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Exhibition: ‘Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs from Mexico and California’ at the Downtown Central Library, Los Angeles

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

Curated by William Ewing and Phillip Prodger

Paul Outerbridge. 'Women by Car, Laguna Beach, California' c. 1950

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. 'Balboa Beach, California' c. 1950

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

Opening hours:
Monday 10am – 8pm
Tuesday 10am – 8pm
Wednesday 10am – 8pm
Thursday 10am – 8pm
Friday 9.30am – 5.30pm
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Los Angeles Central Library website

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Exhibition: ‘Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s’ at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 7th March – 10th May, 2009

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.”

~ Ralph Goings

Richard Estes (American, b. 1932)
Telephone Booths
1967

Richard Estes (American, b. 1932)
Supreme Hardware
1974

Audrey Flack (American, b. 1931) 'Queen' 1976

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' 1970 (installation view)

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

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 Dalí. 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.

Text from the Guggenheim website

Robert Bechtle (American, 1932-2020)
Alameda Gran Torino
1974

Ron Kleemann (American, 1937-2014)
Big Foot Cross
1977-1978
Acrylic on canvas
54 x 78 inches

Deutsche Guggenheim

This museum closed in 2013.

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

Exhibition dates: 3rd February – 25th May 2009

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

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

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

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

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

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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

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

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

Text from the Steidl website

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

Text from the Amazon website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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Photographic prize: the Magnum Foundation and the Inge Morath Foundation announce the sixth annual Inge Morath Award

March 2009

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

Inge Morath (American born Austria, 1923-2002)
Window washer
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

Inge Morath (American born Austria, 1923-2002)
Mrs. Eveleigh Nash, London, 1953
1953
Gelatin silver print

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Artist’s talk: Photographer Gregory Crewdson to present at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

12th March, 2009

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 (Sunday Roast) from the series Beneath the Roses
2005
Digital pigment print

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
4525 Oak Street
Kansas City, MO 64111

Opening hours:
Thursday – Monday 10am – 5pm
Closed Tuesday and Wednesday

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art website

Gregory Crewdson on the Gagosian website

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The wonderful world of artist Dale Chihuly

March 2009

Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941)
Palazzo Ducale Chandelier
1998

Visit the Dale Chihuly website and click on the “Work” link to see a truly remarkable artist at work!

Marcus

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

Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941)
Chiostro di Sant’apollonia Chandelier
1996

Dale Chihuly is most frequently lauded for revolutionising the Studio Glass movement by expanding its original premise of the solitary artist working in a studio environment to encompass the notion of collaborative teams and a division of labor within the creative process. However, Chihuly’s contribution extends well beyond the boundaries both of this movement and even the field of glass: his achievements have influenced contemporary art in general. Chihuly’s practice of using teams has led to the development of complex, multipart sculptures of dramatic beauty that place him in the leadership role of moving blown glass out of the confines of the small, precious object and into the realm of large-scale contemporary sculpture. In fact, Chihuly deserves credit for establishing the blown glass form as an accepted vehicle for installation and environmental art beginning in the late twentieth century and continuing today.

Stylistically over the past forty years, Chihuly’s sculptures in glass have explored colour, line, and assemblage. Although his work ranges from the single vessel to indoor/outdoor site-specific installations, he is best known for his multipart blown compositions. These works fall into the categories of mini-environments designed for the tabletop as well as large, often serialised forms that are innovatively displayed in groupings on a wide variety of surfaces ranging from pedestals to bodies of natural water. Masses of these blown forms also have been affixed to specially engineered structures that dominate large exterior or interior spaces.

