Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Freshly Felled Trees, Nemah, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2007
Not much joy in this melancholy tone poem, but there doesn’t need to be. Masses of history, memory, anxiety, isolation and death, all reinforced by Johnson’s photographic perspective, which seems to flatten out the pictorial plane. Some stunning photographs and others that don’t hit the mark, but overall a very strong body of work. View the complex, environmental, social documentary photographs of the Sawdust Mountain series on Eirik Johnson’s website.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Rena Bransten Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“When I was a young, my family would hunt for mushrooms in the forests of the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. Some days we would spend afternoons along the shallows of a river watching salmon fight their way to spawning grounds upstream. These were the icons of the region: forest and salmon, pillars of Northwest identity. These photographs address the complicated relationship between the region’s landscape, the industries that rely upon natural recourses, and the communities they support.
‘Sawdust Mountain’ is a melancholy love letter of sorts, a personal reflection on the region’s past, its hardscrabble identity and the turbulent future it must navigate.”
Eirik Johnson
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Junked Blue Trucks, Forks, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2007
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Elwha River Dam, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2008
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Stacked logs in Weyerhaeuser sort yard, Cosmopolis, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2007
Eirik Johnson’s colour photographs chronicle his study of Sawdust Mountain, a once idyllic patch of the Pacific Northwest now in decline after a century of human encroachment. The story is a familiar one – early settlers attracted by the sublime beauty and abundant natural resources – of Washington state in the case – began local nature-based industries that eventually depleted the natural resources. The romance of lumberjacks and fishermen taming the wilderness and living off the land has been replaced by the hardscrabble reality of those now trying to eke out a living as well as conservationists and ecologists trying to save and restore the landscape. Johnson presents a well-rounded portrait of a town and country struggling to find solutions to these conflicting demands. His photographs capture the history and legacy of the industries, the landscape at the centre of the vortex, and the changes undertaken to staunch the economic and ecological declines so all can survive.
Johnson was born in Seattle, WA and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Washington, Seattle and with a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Sawdust Mountain photographs will also be exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington who co-published the accompanying book with Aperture. Other Johnson book and exhibitions include Borderlands from 2006 and Animal Holes from 2007. Johnson is currently living and teaching in Boston at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Text from the Rena Bransten Gallery website [Online] Cited 11/06/2009. No longer available online
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Weyerhaeuser sorting yard along the Chehalis River, Cosmopolis, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2006
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Stacked alder boards, Seaport Lumber Planer, South Bend, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2007
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Adult books, firewood and truck for sale, Port Angeles, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2008
A culmination of four years of photographing throughout Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, Sawdust Mountain focuses on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support.
Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these declining industries has been increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. In this, his second book, Johnson reveals a landscape imbued with an uncertain future – no longer the region of boomtowns built upon the riches of massive old-growth forests.
Johnson, a Seattle native, describes his photographs as “a melancholy love letter of sorts, my own personal ramblings.” Through this poetic approach, Sawdust Mountain records a region affected by historic economic complexities, and by extension, one aspect of our fraught relationship with the environment in the twenty-first century.
Text from the Aperture Foundation website. No longer available online
Perhaps it’s just me, but I seem to have become a little jaded towards the recent photographs of William Eggleston.
Other than the green reflection of lights in rainwater (above) the photographs seem to have lost their unique voice, the social insight that gave his earlier work it’s zing – provocative images that challenged how we live through a meditation on subject matter, construction of space, and tone of “colour”. How the colour that surrounds us inflects our very being.
In these photographs it feels like there has been little development in his style over the years with a consequent lessening of their visual impact. Now Eggleston’s colour just feels like a party trick, performed by rote with little consequential meaning to either the colour or the image. Perhaps the way we look at the world (and how we picture it) has finally overtaken the director’s prescient creative vision – his auteurship, his authorship.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fondation Cartier for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.
“In Eggleston’s best work, the work that made him famous, color is intrinsic to the meaning of the photograph. Its not simply a garnish to draw the eye. His best photographs are not ‘about’ the color; they are about larger issues that the color is used in the service of. This is whats missing in his Paris pictures. The color here is pure ornament, eye candy to seduce you into forgetting that the picture has nothing to say.”
Anonymous. “William Eggleston Mails It In From Paris,” on the Leicaphilia website April 21, 2014 [Online] Cited 06/02/2019
For the last three years, American photographer William Eggleston has photographed the city of Paris as part of a commission for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Taken throughout different seasons, these new images by one of the fathers of colour photography portray the local and the cosmopolitan, the glamorous and the gritty, the everyday and the extraordinary.
This exhibition also provides an exceptional occasion to bring together William Eggleston’s distinctive pictures and his recent paintings, an unknown aspect of his work that has never before been presented to the public.
William Eggleston’s recent book Paris, published by Steidl and commissioned by FoundationCartier, is a collective body of work that comprises his oeuvre of color drawings and recent Paris photographs. Similar to Ben Shahn, Charles Scheeler, Diego Rivera, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha, Eggleston has reached out beyond photography to express his creative talents.
The photographs and drawings are intertwined throughout the book, creating an interesting visual cadence. The page spreads illustrate various layout designs, including a single image of either a photograph or drawing on a spread, pairs of drawings and photographs and pairs of drawing facing a photograph. All of the drawings and photographs are contained within the boundaries of the page. …
We know mostly of Eggleston’s photographs, but from the dating on one of the drawings included in this book, we can determine that Eggleston has been working with the drawing medium since 1968. It is interesting to speculate as to how one medium may have influenced the other for Eggleston. As an example, the earlier photographs by Shahn and Scheeler seem to have had an influence on how these two artists subsequently worked their framing, pictorial space, mass & line quality in their subsequent paintings.
