Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print
Wishing you all a happy festive season and a safe and Happy New Year.
Looking forward to more photographic explorations in 2026.
Thank you to all Art Blart readers for their support in 2025!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Curators: The exhibition is co-curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, and Deborah Willis, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University.
Thomas Ellis (American, 1963-2025)
The Game
1947
Gelatin silver print
21 x 31.8cm (8 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.)
Courtesy of the Darrel Ellis Estate, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Candice Madey, New York
Photo: Adam Reich
Thomas Sayers Ellis (October 5, 1963 – July 17, 2025) was an American poet, photographer, musician, bandleader and teacher.
“There’s nothing like a photograph for reminding you about difference. There it is. It stares you ineradicably in the face”
~ Professor Stuart Hall, 2008
This looks to be a “worthy” exhibition on photography and the Black Arts movement but without having seen it in person there is little specific comment I can make about the exhibition. However, some thoughts on the photographs in this posting are possible.
It is a joy for me to be able to learn more about an important area in photographic history, vis a vis “the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture.” (Text from the NGA website)
There are many photographers in the posting who I have never heard of before, whose work I have never seen, and I always like learning, for in learning you may gain some small amount of wisdom and appreciation of different cultures and points of view. I have added biographical information for each artist to their images where possible.
The photographs from the period 1955-1985 mark a shift away from an aesthetic and formalist way of looking at the image where the role of the photographer and the reception of the print was in its primacy (the 1950s-1960s) “towards a more polemical, critical and cultural analysis by Tagg, Sekul, Solomon-Godeau and others in the 1980s and 90s. These shifts from the pictorial to the political … decentre the photographer and bring into focus the photographed and viewing subjects…”1
In these photographs it is not so much the primacy of the artist, the aesthetics of the image, nor the photographs status as art objects, but the people within the images that are the focus of attention. They bring to the forefront of the viewer’s consciousness (or should do) the racial politics at work within photography in the context of discussions around race and representation and the ongoing legacies of Western imperialism.
The photographs demonstrate “that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography, and their effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.”2
They bring to light (aha!) “new ways of seeing that bring the Other into focus”, photographs that challenge us to acknowledge the structural racism that is embedded in daily life which produces adverse outcome for people of color. Through such an acknowledgement we may open up a personally and culturally transformative dialogic space, “a “space of possibilities” where participants listen, engage with, and even transcend their own viewpoints to see issues from multiple angles” – as there can never be a single view point when we “examine” social groups that are subaltern (groups that have been marginalised or oppressed).
From a distance this seems to be one of the problems of the exhibition. It’s all so worthy and righteous, full of the injustice of it all, and perhaps that’s as it should be for those were the times and the culture from which these photographs emerged. But I can’t help but get the feeling that this exhibition seems to feel and read more like a study in cultural anthropology, more a sociological statement than any celebration of Black history and culture from the period. Speaking from the standpoint of a white, middle class artist and writer, there seems to be little joy to be had here – to me one of the essential elements of Black culture, the joy of gospel, jazz, laughter, love – but I’m supposedly on the inside looking out (or is it the outside looking in!). Who am I to say.
What is undeniable is that, as Professor Stuart Hall so succinctly observes, there is nothing like a photograph to remind you of difference, to challenge your perceptions on how you view and interact with the world around you, to open up new ways of seeing. As such, the photographs in this exhibition may allow us deeper insight into the “conditions of our own becoming” (while human beings have agency, the circumstances under which they act and develop their humanity are largely shaped by existing material, social, and historical conditions that they did not choose) of the people that live around us, even as we acknowledge that there is no singular point of view, that cultural forms have no single determinate meaning, and that no one, and “no discipline, whether art- or photo-history, or ethnography or geography, speaks with a single voice.”1
Not one way of seeing, but multiple ways of seeing our fellow human beings.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Catherine De Lorenzo. “Oceanian imaginings in French photographic archives,” in History of Photography, Issue 2, Volume 28, 2004, pp. 137-184
2/ Text from the description of the book by Mark Sealy. Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019.
The book examines how Western photographic practice has been used as a tool for creating Eurocentric and violent visual regimes, and demands that we recognise and disrupt the ingrained racist ideologies that have tainted photography since its inception in 1839.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art, Washington for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The work that was done by artists and photographers before, during, and after the Black Arts Movement establishes a strategy of community engagement. It is that engagement that allows communities to define themselves and also to engage people in new forms of looking.”
Co-curator Philip Brookman
Cultural forms set the wider terms of limitation and possibility for the (re)presentation of particularities and we have to understand how the latter are caught in the former in order to understand why such-and-such gets (re)presented in the way it does. Without understanding the way images function in terms of, say, narrative, genre or spectacle, we don’t really understand why they turn out the way they do.
Secondly, cultural forms do not have single determinate meanings – people make sense of them in different ways, according to the cultural (including sub-cultural) codes available to them. For instance, people do not necessarily read negative images of themselves as negative …
Richard Dyer. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993, pp.2-3
Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936)
Coltrane at the Gate
1961
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Charina Endowment Fund
Adger Cowans is a pioneering photographer and one of the founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective that played a key role in shaping Black photography in the 1960s and beyond.
In 1958 Cowans worked as an assistant to renowned photographer Gordon Parks. Throughout the 1960s Cowans became involved with influential groups associated with the Black Arts Movement, including Group 35 and Afri-COBRA, which he joined in 1968.
His photographic work spans a wide range of approaches and subjects, from street photography in Harlem to documenting major historical events like the rallies and the funeral of Malcolm X. He also captured iconic jazz musicians, including John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Frank Dandridge (American, b. 1938)
Blinded Birmingham Church Bombing survivor, Sarah Jean Collins, Birmingham, AL, 1963
“Clutching robe in hospital bed, Sarah Jean Collins was near bomb when it exploded in church. Her sister was killed. It will be weeks before she knows whether she can see again.”
September 27, 1963
Gelatin silver print
Overall: 35 x 50 cm (13 3/4 x 19 11/16 in.)
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
© Frank Dandridge
Photo: Frank Dandridge / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock
Frank Dandridge is a freelance photojournalist who worked mainly for Life Magazine in the 60’s. He covered numerous assignments, including, The Harlem Riots in 1964, Dr. King’s March on Washington, in 1963, and the terrible Birmingham Bombing in 1963. His photos also appeared in Look, Saturday Evening Post, Pageant, Paris Match, Good Housekeeping, Quick Magazine, the Canadian Film Board, Playboy, and many other national magazines. He won an Art Director’s Award for his photo essay, “The Two Faces of Harlem”, that appeared in Look magazine. His work included photographing many celebrities, including, Bobby Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, President Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jimmy Hoffa.
Text from the IMBd website
The photos that Frank Dandridge shot for LIFE magazine paint a vivid portrait of violence and race in 1960s America. He reported on riots in Harlem, in Watts, and in Newark,. He was in Selma, Alabama when Martin Luther King marched in the days immediately after Bloody Sunday. Dandridge’s most famous photo is of Sarah Collins, a 12-year-old girl whose eyes were in bandages after the bombing of a Sunday school class at the16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. That bombing killed four girls, including Collins’ sister, while wounding many others and leaving Collins blind in one eye. The image of Collins in her hospital bed made vivid for America the cruelty of this horrific bombing by four men who were members of a splinter group of the Klu Klux Klan.
Bill Syken. “Race in the 1960s: The Photography of Frank Dandridge,” on the LIFE website Nd [Online] Cited 26/11/2025
Frank Dandridge (American, b. 1938)
Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders watched President Lyndon B. Johnson speak on television
1965
Gelatin silver print
© Frank Dandridge
Photo: Frank Dandridge / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock
Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
Racism, when it is embedded in the structures, policies and practices of our social and political institutions can be termed “institutional”. Institutional racism, which will be described by the authors more fully below, is reflected in professional practice and working methods that result in racialized disparities. Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and political philosopher, stands out as one of the earliest academics to explore the nature of racism from a psychosocial perspective. Fanon (1967) talked of “vulgar racism in its biological form”, which was evident for several hundreds of years, being replaced in the mid-20th century by “more subtle forms” (p. 35). In a study of Fanon’s clinical psychology and social theories, McCulloch (1983) refers to this new racism as “cultural racism” – describing this as “a more sophisticated form [of racism] in which the object is no longer the physiology of the individual but the cultural style of a people” (p. 120). Cultural racism believes that the dominant group’s culture is superior to the seemingly “lower” minority groups.
