Exhibition dates: 10th March – 30th November 2020
Curator: Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary
1917
Gelatin silver print
1 1/2 in. × 2 in. (3.8 × 5.1cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2020 Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures
This tiny but iconic masterpiece of twentieth-century photography is the second earliest work in the exhibition, and a gem in the Tenenbaum and Lee collection. Made while André Kertész was convalescing from a gunshot wound received while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, it prefigures by some fifteen years his renowned mirror distortions produced in Paris. Displaying both Cubist and Surrealist influences, the photograph reveals the artist’s commitment to the spontaneous yet analytic observation of fleeting commonplace occurrences – one of the essential and most idiosyncratic qualities of the medium.
It’s a mystery
There are some eclectic photographs in this posting, many of which have remained un/seen to me before.
I have never seen the above version of Kertész’s Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary (1917), with wall, decoration and water flowing into the pool at left. The usual image crops these features out, focusing on the distortion of the body in the water, and the lengthening of the figure diagonally across the picture frame. That both images are from the same negative can be affirmed if one looks at the patterning of the water. Even as the exhibition of Kertész’s work at Jeu de Paume at the Château de Tours that I saw last year stated that their version was a contact original… this is not possible unless the image has been cropped.
Other images by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Outerbridge Jr., Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Pierre Dubreuil, Ilse Bing, Bill Brandt, Dora Maar, Joseph Cornell, Nan Goldin, Laurie Simmons, Robert Gober, Rachel Whiteread, Zanele Muholi have eluded my consciousness until now.
What I can say after viewing them is this.
I am forever amazed at how deep the spirit, and the medium, of photography is… if you give the photograph a chance. A friend asked me the other day whether photographs had any meaning anymore, as people glance for a nano-second at images on Instagram, and pass on. We live in a world of instant gratification was my answer to him. But the choice is yours if you take / time with a photograph, if it possesses the POSSIBILITY of a meditation from its being. If it intrigues or excites, or stimulates, makes you reflect, cry – that is when the photographs pre/essence, its embedded spirit, can make us attest to the experience of its will, its language, its desire. In our presence.
The more I learn about photography, the less I find I know. The lake (archive) is deep – full of serendipity, full of memories, stagings, concepts and realities. Full of nuances and light, crevices and dark passages. To understand photography is a life-long study. To an inquiring mind, even then, you may only – scratch the surface to reveal – a sort of epiphany, a revelation, unknown to others. Every viewing is unique, every interpretation different, every context unknowable (possible).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. When Minor White was asked, what about photography when he dies? When he is no longer there to influence it? And he simply says – photography will do what it wants to do. This is a magnificent statement, and it shows an egoless freedom on Minor White’s part. It is profound knowledge about photography, about its freedom to change.
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Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This exhibition will celebrate the remarkable ascendancy of photography in the last century, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee’s magnificent promised gift of over sixty extraordinary photographs in honour of The Met’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The exhibition will include masterpieces by the medium’s greatest practitioners, including works by Paul Strand, Dora Maar, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy; Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and Joseph Cornell; Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, and Cindy Sherman.
The collection is particularly notable for its breadth and depth of works by women artists, its sustained interest in the nude, and its focus on artists’ beginnings. Strand’s 1916 view from the viaduct confirms his break with the Pictorialist past and establishes the artist’s way forward as a cutting-edge modernist; Walker Evans’s shadow self-portraits from 1927 mark the first inkling of a young writer’s commitment to visual culture; and Cindy Sherman’s intimate nine-part portrait series from 1976 predates her renowned series of “film stills” and confirms her striking ambition and stunning mastery of the medium at the age of twenty-two.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe
1918
Platinum print
9 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (24.1 × 19.1cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This photograph marks the beginning of the romantic relationship between Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, which transformed each of their lives and the story of American art. The two met when Stieglitz included O’Keeffe, a then-unknown painter, in her first group show at his gallery 291 in May 1916. A year later, O’Keeffe had her first solo show at the gallery and exhibited her abstract charcoal No. 15 Special, seen in the background here. In the coming months and years, O’Keeffe collaborated with Stieglitz on some three hundred portrait studies. In its physical scope, primal sensuality, and psychological power, Stieglitz’s serial portrait of O’Keeffe has no equal in American art.
Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1958)
Telephone
1922
Platinum print
4 1/2 × 3 3/8 in. (11.4 × 8.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A well-paid advertising photographer working in New York in the 1930s, Paul Outerbridge Jr. was trained as a painter and set designer. Highly influenced by Cubism, he was a devoted advocate of the platinum-print process, which he used to create nearly abstract still lifes of commonplace subjects such as cracker boxes, wine glasses, and men’s collars. With their extended mid-tones and velvety blacks, platinum papers were relatively expensive and primarily used by fine-art photographers like Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz. This modernist study of a Western Electric “candlestick” telephone attests to Outerbridge’s talent for transforming banal, utilitarian objects into small, but powerful sculptures with formal rigour and startling beauty.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Nude
1925, printed 1930s
Gelatin silver print
8 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (21.6 × 19cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
Edward Weston moved from Los Angeles to Mexico City in 1923 with Tina Modotti, an Italian actress and nascent photographer. They were each influenced by, and in turn helped shape, the larger community of artists among whom they lived and worked, which included Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and many other members of the Mexican Renaissance. In fall 1925 Weston made a remarkable series of nudes of the art critic, journalist, and historian Anita Brenner. Depicting her body as a pear-like shape floating in a dark void, the photographs evoke the hermetic simplicity of a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi. Brenner’s form becomes elemental, female and male, embryonic, tightly furled but ready to blossom.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Boulevard de Strasbourg
1926
Gelatin silver print
8 7/8 in. × 7 in. (22.5 × 17.8 cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Eugène Atget became the darling of the French Surrealists in the mid-1920s courtesy of Man Ray, his neighbour in Paris, who admired the older artist’s seemingly straight forward documentation of the city. Another American photographer, Walker Evans, also credited Atget with inspiring his earliest experiments with the camera. A talented writer, Evans penned a famous critique of his progenitor in 1930: “[Atget’s] general note is a lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not ‘the poetry of the street’ or ‘the poetry of Paris,’ but the projection of Atget’s person.”