The Paris photographs that Eggleston made of graffiti or his tight framing in conjunction with a longer lens to compress the pictorial space are visually similar in style to his drawings. The subjects he photographs are framed to create similar vibrant color masses and lines as his drawing, abstracting reality into basic graphic components. …
With these drawings, paintings and photographs, Eggleston shows a interesting handling of these mediums and offers an insight as to how influential the period of Abstract Expressionism is to his photographic process.
Extract from Douglas Stockdale. “William Eggleston – Paris,” on The PhotoBook Journal website September 12, 2009 [Online] Cited 06/02/2019
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Front Facade 1993 Polaroid Courtesy of the artist
A selection of photographs of Fay by William Wegman. Gotta love that dog!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Akron Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Miss Mit 1993 Polaroid Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) On Set 1994 Polaroid Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Patriotic Poodle 1994 Polaroid Courtesy of the artist
The Akron Art Museum is deeply honoured to be one of only two venues to present William Wegman: Fay, a wonderfully witty and moving exhibition about the artistic collaboration between William Wegman (b. 1943) and his celebrated Weimaraner Fay (1984-1995).
The breadth of Wegman’s audience is truly remarkable. In addition to being internationally renowned in art circles, he is one of the few artists to successfully disseminate his work – especially the photographs, videos and books featuring his beloved Weimaraner dogs – through the mass media.
Wegman is a conceptual artist who works in many different media. Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1943, he graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1965 with a BFA in painting. Subsequently, he enrolled in the Masters painting and printmaking program at the University of Illinois. In 1970, he moved to southern California and began exhibiting his photographs. He was one of the earliest artists to explore video and has used photography for over four decades.
While living in California, Wegman acquired Man Ray, a Weimaraner whom he named after the surrealist French photographer. The dog became his partner in both life and art during their 12 year collaboration. Man Ray became so famous that, upon his passing, he was named ‘Man of the Year’ by the New York City newspaper The Village Voice.
Grief-stricken by Ray’s death, Wegman made the decision not to get another dog, but some years later he came to meet another Weimaraner:
“When we first met in Memphis, Tennessee, she was six months old and her name was Cinnamon Girl. I named her Fay after Fay Wray, of course, but also after my first colour Polaroid with Man Ray and the nail polish, which I had titled Fay Ray. Her fur was taupe, lighter and warmer-toned than Man Ray’s, and she had yellow eyes like in a Rousseau painting. I had no intention of photographing Fay. Man Ray was irreplaceable. I didn’t want to mar my memory of him.
… In a short time Fay matured from a coltish youth into a Garboesque beauty. My pictures grew with her. Now she was the muse, the adored one. Skin-deep beauty became the soul of my work.” ~ William Wegman, Polaroids, New York, 2002
Fay had a chameleon-like quality very different from Man Ray’s concrete presence. The bond between the artist and his muse is undeniable. Images of Fay balanced upon an ironing boarding in Sphinx (1987) and coolly starting into the lens from beneath a black net in Netted (1988) show her deep trust in Wegman. His work with Fay captures the canine in a spectrum of emotions. Her huge, expressive citron eyes convey in one shot tragedy and in the next, joy. A series of photographs show Fay swathed in human clothing, posed as a woman, with the human arms and legs of her co-model. The canine appears part human, her expression incredibly familiar. Fay also posed with a variety of props, from roller-skates to masks of fruit, flowers and other found objects.
The Akron Art Museum is fortunate to be able to include in this exhibition not just black and white photographs but also large format Polaroids and chromogenic (colour) prints, from the artist’s personal collection. In addition to 56 still photographs, extensive selections from Wegman’s videos featuring Fay will be on continuous view in the exhibition.”
Text from the Akron Art Museum website
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Basic Shapes In Color 1993 Chromogenic colour print 24″ x 20″ Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Fay Ray 1988 Gelatin silver print 16.2 x 16.2cm. (6.4 x 6.4 in.) Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Oaken 1992 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Lawn Chair 1988 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Retriever 1994 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) U-Tree 1992 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Untitled (Ghent Fay with Apples) 1990 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
Akron Art Museum One South High Akron, Ohio 44308
Opening hours Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: 11.00am – 5.00pm Thursday: 11.00am – 8.00pm Closed: Monday and Tuesday
Curator:Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of MoMA’s Department of Photography
Many thankx to La Casa Encendida for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Wall Street 1915 Platinum palladium print
Wall Street is a platinum palladium print photograph by the American photographer Paul Strand taken in 1915. There are currently only two vintage prints of this photograph with one at the Whitney Museum of American Art (printed posthumously) and the other, along with negatives, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This photograph was included in Paul Strand, circa 1916, an exhibition of photographs that exemplify his push toward modernism.
It depicts a scene of everyday life in Manhattan’s Financial District. Workers are seen walking past the J.P. Morgan & Co. building in New York City on the famous Wall Street, of which the photograph takes its name. The photograph is famous for its reliance on the sharpness and contrast of the shapes and angles, created by the building and the workers, that lead to its abstraction. This photograph is considered to be one of Strand’s most famous works and an example of his change from Pictorialism to straight photography. Strand moved from the posed to portraying the purity of the subjects. It is one of several images that stand as marks of the turn to modernism in photography. …
Technique
This photograph depicts the J.P. Morgan building in New York City. Strand photographed “people hurrying to work past the banking building” situated on Wall Street, from which the photo takes its name. the subject depicted is a real-life subject without manipulation. The depiction of the real nature of the medium and the subject is an example of straight photography. There is no focal point, with the lines converging off of the frame of the image. The financial building take majority of the frame. Emphasis is placed on the strong shapes created by the architecture of the building. The workers are included in the image, but are faceless and are trumped in size by the massive square shapes from the building they walk past. Also, the workers are captured in motion which on film makes them appear blurry. This aesthetic that Strand creates in Wall Street is his break toward the modern, the straight photography, demonstrating that Pictorialism is no longer part of his aesthetic. Strand captured the building with clean, sharp lines. The building is covered in the high contrast, chiaroscuro. It is heavily in the shadows, but still creates an overwhelming presence over the people that walk past it. These people are also shrouded in the contrast made evident with the clean lines and black and white nature of his photos and photography as a medium. The people jump from their places, being the dark figures in the light of the sun that beams in from the left of the frame.