Cultural racism champions the supremacy of cultures. Commonly, some version of European culture or, more specifically, white European culture, rather than the white “race” (Amin, 1989), thereby producing a situation of racism without “races” (Balibar, 1991). It was the American civil leaders Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Carmichael & Hamilton, 1967), who first described institutional racism:
It takes two, closely related forms … we call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals … the second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing acts … and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. (p. 2)
Institutional racism forms an array of broader structural racism processes “that exclude … substantial numbers of members of particular groups from significant participation in major social institutions” (Henry & Tator, 2005, p. 352). According to minority mental health models like the racism-induced reactive negative emotionality cycle (Lazaridou & Heinz, 2021), structural racism and institutional racism result in experiences of rejection and emotional alienation in public spaces for Black people and People of Color (Lentin, 2015).
Structural racism in employment, earnings and credit may mutually limit equal access to quality, affordable accommodation. However, when public spaces are sites of surveillance, intimidation and frequent hostility by the police or by ordinary citizens, then the structure of social situations, such as even leaving one’s house and speaking in public, are filled with stress, anxiety, and fear (Chou et al., 2012; Sibrava et al., 2013). There is pervasive evidence that structural racism has destructive impacts on the health and wellbeing of patients from minority groups, including migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (Alvarez et al., 2016; Bailey et al., 2017; Graham et al., 2016; Noh & Kaspar, 2003).
Felicia Lazaridou and Suman Fernando. “Deconstructing institutional racism and the social construction of whiteness: A strategy for professional competence training in culture and migration mental health,” in Transcult Psychiatry, 2022 Apr 4; 59(2), pp. 175-187.
Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 2025 – January 2026
James Barnor (Ghanaian, b. 1929)
Drum cover girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London
1966, printed 2023
Chromogenic print
29 × 29cm (11 7/16 × 11 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© James Barnor / Courtesy Galerie Clementine de la Feronnière
In the tradition of Black African photographers such as Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta and Sanlé Sory, Barnor’s photographs present people of all ages and all walks of life – whether in Accra, Ghana or in the suburbs of London, England – through direct and honest studio portraits or in more candid documents of the communities that surrounded him. …
Barnor’s photographs plant the seed of equality and happiness as a way of transmitting this knowledge to others. “He is a living archive, a link between the birth of photography in West Africa and the development of the discipline for the modern era.”2 It is his passion and feeling for the practice of photography, the stories that it tells and his engagement with the spirit of the people that he encounters – as a conversation between equals – that intuitively ground his work in the history of photography and the history of Black culture and makes them forever young.
Marcus Bunyan. “It’s late, but it’s better late than never,” on the Art Blart website October 17, 2021 [Online] Cited 26/11/2025
Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006)
Above this Earth, Games, Games
1968
Collage and acrylic on canvas
Overall: 114.3 x 114.3 cm (45 x 45 in.)
Collection of Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago
Photo: P.D. Young / Spektra Imaging
During the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, the prolific artist Ralph Arnold (1928-2006) made photocollages that appropriated and commented upon mass media portrayals of gender, sexuality, race and politics. Arnold’s complex visual arrangements of photography, painting and text were built upon his own multilayered identity as a black, gay veteran and prominent member of Chicago’s art community…
Text from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago
Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006)
Soul Box
1969
Assemblage with found objects and collage on Masonite
Framed: 71.1 x 56.8 x 14.9cm (28 x 22 3/8 x 5 7/8 in.)
Private collection of Courtney A. Moore
Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago
The first exhibition to consider photography’s impact on a cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.
Uniting around civil rights and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many visual artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers expressed hope and dignity through their art. These creative efforts became known as the Black Arts Movement.
Photography was central to the movement, attracting all kinds of artists – from street photographers and photojournalists to painters and graphic designers. This expansive exhibition presents 150 examples tracing the Black Arts Movement from its roots to its lingering impacts, from 1955 to 1985. Explore the bold vision shaped by generations of artists including Billy Abernathy, Romare Bearden, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Doris Derby, Emory Douglas, Barkley Hendricks, Barbara McCullough, Betye Saar, and Ming Smith.
Text from the NGA website
Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 investigates the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture. The Black Arts Movement was a uniquely American creative initiative, closely linked to the civil rights movement and comparable to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s in its impact. Through new institutions and publications, Black writers, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists explored ways their art could further the American civil rights movement and communicate messages of Black history and identity. Photography and the Black Arts Movement reveals how studio and street photographers, photojournalists, painters, conceptual artists, graphic designers, and community activists used photography to cut across traditional racial boundaries, express messages of empowerment, and advance social justice.
Bringing together some 150 works by more than 100 artists, Photography and the Black Arts Movement also includes objects from Africa, the Caribbean region, and Great Britain, representing artistic dialogues created through travel, migrations, and international engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the movement. Among the artists included are Billy Abernathy, Anthony Barboza, Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Ernest Cole, Adger Cowans, Roy DeCarava, Emory Douglas, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Samuel Fosso, Charles Gaines, Barkley Hendricks, Danny Lyon, Barbara McCullough, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Juan Sánchez, Coreen Simpson, Betye Saar, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems.
The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Text from the NGA website
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937)
During the summer of 1960, the elders of Orangeburg took to the streets as part of ongoing demonstrations and boycotts in support of civil rights. They are standing outside a segregated supermarket where they were allowed to shop but not sit down for lunch
1960, printed 2024
Inkjet print
37.3 x 55.9cm (14 11/16 x 22 in.)
Cecil J. Williams (born November 26, 1937) is an American photographer, publisher, author and inventor who is best known for his photographs documenting the civil rights movement in South Carolina.
He began his career at an early age, photographing wedding and family parties. He studied art at Claflin University, while also being a photographer for the university. …
At the age of 14, Williams was one of 25 photographers around the world freelancing for JET magazine. JET caught wind of the movement growing in Orangeburg. They needed an onsite correspondent for constant updates, and someone to document the events. The only time Williams’ work appeared on the cover of JET was his picture of Coretta Scott King speaking at the protest during the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike.
Williams has photographed significant desegregation efforts in South Carolina since the 1950s. Some of his most notable pictures are of the activity during the Briggs v. Elliott case in Summerton. It was the first of five desegregation cases pushing to integrate public schools in the United States. The five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case that declared that having “separate but equal” public schools for whites and blacks was unconstitutional.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937)
Clara White Mission, Jacksonville, Florida
1960s, printed 2024
Inkjet print
45.7 x 45.7cm (18 x 18 in.)
Bob Fletcher (American, b. 1938)
Placards of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner at a Demonstration on the boardwalk during the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey
1964
Gelatin silver print
33.97 × 22.86cm (13 3/8 × 9 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Anonymous gift
Robert E. “Bob” Fletcher is a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and educator. Born in 1938 in Detroit, Michigan, Fletcher majored in History and English at Fisk University and Wayne State University. In 1963, Fletcher became active in the civil rights movement, taking photographs for and administering the National Student Association’s Detroit Tutorial Program. After moving to New York City, he worked at the Harlem Education Project and set up a photographic workshop.
In the summer of 1964, Fletcher became a Freedom School teacher in Mississippi and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff as a photographer; he documented the Civil Rights Movement throughout the South, between 1964 and 1968. After returning to New York in 1969, Fletcher set up a photography workshop at the Henry Street Settlement, and taught photography at Antioch College and Brooklyn College Film Studio.
Text from the New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts website
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Ethel Sharrieff in Chicago
1963
Gelatin silver print
14.6 × 15.9cm (5 3/4 × 6 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Robert A. Sengstacke (American, 1943-2017)
Dr. Martin Luther King
January 1, 1965
Gelatin silver print
35.1 × 27.3cm (13 13/16 × 10 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke spent more than a half century photographing Chicago’s cultural and political landscape, most notably for the weekly newspaper the Chicago Defender, for which he also worked as an editor. The Defender was founded by Robert’s great-uncle Robert Sengstacke Abbott in 1905, and Robert’s father, John Sengstacke, ran the paper for nearly 60 years. In the mid-1950s, after attending Florida’s Bethune Cookman College, Bobby Sengstacke returned to Chicago and honed his skills with fellow photographers Billy (Fundi) Abernathy, Le Mont Mac Lemore, and Bob Black. In the years that followed, he became a member of a tight-knit network of South Side photojournalists who created intimate documents of Chicago’s Black community, from Civil Rights rallies led by Martin Luther King Jr. to the city’s lively entertainment scene.
Sengstacke was also a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), which brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.
Text from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022)
Member of Southern Media Photographing a Young Girl, Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi
1968
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of David Knaus
The photography of the US civil rights activist and academic Doris Derby … began through documenting the struggles of black people in the segregated south. However, rather than recording the dramatic events and protests of the nine years from her arrival in Mississippi from New York in 1963, Doris chose to capture the everyday human effort required to live through them.