Over the years Chihuly and his teams have created a wide vocabulary of blown forms, revisiting and refining earlier shapes while at the same time creating exciting new elements, such as his Fiori, all of which demonstrate mastery and understanding of glassblowing techniques. Earlier forms, such as the Baskets, Seaforms, Ikebana, Venetians, and Chandeliers, from the late 1970s through the 1990s have been augmented since the early to mid-1990s with new blown elements. Chihuly and his teams primarily developed these while working in glass factories in France, Finland, Ireland, and Mexico. The resulting Reeds, Saguaros, Herons, Belugas, Seal Pups, and other forms are now juxtaposed with the earlier series, including Macchia, Niijima Floats, and Persians in lively new contexts.

“Since the early 1980s, all of Chihuly’s work has been marked by intense, vibrant colour and by subtle linear decoration. At first he achieved patterns by fusing into the surface of his vessels “drawings” composed of prearranged glass threads; he then had his forms blown in optic moulds, which created ribbed motifs. He also explored in the Macchia series bold, colourful lip wraps that contrasted sharply with the brilliant colours of his vessels. Finally, beginning with the Venetians of the early 1990s, elongated, linear blown forms, a product of the glassblowing process, have become part of his vocabulary, resulting in highly baroque, writhing elements. In recent years Chihuly has experimented with Polyvitro to create new interpretations of some of his glass forms.

Davira S. Taragin on the Dale Chihuly website

Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) 'Chiostro di Sant'apollonia Chandelier' 1996 (detail)

Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941)
The artist with his Chiostro di Sant’apollonia Chandelier (detail)
1996

Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941)
Colorado Springs Fountain
installation 2005

Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941)
Basket Forest
2005

Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941)
Macchia Forest
2004

Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941)
Ponti Duodo e Barbarigo Chandelier
1998

Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941)
Saffron Tower
2008

Dale Chihuly website

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Review: ‘Ocean Without A Shore’ video installation by Bill Viola at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

February 2009

Bill Viola – Ocean Without a Shore | TateShots

Bill Viola’s video installation, Ocean Without a Shore, is presented in the atmospheric setting of the church of San Gallo, Venice. Monitors positioned on three stone altars in the church show a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light, as if encountered at the intersection between death and life. Viola talks about his artistic intentions and the technical challenges of the piece.

Originally installed inside the intimate 15th century Venetian church of San Gallo as part of the 2007 Venice Biennale (see above) incorporating its internal architecture into the piece using the three existing stone altars as support for the video screens, the installation has been recreated in a small darkened room at The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. What an installation it is.

Deprived of the ornate surroundings of the altars of the Venetian chapel – altars of which Viola has said that, “… as per the original development of the origins of Christianity these alters actually are a place where the dead kind of reside and connect with those of us, the living, who are here on earth. And they really are a connection between a cross, between a tomb and an alter – a place to pray,”1 – the viewer is forced to concentrate on the images themselves. This is no bad thing, stripping away as it does a formalised, religious response to mortality.

In the work Viola combines the use of a primitive twenty five year old security black and white analogue video surveillance camera with a high definition colour video camera through the use of a special mirror prism system. This technology allows for the seamless combination of both inputs: the dead appear far off in a dark obscure place as grey ghosts in a sea of pulsating ‘noise’ and gradually walk towards you, crossing the invisible threshold of a transparent water wall that separates the dead from the living, to appear in the space transformed into a detailed colour image. As they do so the sound that accompanies the transformation grows in intensity reminding me of a jet aircraft. You, the viewer, are transfixed watching every detail as the ghosts cross-over into the light, through a water curtain.

The performances of the actors (for that is what they are) are slow and poignant. As Viola has observed, “I spent time with each person individually talking with them and you know when you speak with people, you realise then that everybody has experienced some kind of loss in their life, great and small. So you speak with them, you work with them, you spend time and that comes to the surface while we were working on this project together, you know? I didn’t want to over-direct them because I knew that the water would have this kind of visual effect and so they were able to, I think, use this piece on their own and a lot of them had their own stories of coming back and visiting a relative perhaps, who had died.”1

The resurrected are pensive, some wringing the hands, some staring into the light. One offers their hands to the viewer in supplication before the tips of the fingers touch the wall of water – the ends turning bright white as they push through the penumbrae of the interface. As they move forward the hands take on a stricken anguish, stretched out in rigour. Slowly the resurrected turn and return to the other side. We watch them as we watch our own mortality, life slipping away one day after another. Here is not the distraction of a commodified society, here is the fact of every human life: that we all pass.