Strand fills the image with his recognisable aesthetic. The photo is platinum print, one of the materials frequently used by photographers of the time. Strand was unique in how he printed his photos. As stated on the George Eastman House website section Notes on Photography, Strand would make large prints from small negatives. He also left them in their matte condition that was inherent with platinum print. With his printing techniques, he “added a richness to the image.” As with the time, the photo is entirely black and white. There is a heavy contrast with the black and white areas of the photo. Strand creates diagonal shapes that pull emphasis to subject of the building and away from the people.
Aspects
Having taken Hine’s class at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, social change became important to Strand and appeared often in his art. As a pupil of Hine, Strand learned of the social aspect his work could have. With Wall Street, he sought to portray a social message. He captured the faceless people next to the looming financial building in order to give a warning. Strand shows “the recently built J.P. Morgan Co. building, whose huge, dark recesses dwarf the passersby with the imposing powers of uniformity and anonymity.” The people cannot escape the overwhelming power that this modern establishment will have on their future and the future of America. He warns us to not be the small people that look almost ant-like next to this building that has a massive amount of control over the American economy.
Unidentified photographer Brooklyn Bridge c. 1914 Gelatin silver print 7 5/8 × 9 9/16″ (19.4 × 24.3cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The New York Times Collection
La Casa Encendida presents an exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, which showcases a fundamental part of the institution’s assets: its photography collection. Portraits of New York: Photographs from the MoMA offers an overview of the history of photography against the backdrop of this iconic metropolis through the work of more than 90 artists.
For the show’s curator Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of the MoMA’s Department of Photography, “Portraits of New York amply reflects the history of synergies between this medium and the Big Apple during a period of important transformations for both. The photographs generated by the restless and constant commitment of numerous photographs to New York City have played a fundamental role in determining how New Yorkers perceive the city and themselves. These photographs have also defined the city’s image in the world’s imagination.”
Featured artists include Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, Walker Evans, Andreas Feininger, Larry Fink, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Lewis W. Hine, William Klein, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Edward Steichen, Thomas Struth and Garry Winogrand.
Text from the La Casa Encendida website
Lewis Wickes Hine (American, 1874-1940) Welders on the Empire State Building c. 1930 Gelatin silver print 10 5/8 × 13 5/8″ (27 × 34.6cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on Photography Fund
Ted Croner (American, 1922–2005) Central Park South 1947-1948 Silver gelatin print 10 15/16 x 13 3/4″ (27.8 x 34.9cm) Gift of the photographer Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ted Croner (1922-2005) was an American photographer, described as an influential member of the New York school of photography during the 1940s and 1950s. His images are said to represent the best example of this movement.
Born in Baltimore in 1922 and raised in North Carolina, Croner developed an interest in photography while in high school. He honed his skills while serving as an aerial photographer in World War II before settling in New York City in 1947. At the urging of fashion photographer Fernand Fonssagrives, he enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch’s class at The New School where he studied with Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Lisette Model. During this period he produced many of his most memorable images including “Taxi, New York Night, 1947-48”, which appears on the cover of Bob Dylan’s 2006 album, Modern Times. Another of Croner’s photographs was used on the cover of Luna’s album Penthouse.
Croner also had a successful career as a fashion and commercial photographer – his work was published in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. He also worked extensively with corporations such as Coca-Cola and Chase Manhattan Bank. Croner is best known for his haunting night images of New York City taken in the 1940s and 1950s. He was one of several important photographers who belonged to the New York school of photography.
Photographs from the MoMA, which will provide an in-depth look at an essential component of the MoMA’s assets: its photography collection. Curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of the museum’s department of photography, the exhibition offers an overview of the history of photography through the work of over 90 artists, with the iconic city as a backdrop. It includes some of the most prestigious names in photography, such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walter Evans, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Cindy Sherman, Irving Penn and Alfred Stieglitz.
For Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of the MoMA’s Department of Photography, “Portraits of New York amply reflects the history of synergies of this medium and of the Big Apple during a period of important transformations for both. The photographs generated by the restless and constant commitment of numerous photographers to the city of New York have played a fundamental role in determining how New Yorkers perceive the city and themselves. These photographs have also defined the city’s image in the world’s imagination.
[…] The urban landscape of the city is a combination of the old and the new in constant evolution, and these physical transformations are repeated in the demographic changes that have characterised the city since the 1880s, when massive waves of immigrants began to arrive. This same diversity can be seen in the photography of New York of the past four decades. Just as its architects are inspired and limited by surrounding structures and building codes, and just as its inhabitants learn and rub up against each other and previous generations, so too the photographers of New York transport the visual memory of a an extensive and extraordinary repertoire of images of the city. They take on the challenge of creating new works that go beyond traditions and respond to what is new in New York.”
The exhibition curator continues: “Throughout the 20th century, numerous artists have felt inspired by New York’s combination of glamour and rawness. The city – which acquired its modernity at the same pace as photography, and in an equally impetuous and undisciplined way – has always been a theme of particular vitality for photographers, both those who have visited the city and those who live in it. On one occasion, faced with the challenge of capturing the essence of New York with a camera, the photographer Berenice Abbott wondered, “How shall the two-dimensional print in black and white suggest the flux of activity of the metropolis, the interaction of human beings and solid architectural constructions, all impinging upon each other in time?” Each of the photographs reproduced here is a unique response to that question.