She went into rural communities to witness the work of children in the fields and women living in wooden shacks trying to care for families. “They were looking to find some help, some way to get out of their horrible poverty and despair,” she said. …
Influenced both by the German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz, who was concerned with the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class, and the photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured the creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, she also took pictures of children in urban settings, of old and young people attending election events, and those working for the movement, among them the author Alice Walker.
Hannah Collins. “Doris Derby obituary,” on The Guardian website Wed 13 Apr 2022 [Online] Cited 26/11/2025
Darryl Cowherd (American, b. 1940)
Stokely Carmichael, Unknown Chicago Church
c. 1968
Gelatin silver print
24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
A key figure in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, Darryl Cowherd has enjoyed an extensive career ranging from photojournalism to broadcast television. At the age of 20, frustrated with work and school, Cowherd followed the advice of his mentor, Chicago-based photographer Robert Earl Wilson, who encouraged him to travel and photograph abroad. Cowherd had initially studied to become a doctor and then worked for the postal service, but neither role proved a lasting fit. After nearly four years in Europe, during which Cowherd honed his photography skills, he returned to Chicago in 1964 and began taking freelance photography assignments while working at a film processing lab. His return to Chicago coincided with the emergence of the Chicago Freedom Movement (1965-67) and the Black Arts Movement (most active in the years 1965-76). An active participant in both movements, Cowherd frequently photographed the activities surrounding them as they grew and gained momentum.
Cowherd was a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a collective that brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.
Text from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Hiram Maristany (American, 1945-2022)
Juan González, Minister of Information, in the doorway of the first office of the Young Lords
1969, printed 2021
Gelatin silver print
33 x 46cm (13 x 18 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Hiram Maristany
Hiram Sebastian Maristany was a Nuyorican American photographer, and director of El Museo del Barrio (a museum in NYC which specialises in Latin American and Caribbean art, with an emphasis on works from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York City) from 1975 to 1977. He was known for his association with, and documentation of, the Young Lords chapter in Harlem, which he co-founded in 1969.
Juan González was a co-founder of the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican rights organisation in New York City, where he helped lead the group in protests for social justice. The Young Lords fought for better healthcare, education, and city services, and against police abuse and Puerto Rico’s colonial status. Following his work with the Young Lords, González became a celebrated journalist, co-hosting Democracy Now! and writing for the New York Daily News.
Texts from the Wikipedia website
Poet Larry Neal, who coined the term Black Arts Movement, described it as “a cultural revolution in art and ideas.” This movement included poets, playwrights, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, and painters. They came together to make art that advanced civil rights and celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.
This cultural revolution shook up the art world in the 1950s and ’60s. It embodied the struggle for self-determination championed by global freedom movements. New collectives, workshops, and collaborations emerged. Creatives made art that promoted Black dignity, hope, and freedom. They asked, how could art inspire social and political change? And what would it look like?
Photography was a driving force from the beginning, playing a critical role as both a communications tool and art form. Learn more about the movement and photography’s part in it – major themes in our exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985.
Our exhibition begins in 1955, more than a decade before Larry Neal named the Black Arts Movement. That year, several events – and photographs of those events – helped catalyse the civil rights movement.
In September, Jet magazine was one of several publications that printed open-casket photographs of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi. Those disturbing images were seen across the country, including by a woman in Montgomery, Alabama: Rosa Parks. That December, Parks sat in the front, “white only” section of a segregated bus. The driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused. As she later recounted, Emmett Till was on her mind in that moment.
Parks, in turn, was photographed sitting at the front of the segregated bus. Those images, and others like them, brought widespread awareness to the struggles for equal rights. Organisations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) encouraged photography of their marches, demonstrations, and acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. SNCC even taught some members to use a camera. Lifelong activist Maria Varela became a SNCC photographer after recognising the need for more images of Black life to support the movement.
The beginning of the Black Arts Movement is often pinned to poet, playwright, and writer Amiri Baraka founding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood in 1965. Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde were among the many writers and poets active in the movement. Some collaborated with visual artists, even forming collectives such as the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago.
OBAC writers, scholars, painters, and photographers collaborated to create the Wall of Respect community mural in 1967. It commemorated key figures in African American history, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Muhammad Ali, and Nina Simone. The mural was like a two-story collage that covered the facade of a building in the city’s South Side neighbourhood. It incorporated paintings by several artists alongside mounted photographs by Roy Lewis and Darryl Cowherd. At the centre was Amiri Baraka’s poem “SOS,” which opens, “Calling all black people.” The mural was demolished in 1972, but photographs by Roy Lewis and Robert Sengstacke continue to spread its message.
Music was an equally important part of the Black Arts Movement. Musicians John Coltrane and Sun Ra both performed at a fundraiser for Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. Their experimental and expressive jazz inspired Black Arts Movement writers and artists.
In Coltrane at the Gate, photographer Adger Cowans depicted the saxophonist’s energy. Ming Smith captured the magic of a Sun Ra performance. For his homage to saxophonist Charlie Parker (who was commonly known as “Bird”), painter Raymond Saunders embraced the spontaneous spirit of jazz. Saunders collaged a newsprint photograph below the word “bird” written in a chalk-like white script.
The Black Arts Movement celebrated the “beauty and goodness of being Black,” as Larry Neal put it. Photographer Kwame Brathwaite helped popularise the phrase “Black is beautiful.” Brathwaite was a pioneer of uplifting Black identity. He helped found groups that challenged conventional standards of beauty and celebrated African heritage. They organised fashion shows, created “Black is beautiful” products, and operated a photography studio.
In Untitled (Portrait, Reels as Necklace), Brathwaite adorned the model with a necklace made from film developing reels to “expose” her beauty. More than a decade later, Carla Williams created a self-portrait that echoed Brathwaite’s work. Showing herself in curlers, Williams challenged popular notions of beauty.
Small collectives of visual artists and photographers came together around the principles of the Black Arts Movement. In New York, the Kamoinge Workshop photography collective met regularly to critique each other’s work, debate photography’s purpose and aesthetics, and share tips. They created a space for their art by developing their own portfolios and exhibitions. The workshop also produced the groundbreaking Black Photographers Annual between 1973 and 1980.
A group of Chicago artists formed AfriCOBRA. The collective’s founders defined their own aesthetic principles, aimed at creating “images that jar the senses and cause movement” and “images designed for mass production.”
The Black Arts Movement made an impact beyond the United States. In Great Britain, Raphael Albert organised and photographed Black beauty pageants in London. James Barnor focused on style, migration, and Black city life in London and in Accra, Ghana. Horace Ové photographed the British Black Power Movement. He also captured scenes of the West African and West Indian communities in London, like his Walking Proud, Notting Hill Carnival.
Samuel Fosso opened his first photography studio in Bangui, Central African Republic, at age 13. After finishing with clients, Fosso would use his studio to experiment with self-portraits. He wore an array of costumes and adopted personas, often taking inspiration from the pictures of Black Americans he saw in magazines shared by American Peace Corps volunteers.
By the end of the 1970s, the literary arm of the Black Arts Movement had waned, but a new generation of artists and photographers carried on its spirit. Coming out of art school, photographers such as Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson explored more personal, metaphorical, and conceptual ideas.
In her Family Pictures and Stories series, Weems made her own family the subjects. The intimate photographs presented a counterargument to claims that many Black Americans faced poverty and struggle as a result of weak family structures. Weems paired the photographs with brief stories about each family member.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Herbert Randall (American, b. 1936)
Untitled (Bed-Stuy, New York)
c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
22.8 x 15.6cm (9 x 6 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2022.89.1
© Herbert Randall
Herbert Eugene Randall, Jr. is an American photographer who had documented the effects of the Civil Rights Movement. Randall is of Shinnecock, African-American and West Indian ancestry.
Randall studied photography under Harold Feinstein in 1957. From 1958 to 1966, he worked as a freelance photographer for various media organizations. His photographs were used by the Associated Press, United Press International, Black Star, various television stations, and other American and foreign publications. Randall was also a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African-American photographers, in New York City in 1963.
In 1964, Sanford R. Leigh, the Director of Mississippi Freedom Summer’s Hattiesburg project, persuaded Randall to photograph the effects of the Civil Rights Movement in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Randall had a Whitney Fellowship for that year, and had been looking for a project. He spent the entire summer photographing solely in Hattiesburg, among the African-American community and among the volunteers in area projects such as the Freedom Schools, Voter Registration, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party campaign.