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France, January 1927
1927
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Shadow, Self-Portrait (Right Profile, Wearing Hat), Juan-les-Pins, France, January 1927
1927
Film negative
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Pierre Dubreuil (French, 1872-1944)
The Woman Driver
1928
Bromoil print
9 7/16 × 7 5/8 in. (24 × 19.3cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Like many other European and American photographers, Pierre Dubreuil was indifferent to the industrialisation of photography that followed the invention and immediate global success of the Kodak camera in the late 1880s. A wealthy member of an international community of photographers loosely known as Pictorialists, he spurned most aspects of modernism. Instead, he advocated painterly effects such as those offered by the bromoil printing process seen here. What makes this photograph exceptional, however, is the modern subject and the work’s title, The Woman Driver. Dubreuil’s wife, Josephine Vanassche, grasps the steering wheel of their open-air car and stares straight ahead, ignoring the attention of her conservative husband and his intrusive camera.
Florence Henri (French, born America 1893-1982)
Windows
1929
Gelatin silver print
14 1/2 × 10 1/4 in. (36.8 × 26cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A peripatetic French American painter and photographer, Florence Henri studied with László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in Germany in summer 1927. Impressed by her natural talent, he wrote a glowing commentary on the artist for a small Amsterdam journal: “With Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase, the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today… Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective and viewpoint.” Despite the high regard for her paintings and photographs in the 1920s, Henri remains largely under appreciated.
![Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) '[Rue de Valois, Paris]' 1932](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/ilse-bing-rue-de-valois-paris-1932.jpg)
Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
[Rue de Valois, Paris]
1932
Gelatin silver print
11 1/8 × 8 3/4 in. (28.3 × 22.2cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Estate of Ilse Bing
Ilse Bing trained as an art historian in Germany and learned photography in 1928 to make illustrations for her dissertation on neoclassical architecture. In 1930 she moved to Paris, supporting herself as a freelance photographer for French and German newspapers and fashion magazines. Known in the early 1930s as the “Queen of the Leica” due to her mastery of the handheld 35 mm camera, Bing found the old cobblestone streets of Paris a rich subject to explore, often from eccentric perspectives as seen here. She moved to New York in 1941 after the German occupation of Paris and remained here until her death at age ninety-eight.
Bill Brandt (British, 1904-1983)
Soho Bedroom
1932
Gelatin silver print
8 7/16 × 7 5/16 in. (21.4 × 18.5cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bill Brandt challenged the standard tenets of documentary practice by frequently staging scenes for the camera and recruiting family and friends as models. In this intimate study of a couple embracing, the male figure is believed to be either a friend or the artist’s younger brother; the female figure is an acquaintance, “Bird,” known for her beautiful hands. The photograph appears with a different title, Top Floor, along with sixty-three others in Brandt’s second book, A Night in London (1938). After the book’s publication, Brandt changed the work’s title to Soho Bedroom to reference London’s notorious Red Light district and add a hint of salaciousness to the kiss.
![Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) '[Woman and Child in Window, Barcelona]' 1932-34](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/dora-maar-woman-and-child-in-window-barcelona.jpg)
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
[Woman and Child in Window, Barcelona]
1932-34
Gelatin silver print
11 1/8 × 8 3/8 in. (28.2 × 21.2cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
When Dora Maar first traveled to Barcelona in 1932 to record the effects of the global economic crisis, she was twenty-five and still finding her footing as a photographer. To sustain her practice, she opened a joint studio with the film designer Pierre Kéfer. Working out of his parents’ villa in a Parisian suburb, he and Maar produced mostly commercial photographs for fashion and advertising – projects that funded Maar’s travel to Spain. With an empathetic eye, she documents a mother and her child peering out of a makeshift shelter. Adapting an avant-garde strategy, she chose a lateral angle to monumentalise her subjects.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Nude
1934
Gelatin silver print
3 5/8 in. (9.2cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
The nude as a subject for the camera would occupy Edward Weston’s attention for four decades, and it is a defining characteristic of his achievement and legacy. This physically small but forceful, closely cropped photograph is a study of the writer Charis Wilson. Although presented headless and legless, Wilson tightly crosses her arms in a bold power pose. Weston was so stunned by Wilson when they first met that he ceased writing in his diary the day after he made this photograph: “April 22 [1934], a day to always remember. I knew now what was coming; eyes don’t lie and she wore no mask… I was lost and have been ever since.” Wilson and Weston immediately moved in together and married five years later.
The exhibition Photography’s Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection celebrates the remarkable ascendancy of photography in the last hundred years through the magnificent promised gift to The Met of more than 60 extraordinary photographs from Museum Trustee Ann Tenenbaum and her husband, Thomas H. Lee, in honour of the Museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The exhibition will feature masterpieces by a wide range of the medium’s greatest practitioners, including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Ilse Bing, Joseph Cornell, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Andreas Gursky, Helen Levitt, Dora Maar, László Moholy-Nagy, Jack Pierson, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray, Laurie Simmons, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Edward Weston, and Rachel Whiteread.
The exhibition is made possible by Joyce Frank Menschel and the Alfred Stieglitz Society.
Max Hollein, Director of The Met, said, “Ann Tenenbaum brilliantly assembled an outstanding and very personal collection of 20th-century photographs, and this extraordinary gift will bring a hugely important group of works to The Met’s holdings and to the public’s eye. From works by celebrated masters to lesser-known artists, this collection encourages a deeper understanding of the formative years of photography, and significantly enhances our holdings of key works by women, broadening the stories we can tell in our galleries and allowing us to celebrate a whole range of crucial artists at The Met. We are extremely grateful to Ann and Tom for their generosity in making this promised gift to The Met, especially as we celebrate the Museum’s 150th anniversary. It will be an honour to share these remarkable works with our visitors.”
“Early on, Ann recognised the camera as one of the most creative and democratic instruments of contemporary human expression,” said Jeff Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. “Her collecting journey through the last century of picture-making has been guided by her versatility and open-mindedness, and the result is a collection that is both personal and dynamic.”
The Tenenbaum Collection is particularly notable for its focus on artists’ beginnings, for a sustained interest in the nude, and for the breadth and depth of works by women artists. Paul Strand’s 1916 view from the viaduct confirms his break with the Pictorialist past and establishes the artist’s way forward as a cutting-edge modernist; Walker Evans’s shadow self-portraits from 1927 mark the first inkling of a young writer’s commitment to visual culture; and Cindy Sherman’s intimate nine-part portrait series from 1976 predates her renowned series of “film stills” and confirms her striking ambition and stunning mastery of the medium at the age of 22.
Ms. Tenenbaum commented, “Photographs are mirrors and windows not only onto the world but also into deeply personal experience. Tom and I are proud to support the Museum’s Department of Photographs and thrilled to be able to share our collection with the public.”