The effect on the viewer is both sad but paradoxically uplifting. I cried.

A friend who I went with said that the images reminded her not of the dead temporarily coming back to life, but the birth of a new life – the breaking of water at the birth of a child. The performers seemed to her to behave like children brought anew into the world. One of my favourite moments was when the three screens were filled with just noise and a figure then appears out of the beyond, a dim and distant outline creating a transcendental moment. Unfortunately there are no images of these grainy figures. As noted below Viola uses a variety of different ethnic groups and cultures for his performers but the one very small criticism I have is they have no real individuality as people – there are no bikers with tattoos, no cross dressers, no punks because these do not serve his purpose. There is the black woman, the old woman, the middle aged man, the younger 30s man in black t-shirt: these are generic archetypes of humanity moulded to Viola’s artistic vision.

Viola has commented, “I think I have designed a piece that’s open ended enough, where the people and the range of people, the kind of people we chose are from various ethnic groups and cultures. And I think that the feeling of more this is a piece about humanity and it’s about the fragility of life, like the borderline between life and death is actually not a hard wall, it’s not to be opened with a lock and key, its actually very fragile, very tenuous.

You can cross it like that in an instant and I think religions, you know institutions aside, I think just the nature of our awareness of death is one of the things that in any culture makes human beings have that profound feeling of what we call the human condition and that’s really something I am really interested in. I think this piece really has a lot to do with, you know, our own mortality and all that that means.”1

These series of encounters at the intersection of life and death are worthy of the best work of this brilliant artist. He continues to astound with his prescience, addressing what is undeniable in the human condition.

Long may he continue.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ TateShots. Venice Biennale: Bill Viola. 30 June 2007 [Online] Cited 23/09/2009. No longer available online

“The unfolding of consciousness, the revelation of beauty, present even after death, the moment of awe, the space without words, the emptiness that builds mountains, the joy of loving, the sorrow of loss, the gift of leaving something behind for the next traveler.”

Bill Viola

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024)
Ocean Without A Shore (excerpt)
2007
Installation in the church of San Gallo, Venice

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024)
Ocean Without A Shore (excerpt)
2007

“Ocean Without a Shore is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then break through an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realise that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.”

Bill Viola
25 May 2007
Text © Bill Viola 2007

The work was inspired by a poem by the twentieth century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop:

Hearing things more than beings,
listening to the voice of fire,
the voice of water.
Hearing in wind the weeping bushes,
sighs of our forefathers.

The dead are never gone:
they are in the shadows.
The dead are not in earth:
they’re in the rustling tree,
the groaning wood,
water that runs,
water that sleeps;
they’re in the hut, in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.

The dead are never gone,
they’re in the breast of a woman,
they’re in the crying of a child,
in the flaming torch.

The dead are not in the earth:
they’re in the dying fire,
the weeping grasses,
whimpering rocks,
they’re in the forest, they’re in the house,
the dead are not dead.

Text from the Ocean Without A Shore website [Online] Cited 23/09/2009. No longer available online

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) 'Ocean Without A Shore' 2007 video still

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) 'Ocean Without A Shore' 2007 video insatllation

Installation photographs of Ocean Without A Shore at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) 'Ocean Without A Shore' 2007 original video installation at church of San Gallo (still)

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024)
Ocean Without A Shore (still)
2007
Original installation at church of San Gallo

NGV International
180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne

Open daily 10am-5pm

National Gallery of Victoria International website

Bill Viola website

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Exhibition: ‘Edward Steichen In High Fashion: The Conde Nast Years, 1923 – 1937’ at the International Centre of Photography, New York