Only five of Randall’s photographs were published in the summer of 1964. One seen worldwide was the bloodied, concussed Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, head of a prominent Cleveland congregation and former conscientious objector to World War II. However, most of his photographs sat in a file at the Shinnecock Reservation, on Long Island, New York.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Billy Abernathy (Fundi) (American, 1939-2016)
Mother’s Day from the series “Born Hip”
1962
gelatin silver print
17.5 x 13.3cm (6 7/8 x 5 1/4 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Illinois Arts Council
Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY
Photographer Billy (Fundi) Abernathy was known for creating images that defined Black confidence, elegance, and style. This work extended to his collaborations with his wife, Sylvia (Laini) Abernathy, with whom he designed album covers for Delmark Records in the 1960s. Around that time, the poet and author Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) encountered Abernathy’s photographs of Chicago and proposed a book project that would combine his poetry with Abernathy’s images. The resulting collaboration, In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style), was designed by Laini and published in 1970. In 1971 the New York Times hailed the book as “an example of the new direction that black art is taking.”
Text from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998)
A television playing coverage of James Baldwin at the March for Freedom and Jobs in Washington, DC
1963/2025
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
African American artist Charles “Teenie” Harris, captured “the essence of daily African-American life in the 20th century. For more than 40 years, Harris – as lead photographer of the influential Pittsburgh Courier newspaper – took almost 80,000 pictures of people from all walks: presidents, housewives, sports stars, babies, civil rights leaders and even cross-dressing drag queens.”
See the Art Blart posting on the exhibition Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 2011 – April 2012
Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)
Untitled (Playground) from the “Playground Series”
c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
25.7 x 19.1cm (10 1/8 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee
In 1953, he enrolled at the historically Black college in Petersburg, which was not far from his hometown of Richmond. He began working as a reporter for the school paper, and during that time Draper’s father, who was an amateur photographer himself, sent Louis his first camera. By 1956, Draper’s title at the paper had changed to cameraman. After his revelatory first experience with The Family of Man, a catalogue that accompanied the 1955 photography exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, he decided to leave school during his final semester and move to New York City to become a photographer. Once there, Draper enrolled in a photography workshop led by Harold Feinstein, and was mentored by W. Eugene Smith, one of the most prominent American photojournalists.
In 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, Draper became a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York-based collective of Black photographers. Workshop members met regularly to discuss one another’s work, produced group portfolios, exhibitions, and publications, and mentored young people all over the city. Draper emerged as one of the group’s teachers, which began his long career as an educator (he worked in numerous teaching roles, including at Pratt Institute and Mercer County Community College). The collective aimed to “create the kind of images of our communities that spoke of the truth we’d witnessed and that countered the untruths we’d all seen in mainline publications.” Kamoinge members wanted to avoid the racial stereotypes prevalent in the media and the violence that was typical of journalistic coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, working instead to represent their communities in a positive light.
Jane Pierce, Carl Jacobs Foundation Research Assistant, Department of Photography, “Louis Draper,” on the MoMA website 2021 [Online] Cited 27/11/2025
Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)
Untitled (Santos) from the “Playground Series”
1967
Gelatin silver print
32.9 x 22.8cm (12 15/16 x 9 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
© Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee
Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922-2007)
I Am A Man, Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee
March 28, 1968
Gelatin silver print
19 × 32.6cm (7 1/2 × 12 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Photojournalist Ernest C. Withers was born on August 7, 1922, in Memphis, Tennessee. Withers got his start as a military photographer while serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Upon returning to a segregated Memphis after the war, Withers chose photography as his profession.
In the 1950s, Withers helped spur the movement for equal rights with a self-published photo pamphlet on the Emmitt Till murder. Over the next two decades, Withers formed close personal relationships with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and James Meredith. Withers’s pictures of key civil rights events from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the strike of Memphis sanitation workers are historic. Indeed, Withers was often the only photographer to record these scenes, many of which were not yet of interest to the mainstream press.
Withers photographed more than the southern Civil Rights Movement. Whether Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and other Negro League baseball players, or those jazz and blues musicians who frequented Memphis’ Beale Street, Withers photographed the famous and not-so famous. Withers’s collection includes pictures of early performances of Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.
Text from The History Makers website
Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)
Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi
July 1971
Gelatin silver print
21.5 x 29.2cm (8 7/16 x 11 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee
Never-before-seen photographs alongside images of cultural icons reveal the medium’s central role during a pivotal era of creative expression
The National Gallery of Art presents Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985, an exhibition exploring the work of American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora photographers in developing and fostering a distinctly Black visual culture and identity. The first presentation to investigate photography’s role in the Black Arts Movement, a creative initiative comparable to the Harlem Renaissance in its scope and impact, which evolved concurrently to the civil rights and international freedom movements, the exhibition reveals how artists developed strategies to engage communities and encourage self-representation in media, laying a foundation for socially engaged art practices that continue today. Photography and the Black Arts Movement will be on view in the West Building from September 21, 2025, to January 11, 2026, before traveling to California and Mississippi.
Photography and the Black Arts Movement brings together approximately 150 works spanning photography, video, collage, painting, installation, and other photo-based media, some of which have rarely or never been on view. Among the over 100 artists included in the exhibition are Billy Abernathy (Fundi), Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Charles Gaines, James E. Hinton, Danny Lyon, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Nellie Mae Rowe, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.
This expansive selection of work showcases the broad cultural exchange between writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and other visual artists of many backgrounds, who came together during the turbulent decades of the mid-20th century to grapple with social and political changes, the pursuit of civil rights, and the emergence of the Pan-African movement through art. The exhibition also includes art from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain to contextualize the global engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the Black Arts Movement.
“Working on many fronts – literature, poetry, jazz and new music, painting, sculpture, performance, film, and photography – African American artists associated with the Black Arts Movement expressed and exchanged their ideas through publications, organisations, museums, galleries, community centres, theatres, murals, street art, and emerging academic programs. While focusing on African American photography in the United States, the exhibition also includes works by artists from many communities to consider the extensive interchange between North American artists and the African diaspora. The exhibition looks at the important connections between America’s focus on civil rights and the emerging cultural movements that enriched the dialog,” said Philip Brookman, cocurator of the exhibition and consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art.
“Photography and photographic images were crucial in defining and giving expression to the Black Arts Movement and the civil rights movement. By merging the social concerns and aesthetics of the period, Black artists and photographers were defining a Black aesthetic while expanding conversations around community building and public history,” said Deborah Willis, guest cocurator, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. “The artists and their subjects helped to preserve compelling visual responses to this turbulent time and their images reflect their pride and determination.”
The exhibition draws significantly from the National Gallery’s collection – including more than 50 newly acquired works by Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, Louis Draper, Ray Francis, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Horace Ové, Jamel Shabazz, Malik Sidibé, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others – and from lenders in the US, Great Britain, and Canada. Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 presents the cultural and political titans of the era, including civil rights leaders, artists, and musicians, as well as everyday people, scenes of daily life, and fashion and commercial photography. Structured around nine thematic sections – including explorations of the self, community, fashion and beauty, the media, and ritual – the exhibition weaves a holistic vision of the period and its cultural impact.
Among the works in the first section of the exhibition is a collage by Romare Bearden, 110th Street Harlem Blues (1972). A dynamic mixture of painted paper and photographs, the work illustrates the ongoing vitality of Harlem’s community, echoing the vibrancy and social content of the Harlem Renaissance, which Bearden was exposed to in his early life. Moving into the section titled Picturing the Self / Picturing the Movement, self-portraits by Coreen Simpson, Alex Harsley, and Barkley L. Hendricks underscore a central theme of the exhibition: artists asserting their presence within the broader narrative of the movement and the era, along with the importance of self-representation in their art. A highlight of Representing the Community – a section filled with everyday scenes of people at work and at rest – is Ralph Arnold’s Soul Box (1969), a mixed-media assemblage of found objects and collage, serving as a time capsule that captures stories of the Black Arts Movement.
Photographs were a crucial tool used to communicate the events of the civil rights movement to a national audience. Artists and news media understood the power of photographs to address inequality and advocate for civil and human rights, and some works in the exhibition are by photojournalists who captured the speeches, marches, and sit-ins that defined the era. A rarely seen 1965 photograph by Frank Dandridge captures Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. watching President Lyndon B. Johnson’s televised address following the Selma, Alabama, marches – events that would ultimately lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Depicting Dr. King in a private, domestic moment, the image underscores not just the personal gravity of the moment but the television’s growing role in shaping public understanding of the era’s historic events. One of several works featured in the In the News section, it reflects how photographers responded to the shifting landscape of news media – from still photography to the rise of television.