The exhibition will feature a diverse range of styles and photographic practices, combining small-scale and large-format works in both black and white and colour. The presentation will integrate early modernist photographs, including superb examples by avant-garde American and European artists, together with work from the postwar period, the 1960s, and the medium’s boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and extend up to the present moment.
Photography’s Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection is curated by The Met’s Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs.
Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Tamara Toumanova (Daguerreotype-Object)
October 1941
Construction with photomechanical reproduction, mirror, rhinestones or sequins, and tinted glass in artist’s frame
Dimensions: 5 1/8 × 4 3/16 in. (13 × 10.6 cm)
Frame: 9 3/4 × 8 3/4 × 1 7/8 in. (24.8 × 22.2 × 4.8 cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2020 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Joseph Cornell is celebrated for his meticulously constructed, magical shadow boxes that teem with celestial charts, ballet stars, parrots, mirrors, and marbles. Into these tiny theaters he decanted his dreams, obsessions, and unfulfilled desires. Here, his subject is the Russian prima ballerina Tamara Toumanova. Known for her virtuosity and beauty, the dancer captivated Cornell, who met her backstage at the Metropolitan Opera and thereafter saw her as his personal Snow Queen and muse.
Tamara Toumanova (Georgian 2 March 1919 – 29 May 1996) was a Georgian-American prima ballerina and actress. A child of exiles in Paris after the Russian Revolution of 1917, she made her debut at the age of 10 at the children’s ballet of the Paris Opera.
She became known internationally as one of the Baby Ballerinas of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo after being discovered by her fellow émigré, balletmaster and choreographer George Balanchine. She was featured in numerous ballets in Europe. Balanchine featured her in his productions at Ballet Theatre, New York, making her the star of his performances in the United States. While most of Toumanova’s career was dedicated to ballet, she appeared as a ballet dancer in several films, beginning in 1944. She became a naturalised United States citizen in 1943 in Los Angeles, California.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Noto, Sicily, September 5, 1947
September 5, 1947
Gelatin silver print
6 × 6 in. (15.2 × 15.2 cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Richard Avedon believed this early street portrait of a young boy in Sicily was the genesis of his long fashion and portrait career. On the occasion of The Met’s groundbreaking 2002 exhibition on the artist, curators Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman described the work as “a kind of projected self-portrait” in which “a boy stands there, pushing forward to the front of the picture. … He is smiling wildly, ready to race into the future. And there, hovering behind him like a mushroom cloud, is the past in the form of a single, strange tree – a reminder of the horror that split the century into a before and after, a symbol of destruction but also of regeneration.”
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Philadelphia
1961
Gelatin silver print
12 1/16 × 17 15/16 in. (30.7 × 45.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Philadelphia is the earliest dated photograph from a celebrated series of television sets beaming images into seemingly empty rooms that Lee Friedlander made between 1961 and 1970. The pictures provided a prophetic commentary on the new medium to which Americans had quickly become addicted. Walker Evans published a suite of Friedlander’s TV photographs in Harper’s Bazaar in 1963 and noted: “The pictures on these pages are in effect deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate… Taken out of context as they are here, that baby might be selling skin rash, the careful, good-looking woman might be categorically unselling marriage and the home and total daintiness. Here, then, from an expert-hand, is a pictorial account of what TV-screen light does to rooms and to the things in them.”
Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Self-Service – Milan, New Mexico
1962
Gelatin silver print
4 11/16 × 4 11/16 in. (11.9 × 11.9cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Ed Ruscha
This intentionally mundane work by the Los Angeles–based painter and printmaker, Ed Ruscha, appears in Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), the first of sixteen landmark photographic books he published between 1963 and 1978. The volume established the artist’s reputation as a conceptual minimalist with a mastery of typography, an appreciation for seriality and documentary practice, and a deadpan sense of humour. Early on, he was influenced by the photographs of Walker Evans. “What I was after,” said Ruscha, “was no-style or a non-statement with a no-style.”
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Ivy in the Boston Garden: Back
1973
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
© Nan Goldin
While still in college, Nan Goldin spent two years recording performers at the Other Side, a Boston drag bar that hosted beauty pageants on Monday nights. This black-and-white study of Ivy, Goldin’s friend from the bar, walking alone through the Boston Common is one of the artist’s earliest photographs. The portrait evokes the glamorous world of fashion photography and hints at its loneliness. In all of her photographs, Goldin explores the natural twinning of fantasy and reality; it is the source of their pathos and rhythmic emotional beat. A decade after this elegiac photograph, she conceived the first iteration of her 1985 breakthrough colour series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which was presented as an ever-changing visual diary using a slide projector and synchronised music.
Laurie Simmons (American, b. 1949)
Woman/Interior I
1976
Gelatin silver print
5 3/4 × 7 1/2 in. (14.6 × 19.1cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2020 Laurie Simmons
Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York
Laurie Simmons began her career in 1976 with a series of enchantingly melancholic photographs of toy dolls set up in her apartment. The accessible mix of desire and anxiety in these early photographs resonates with, and provides a useful counterpoint to, Cindy Sherman’s contemporaneous “film stills” such as Untitled Film Still #48 seen nearby. Simmons and Sherman were foundational members of one of the most vibrant and productive communities of artists to emerge in the late twentieth century. Although they did not all see themselves as feminists or even as a unified group of “women artists,” each used the camera to examine the prescribed roles of women, especially in the workplace, and in advertising, politics, literature, and film.
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #48
1979
Gelatin silver print
6 15/16 × 9 3/8 in. (17.6 × 23.8cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A lone woman on an empty highway peers around the corner of a rocky outcrop. She waits and waits below the dramatic sky. Is it fear or self-reliance that challenges the unnamed traveler? Does she dread the future, the past, or just the present? So thorough and sophisticated is Cindy Sherman’s capacity for filmic detail and nuance that many viewers (encouraged by the titles) mistakenly believe that the photographs in the series are reenactments of films. Rather, they are an unsettling yet deeply satisfying synthesis of film and narrative painting, a shrewdly composed remaking not of the “real” world but of the mediated landscape.
Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Coral Sea
1983
Platinum print
23 1/8 × 19 1/2 in. (58.8 × 49.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This study of a Midway-class aircraft carrier shows a massive warship not actually floating on the ocean’s surface but seemingly sunken beneath it. The rather minimal photograph is among the rarest and least representative works by Robert Mapplethorpe, who is known mostly for his uncompromising sexual portraits and saturated flower studies, as well as for his mastery of the photographic print tradition. Here, he chose platinum materials to explore the subtle beauty of the medium’s extended mid-grey tones. By rendering prints using the more tactile platinum process, Mapplethorpe hoped to transcend the medium; as he said it is “no longer a photograph first, [but] firstly a statement that happens to be a photograph.”