Exhibition dates: 16th January – 3rd May, 2009

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Gloria Swanson' 1924 'Edward Steichen In High Fashion: The Conde Nast Years, 1923 - 1937' at the International Centre of Photography, New York, Jan - May, 2009

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Gloria Swanson (Vanity Fair, February 1, 1924)
1924
Gelatin silver print
The Sylvio Perlstein Collection Courtesy of Condé Nast Archive, Condé Nast Publications, Inc, New York/ Paul Hawryluk, Dawn Lucas and Rachael Smalley

As part of the International Center of Photography’s 2009 Year of Fashion, the museum will host a retrospective of Edward Steichen’s fashion and celebrity portraiture. Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937, will be on view at ICP (1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street) from January 16 through May 3, 2009. It will feature 175 vintage photographs, drawn mainly from the extensive archive of original prints at Condé Nast, along with a selection of important prints from the collection of the George Eastman House Museum. This will be the first exhibition in which the full range of his fashion photography and celebrity portraiture will be shown, including many images that have never been exhibited before. Having previously traveled throughout Europe, the exhibition will be presented on its North American tour in this version only at ICP.

Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was already a famed Pictorialist photographer and painter in the United States and abroad when he was offered the position of chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair by Condé Nast. Upon assuming the job, the forty-four year old artist began one of the most lucrative and controversial careers in photography. To Alfred Stieglitz and his followers, Steichen was seen as damaging the cause of photography as a fine art by agreeing to do commercial editorial work. Nevertheless, Steichen’s years at Condé Nast magazines were extraordinarily prolific and inspired. He began by applying the soft focus style he had helped create to the photography of fashion. But soon he revolutionised the field, banishing the gauzy light of the Pictorialist era and replacing it with the clean, crisp lines of Modernism. In the process he changed the presentation of the fashionable woman from that of a distant, romantic creature to that of a much more direct, appealing, independent figure. At the same time he created lasting portraits of hundreds of leading personalities in movies, theatre, literature, politics, music, and sports, including Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Colette, Winston Churchill, Amelia Earhart, Jack Dempsey, Noel Coward, Greta Garbo, Dorothy Parker, and Cecil B. De Mille.

From the ArtDaily.org website

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

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'On George Baher's yacht' 1928 Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Gloria Swanson' 1924 'Edward Steichen In High Fashion: The Conde Nast Years, 1923 - 1937' at the International Centre of Photography, New York, Jan - May, 2009

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
On George Baher’s yacht
1928
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Condé Nast Archive

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Gary Cooper
1930
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Condé Nast Archive

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Joan Crawford
1932
Gelatin silver print
© 1932 Condé Nast

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Princess Nathalie Paley wearing sandals by Shoecraft
1934
Gelatin silver print
© 1934 Condé Nast

Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley (Russian: Наталья Павловна Палей; 5 December 1905 – 27 December 1981) was a Russian aristocrat who was a non-dynastic member of the Romanov family. A daughter of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia, she was a first cousin of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II. After the Russian Revolution, she emigrated first to France and later to the United States. She became a fashion model, socialite, vendeuse, and briefly pursued a career as a film actress.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Sinclair Lewis' 1932

Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters.” Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth(1929), and It Can’t Happen Here (1935).

Several of his notable works were critical of American capitalism and materialism during the interwar period. Lewis is respected for his strong characterisations of modern working women.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Patricia Bowman' 1932

Patricia Bowman (December 12, 1908 – March 18, 1999) was an American ballerina, ballroom dancer, musical theatre actress, television personality, and dance teacher.

Dance critic Jack Anderson described her as “the first American ballerina to win critical acclaim and wide popularity as a classical and a musical-theater dancer … Her sparkling stage personality won her many fans.” She was the first prima ballerina of the Radio City Music Hall when it opened in 1932, and is chiefly remembered for her work as a founding member of the American Ballet Theatre with whom she was a principal dancer from 1939 to 1941.