The Black Arts Movement was instrumental in reshaping fashion, advertising, and media as tools of self-representation and cultural empowerment. A Kraft Foods advertisement (1977), photographed by Barbara DuMetz and featuring a young Black girl holding her doll, illustrates how the movement prompted advertisers to engage Black audiences more thoughtfully by hiring Black photographers and models in their campaigns. It is among the highlights of the Fashioning the Self section, along with an editorial photograph by Kwame Brathwaite, the photographer who helped coin the “Black is Beautiful” movement, and many depictions of women in beauty shops, showing the importance of these spaces to forming identity and community.
The exhibition’s concluding section, Transformations in Art and Culture, reflects a shift in the Black Arts Movement’s purpose – from its earlier focus on civil rights to a younger generation’s engagement with more historical and conceptual ideas, while still drawing on the movement’s visual language. Highlights include multimedia and time-based works by Ulysses Jenkins, Charles Gaines, and Lorna Simpson, which explore new and experimental ways to explore Black identity.
Published in association with Yale University Press, the fully illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition examines the vital role photography played in the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, which brought together writers, filmmakers, and artists as they explored ways of using art to advance civil rights and Black self-determination. Edited by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, with a preface by Angela Y. Davis and contributions by Makeda Best, Margo Natalie Crawford, Romi Crawford, Cheryl Finley, Sarah Lewis, and Audrey Sands, this book reveals how photographs operated across art, community building, journalism, and political messaging to contribute to the development of a distinctly Black art and culture. Essays by these distinguished scholars focus on topics such as women and the movement, community, activism, and Black photojournalism, and consider the complex connections between American artists and the African diaspora, and the dynamic interchange of Pan-African ideas that propelled the movement.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art
Harry Adams (American, 1918-1985)
Protest Car, Los Angeles
1962, printed 2024
Inkjet print
27.5 x 35.4 cm (11 x 13 15/16 in.)
Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, California State University, Northridge, Harry Adams Archive
© Harry Adams. All rights reserved and protected.
Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge
Harry Adams, also known as “One Shot Harry,” was one of the best-known members of the Los Angeles African American community. Having access to the city’s inner circle, he became known for his images of politicians, entertainers, and society figures. Adams worked as a freelancer for the California Eagle and Los Angeles Sentinel for 35 years and had a number of churches and lawyers as clients. His collection is particularly rich in its documentation of African American social life including images of social organisations, churches, schools, civil rights organisations, protests and cultural events. …
The collection of images for the period 1950-1985 is rich in its depiction of the unique lives of African Americans in and around the Los Angeles area. There are many images of important black political leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm X, and many others.
Text from the California State University Northridge website
Raphael Albert (British born Grenada, 1939-2009)
Beauty Salon, London
c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
27.3 x 27.3cm (10 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.)
Collection of Autograph, London
© Raphael Albert
Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, the cultural promoter, entrepreneur and photographer Raphael Albert organised and documented numerous black beauty pageants and other cultural events in London. His long and successful career as a promoter and chronicler of pageants included the establishment of Miss Black and Beautiful, Miss West Indies in Great Britain, and Miss Grenada.
These competitions celebrated the global ‘Black is Beautiful’ aesthetic in a local west London context: paired with the obligatory bathing costumes and high heels, Albert’s contestants often sported large Afro hairstyles, inventing and reinventing themselves on stage while articulating a particular and multifaceted black femininity as part of a widely contested and ambiguous cultural performance.
Text from the Autograph website
Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Handcuffed blacks were arrested for being in white area illegally
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 24.5 x 16.5 cm (9 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2022.102.2
© Ernest Cole / Magnum Photos
~ Exhibition: ‘Ernest Cole: House of Bondage’ at Foam, Amsterdam, January – June 2023
~ Text/Exhibition: “Ernest Cole: Journeys through Photojournalism, Social Documentary Photography and Art,” on the exhibition ‘Ernest Cole Photographer’ at The Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, April – July 2013
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Newsman Being Frisked at Muslim Rally in Chicago
1963, printed 1997
Gelatin silver print
47.3 x 33.7cm (18 5/8 x 13 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
~ Text/Exhibition: “Visible Man / Invisible photographer” on the exhibition Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 2022 – January 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks and “The Atmosphere of Crime”‘ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, February 2021 ongoing
~ Photographs: Gordon Parks “The Atmosphere of Crime”, 1957 February 2020
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, July – November 2019
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January – September 2015
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Segregation Story’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 2014 – June 2015
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument’ at The New Orleans Museum of Art, September 2013 – January 2014
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: 100 Moments’ at New York State Museum, January – May 2013
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Centennial’ at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, February – April 2013
~ Exhibition: ‘Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks’ at the Phoenix Art Museum, August – November 2011
Herman Howard (American, 1942-1980)
Sweet as a Peach, Harlem, New York City
1963
Gelatin silver print
16 x 23.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969)
View of the crowd as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses civil rights demonstrators at 40th Street and Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia
August 3, 1965
Gelatin silver print
24.8 x 19.7cm (9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.)
John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries
John W. Mosley (May 19, 1907 – October 1, 1969) was a self-taught photojournalist who extensively documented the everyday activities of the African-American community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for more than 30 years, a period including both World War II and the civil rights movement. His work was published widely in newspapers and magazines including The Philadelphia Tribune, The Pittsburgh Courier and Jet magazine.
Mosley has been called a “cultural warrior” for preserving a record of African-American life in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, one which combats “negative stereotypes and false interpretations of African-American history and culture”. …
Mosley flourished in his career as a photographer from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was known to photograph as many as four events a day, seven days a week. He traveled around Philadelphia on public transit, carrying his cameras and other equipment.
Mosley shot in black and white film. He used a large-format Graflex Speed Graphic camera. and a medium-format Rollieflex.
Proud of his heritage, Mosley chose to portray the black community positively at family, social, and cultural events that were part of daily life. He photographed individuals and families at weddings, picnics, churches, segregated beaches, sporting events, concerts, galas, and civil rights protests. During a time of racism and segregation, he emphasised the achievements of black celebrities, athletes, and political leaders.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Moneta Sleet Jr. (American, 1926-1996)
Two Teenaged Supporters of the Selma March
1965, printed c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
43.3 x 29.5cm (17 1/16 x 11 5/8 in.)
Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of the Johnson Publishing Company
© Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Made possible by the Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution
“During the Civil Rights Movement, I was a participant just like everybody else. I just happened to be there with my camera, and I felt and firmly believed that my mission was to photograph and show the side of it that was the right side.”
~ Moneta Sleet Jr.
During Sleet’s 41 years at Ebony, he worked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s side for 13 years, capturing historical moments of the civil rights movement.
Sleet began working for Ebony magazine in 1955. Over the next 41 years, he captured photos of young Muhammad Ali, Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Jomo Kenyatta, former ambassador Andrew Young in a blue leather jacket and jeans in his office at the United Nations, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Liberia’s William Tubman and Billie Holiday. He gained the affection and esteem of many civil rights leaders, many of whom called on him by name. When Coretta Scott King found out that no African American photographers had been assigned to cover her husband’s funeral service, she demanded that Sleet be a part of the press pool. If he was not, she threatened to bar all photographers from the service. Besides his photo of Coretta Scott King, he also captured grieving widow Betty Shabazz at the funeral of her husband Malcolm X.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Untitled (Charles Peaker Street Speaker, head of ANPM, after Carlos Cooks passed away, on 125th Street)
c. 1968, printed 2016
Inkjet print
37.2 x 37.2 cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Black Is Beautiful.
From Marcus Garvey to the Black Panther Party, these three words powered the political dreams and material possibilities of generations of Black people living in the United States. Over the course of seven decades, the recently departed photographer Kwame Brathwaite constructed a glorious visual lexicon to articulate a Pan-Africanist argument. Whether through his rhythmic documentation of the jazz scene in Harlem and the Bronx, or his cofounding of the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Brathwaite positioned photography at the nexus of Black artistic, political, and musical expression. Moving between concert halls and boxing rings, portrait studios and protest movement scenes – his Hasselblad in hand – Brathwaite chronicled self-determination and creativity that celebrated Blackness in all of its forms. Each of his photographs brims with bombastic flare and undeniable elegance. Their narrative potential is still transfixing.
“Black Is Beautiful was my directive,” Brathwaite said. “It was a time when people were protesting injustices related to race, class, and human rights around the globe. I focused on perfecting my craft so that I could use my gift to inspire thought, relay ideas, and tell stories of our struggle, our work, our liberation…. Oppression still exists today, and we must keep fighting, keep on pushing until we are free. A luta continua, a vitória é certa – the struggle continues, victory is certain.”
Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Esther Adler, Roxana Marcoci, Marilyn Nance, David Hartt, Michael Famighetti. “Remembering Kwame Brathwaite (1938-2023),” on the MoMA website, Dec 26, 2023 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025
Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022)
Black-owned Grocery Store, Sunday, Mileston, Mississippi
1968
Gelatin silver print
21.9 x 32.7cm (8 5/8 x 12 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of David Knaus
© Doris A. Derby
While the Black Arts Movement is generally pegged to the 1960s and ’70s, the point of departure for Willis and Brookman was the work of photographer Roy DeCarava, who in 1955, on the cusp of the civil rights movement, released a book titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life. The book featured portraits of Black life in Harlem activated by a fictitious character named Mary Bradley, a narrative invention of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes.
In the book, Sister Mary’s musings unfold within DeCarava’s photographic landscape. The exhibition includes an image from the book featuring bassist Edna Smith, whose face is partially illuminated by a single light in the distance. Her downward gaze conveys a sense of somberness that’s echoed by the shadows that surround her, while the single glint of light coming off her wristwatch draws attention to the bass like the beacon from a lighthouse.
Published decades following the Harlem Renaissance, one year after Brown v. Board of Education and months after the murder of Emmitt Till, DeCarava’s book came at a critical moment in art history, a time when photography became more broadly recognised as fine art through groundbreaking exhibitions like “The Family of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art, also in 1955. With that recognition, Black artists seized an opportunity to compose compelling visual narratives. “The collaboration between Langston Hughes and Roy De Carava was influential for so many photographers and artists, in part because De Carava and Hughes were looking at their respective communities, and they put together a story that was looking inward,” says Brookman.
Colony Little. “A Show at the National Gallery Highlights the Role of Photography in the Black Arts Movement,” on the ARTnews website November 20, 2025 [Online] Cited 24/11/2025
Ray Francis (American, 1937-2006)
Genie
1971
Gelatin silver print
13.97 × 17.78cm (5 1/2 × 7 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Ray Francis was a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop. He received his first camera in 1952, at the age of 15. In 1961 he met Louis Draper, with whom he formed Group 35. In 1963 Group 35 merged with other photographers to create Kamoinge, where Francis contributed significantly by creating a darkroom for the group and working as a photo editor for the Black Photographers Annual.
His photographic work spanned still life, portraiture, and landscape, often using dramatic light and shadow, influenced by Johannes Vermeer’s use of composition. Francis also made contributions as an educator, teaching at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood Youth Corps (1966–1969) and later serving as director of the New York City Board of Education’s photography program for Intermediate School 201 from 1970 to 1974.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Untitled (Portrait, Reels as Necklace)
c. 1972, printed later
Inkjet print
74.93 × 74.93cm (29 1/2 × 29 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Funds from Renée Harbers Liddell and Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Kwame Brathwaite
Kwame Brathwaite, [was] a photographer, musician and African American activist who was a unique politico-aesthete. With his brother Elombe Brath, he virtually invented the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” in the 1960s by photographing the Grandassa Models in Harlem: young African American women who became the sensational template for beauty, doing away with the usual cosmetic products and the usual white standard of femininity.
Black Is Beautiful became a radical rallying cry, an inspired three-word prose poem and manifesto for change. Simply to assert that black people were beautiful was a liberating force in art, politics and culture, and Brathwaite became a part of Black power’s pan-Africanist movement by photographing Muhammad Ali before his Rumble in the Jungle fight in Zaire in 1974. He was the exclusive photographer for the Jackson 5’s African tour, and became the house photographer for the Apollo theatre, building an amazing archive of black musicians, and with Elombe was the driving force behind bringing Nelson Mandela to speak in Harlem.
Peter Bradshaw. “Black Is Beautiful: The Kwame Brathwaite Story – exhilarating record of game-changing photographer,” on The Guardian website Fri 10 Oct 2025 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025
Romare Bearden (American, 1911-1988)
110th Street Harlem Blues
1972
Collage
© Romare Bearden Foundation
African-American artist, activist, and writer Romare Bearden was close friends with film producer and photographer Sam Shaw, and he often drew inspiration from Shaw’s creative projects. The portraits incorporated into this collage feature outtakes of extras from a movie Shaw may have documented as set photographer.
Bearden’s work reflects his improvisational approach to his practice. He considered his process akin to that of jazz and blues composers. Starting with an open mind, he would let an idea evolve spontaneously. “You have to begin somewhere,” he once said, “so you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way.”
Text from the Fraenkel Gallery Facebook page via DC Gallery, New York
Other works of art in the show are a testament to the medium’s lasting influence on established visual artists. Among these was Romare Bearden, who in the mid-1960s began exploring photographic collage; it would become an art form he used to create his most influential works. “Romare Bearden has always been integral to understanding the Black Arts Movement,” says Brookman. “By using photographs in his collages, he makes a direct connection between photography in all of its forms and the Black Arts Movement. That was something I had not seen or thought a lot about before, how much photography is incorporated into his visual art, including painting, during that time.”
Colony Little. “A Show at the National Gallery Highlights the Role of Photography in the Black Arts Movement,” on the ARTnews website November 20, 2025 [Online] Cited 24/11/2025
Chester Higgins (American, b. 1946)
Father prays over son on Osu Beach, Accra, Ghana
1973
Gelatin silver print
22.8 x 34cm (9 x 13 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Chester Higgins. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery
Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
The Blues Singer, Harlem, NY
1976
Gelatin silver print
22.1 x 32.7 cm (8 11/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Charina Endowment Fund in memory of Robert B. Menschel
~ Text/Exhibition: “Street cred,” on the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at Denver Art Museum, November 2024 – May 2025
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April – July 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey: An American Project’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April – October 2021
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey: An American Project’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 2020 – March 2021
Barbara DuMetz (American, b. 1947)
Kraft Foods advertisement
1977
Barbara DuMetz (born 1947) is an American photographer and pioneer in the field of commercial photography. She began working in Los Angeles as a commercial photographer in the 1970s, when very few women had established and maintained successful careers in the field, especially African-American women. Over the course of her career, “she made a major contribution to diversifying the landscape of images that defined pop culture in the United States.”
DuMetz is known for her work with African-American celebrities, corporations and images of everyday life in African-American communities. …
DuMetz has been a professional photographer for more than four decades. Over the course of her career, she has produced award-winning images for advertising agencies including Burrell Advertising, J. P. Martin Associates and InterNorth Corporation. Her photographs have appeared in African-American publications including Black Enterprise, Ebony, Essence, Jet and The Crisis. She has taken commercial photographs for corporations including The Coca-Cola Company, Delta Air Lines and McDonald’s Corporation.
DuMetz ran and maintained three different photography studios located in the Los Angeles area where she was contracted by department stores, record companies, graphic design studios, advertising agencies, public relations firms, film production companies, actors and business professionals. DuMetz’s has shot photo layouts of celebrities and artists and personalities including Maya Angelou, Ernie Barnes, Bernie Casey, Pam Grier, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Quincy Jones, Samella Lewis, Ed McMahan, Thelonious Monk, Lou Rawls, Della Reese, Richard Roundtree, Betye Saar, Charles Wilbert White, and Nancy Wilson. Her show The Creators: Photographic Images of Literary, Music and Visual Artists, at the Southwest Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2015, included images of over two dozen African-American artists whom she has photographed.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Ming Smith (American, b. 1947)
Sun Ra Space II, New York, New York
1978
Gelatin silver print
15.24 × 22.4cm (6 × 8 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Charina Endowment Fund
“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”
“My work as a photographer was to record, culturally, the period of time in which I lived – and I recorded it as an artist.”
“Oh no, it’s all discovery, it’s all improvisation. It’s like when jazz musicians solo. They improvise, and photography is definitely that, for me.”
“Whether I’m photographing a person on the street, someone I know, or on an assignment, I’m doing it because I admire them. I like the sense of exchange – they’re giving and I’m taking, but I’m also giving them something back. There were certain people who would understand what I was looking for and would try to give me a photograph by posing. Whatever I’m shooting, whether it’s a portrait or a place, my intention is to capture the feeling I have about that exchange and that energy.”
Ming Smith
Coreen Simpson (American, b. 1942)
Self-Portrait
1978
Gelatin silver print
21.6 x 16.8cm (8 1/2 x 6 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Coreen Simpson
Simpson’s career launched when she became editor for Unique New York magazine in 1980, and she began photographing to illustrate her articles. She then became a freelance fashion photographer for the Village Voice and the Amsterdam News in the early 1980s, and covered many African-American cultural and political events in the mid-1980s. She is also noted for her studies of Harlem nightlife. She constructed a portable studio and brought it to clubs in downtown Manhattan, barbershops in Harlem, and braiding salons in Queens. Her work’s ability to present a wide variety of subjects with “depth of character and dignity” has been compared to that of Diane Arbus and Weegee.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Simpson became a photographer after noticing that she could make better images than the ones used to illustrate her stories as a freelance lifestyle writer. She took the chance to start creating the images she wanted to see. In 1976, she contacted her friend Walter Johnson, a street photographer who worked at a photo lab in Manhattan, with whom she had been acquainted from her modeling days, and asked if he could teach her how to use a camera. He showed her how to use it, and as soon as she got a hold of it, she became unstoppable.