Robert Gober (American, b. 1954)
Untitled (detail)
1988
Gelatin silver print
6 1/2 × 9 7/16 in. (16.5 × 24cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Although Robert Gober is not often thought of as a photographer, his conceptual practice has long depended on a camera. From the time of his first solo show in 1984 Gober has documented temporal projects in hundreds of photographs, and today many of his site-specific installations survive as images. His photography resists classification, seeming to split the difference between archival record and independent artwork. Here, across three frames, flimsy white dresses advance and recede into a deserted wood. Gober sewed the garments from fabric printed by the painter Christopher Wool in the course of a related collaboration. Seen together, Gober’s staged photographs record an ephemeral intervention in an unwelcoming, almost fairy-tale landscape.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Imperial Montreal
1995
Gelatin silver print
20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A self-taught expert on the history of photography and Zen Buddhism, Hiroshi Sugimoto posed a question to himself in 1976: what would be the effect on a single sheet of film if it was exposed to all 172,800 photographic frames in a feature-length movie? To visualise the answer, he hid a large-format camera in the last row of seats at St. Marks Cinema in Manhattan’s East Village and opened the shutter when the film started; an hour and a half later, when the movie ended, he closed it. The series (now forty years in the making) of ethereal photographs of darkened rooms filled with gleaming white screens presents a perfect example of yin and yang, the classic concept of opposites in ancient Chinese philosophy.
Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Prada II
1996
Chromogenic print
65 in. × 10 ft. 4 13/16 in. (165.1 × 317cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Andreas Gursky / Courtesy Sprüth Magers / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
To produce this quasi-architectural study of a barren luxury store display, Andreas Gursky used newly available software both to artificially stretch the underlying chemical image and to digitally generate the billboard-size print. At ten feet wide, the work is a Frankensteinian glimpse of what would transform the medium of photography over the next two decades. Gursky seems to have fully understood the Pandora’s box he had opened by using digital tools to manipulate his pictures, which put into question their essential realism: “I have a weakness for paradox. For me… the photogenic allows a picture to develop a life of its own, on a two-dimensional surface, which doesn’t exactly reflect the real object.”
Rachel Whiteread (English, b. 1963)
Watertower Project
1998
Screenprint with applied acrylic resin and graphite
20 in. × 15 15/16 in. (50.8 × 40.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Rachel Whiteread
How might one solidify water other than by freezing it? In New York in June 1998, a translucent 12 x 9-foot, 4½-ton sculpture created by Rachel Whiteread landed like a UFO atop a roof at the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street. The artist described the work – a resin cast of the interior of one of the city’s landmark wooden water tanks – as a “jewel in the Manhattan skyline.” This print is a poetic trace of the massive sculpture, which was commissioned by the Public Art Fund. The original work of art holds and refracts light just like the acrylic resin applied to the surface of this print.
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
2005
Chromogenic print
57 × 88 in. (144.8 × 223.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gregory Crewdson describes his highly scripted photographs as single-frame movies; to produce them, he engages teams of riggers, grips, lighting specialists, and actors. The story lines in most of his photographs centre on suburban anxiety, disorientation, fear, loss, and longing, but the final meaning almost always remains elusive, the narrative unfinished. In this photograph something terrible has happened, is happening, and will likely happen again. A woman in a nightgown sits in crisis on the edge of her bed with the remains of a rosebush on the sheets beside her. The journey from the garden was not an easy one, as evidenced by the trail of petals, thorns, and dirt. Even so, the protagonist cradles the plant’s roots with tender regard.
Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Football Landscape #8 (Crenshaw vs. Jefferson, Los Angeles, CA)
2007
Chromogenic print
48 × 64 in. (121.9 × 162.6cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
High school football is not a conventional subject for contemporary artists in any medium. Neither are freeways nor surfers, each of which are series by the artist Catherine Opie. A professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, Opie spent several years traveling across the United States making close-up portraits of adolescent gladiators as well as seductive, large-scale landscape views of the game itself. Poignant studies of group behaviour and American masculinity on the cusp of adulthood, the photographs can be seen as an extension of the artist’s diverse body of work related to gender performance in the queer communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Vukani II (Paris)
2014
Gelatin silver print
23 1/2 in. × 13 in. (59.7 × 33cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The South African photographer Zanele Muholi is a self-described visual activist and cultural archivist. In the artist’s hands, the camera is a potent tool of self-representation and self-definition for communities at risk of violence. Muholi has chosen the nearly archaic black-and-white process for most of their portraits “to create a sense of timelessness – a sense that we’ve been here before, but we’re looking at human beings who have never before had an opportunity to be seen.” Challenging the immateriality of our digital age, Muholi has restated the importance of the physical print and connected their work to that of their progenitors. In this recent self-portrait, Muholi sits on a bed, sharing a quiet moment of reflection and self-observation. The title, in the artist’s native Zulu, translates loosely as “wake up.”