Text from the Wikipedia website

An exhibition of 175 works by Edward Steichen drawn largely from the Condé Nast archives, this is the first presentation to give serious consideration to the full range of Steichen’s fashion images. Organised by the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, in conjunction with the International Center of Photography, the exhibition will open at ICP after an extensive tour in Europe. Steichen’s approach to fashion photography was formative and over the course of his career he changed public perceptions of the American woman. An architect of American Modernism and a Pictorialist, Steichen exhibited his fashion images alongside his art photographs. Steichen’s crisp, detailed, high-key style revolutionised fashion photography, and his influence is felt in the field to this day – Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Bruce Weber are among his stylistic successors.

Text from the International Centre of Photography website

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Evening shoes by Vida Moore' 1927

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Model posing for Beauty Primer on hand and nail care
1934
Gelatin silver print
© 1934 Condé Nast

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Anna May Wong' 1930

Wong Liu Tsong (January 3, 1905 – February 3, 1961), known professionally as Anna May Wong, was an American actress, considered the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood, as well as the first Chinese American actress to gain international recognition. Her varied career spanned silent film, sound film, television, stage, and radio.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Sylvia Sidney' 1929

Sylvia Sidney (born Sophia Kosow; August 8, 1910 – July 1, 1999) was an American stage, screen, and film actress whose career spanned 70 years. She rose to prominence in dozens of leading roles in the 1930s. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams in 1973. She later gained attention for her role as Juno, a case worker in the afterlife, in Tim Burton’s 1988 film Beetlejuice, for which she won a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Pola Negri' 1925

Pola Negri (/ˈpoʊlə ˈnɛɡri/; born Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec [apɔˈlɔɲa xaˈwupʲɛt͡s]; 3 January 1897 – 1 August 1987) was a Polish stage and film actress and singer. She achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles. She was also acknowledged as a sex symbol of her time.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Loretta Young' 1931

Loretta Young (born Gretchen Michaela Young; January 6, 1913 – August 12, 2000) was an American actress. Starting as a child, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1989. She received numerous honors including an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and three Primetime Emmy Awards as well as two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her work in film and television.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Mary Heberden' 1935

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Mary Heberden' 1935 'Katharine Hepburn wearing a coat by Clare Potter' 1933

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Katharine Hepburn wearing a coat by Clare Potter
1933
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Condé Nast Archive

International Centre of Photography website

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Exhibition: ‘Steam and Steel: The Photographs of O. Winston Link’ at George Eastman Museum, New York

Exhibition dates: 11th October 2008 – 25th January, 2009

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) 'Hot Shot Eastbound, at the Iaeger Drive-In. W.V. Aug. 2, 1956' from the exhibition 'Steam and Steel: The Photographs of O. Winston Link' at George Eastman Museum, New York, Oct 2008 - Jan 2009

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001)
Hot Shot Eastbound, at the Iaeger Drive-In. W.V. Aug. 2, 1956
1956
Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link/© Conway Link
Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum

Link pasted the plane into the negative at a later stage

I have to admit to a very large amount of admiration for this photographer. He is brilliant, simply the best photographer of trains and their cultural surrounds that the world has ever seen. He persevered within his photographic projects through thick and thin. I feel a special affinity toward this man as I love trains, planes, ships and trucks (although I am yet to use trains in my work).

As with all great photographers he pursued his goals with passion, a unique eye and the ability to produce a ‘signature’ photograph that could only be his. His photographs are timeless remembrances of the history and culture of the era. The above image combines all the elements of 1950s America – the drive in, the couple, the speed, the convertible car, night and the ambiguous slightly sinister rocket like plane. Planes, trains and automobiles are the stuff of legend for me, a child of the 1950s. The lighting of the train is incredible, with rows of flash set off at just the right moment. The precision and skill to do this and the resulting tableaux have few equals. When I first saw this image I was amazed and still am today!