New York may not be the capital of the United States, but it prides itself on being the capital of the world. Its inhabitants are intimate strangers, its avenues are constantly teeming and its buildings are absolutely unmistakeable, though they are packed so close together that it is impossible to see just one. The New York subway runs twenty-four hours a day, which has earned it the sobriquet of “the city that never sleeps.” It is the model for Gotham City, the disturbing metropolis that Batman calls home, and a symbol of independence and a wellspring of opportunities in a wide variety of films, from Breakfast at Tiffany‘s to Working Girl. And this is just a sample of the captivating and abundant raw material that the city offers to artists, regardless of the medium in which they work. However, it is the convergence of photographers in this city – in this place that combines anonymity and community, with its local flavour and global ambitions – that has created the ideal setting for the development of modern photography.
Text from the La Casa Encendida website [Online] Cited 28/04/2009. No longer available online
Each of Sherman’s sixty-nine Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), presents a female heroine from a movie we feel we must have seen. Here, she is the pert young career girl in a trim new suit on her first day in the big city. Among the others are the luscious librarian (#13), the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway (#7), the ingenue setting out on life’s journey (#48), and the tough but vulnerable film noir idol (#54). To make the pictures, Sherman herself played all of the roles or, more precisely, played all of the actresses playing all of the roles. In other words, the series is a fiction about a fiction, a deft encapsulation of the image of femininity that, through the movies, took hold of the collective imagination in postwar America – the period of Sherman’s youth, and the crucible of our contemporary culture.
In fact, only a handful of the Untitled Film Stills are modelled directly on particular roles in actual movies, let alone on individual stills of the sort that the studios distribute to publicise their films. All the others are inventive allusions to generic types, and so our sure sense of recognition is all the more telling. It tells us that, knowingly or not, we have absorbed the movie culture that Sherman invites us to examine as a powerful force in our lives.
Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 295.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Woman with Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C 1968 Silver gelatin print Museum of Modern Art, New York
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Babe Ruth c. 1927 Gelatin silver print 13 3/8 × 10 7/16″ (33.9 × 26.5cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray
Opening hours: La Casa Encendida is open from Monday to Sunday from 10am to 10pm every day of the year except national and Community of Madrid holidays
“For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world … Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy …”
Charles Baudelaire. The Painter of Modern Life 1863
“At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”
James Agee
Speaking of pioneers of colour photography the wonderful American photographer Helen Levitt died recently at the end of March. Here is a selection of her colour work from the 1970s – 1980s. With two Guggenheim Foundation grants in 1959 and 1960 she switched from black and white to colour dye-transfer prints photographing the theatre of the street, the serendipity of the decisive moment previsualised and captured through awareness and an intimate knowledge of her subject matter. Unfortunately in a burglary in 1970 most of her colour transparencies and prints were stolen from that initial period.
What remains, as Sally Mann would say, are the eloquent bones of the matter: superb lush colour photographs taken after 1970 that engage the viewer not in memory but in the moment, not in nostalgia but in joy. In colour she found “beauty in correspondences.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
… Her pictures were mostly of Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. She shot them in black and white, as silver gelatin prints, in the 1930s and 1940s and in colour dye-transfer prints in the 1960s and 1970s. In between, she got into movie-making for a while. Her theme was the same, the streets of New York. Apart from a trip in 1941 to Mexico City, she never found a better subject in her life.
The grittier parts were her particular joy. Her world was run-down streets, rubble-filled building sites, warehouses and litter-strewn front steps. This was urban photography with a vengeance: small scraps of sky, no trees. When she was going with Walker Evans in 1938, borrowing his camera as well (“of course”) as sleeping with him, he used to be afraid of going as far uptown as she did. Some of her young male subjects, lounging around in their zoot suits and fedoras, had an unmistakable air of menace. But mostly she brought back images of gossiping women and her favourite, scrambling children. A right-angle viewfinder allowed her to take the picture without them knowing, even, as Evans showed her, when riding right beside them in the subway.
Here and there
Her birthplace was in Brooklyn, where her father was in the wholesale knitwear business. She aspired to something more artistic, but found she couldn’t draw. For a time she trained in ballet, which taught her to appreciate the musculature of posing bodies and the spontaneous grace of her child subjects. After dropping out of high school she went to work in the darkroom of Florian Mitchell’s commercial portrait-photography studio on $6 a week. There she was hooked.
A good image, she thought, was just lucky. But her New Yorker’s instinct seemed to tell her exactly where to wait for one. A broken-down car would soon attract people to lie under it, peer under the hood or try to push it. A cane chair, put out on the sidewalk, would draw an elderly man with cigar and newspaper, or a plump young woman in a housecoat wilting in the heat. With luck dogs would come out too, rough-haired mutts or poodles with fresh-shampooed coats. The open back of a truck would reveal delivery men moping on piles of sacks, or dozing among pink and blue bales of cloth. Any abandoned thing – a tea-chest, a mirror frame, the pillared entry of an empty building – would soon sport knots of children diving in, climbing up, fighting and contorting their small bodies in every kind of way.
Her pictures did not have names. “New York”, and the year, was the label on most of them. They did not need explaining; they were “just what you see”. Many had a backdrop of posters, graffiti or billboards, which gave a commentary of sorts. “Special Spaghetti 25 cents.” “Post No Bills.” “Nuts roasted daily.” “Buttons and Notions, One Flight Up.” “Bill Jones Mother is a Hore.” Her earliest project with her first, secondhand camera was to photograph children’s chalk drawings on the pavements. She never tried to speculate on them. What mattered was the patterns they made.
In the 1960s, when she got two Guggenheim grants, she began to shoot the streets in colour. The tricky developing ultimately frustrated her, and the streets, too, had changed. The children had retreated indoors to watch television. But where she had found grace and texture in black and white, colour now provided beauty in correspondences. The multi-coloured balls in bubble-gum machines could be picked up in a girl’s dress, or the red of a stiletto shoe matched with the frame of a shop window. Her broken-down cars were now lurid beasts against the stucco walls. And out of her peeling, greenish doorways could come women in furs, or pink hair-curlers, or orange-striped socks.