She argues that great images are the key to having a successful published story. “You have to feel good about yourself, and good about the article that you’re presenting to the public,” she says. “So what makes it good? It’s the visuals. The visuals make it good.”
Briana Ellis-Gibbs. “Photographer Coreen Simpson’s illustrious career capturing Toni Morrison and Muhammad Ali: ‘I’ve never gotten bored’,” on The Guardian website Tue 21 Oct 2025 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944)
Grace Jones, New York City
1970s
Gelatin silver print
27 × 23.7cm (10 5/8 × 9 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anthony Barboza (born 1944 in New Bedford, Massachusetts) is a photographer, historian, artist and writer. With roots originating from Cape Verde, and work that began in commercial art more than forty years ago, Barboza’s artistic talents and successful career helped him to cross over and pursue his passions in the fine arts where he continues to contribute to the American art scene.
Barboza has a prolific and wide range of both traditional and innovative works inspired by African-American thought, which have been exhibited in public and private galleries, and prestigious museums and educational institutions worldwide. He is well known for his photographic work of jazz musicians from the 1970s – ’80s. Many of these works are in his book Black Borders, published in 1980 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In an article printed in 1984 in The City Sun, he said, “When I do a portrait, I’m doing a photograph of how that person feels to me; how I feel about the person, not how they look. I find that in order for the portraits to work, they have to make a mental connection as well as an emotional one. When they do that, I know I have it.” Many of his photographs achieve his signature effect through the careful use of lighting and shadows, manipulation of the backdrop, measured adjustments to shutter speeds, composition, and many other techniques and mediums at his command.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Nellie Mae Rowe (American, 1900-1982)
God Loves Us All
1978
Marker on silver gelatin print
15.9 x 29.2cm (6 1/4 x 11 1/2 in.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment and the American Women’s History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by theSmithsonian American Women’s History Initiative
© 2025 Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Nellie Mae Rowe was born in Georgia, in the last year of the nineteenth century – to a once-enslaved father and mother born the year of Emancipation. Rowe laboured as a child, married young, was widowed twice, and worked much of her adult life as a uniformed “domestic” in white households. Although her early life was shaped by segregation and oppression, Rowe’s desire to define herself sparked a joyful and colourful body of art that suffused her home and yard. This undeniable and contagious positivity made Rowe one of the first Black self-taught women to be celebrated for her art.
Rowe saw art-making as a God-given way to convey gratitude and recover a girlhood lost to labor and poverty. She transformed her property into an enriched realm she called her “Playhouse,” embellished with artworks and found objects that brought a heightened animation to her surroundings. Amid a society that rarely featured Black women in works of art and cast them as demeaning stereotypes in popular culture, Rowe took control of the narrative. She depicted friends, neighbours, and herself in drawings and hand-coloured photographs, confident images of Black beauty and free-spirited joy. In a radical act of reclamation, she crafted a world where cultural pride, personal style, and a bit of the unexpected embody the richness of life.
(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)
Text from the Smithsonian American Art Museum website
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Mom at Work
1978-1984
Gelatin silver print
60.96 × 92.71cm (24 × 36 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
~ Exhibition: ‘Carrie Mae Weems. The Heart of the Matter’ at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, April – September, 2025
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April – July 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video’ at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, January – May 2014
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (American, b. 1951)
Jake with His Boat Arriving on Daufuskie’s Shore, Daufuskie Island, South Carolina
1978, printed 2007
Gelatin silver print
31.1 x 46.6cm (12 1/4 x 18 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Funds from Diana and Mallory Walker
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951, USA) is an American photographer, photojournalist and AIDS activist. Beginning photography at the age of 18, she trained with American street photographer Garry Winogrand before graduating from the Cooper Union School of Art with a BFA in 1975, completing a year of independent photographic study in West Africa. Her 1977 photograph ‘Black Man, White Woman, Johannesburg, South Africa’ emblematised the visual narrative of apartheid at that time, recalling the institutionalised racism Jeanne had herself experienced as an African-American photographer.
Jeanne’s experience in South Africa informed her later work, encouraging her to focus on the contemporary experience of Blackness through humanist street photography. More recently, her photobook Daddy and Me: A Photo Story of Arthur Ashe and His Daughter, Camera (1993), which captures the last year of her husband Arthur Ashe’s life, has been praised as a sensitive record of family and mortality which demystifies AIDS. Following the tragedy of Ashe’s death, Jeanne has become a spokesperson for further AIDS research.
Text from the Hundred Heroines website
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017)
Self-Portrait with Red Sweater
1980, printed 2023
Chromogenic print
24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017) was an American painter and photographer who revolutionised portraiture through his realist and post-modern oil paintings of Black Americans living in urban areas, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hendricks’ depictions of the Black figure exude attitude and style. The artist culled subjects for his hagiographic portraits from sartorially minded friends and acquaintances he encountered around the world, including travels to Jamaica, his hometown of Philadelphia, and Connecticut where he last lived and worked. He applied intense focus to his subjects while painting, allowing him to capture their unique personalities. Steeped in pop culture and balanced with exquisite detail, the cast of characters in Hendricks’ work inhabits an unconventional realism united by painterly mastery.
While the directness of his subjects’ gaze could be piercing, Hendricks invoked humour through the titling of his pieces, mitigating the gravity of the message and allowing for an opening into the work. His paintings are distinctly of their time, grounded in the style of their contemporary present, and simultaneously emphatically timeless. They are a direct engagement with art history, the tradition of portraiture, and a confrontation of institutional portrayal of the black subject.
Hendricks was first a photographer before taking up painting. Beyond his portraiture, he also made distinct works on paper and painted landscapes and still lifes, including an early series of Basketball paintings that explored abstraction and colour theory. Throughout his career, Hendricks refused to be boxed into a medium, and his practice is commanding, bold, and without limitations to media or form.
Text from the Jack Shainman website
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Miles Davis
1981
Gelatin silver print
22.9 x 34.1cm (9 x 13 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Carla Williams (American, b. 1965)
Untitled (curlers) #1.2
1984-1985
Gelatin silver print
27.31 × 34.93cm (10 3/4 × 13 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Los Angeles native Carla Williams is a photographer and curator known for her exploration of identity, race, gender, and representation.
She first encountered photography in 1983 during her sophomore year at Princeton University, studying under Emmet Gowin. Her early work in self-portraiture began at Princeton, where she used the large-format camera to explore her own image. The focus of renewed scholarship, these works reflected on the lack of visibility of African American women in photographic history. Williams earned an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico in 1991, where her thesis project focused on the themes of self-representation and identity. After graduating, she worked as a curator of photography at institutions in Los Angeles and New York.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954)
Mixed Statement
1984
Oil and metallic paint, pencil, colored pencil, oil pastel, marker, paper money, fabric, thread, leaves, painted, printed, torn, and cut-and-pasted coloured paper, and gelatin silver prints on canvas, 3 panels
137.16 x 243.84cm (54 x 96 in.)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Harry Torczyner (by exchange), 2024
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
Juan Sánchez, the influential Nuyorican visual artist, teacher, writer, and curator once declared “Political art is a medium used as a weapon to hopefully recapture or regain the positive energy of celebration – to regain the goodness of humanity.” Sánchez, the child of Puerto Rican immigrants, was born and raised in Brooklyn. Encompassing a variety of mediums and techniques, including collage, painting, printmaking, photography, and video, his work is informed by his activism and engagement with issues of colonialism and its legacy, race, class, cultural identity, equality, social justice, and self-determination. At the same time, he has maintained a consistent focus on communities, families, and both personal and political histories in his work.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
Opening hours:
Daily 10.00am – 5.00pm
Curators: Dennis Bell, founder of the Bob Mizer Foundation, and De Kwok, Head of Public Programming
*PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
~ Honesty
~ ~ Integrity
~ ~ ~ Dignity
~ ~ ~ ~ Vulnerability
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Respect
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Love
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Friendship
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Sexuality
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Strength
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Beauty
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Form
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Humanism
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Identity
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Personality
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Presence
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Intimacy
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Nude
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Empathy
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Revelation
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Spirit
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Truth
I’ve been wanting to do a posting on the magnificent New Orleans photographer George Dureau’s work for a long while but because there are so few exhibitions of his photographs I have never had the opportunity – until now.