O. Winston Link had a deep respect for the people and machines he was photographing – capturing a vanishing world before it all but disappeared. Thank god there was someone with vision and foresight to accomplish this task so that these incredible and indelible images will forever transcend the time in which they were taken, to give joy to the people that look at them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) 'Maud Bows to the Virginia Creeper, Green Cove, Virginia, October 27, 1956' from the exhibition 'Steam and Steel: The Photographs of O. Winston Link' at George Eastman Museum, New York, Oct 2008 - Jan 2009

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001)
Maud Bows to the Virginia Creeper, Green Cove, Virginia, October 27, 1956
1956
Gelatin silver print
15 1/2 x 19 3/8 in. (39.37 x 49.21cm)
O. Winston Link/© Conway Link
Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum

The Abingdon Branch of the N&W led Link to another approach in his documentation of the railroad. Since the trains did not run at night, all of the images had to be made in daylight, making this branch the source of many of his genre scenes and colour images. The branch was short but steep, including the highest point of any passenger train in the east. With top speeds of 25 mph, it earned the nickname “Virginia Creeper.”

Link found the slow pace and setting the most bucolic of the entire N&W system. He wrote, “There was beauty at every curve and every bridge.” The line crept by cascading waterways and across high wooden trestles. Although the entire branch was abandoned in 1978, the railbed has since become a hiking trail, with Green Cove the only station remaining and restored to the look of this photograph.

Text from the Akron Art Museum website

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) '"Giant Oak," Max Meadows, Va., Dec. 30, 1957' from the exhibition 'Steam and Steel: The Photographs of O. Winston Link' at George Eastman Museum, New York, Oct 2008 - Jan 2009

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001)
“Giant Oak,” Max Meadows, Va., Dec. 30, 1957
1957
Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link/© Conway Link
Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum

Ogle Winston Link, known commonly as O. Winston Link, has been revered by many as the most important railroad photographer of all time. He is best known for his black-and-white photography and sound recordings of the last days of steam locomotive railroading in the United States in the late 1950s. A true American master, Link produced night-time photographs of the railroad over a five-year period that ended when the last steam locomotive of the Norfolk & Western Railway was taken out of service in May 1960.

This exhibition features more than 100 framed photographs as well as Link’s actual photographic and lighting equipment, plus his personal notebooks detailing set-ups, formulas, and exposure details.

Text from the George Eastman Museum website

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001)
NW1635, The Birmingham Special, arriving at Rural Retreat, Va.
1957
Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link/© Conway Link
Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001)
“The Birmingham Special Crosses Bridge 201,” near Radford, Va., Dec. 17, 1957
1957
Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link/© Conway Link
Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001)
“Second Pigeon Creek Shifter and Icicles,” near Gilbert, W.Va., March 16, 1960
1960
Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link/© Conway Link
Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001)
NW709 Train No. 3, The Pocahontas, Westbound Exiting Montgomery Tunnel, Christiansburg, Virginia
1957
Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link/© Conway Link
Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum

Unknown photographer
“Link Sets Up Two View Cameras at Bridge 8,” Watauga, Va., Nov. 1, 1957
1957
Gelatin silver print
Thomas H. Garver/© Conway Link
Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum

George Eastman Museum
900 East Ave, Rochester, NY 14607, USA

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm
Sunday 11am – 5pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

O. Winston Link Museum

George Eastman House website

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Exhibition: ‘William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 7th November, 2008 – 25th January, 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' c. 1971-1973 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Nov 2008 - Jan 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
c. 1971-1973
From Troubled Waters 1980
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

One of the most influential photographers of the last half-century, William Eggleston has defined the history of colour photography. This exhibition is the artist’s first retrospective in the United States and includes both his colour and black-and-white photographs as well as Stranded in Canton, the artist’s video work from the early 1970s.

William Eggleston’s great achievement in photography can be described in a straightforward way: he captures everyday moments and transforms them into indelible images. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 presents a comprehensive selection from nearly fifty years of image-making.

