in left hand]' c. 1908](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/edward-s-curtis-1868-1952-the-north-american-indian-portfolio-v-1907-photogravure-on-vellum19-web.jpg "Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) '[Atsina Indian, Red Whip, half-length portrait, seated, facing front, wearing feather, beaded buckskin shirt, holding pipe in left hand]' c. 1908")
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