She did not rate her own work highly. Though her original prints eventually sold for tens of thousands of dollars, she let them pile up in her apartment in boxes labelled “Nothing good” or “Here and there”. Her hopes when she started were for photographs that would make a socialist statement of some sort, but she abandoned that on Cartier-Bresson’s advice. A “nice picture”, as she reluctantly admitted some of hers were, was a work of art that had value in itself, as well as a celebration of the random, teeming work of art that is the city of New York.
Anonymous. “Helen Levitt,” on The Economist website April 8th 2009 [Online] Cited 16/04/2009. No longer available online
Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt by John Szarkowski, Powerhouse Books, 2005 is available from the Amazon website. The photograph above is used on the cover of the book.
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Women by Car, Laguna Beach, California c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“Art is life seen through man’s inner craving for perfection and beauty – his escape from the sordid realities of life into a world of his imagining. Art accounts for at least a third of our civilization, and it is one of the artist’s principal duties to do more than merely record life or nature. To the artist is given the privilege of pointing the way and inspiring towards a better life.”
Paul Outerbridge
If Outerbridge only photographed intermittently after 1943, then what photographs they are. Perhaps some of the most important colour photographs of their generation were made after he moved to California influencing the next generation of colour photographers (as noted below in the press release). What else can one say – his aesthetic sensibility is sensational, so far ahead of his time, so prescient of future colour spaces in photography. I know how “no regular income” feels as an artist, but he still had the courage and vision to make the work. I am in awe of the man: the visual complexity but eloquent simplicity of his photographs is simply amazing, simply… his own.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Downtown Central Library for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Recently discovered colour images of California and Mexico taken during the 1940s and 1950s by the late visionary photographer Paul Outerbridge, who was considered “a master of colour photography,” will be exhibited at the Central Library’s First Floor Galleries, 630 W. Fifth St., downtown, from March 28 through June 28 2009.
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Balboa Beach, California c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“[Outerbridge] was a designer and illustrator in New York before turning to photography in the 1920s. In 1925, having established himself as an innovative advertising photographer and graphic designer, he moved to Paris and worked for the French edition of Vogue magazine. There he met Edward Steichen, with whom he developed a friendly rivalry. Around 1930, having returned to New York, Outerbridge began to experiment with colour photography, in particular the carbro-colour process. He focused primarily on female nudes – striking, full-colour images that were ahead of their time. The growing popularity of the dye transfer process lead to cheaper color photographs and Outerbridge, who stuck fast to the carbro process as superior in its richness and permanence, saw his commercial work dry up, leaving him without a regular source of income. In 1943 Outerbridge moved to California, where he photographed only intermittently.”
Text from the Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 14/04/2009. No longer available online
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Reclining Nude c. 1937 Pigment dyed digital print
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Motel Bar, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1948 Dye transfer print 16″ x 20″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Hotel Lobby, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
As one of America’s earliest masters of colour photography, Paul Outerbridge established his reputation by making virtuoso carbro-colour prints of nudes and still-lives in the 1930s. As pictures, they are as brilliant and innovative today as when they earned their place as classics in the history of photography.
Outerbridge left New York in the 1940s, choosing to settle in California, and eventually taking up residency in the Mediterranean-style ocean side town of Laguna Beach. Little is known of Outerbridge’s last body of work in the 8 years preceding his death in 1958. But Outerbridge’s recently printed transparencies from the 1950s affirms that he fully understood the possibilities inherent in colour photography despite it being the early days of its use in photographic art. Outerbridge went on to make a body of work that presaged the style and imagery of colour photographers working a full quarter of a century later.
Employing a 35mm camera rather than the large-format equipment of the studio, Outerbridge captured vivid pictures while on the fly. His images were composed using the same precision of form and colour that characterised his 1930s studio work, but, in this series, Outerbridge applied his earlier techniques to the energetic world of the street. This was a new landscape for Outerbridge, who, seeing in the new spectrum of colour, depicted the people and places from his adopted Southern California, and, with great relish and sensitivity, from the Mexican towns just south of the border. In the tradition of such photographers as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Anton Bruehl, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, all of whom made significant photographic forays into Mexico, Outerbridge ventured south from Laguna. In his 1949 black Cadillac, Outerbridge frequented the seaport towns along the Baja peninsula. One of his favourite stops was Mazatlan, on Mexico’s western coast, where he took particular pleasure in surveying the urban architecture, absorbing – and documenting – the city streets teeming with people, the brightly coloured topography.
Among the scenes Outerbridge etched onto film: carnival carriages with passengers dressed and bound for a grand party; a group of fashionable men relaxing in an outdoor hotel lobby drinking Cokes and beer while a small orchestra plays on in the afternoon sun; and a lone girl in a lime-green dress and white sweater walking past a gas station whose painted-red details add vibrant flourishes to the scene. Outerbridge was keenly aware that the beauty of everyday objects was also tied to the larger meanings anchored in the social landscape, but he cared less for this fact than for the expression of pure colour and form as seen through and by the lens.
These extraordinary pictures recall the 1970s photographs of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who strove to codify these same formal and subjective aesthetics into a bold definition of the new colour vocabulary. Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs from California and Mexico will bring a heretofore undiscovered and unrecognised sequence of photographs that bridges the formal gap between the past and the present. Outerbridge’s visionary handling of colour confirmed that he had instinctively known the potential of the colour medium, and, luckily for us, he created an astounding body of photographs to prove it.
Text from the Curatorial Assistance website [Online] Cited 19/01/2019
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Gas Station, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1950 Dye transfer print 16″ x 20″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Self-portrait on Lounge, Oceanside Resort, California c.1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“Outerbridge, who died in 1958, built his reputation in the early 1920s in New York and Paris making elegant black and white photo abstractions primarily of nudes and still lifes that rivalled those of his peers, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston. In the 1930s, Outerbridge mastered the exquisite tri-carbro-colour print process and went on to make some of the most important colour photographs in art and advertising of that time.
Moving to California in 1943 and taking up residence in Laguna Beach, Outerbridge made his last important body of work throughout California and Mexico. Between 1948 and until his death in 1958 he codified a new language in colour photographs that anticipated the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and others known for their “New Color” work in the 1970s.