Born in 1939 in Sumner, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta region, Eggleston showed an early interest in cameras and audio technology. While studying at various colleges in the South, he purchased his first camera and came across a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment (1952). In the early 1960s, Eggleston married and moved to Memphis, where he has lived ever since. He first worked in black-and-white, but by the end of the decade began photographing primarily in colour. Internationally acclaimed and widely traveled, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing all around the world, conveying intuitive responses to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and moods as specific expressions of local colour. Psychologically complex and casually refined, bordering on kitsch and never conventionally beautiful, these photographs speak principally to the expanse of Eggleston’s imagination and have had a pervasive influence on all aspects of visual culture. By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing, Eggleston convinces us of the idea of the democratic camera.

This exhibition was organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Text from the Whitney Museum of American Art website

Many thankx to the Whitney Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' 1973 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Nov 2008 - Jan 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Baby Doll Cadillac)
1973, printed 1996
From the Los Alamos portfolio
Dye transfer print
11 3/4 × 17 11/16in. (29.8 × 44.9cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, NYC

William Eggleston (America, born July 27, 1939) 'Memphis' c. 1970

William Eggleston video

“This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston’s retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A key figure in American photography, Eggleston is credited almost single-handedly with ushering in the era of colour photography. Eggleston discusses his shift from black and white to colour photography in this video as, “it never was a conscious thing. I had wanted to see a lot of things in colour because the world is in colour”. Also included in this video are Eggleston’s remarks about his personal relationships with the subjects of many of his photographs.”

The Ending of Stranded in Canton

In 1973, photographer William Eggleston picked up a Sony PortaPak and took to documenting the soul of Memphis and New Orleans. Transvestites, geek men biting off chicken heads, classy blues musicians, and crazed men with guns form the backbone of this documentary look at the “Southern Hipsters” of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Stranded in Canton

In 1973, photographer William Eggleston picked up a Sony PortaPak and took to documenting the soul of Memphis and New Orleans.

“These were the Merry Prankster and “Easy Rider” years, when road trips and craziness were cool, and Mr. Eggleston set out on some hard-drinking picture-taking excursions. He also embarked on repeated shorter expeditions closer to home in the form of epic bar crawls, which resulted in the legendary video “Stranded in Canton.”

Originally existing as countless hours of unedited film and recently pared down by the filmmaker Robert Gordon to a manageable 76 minutes, it was shot in various places in 1973 and 1974. (The new version is in the retrospective.) Mr. Eggleston would show up with friends at favourite bars, turn on his Sony Portapak, push the camera into people’s faces and encourage them to carry on.

And they did. Apart from brief shots of his children and documentary-style filming of musicians, the result is like some extreme form of reality television. Your first thought is: Why do people let themselves be seen like this? Do they know what they look like? You wonder if Mr. Eggleston is deliberately shaping some tragicomic Lower Depths drama or just doing his customary shoot-what’s-there thing, the what’s-there in this case being chemical lunacy. For all the film’s fringy charge there’s something truly creepy and deadly going on, as there is in much of Mr. Eggleston’s art. You might label it Southern Gothic; but whatever it is, it surfaces when a lot of his work is brought together.”

Holland Cotter. “Old South Meets New, in Living Color,” on The New York Times website Nov 6, 2008

William Eggleston (America, b. 1939)
Untitled
c. 1976
From Election Eve
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Cheim & Read Gallery

William Eggleston (American, born 1939)
Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi)
1980
Dye-transfer print
29.6 x 45.5cm (11 5/8 x 17 15/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
Nd
Dye-transfer print
From Los Alamos 1965-1968 and 1972-1974 (published 2003)
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' c. 1975 (Marcia Hare in Memphis Tennessee) c. 1975

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Marcia Hare in Memphis Tennessee)
c. 1975
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Huntsville, Alabama' c. 1971

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis Tennessee)
1965
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis)
c. 1969-1971
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Cheim & Read Gallery

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1983
From a series of photographs taken at Graceland
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

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