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![Francis Frith (British, 1822-98) 'The Pyramids of Dahshoor [Dahshur], from the East, from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith' 1858 (published 1860 or 1862)](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/frith-the-pyramids-of-dahshoor-web.jpg)
![Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) 'Das Bäumchen [Sapling]' 1928](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/renger-patzsch-das-bacc88umchen.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) '[Nude Models Posing for a Painting Class]' 1890s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-nude-models-posing-for-a-painting-class-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) '[Adolf de Meyer Photographing Olga in a Garden]' 1890s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-photographing-olga-in-a-garden-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) '[Self-Portrait in India]' 1900](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-self-portrait-in-india-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) '[Self-Portrait in India]' (detail) 1900](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-self-portrait-in-india-detail.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) '[Amida Buddah, Japan]' 1900](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-amida-buddah-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) '[View Through the Window of a Garden, Japan]' 1900](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-view-through-the-window-of-a-garden-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) '[Lady Ottoline Morrell]' c. 1912](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-lady-ottoline-morrell-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) '[Dance Study]' c. 1912](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-dance-study-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) 'Nijinsky [Plate from Le Prelude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune]' 1912](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-portrait-of-vaslav-nijinski-1912-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) 'Nijinsky [Plate from Le Prelude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune]' 1914](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-nijinsky-plate-from-le-prelude-acc80-laprecc80s-midi-dun-faune-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) '[Image from "Prelude à l'Après-Midi d'un faune"]' 1914](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-image-from-prelude-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) 'Study for Vogue [Jan 1-1918, Betty Lee, Vogue, page 41]' 1918-21](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-study-for-vogue-web.jpg)
![Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868-1946 Los Angeles, California) 'Etienne de Beaumont [Count Etienne de Beaumont (French, 1883-1956)]' c. 1923](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-etienne-de-beaumont-web.jpg)
Exhibition: ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles: Transportation Photographs from the National Galleries of Scotland’ at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
Tags: 49 Jets, aerial photographer, aerial photography, Aerial view of Edinburgh, Alfred G Buckham, Alfred G. Buckham Aerial view of Edinburgh, Alfred G. Buckham Cloud Turrets, Alfred G. Buckham R100, Alfred G. Buckham Sunshine and Showers, Alfred G. Buckham The Forth Bridge, Alfred Stieglitz, Alfred Stieglitz The Steerage, Black Camel, Brian Souter, British art, British photographer, British photography, Cloud Turrets, David Williams, David Williams Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Dieter Appelt, Dieter Appelt Forth Bridge - Cinema. Metric Space, Edinburgh Bus Queue, Eugene Clutterbuck Impey, Eugene Clutterbuck Impey Riding Camel with trappings, Evelyn George Carey, Evelyn George Carey The Forth Bridge, Evelyn George Carey Two Seated Men Raising a Boy up to Demonstrate the Cantilever Principle, Forth Bridge, Forth Bridge - Cinema. Metric Space, Glasgow, Humphrey Spender, Iain Mackenzie, Iain Mackenzie Man on the Metro Glasgow, Iain Mackenzie Radiator of Vehicle, Iain Mackenzie Ticket Office Glasgow Metro, Inchgarvie South Cantilver, inge morath, Inge Morath Mrs Eveleigh Nash, Jeffrey Milstein, Jeffrey Milstein 49 Jets, Man on a Bicycle, Man on the Metro, Man on the Metro Glasgow, modernist composition, Mrs Eveleigh Nash, New York Subway 1975, Planes Trains & Automobiles, Planes Trains & Automobiles Transportation Photographs from the National Galleries of Scotland, R100, Radiator of Vehicle, Richard Hough, Richard Hough Edinburgh Bus Queue, Riding Camel with trappings, Ross Gillespie, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Scottish art, Scottish artist, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Scottish photography, Sean Hudson, Sean Hudson New York Subway 1975, Sir Benjamin Baker, Sir John Fowler, social commentary, Sunshine and Showers, The Forth Bridge, The Steerage, Ticket Office Glasgow Metro, transport photography, Transportation Photographs from the National Galleries of Scotland, Tricia Malley, Tricia Malley and Ross Gillespie, Tricia Malley and Ross Gillespie Brian Souter, Two Seated Men Raising a Boy up to Demonstrate the Cantilever Principle
Exhibition dates: 2nd June 2018 – 13th January 2019
Iain Mackenzie
Man on the Metro, Glasgow
c. 1980
Silver gelatin print
36.5 x 24.6 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Scottish Arts Council Gift 1997
© Iain Mackenzie
The highlights for me in this posting, and probably in the exhibition if I actually saw it, are the works of Alfred G. Buckham and Iain Mackenzie.
The first, a daredevil, crash-prone pilot who trained as a painter and then became the leading aerial photographer of his day, renowned for his atmospheric shots of the landscape. “Over the years Buckham amassed a vast collection of photographs of skies which he could integrate with a separate landscape photograph to enhance the drama and create a more impressive composition. He also often manipulated his images further by adding hand painted aircraft… which heightens the viewer’s awareness of the dominating power and scale of the natural world.”
These ever so romantic constructions are, in effect, flights of fancy. Buckingham wanted them to be as accurate as possible to ‘the effect that I saw’ through effect – he “collaged or hand-painted the form of a tiny aircraft to enhance the vertiginous effect” and also to enhance the surreal nature of nature. Just imagine the skill needed to combine multiple negatives and then hand-paint aircraft and airships, such as the R100 below, at the correct scale and delicate composition into the photographic image. Impressive not just from a technical perspective (the taking of the photographs; the montaging of the negatives) – but also from an aesthetic, sensual and spiritual perspective of the land and the air, the clouds and the sky. The stuff we breathe and the clouds that we observe everyday.
Speaking of the everyday, the second artist that I admire in this posting for his down to earth photographs of everyday life, is Iain Mackenzie. You can see many more of his photographs than are in this posting on the National Galleries of Scotland website. Notice the isolated figures in the brittle, urban landscape – the large, empty white-washed windows, the large signs, the “weight” of the heavy space that hangs above the grounded figures: The Cabin Restaurant, Shoe Repairs, The Govan Restaurant, Enjoy Your Seafood in Comfort!
The desolate streets of downtown Glasgow where the Shoe Repair Shop man stares straight at the camera, while his sign proclaims ~ Long Life ~ Repair Specialist. I absolutely love this type of photography, it washes over me and refreshes me, it seeps into my bones and lives there. Because I grew up belonging to this “working class”; they are me when I was young. We had no hot water when I was a child, my mother used to boil the kettle on the stove and fill a bath tub on the kitchen floor to bathe us kids, we were that poor. There is a grittiness about these people, resilience and fortitude, charm on occasion, that Mackenzie captures perfectly. Just look at the faces of the people on the Glasgow Metro. It’s a tough life.
Marcus
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Many thankx to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles is the third in a series of thematic exhibitions exploring the exceptional permanent collection of photography at the National Galleries of Scotland.
Navigating land, sea and air, this exhibition takes a look at the variety of modes of transport used around the world from the 1840s onwards. This is a truly global look at travel, from pedal power to commercial airliners, via cars, horse-drawn carriages, sleighs, buses, and the occasional camel!
Through work by the likes of Alfred G. Buckham, Humphrey Spender and Alfred Stieglitz we examine how photography has been used to chart the technological innovations created by the desire to travel and the impact that transportation has on society. The exhibition shows how transport is part of our everyday lives, from the daily grind of commuting to the pleasure of holidays away.
Evelyn George Carey (1858 – 1932)
The Forth Bridge. Two Seated Men Raising a Boy up to Demonstrate the Cantilever Principle
September 17th 1885 (print by Michael and Barbara Gray 2007)
Digital inkjet print from negative
46.40 x 58.00 cm
© National Records of Scotland
During the construction of the Forth Bridge, the young engineer Evelyn George Carey was given privileged access to the site in order to make a comprehensive photographic record of the bridge’s development. It was hoped that this visual documentation would restore public confidence in British engineering following the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879. In this photograph Carey uses volunteers, possibly the architects of the bridge Sir John Fowler and Sir Benjamin Baker, to demonstrate the cantilever principle. If you look closely you can see that the boy’s weight is sufficiently supported for his feet to rise off the ground – just as the cantilevers support the central girder of the bridge.