“The curious position of prosperous American tourists amid the daily poverty experienced by some Mexicans is one of the recurring themes in the work, but with Outerbridge there is no political polemic,” says co-curator Phillip Prodger. “Outerbridge was thinking of his photographs as jig-saw puzzles made up of many different highly coloured pieces, each placed with meticulous care.”
Among Outerbridge’s subjects are carnival carriages with passengers dressed and headed for a grand party; a group of fashionable men relaxing in an outdoor hotel lobby drinking Coke and beer while a small orchestra plays; a girl in a lime-green dress and white sweater walking past a gas station whose painted-red details add a vibrant flourish to the scene.”
Text from the Downtown Central Library press release [Online] Cited 14/04/2009. No longer available online
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Model with Satin Dress, Laguna Beach, California c. 1950 Tricolor carbon print 20″ x 16″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Party, Laguna Beach c. 1950 Tricolor carbon print 20″ x 16″
Los Angeles Central Library 630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, CA 90071 Phone: (213) 228-7000
Many thankx to the Deutsche Guggenheim for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.
“My paintings are about light, about the way things look in their environment and especially about how things look painted. Form, colour and space are at the whim of reality, their discovery and organisation is the assignment of the realist painter.”
Richard Estes (American, b. 1932) Telephone Booths 1967
Richard Estes (American, b. 1932) Supreme Hardware 1974
Audrey Flack (American, 1931-2024) Queen 1976
Audrey Flack (American, 1931-2024) Strawberry Tart 1974 Oil on canvas 24 x 30 inches
Don Eddy (American, b. 1944) Untitled 1971
Chuck Close (American, 1940-2021) Leslie 1973
Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016) McDonalds Pick Up (installation view) 1970 41 x 41 inches Oil on canvas Collection of Marilyn and Ivan Karp
Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016) Airstream 1970
Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016) Dicks Union General 1971 Oil on canvas
By the end of the 1960s, a number of young artists working in the United States had begun making large-scale realist paintings directly from photographs. With often meticulous detail, they portrayed the objects, places, and people that defined urban and suburban everyday life in America. In contrast to the Pop artists, they did not present their ubiquitous, often mundane, subject matter in a glamorised or ironic manner. They sought instead to achieve a great degree of objectivity and precision in the execution of their work in an effort to stay more or less faithful to the mechanically generated images that served as their source material. They developed various means of systematically translating photographic information onto canvas. In prioritising the way the camera sees over the way the eye sees, they underscored the complexity of the relationship between the reproduction and the reproduced as well as the impact of photography on the perception of both daily life and reality in general.
A number of terms were proposed in quick succession to describe this novel approach to painting, chief among them Super-Realism, Hyperrealism, and Photorealism. The artists identified as Photorealists neither formed a coherent group nor considered themselves to be part of a movement, and a number of them actively challenged their association with the label. Nevertheless, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the seventeen artists in Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s – Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Franz Gertsch, Ralph Goings, Ron Kleemann, Richard McLean, Malcolm Morley, Stephen Posen, John Salt, Ben Schonzeit, and Paul Staiger – were exploring a related set of issues, methods, and subjects that led critics, curators, and art historians to both exhibit and write about their work as a coherent trend in contemporary art. Picturing America focuses on this formative, defining period in the history of Photorealism.
The exhibition includes thirty-one paintings, a number of them the most iconic and masterful works of 1967-1982, for example Richard Estes’s Telephone Booths (1967, above) and Chuck Close’s Leslie (1973, above). Picturing America is divided into four sections, three exploring key themes of Photorealist painting during the 1970s – Reflections on the City, Culture of Consumption, and American Life – and a fourth dedicated to a portfolio of ten lithographs made on the occasion of Documenta 5 in 1972, which featured the first major group showing of Photorealism.
Text from the Deutsche Guggenheim website
Â
Picturing Americas – American Photorealism in the 70s
Vernissage video of “Picturing Americas”, an art exhibition about American Photorealism in the 1970s, presented in Berlin by Deutsche Guggenheim, a joint venture between Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York. The exhibition (March – May 2009) was the first major showing of American Photorealism in Germany since “documenta 5” in 1972.
The video includes interviews of Valerie Hillings, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and interviews with the following artists: Ron Kleemann, Robert Bechtle, Tom Blackwell. You can also enjoy stills of selected pictures shown at the exhibition. Video courtesy of VernissageTV (VTV).
Text from the YouTube website
Robert Bechtle (American, 1932-2020) Foster’s Freeze, Escalon 1975
Charles Bell (American, 1935-1995) Gum Ball No. 10: “Sugar Daddy” 1975 Oil on canvas 66 x 66 inches
Charles Bell was born in 1935 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although Bell became interested in art at a young age, he never received formal training. In 1957, he completed a BBA at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and did not decide to pursue an artistic career until the early 1960s after touring in the U.S. Navy. At this point in time, he was working in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was drawn to the vibrantly colored paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Other artistic influences Bell has cited range from Pop art to the realisms of Jan Vermeer and Salvador DalÃ. It was through the painter Donald Timothy Flores, however, that Bell learned technique, most notably trompe l’oeil, while working in the former’s San Francisco studio. Under Flores, Bell painted mostly small-scale landscapes and still lifes, which earned him the Society of Western Artists Award in 1968.
In 1967 Bell relocated to New York, where he set up his first studio. Two years later he began showing at New York’s Meisel Gallery run by Louis K. Meisel, who popularized the term “Photorealism” and helped establish the style as a movement. Bell embraced a photo-based technique in his work not only for the way it renders imperceptible details visible, but also for how he saw the close-up photographic view as emblematic of contemporary visual experience steeped in a daily bombardment of media imagery. Bell carried out his Photorealist works by photographing his subjects in still-life compositions and painting from his image.