Evelyn George Carey (1858 – 1932)
The Forth Bridge. Inchgarvie South Cantilver
September 21st 1889 (print by Michael and Barbara Gray 2007)
Digital inkjet print from negative
46.40 x 58.00 cm
Commissioned 2007
© National Records of Scotland
The building of the Forth Bridge was celebrated in its day as “a triumph of engineering skill to eclipse the Ship Canal which has turned Africa into an island and a work which will reduce the pyramids to mere child’s play”. Following the disastrous collapse of the Tay Bridge in 1879, the engineers, John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, proposed a revolutionary design. The project was observed and controlled through photography. The official photographer was Evelyn George Carey, who was the assistant engineer from 1883-90. His pictures express the labour, tensions and hazards of the project. Together, his photographs create a sequence, following and examining the course of the construction with a critical eye, and offer an understanding of the later, Modernist fascination with such structures.
Dieter Appelt (born 1935)
Forth Bridge – Cinema. Metric Space, 2004
2004
312 silver gelatin prints, framed in eight panels
150.00 x 400.00 cm (individual framed panels: 48.00 x 150.00 x 4.00 cm)
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Purchased 2006
© Dieter Appelt
It was during a journey through Scotland in 1976 that Appelt first saw the Forth Rail Bridge. It made an immediate impact and he began to imagine a film work based on its construction. He returned to the project in 2002, producing a precisely composed photographic montage of the Rail Bridge comprising 312 separate black and white prints. Appelt then began by making a 35mm film, running the camera along the parallel Road Bridge. For the artist, the piece “emerges like a musical score from the filmic frame”, constructing a formal complexity as intricate as the physical laws that govern the original structure. This work lends an expressive weight both to photography and the conceptualisation of one of Scotland’s iconic monuments.
Eugene Clutterbuck Impey (1830-1904)
Riding Camel with trappings. The figure on foot is a Rajpoot Thakoor
1858-65
Albumen print
15.4 x 20.4 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Gift of Mrs. Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell, 1985
The British Government began to build a photographic record of India in 1855. At first this was a random selection of images of important architectural and archaeological sites, produced by amateur photographers working as government officials and amateurs alike. From the 1860s images of Indian society were also added to this archive. Impey, a government colonial official as well as a skilled photographer, made numerous portraits illustrating characteristic Indian types and activities. This scene of a royal court invokes a sense of a timeless Indian past. Such ‘exotic’ scenes were popular with Victorian Britons.
Unknown
Man on a Bicycle
c. 1910
Silver gelatin print
15.30 x 10.80 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Gift of Mrs. Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1985
In the late nineteenth century cycling became a popular leisure activity. This was in part due to the introduction of the pneumatic tyre, patented in 1888 by the Ayrshire-born John Dunlop. This made bicycles more reliable and less expensive. Cycling clubs formed across Europe and America and for many women cycling provided unprecedented mobility and freedom. In recent years cycling has seen a resurgence in popularity amongst both sports enthusiasts and commuters.
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
The Steerage
1907
Photogravure
19.5 x 15.7 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Presented by Mrs Elizabeth Uldall in memory of her sister, Ruth Anderson 1998
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / DACS 2017
Stieglitz was sailing to Europe in 1907 and found the company of other first class passengers unbearable. One day as he was trying to avoid them, he walked to the end of his deck and looked down into the part of the ship which accommodated the poor passengers. He perceived the ordinary men and women as flashes of colour dotted in among the geometric shapes of ‘iron machinery’. Moved and fascinated by this sight, he raced to his cabin and returned with his camera to take a picture that to him constituted a step in his ‘own evolution’.
The extraordinary advances in the technology of travel over the past 170 years, and their wide-ranging impact on our lives are the subject of a dramatic and inspiring new exhibition of photographs at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this summer. Planes, Trains and Automobiles draws upon the outstanding collection of the National Galleries of Scotland to consider the rapid expansion of transportation from the end of the Industrial Revolution to the present day. It features 70 outstanding images, including key images by Alfred G Buckham and Alfred Stieglitz, which demonstrate how the technologies of photography and transport have evolved in tandem, each of them broadening our horizons and radically altering our perception of our ever-shrinking world.
The exhibition includes iconic photographs such as The Steerage, a career-defining image by the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), made in 1907, while he was travelling to Europe by sea; and Inge Morath’s striking portrait Mrs Eveleigh Nash, The Mall, London (1953). Walking on the first-class deck, Stieglitz looked down into the third-class steerage area below him. Immediately struck by the strength of the composition created by the group of travellers gathered there, he quickly retrieved his camera, and captured the jarring class divide. Celebrated both for its modernist composition and its social commentary, the resulting photograph is one of the most recognisable images in the history of photography. Similarly, Morath (1923-2002), one of the first female photographers to work for renowned photo agency Magnum, used the door frame of an open-topped car to artfully divide her composition, suggesting the social gulf between the wealthy Mrs Nash and her chauffeur.
One of aerial photography’s pioneers was Alfred G. Buckham (1879-1956) who took breath-taking photographs in the skies above Edinburgh. Just as fascinating as his photographs, are Buckham’s dare-devil techniques to capture the perfect shot. He gave this sage advice to budding aerial photographers: ‘It is essential to stand up, not only to make the exposures but to see what is coming along ahead. If one’s right leg is tied to the seat with a scarf or a piece of rope, it is possible to work in perfect security’. Buckham also pioneered early layering of multiple negatives to create the perfect shot giving his photographs an ethereal, otherworldly quality.
The Industrial Revolution led to the rapid expansion of the railways, which had a huge impact on the way that people lived and worked and led to the expansion of many towns and cities. As early as 1845, the railway line in Linlithgow was photographed by David Octavius Hill (1802-70) and Robert Adamson (1821-48), who travelled by train to document the main sights of the town.
The Forth Bridge was the longest bridge in the world when it opened in 1890 and it is now widely regarded as a symbol of Scottish innovation and cultural identity. Radical in style, materials and scale, it marked an important milestone in bridge design and construction during the period when railways came to dominate long-distance land travel. Evelyn George Carey (1858-1932), a young engineer working on the construction of the bridge, made an incredible series of photographs as the building work progressed. In one of these photographs Carey records the amusing sight of two men demonstrating the cantilever principle – resulting in the boy sitting at the centre of the ‘bridge’ being lifted into the air. This series of photographs inspired the German contemporary photographer Dieter Appelt (b.1935) to make Forth Bridge – Cinema. Metric Space – a photographic montage of 312 separate silver gelatine prints which together offer a beautiful, lyrical interpretation of an engineering masterpiece.
Another innovation explored in Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the Victorian phenomenon of the stereograph. Made of two nearly identical scenes, which when viewed together in a special device, create a single three-dimensional image, this new photographic technology essentially mimicked how we see the world. It sparked curiosity and encouraged the public to view images of far-flung places from the comfort of their own home. The natural association between travel and transport meant that modes of transport were one of the most popular themes for stereographs. This exhibition features over 100 stereographs from the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection in a dynamic wall display, alongside digital interpretations.
524 million journeys were made by public transport in Scotland last year and Planes, Trains and Automobiles explores this common form of travel. Photographers have been repeatedly drawn to the theme of commuting, fascinated by its ability to show humanity in movement, following regulated routes to work. Among these are documentary photographers Humphrey Spender (1910-2005) and Larry Herman (b.1942) who both made work observing Glasgow and Glasweigians on their the daily commute. From photographs of the iconic Forth Bridge to images of commuting, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a photographic celebration of transportation in all its forms.
“his is the third in a hugely popular series of thematic exhibitions drawn entirely from the outstanding collection of photography held by the National Galleries of Scotland. The carefully selected photographs on display show how technology and transport have impacted on so many aspects of our lives and provided such a rich and thought-provoking focus for outstanding Scottish and international photographers, from very earliest days of the medium to today’s innovators.” ~ Christopher Baker, Director, European and Scottish Art and Portraiture, National Galleries of Scotland
Press release from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Alfred G. Buckham (1879 – 1956)
R100
c. 1920
Silver gelatin print
38.50 x 46.00 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund 2008
© Richard and John Buckham
Buckham was the leading aerial photographer of his day and was renowned for his atmospheric shots of the landscape. He felt that the most spectacular cloud formations and theatrical light could be captured on “stormy days, with bursts of sunshine and occasional showers of rain”. This is an example of one of his shots of an impressive cloud formation. It features the R100 airship, noted for its more oval, aerodynamic shape in comparison to the traditional Zeppelin. The R100 embarked on its maiden flight in 1929 but in 1930 it was deflated and removed from service following the crash of her sister ship, the R101, with the loss of forty-eight lives. Buckham painted the airship into the scene by hand.
Alfred G. Buckham (1879 – 1956)
Cloud Turrets
c. 1920
Silver gelatin print
38.00 x 45.70 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund 2008
© Richard and John Buckham
This dramatic, and almost surreal photograph, shows the diversity of cloud formations during a fierce thunderstorm. Over the years Buckham amassed a vast collection of photographs of skies which he could integrate with a separate landscape photograph to enhance the drama and create a more impressive composition. He also often manipulated his images further by adding hand painted aircraft, such as in this image, which heightens the viewer’s awareness of the dominating power and scale of the natural world.
Alfred G. Buckham (1879 – 1956)
Sunshine, and Showers
c. 1920
Silver gelatin print
45.5 x 37.7 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund 2008
© Richard and John Buckham
This image shows Captain Jordan flying his ‘Black Camel’ biplane at very close proximity to Buckham’s aircraft. Taken over the landscape around Rosyth, this was near to where Buckham crashed for the ninth time in 1918 and sustained serious injuries.
Alfred G. Buckham (1879 – 1956)
The Forth Bridge
c. 1920
Silver gelatin print
46.00 x 38.00 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund 2008
© Richard and John Buckham
Over the years he amassed a vast collection of photographs of skies which he integrated with a separate landscape photograph to enhance the drama and create a more impressive composition. This image over the Firth of Forth, encapsulates the romantic fusion of man’s engineering achievements against the dramatic beauty of nature. The three steel arches of the Forth Rail Bridge are mirrored in the three biplanes, which Buckham added later by hand, silhouetted against the spectacular sky.
About Alfred G. Buckham’s art
From the earliest days of manned flight, photographers sought to capture the strange and unfamiliar beauty of the view from above. Whether it was from balloons, airships or later, fixed-wing aircraft, enterprising pioneers overcame formidable technical obstacles to create striking new images of the world below. It was, however, through warfare in the twentieth century that aerial photography came to prominence. Alfred Buckham’s remarkable body of work in the air had its origins in a brief, eventful career with the Royal Navy in the last phase of the First World War, but he was also able to develop a highly personal approach that combined his skills in documentary reconnaissance with an artist’s feeling for mood and atmosphere.
Born in London, Buckham’s first ambition was to become a painter but after seeing an exhibition of work by J.M.W. Turner at the National Gallery he apparently destroyed all his own work. He turned instead to photography and in 1917 was enlisted into the photographic division of the Royal Navy. He was stationed first at Turnhouse near Edinburgh and was later transferred to the Grand Fleet based at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth. On his missions he took two cameras, one for his technical photography for the Navy and the other for personal use. Flying over Scotland he took numerous photographs of cloud formations, hilly landscapes and views of towns, often seeking out extremes of weather to add drama to his subject matter.
Buckham’s aerial view of Edinburgh has become one of the most popular photographs in our collection. The view is taken from the west, with the castle in the foreground and the buildings of the Old Town along the Royal Mile gradually fading into a bank of mist with the rocky silhouette of Arthur’s Seat just visible in the distance. Buckham was always keen to capture strong contrasts of light and dark, often combining the skies and landscapes from separate photographs to achieve a theatrical effect. As he does here, he sometimes collaged or hand-painted the form of a tiny aircraft to enhance the vertiginous effect. Yet accuracy remained a concern; Buckham later professed a particular fondness for his view of Edinburgh, ‘because it presents, so nearly, the effect that I saw’.
In the early days of flight, aerial reconnaissance was a hazardous task. Buckham crashed nine times and in 1919 was discharged out of the Royal Navy as one hundred per cent disabled. However, he continued to practise aerial photography through the 1920s, and in 1931 he travelled to Central and South America to take photographs for an American magazine, a commission that resulted in a remarkable series of views of mountain ranges and snow-rimmed volcanoes. In his journals and in various magazine articles, Buckham conveyed a spirit of adventure and derring-do that is not for the faint-hearted or those with a fear of flying. In an article dating from 1927 he wrote:
“It is not easy to tumble out of an aeroplane, unless you really want to, and on considerably more than a thousand flights I have used a safety belt only once and then it was thrust upon me. I always stand up to make an exposure and, taking the precaution to tie my right leg to the seat, I am free to move about rapidly, and easily, in any desired direction; and loop the loop and indulge in other such delights, with perfect safety.”