Although Photorealism emerged as a national phenomenon, certain general qualities distinguish the coastal approaches to the movement. While the majority of the West Coast Photorealists preferred landscapes, particularly images of cars, trucks, and homes within an overall landscape, Bell, like many of the New York–based Photorealists, focused on still life. Bell transformed everyday subject matter by enlarging ordinary objects like Raggedy Ann dolls and gumball machines to an unusually grand scale. His subjects are typically familiar objects associated with childhood, consumer culture, and play, and thus capable of resonating with a broad audience. By focusing on larger-than-life subjects, Bell’s paintings also deny narrative readings of his work. He has described his approach to selecting subject matter as more of an emotional than intellectual process. The hyperrealistic precision of his technique, combined with an exaggerated scale, produces a sensation that oscillates between familiarity and unfamiliarity, thus engaging the viewer sensually and emotionally. The exploration of light remains a persistent theme throughout Bell’s oeuvre, from his earliest treatments of light on mostly opaque surfaces to his interest in reflected and refracted light on transparent materials, as seen in the gumball machine series (1971-77). These investigations gave way to his subsequent interest in objects illuminated from within, such as pinball machines, which he began in 1977.
Unknown artist (American) Front Street, Looking North, Morgan City, LA 1929 Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (8.9 x 14 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
This looks a very interesting exhibition – I wish I could see the actual thing!
Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs and art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This exhibition will focus on a collection of 9,000 picture postcards amassed and classified by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), now part of the Metropolitan’s Walker Evans Archive. The picture postcard represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development. The dynamic installation of hundreds of American postcards drawn from Evans’s collection will reveal the symbiotic relationship between Evans’s own art and his interest in the style of the postcard. This will also be demonstrated with a selection of about a dozen of his own photographs printed in 1936 on postcard format photographic paper.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Street Scene, Morgan City, Louisiana 1935 Film negative 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
“Sold in five-and-dime stores in every small town in America, postcards satisfied the country’s need for human connection in the age of the railroad and Model T when, for the first time, many Americans regularly found themselves traveling far from home. At age twelve, Walker Evans began to collect and classify his cards. What appealed to the nascent photographer were the cards’ vernacular subjects, the simple, unvarnished, “artless” quality of the pictures, and the generic, uninflected, mostly frontal style that he later would borrow for his own work with the camera. Both the picture postcard and Evans’s photographs seem equally authorless – quiet documents that record the scene with an economy of means and with simple respect. Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard proposes that the picture postcard represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development.”
Text from the Steidl website
The American postcard came of age around 1907, when postal deregulations allowed correspondence to be written on the address side of the card. By 1914, the craze for picture postcards had proved an enormous boon for local photographers, as their black-and-white pictures of small-town main streets, local hotels and new public buildings were transformed into handsomely coloured photolithographic postcards that were reproduced in great bulk and sold in five-and-dime stores in every small town in America. Postcards met the nation’s need for communication in the age of the railroad and Model T, when, for the first time, many Americans often found themselves traveling far from home. In the Walker Evans Archive at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a collection of 9,000 such postcards amassed by the great American photographer, who began his remarkable collection at the age of 10. What appealed to Evans, even as a boy, were the vernacular subjects, the unvarnished, “artless” quality of the pictures and the generic, uninflected, mostly frontal style that he later would borrow for his own work. The picture postcard and Evans’ photographs seem equally authorless, appearing as quiet documents that record a scene with both economy of means and simple respect. This volume demonstrates that the picture postcard articulated a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’ artistic development.
Unknown artist (American) Main Street, Showing Confederate Monument, Lenoir, N. C. 1930s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (8.9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Walker Evans was the progenitor of the documentary style in American photography, and he argued that picture postcard captured a part of America that was not recorded in any other medium. In the early 20th century, picture postcards, sold in five-and-dime stores across America, depicted small towns and cities with realism and hometown pride – whether the subject was a local monument, a depot, or a coal mine.
Evans wrote of his collection: “The very essence of American daily city and town life got itself recorded quite inadvertently on the penny picture postcards of the early 20th century .… Those honest direct little pictures have a quality today that is more than mere social history .… The picture postcard is folk document.”
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard is the first exhibition to focus primarily on works drawn from The Walker Evans Archive. The installation is designed to convey the incredible range of his collection and to reflect the eclectic and obsessional ways in which the artist organised his picture postcards. For example, Evans methodically classified his collection into dozens of subject categories, such as “American Architecture,” “Factories,” “Automobiles,” “Street Scenes,” “Summer Hotels,” “Lighthouses,” “Outdoor Pleasures,” “Madness,” and “Curiosities”.
Marty Weil. “Walker Evans’ Picture Postcard Collection on the ephemera: exploring the world of old paper website Feb 24, 2009 [Online] Cited 12/06/2022. No longer available online
Unknown artist (American) Tennessee Coal, Iron, & R. R. Co.’s Steel Mills, Ensley, Ala. 1920s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (8.9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) View of Easton, Pennsylvania 1935 Postcard format gelatin silver print
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) View of Ossining, New York 1930-1931 Gelatin silver print 4 1/8 x 7 13/16 in. (10.5 x 19.8cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999
Unknown artist (American) Holland Vehicular Tunnel, New York City 1920s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Santa Fe station and yards, San Bernardino, California c. 1910 Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Men’s Bathing Department, Bath House, Hot Springs National Park, Ark. 1920s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
In 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, the US Postal service handled 700 million picture postcards. Evans would later recall his fondness for those “honest, direct, little pictures that once flooded the mail.” By the age of twelve he was a collector and through his lifetime, an obsessive. “Yes, I was a postcard collector at an early age. Every time my family would take me around for what they thought was my education, to show me the country in a touring car, to go to Illinois, to Massachusetts, I would rush into Woolworth’s and buy all the postcards.” For Evans, the addition of hand-colouring added a great deal of aesthetic value. …
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard reproduces hundreds of cards from his collection including the three magazine features mentioned above. Also the fine addition of an “illustrated transcript” of his now famous Lyric Documentary lecture at Yale in 1964 makes this a bit more interesting than the title may suggest. …
Later in life Evans had friends around the country while on photo trips keeping an eye for postcards that might interest. He had a particular love for ones produced by the Detroit Publishing Company which were considered the “Cadillac” of postcards. Lee Friedlander related the following from a recent interview: “The Detroit Publishing Company had a formula. If a town had 2,000 people or so, it got a main street postcard; if it had 3,500, it got the main street and also a courthouse square. Walker liked the formula. He had everyone looking for this or that. He told me once in Old Lyme, “If you run across any ‘Detroits,’ get them for me.” I found sixty or seventy cards for him. He loved them.”