This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.
Alfred G. Buckham (1879-1956)
Aerial view of Edinburgh
c. 1920
Silver gelatin print
45.80 x 37.80 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Purchased 1990
© Richard and John Buckham
Photo: Antonia Reeve
Buckham had crashed nine times before he was discharged from the Royal Naval Air Service as a hundred per cent disabled. Continuing to indulge his passion for aerial photography, he wrote that “If one’s right leg is tied to the seat with a scarf or a piece of rope, it is possible to work in perfect security”. Presumably these were the perilous conditions in which the photographer took this dazzling picture of Edinburgh.
Inge Morath (1923-2002)
Mrs Eveleigh Nash, The Mall, London, 1953
1953
Silver gelatin print
40.60 x 50.80 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Purchased 2001
© Inge Morath / Magnum Photos
This is a very elegant composition, with an element of surrealism. It seems to have two perspectives and two vanishing points – the avenue of trees and the little figures on the left inhabit another world from the terrace of the houses on the right. The wealthy Mrs Eveleigh Nash in the foreground is, unexpectedly, shown as a shy woman. The two men in conversation walking by and the distant figures on the left are not so much a background as other lives being lived at the same time.
Sean Hudson
New York Subway 1975
1975
Silver gelatin print
25.40 x 38.40 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Presented by Robin Gillanders
© Sean Hudson
The New York subway was officially opened in 1904, forty-one years after the London Underground and eight years after the Glasgow Subway. It is now one of the largest underground systems in the world. In this atmospheric photograph, Hudson captures the often claustrophobic experience of travelling underground with hundreds of other people.
Iain Mackenzie
Ticket Office, Glasgow Metro
1980s
Silver gelatin print
24.4 x 36.5 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Scottish Arts Council Gift 1997
© Iain Mackenzie
In the 1980s Mackenzie made a series of photographs depicting life in Glasgow, several of which show Glaswegians navigating the subway on their way to work. The Glasgow Subway opened in 1896, making it one of the world’s first underground systems.
Iain Mackenzie
Radiator of Vehicle, Glasgow
Nd
Silver gelatin print
24.80 x 37.00 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Scottish Arts Council Gift 1997
© Iain Mackenzie
Ian MacKenzie & the School of Scottish Studies
The internationally renowned archives of the School of Scottish Studies, based at the University of Edinburgh, were established in 1951 for the collection, research, archiving and publication of materials relating to the cultural life and traditions of Scotland. …
The Photographic Archive contains thousands of images from all over Scotland and beyond. Notable collections include work by Werner Kissling in the Hebrides and Galloway and Robert Atkinson’s images of the Western Isles. Ian MacKenzie’s extensive ethnological record, containing both still and video footage of local customs, festivals and working life, resides alongside his portfolio of fine art photography, of which the School of Scottish Studies Archives is custodian.
MacKenzie was born in Inverness and grew up in the distillery village of Tomatin, Strathdearn. He graduated from Napier College and went on to London to obtain a masters degree in photography from the Royal College of Art. Throughout his life, his devotion to the Highlands inspired him to capture the essence of Scottish culture in his artwork, even when travelling abroad. He came to work at the School of Scottish Studies in 1985, where he was curator of the Photographic Archive for nearly twenty-five years. Aside from maintaining the existing collections, he travelled all over Scotland capturing scenes and customs on the edge of extinction.
His photos reflect his belief that there is always room for the appreciation of the important things in life that are so often overlooked. His project ZenBends reflected this philosophy by focusing on the quality of day-to-day life rather than the constant pursuit of a final goal.
The Ian MacKenzie Memorial Fund was established after his passing in 2009 and all proceeds go to the School of Scottish Studies Archives.
Talitha MacKenzie. Broadsheet Issue 22, January 2013 on the Scottish Council on Archives website [Online] Cited 20/06/2018
More Iain Mackenzie photographs
Richard Hough (1945 – 85)
Edinburgh Bus Queue
Nd
Silver gelatin print
20.20 x 30.00 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Presented by the Scottish Arts Council 1997
© The Estate of the Artist
Richard Hough (1945 – 85)
Edinburgh Bus Queue
Nd
Silver gelatin print
20.20 x 30.00 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Presented by the Scottish Arts Council 1997
© The Estate of the Artist
David Williams (born 1952)
Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh
1980
Silver gelatin print
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
Purchased 1997
© David Williams
For many of us, being pushed in a pram is the first mode of transport we will experience. In this carefully composed photograph it appears that the baby is joined in the pram by a statue of the Madonna and Child and an elderly man – prompting us to contemplate the different stages of life. In 1980, when this photograph was taken, Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Garden was home to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The collection was moved to its current location on Belford Road in 1984. The sculpture seen in this photograph, La Vierge d’Alsace [The Virgin of Alsace] by Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, can now been found in the grounds of Modern Two.
Tricia Malley (born 1955) and Ross Gillespie (born 1958)
Brian Souter
1998
Colour inkjet print
38.3 x 50.8 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland, purchased 2009
© Tricia Malley & Ross Gillespie
Sir Brian Souter (born 5 May 1954) is a Scottish businessman and philanthropist. With his sister, Ann Gloag, he founded the Stagecoach Group of bus and rail operators. He also founded the bus and coach operator Megabus, the train operating company South West Trains, his investments company Souter Holdings Ltd and the Souter Charitable Trust. (Wikipedia)
Jeffrey Milstein (born 1944)
49 Jets
2007
Archival pigment print
101.6 x 101.6 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland
© Jeffrey Milstein
Jeffrey Milstein is a photographer, architect and pilot. His photographic work reflects both his lifelong passion for flight (he received his pilot’s licence when only seventeen years old) and his love of architecture. Milstein utilises small planes and helicopters to create stunning aerial photographs which display a graphic designer’s eye for geometry and design. In addition to photographing from aircraft Milstein has also produced a body of work in which aircraft are the subject of the photograph. For these Milstein positions himself below the aircraft and photographs them as they pass overhead, preparing to land. In the resulting prints Milstein removes the background to better focus on the colours and design of the aircraft. Milstein’s photographs have been exhibited and published worldwide.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
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