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Stable, Natchez, Mississippi March 1935 Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
Unknown artist (American) Future New York, The City of Skyscrapers 1910s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Woolworth and Municipal Buildings from Brooklyn Bridge, New York 1910s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Curve at Brooklyn Terminal, Brooklyn Bridge, New York 1907 Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Empire State Building, New York 1930s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
Opening hours: Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm Closed Wednesday
Inge Morath (American born Austria, 1923-2002) From the series about Regensburg Museums 1999 Gelatin silver print
“To take pictures had become a necessity and I did not want to forgo it for anything.”
Inge Morath
The Magnum Foundation and the Inge Morath Foundation announce the sixth annual Inge Morath Award. The annual prize of $5,000 is awarded by the Magnum Foundation to a female documentary photographer under the age of 30, to support the completion of a long-term project. One award winner and up to two finalists are selected by a jury composed of Magnum photographers.
Inge Morath was an Austrian-born photographer who was associated with Magnum Photos for nearly fifty years. After her death in 2002, the Inge Morath Foundation was established to manage Morath’s estate and facilitate the study and appreciation of her contribution to photography.
Because Morath devoted much of her enthusiasm to encouraging women photographers, her colleagues at Magnum Photos established the Inge Morath Award in her honour. The Award is now given by the Magnum Foundation as part of its mission of supporting new generations of socially-conscious documentary photographers, and is administered by the Magnum Foundation in collaboration with the Inge Morath Foundation.
Past winners of the Inge Morath Award include: Kathryn Cook (US, ’08) for Memory Denied: Turkey and the Armenian Genocide; Olivia Arthur (UK, ’07) for The Middle Distance; Jessica Dimmock (US, ’06) for The Ninth Floor; Mimi Chakarova (US, ’06) for Sex Trafficking in Eastern Europe; Claudia Guadarrama (MX, ’05) for Before the Limit; and Ami Vitale (US, ’02), for Kashmir.
Text from The Inge Morath Foundation website [Online] Cited 01/03/2009. No longer available online
Inge Morath (American born Austria, 1923-2002) Visitor in the Metropolitan Museum 1958 Gelatin silver print
“I have photographed since 1952 and worked with Magnum Photos since 1953, first out of Paris, later out of New York. I am usually labeled as a photojournalist, as are all members of Magnum. I am quoting Henri Cartier-Bresson’s explanation for this: He wrote to John Szarkowski in answer to an essay in which Szarkowski stated that Cartier-Bresson labels himself as a photojournalist.
“May I tell you the reason for this label? As well as the name of its inventor? It was Robert Capa. When I had my first show in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1948 he warned me: ‘watch out what label they put on you. If you become known as a surrealist […] then you will be considered precious and confidential. Just go on doing what you want to do anyway but call yourself a photojournalist, which puts you into direct contact with everything that is going on in the world.'”
It is in this understanding that we have been working as a group and yet everyone following their own way of seeing. The power of photography resides no doubt partly in the tenacity with which it pushes whoever gets seriously involved with it to contribute in an immeasurable number of forms his own vision to enrich the sensibility and perception of the world around him.
[In the 1950s] the burden of the already photographed was considerably less than now. There was little of the feeling of being a latecomer who has to overwhelm the huge existing body of the photographic oeuvre – which, in photography as in painting and literature, necessarily leads first to the adoption and then rejection of an elected model, until one’s own work is felt to be equal or superior, consequently original.
Photography is a strange phenomenon. In spite of the use of that technical instrument, the camera, no two photographers, even if they were at the same place at the same time, come back with the same pictures. The personal vision is usually there from the beginning; result of a special chemistry of background and feelings, traditions and their rejection, of sensibility and voyeurism. You trust your eye and you cannot help but bare your soul. One’s vision finds of necessity the form suitable to express it.”
Inge Morath, Life as a Photographer, 1999
Text from The Inge Morath Foundation website [Online] Cited 01/03/2009. No longer available online
Many thankx to the Nelson-Atkins 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.
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses 2006 Digital pigment print
Famed photographer Gregory Crewdson will present the inaugural discussion in a series sponsored by the Photography Society of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City…
Crewdson’s work has been widely exhibited and reviewed. He makes large-scale photographs of elaborate and meticulously staged tableaux, which have been described as “micro-epics” that probe the dark corners of the psyche. Working in the manner of a film director, he leads a production crew, which includes a director of photography, special effects and lighting teams, casting director and actors. He typically makes several exposures that he later digitally combines to produce the final image.
“Crewdson is one of the most daring and inventive contemporary artists using photography,” said Keith F. Davis, Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins. “His meticulously crafted works are immensely rich in both narrative and psychological terms. They prod us to rethink our ‘usual’ relationship to photographs as physical objects and as records of worldly fact. Crewdson is a genuinely important figure in today’s art world. He has an international reputation and has influenced an entire generation of younger photographic artists.”
Attendance to the program is free.
Text from ArtDaily.org website
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses 2005 Digital pigment print
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses 2005 Digital pigment print
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled (Sunday Roast)Â from the series Beneath the Roses 2005 Digital pigment print
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 4525 Oak Street Kansas City, MO 64111
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.