It’s a great pity that his work is not as recognised as that of his contemporaries, Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. Indeed, you can still pick up an original Dureau in the secondhand art market for around $500 whereas Mapplethorpe’s photographs run into the many thousands.
His photographs are not romantic, certainly not sentimental. He was fascinated by the people he photographed, their truth. These are the stories he conceptualised, posed, lit and photographed, stories that emerged from his imagination, that revealed surprising things about his subjects.
Unlike the clinical formalism of Mapplethorpe, Dureau worked with a poetry that was always present. Indeed, there is something so eloquent and sincere about his photographs for in them the artist draws (Dureau was also a painter) the mysteries of the soul of his subjects.
Dureau’s response to the world and the photographs that emanate from that engagement are humanist in the best sense of the word, revealing his subjects in a direct way that emphasises an individual’s dignity, worth and capacity for self-realisation.
Thus, I feel his photographs are a celebration not just of the human form but more importantly, of the human spirit.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Dennis Bell, Corbin Crable and the Bob Mizer Foundation for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I live a warm, involved humanist sort of life. There are lots of people passing through it. I have exciting experiences and learn things about people. They always go into my art. I cannot have an experience and it not go into my art.”
George Dureau
John H. Lawrence, HNOC emeritus director of museum programs and himself a fine-art photographer, said Dureau’s portraits reveal a tangible intimacy between photographer and subject.
“George respected the people he asked to sit for him,” said Lawrence. “I don’t say that from a knowledge, just from what the photographs show. The direct stare into the camera, it may have been at George’s direction. Even with the gaze directed in that fashion, you don’t get the kind of quality you see in these portraits unless there is a mutual respect between the photographer and the subject. There is a vibe there that is based on these two people having respect for each other as the photograph is made.”
John H. Lawrence quoted in Dave Walker. “The Intimate Eye of George Dureau,” on The Historic New Orleans Collection website, December 31, 2021 [Online] Cited 20/06/2025
This exhibition presents 25 evocative black-and-white portraits by George Dureau, capturing the resilience and vulnerability of his subjects – from athletes to marginalised individuals – against the vibrant cultural backdrop of New Orleans, where beauty and humanity converge in transformative ways.
Installation view of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco showing Dureau’s photograph Craig Blanchette, 1992
Installation views of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco showing Dureau’s photograph John Slate, Nd
Installation view of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco
Installation views of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco
The Bob Mizer Foundation proudly presents Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form, an exhibition showcasing 25 evocative black-and-white portraits by the acclaimed New Orleans artist George Dureau. This compelling collection captures the resilience, vulnerability, and individuality of Dureau’s subjects, spanning athletes, performers, and marginalised individuals.
Dureau’s photography transcends traditional portraiture, blending classical composition with the rich cultural spirit of New Orleans. His intimate works explore themes of identity and dignity, transforming vulnerabilities into powerful symbols of humanity’s resilience. The photographs invite viewers to reimagine beauty as inclusive, diverse, and multifaceted.
“George Dureau’s work is a testament to his unique ability to celebrate the human form while challenging societal norms,” says Den Bell, founder of the Bob Mizer Foundation. “His portraits honour the individuality of his subjects while weaving in the vibrancy of New Orleans, making his work timeless and deeply impactful.”
“Dureau photographed people with kindness and sympathy,” added Mizer Foundation’s Head of Programming, De Kwok, “It has been said that his subject matter became a member of his extended family and you can clearly see that in the way his camera lovingly captured them.”
The exhibition will be on view from March 6 to June 28, 2025, at the Bob Mizer Foundation’s Main Gallery. An opening reception will be held on March 6 from 6.00 pm – 8.30 pm, providing an opportunity to explore the works and celebrate Dureau’s extraordinary legacy.
A celebrated figure in the art world, George Dureau (1930-2014) was renowned for his black-and-white photography and classical paintings. Rooted in the rich cultural heritage of New Orleans, Dureau’s art challenges conventions and highlights the resilience of the human spirit. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inspire audiences with its profound emotional depth and technical mastery.
Text from the Bob Mizer Foundation website
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Wilbert with Hook
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
20 x 16 inches
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
B.J. Robinson
1995
Vintage silver gelatin print
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Troy Brown “For Tennessee”
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled (Sonny Singleton)
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
This exhibition highlights the remarkable artistry of George Dureau through 25 compelling black-and-white portraits that showcase his unique vision. Created during the 1970s and 1980s, these photographs transcend traditional boundaries, blending classical composition with an unflinching exploration of the human experience. Dureau’s subjects – athletes, performers, friends, and individuals often marginalised by society – are elevated to iconic status through his lens.
The images reveal a profound empathy and an unshakable belief in the inherent dignity of every individual. With a studio rooted in the vibrant cultural milieu of New Orleans, Dureau captured not only the physical form but also the spirit of his subjects, transforming their vulnerabilities into striking symbols of resilience and humanity. His work redefines beauty as inclusive and multifaceted, challenging societal norms and inviting reflection on identity, strength, and community.
This exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form presents 25 photographs by one of New Orleans’ most celebrated artists. Dureau’s black-and-white portraits, taken primarily during the 1970s and 1980s, capture the raw beauty, strength, and vulnerability of his subjects. Known for his classical approach and profound empathy, Dureau’s work invites us to confront traditional notions of beauty, body, and identity while celebrating the richness of the human experience.
George Dureau’s intimate portraits are both timeless and grounded in the rich cultural tapestry of New Orleans. His subjects include athletes, performers, friends, and marginalised individuals – including amputees and people with disabilities – rendered with dignity and compassion. Through his lens, Dureau elevates these figures to monumental status, echoing the grandeur of classical sculpture and Renaissance painting. His compositions emphasize the interplay of light and shadow, underscoring the sculptural quality of the human form.
One cannot discuss Dureau’s photography without acknowledging his connection to the city of New Orleans. His studio in the French Quarter became a space of artistic exploration, where he cultivated a dynamic and diverse community. This exhibition captures the spirit of that time and place, highlighting the distinct cultural influences that informed his work. The city’s unique blend of European, African, and Creole traditions provided a fertile ground for Dureau’s creativity, inspiring him to blend the classical and contemporary, the local and the universal.
Dureau’s photographs are celebrated not only for their technical mastery but also for their emotional depth. His subjects often meet the camera’s gaze directly, creating a sense of intimacy and trust. This rapport between artist and subject is palpable, revealing layers of vulnerability and strength. By choosing subjects who were often overlooked or marginalised, Dureau challenges societal norms and compels viewers to reconsider preconceived notions of worth and beauty.
This exhibition also explores the parallels between Dureau’s work and that of his contemporary, Robert Mapplethorpe. While the two artists shared a fascination with the human form and the dramatic use of black-and-white photography, their approaches diverged in significant ways. Dureau’s images are imbued with warmth and humanity that reflect his deep connection to his subjects. Unlike Mapplethorpe, who often sought a polished and idealised aesthetic, Dureau embraced imperfection and individuality, resulting in portraits that are as soulful as they are striking.
Among the works on display are several of Dureau’s most iconic images. Craig Blanchette, 1992 (above) captures a young man with a disarming gaze, his body framed in chiaroscuro that highlights his muscular form and absence of legs. The image challenges the viewer to see beyond the physical difference, emphasising Craig’s confidence and vitality. Similarly, Roosevelt Singleton features a subject with dwarfism, his ethereal presence heightened by the soft, diffused light. These works exemplify Dureau’s ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, presenting his subjects as both individuals and archetypes.
Dureau’s artistry extends beyond the purely visual. His photographs resonate with themes of resilience, identity, and community. They ask us to confront the complexities of human existence and to celebrate the diversity of the human condition. By placing marginalised individuals at the forefront of his work, Dureau not only elevates their stories but also reflects the universal truths of vulnerability and strength that connect us all.
This exhibition offers viewers the opportunity to engage with Dureau’s legacy in a deeply personal way. Each photograph serves as a testament to the power of art to reveal the unseen, to challenge the status quo, and to inspire empathy. Through his lens, Dureau reminds us that every individual – regardless of their physical appearance or societal status – possesses inherent dignity and beauty.
The 31 photographs selected for this show represent the breadth and depth of Dureau’s oeuvre. From tender portraits of friends to bold explorations of the male nude, the images on display capture the full spectrum of his artistic vision. Each piece is a study in contrasts: light and shadow, strength and vulnerability, individuality and universality. Together, they form a cohesive narrative that celebrates the complexity of the human experience.
George Dureau’s work has left an indelible mark on the world of photography and beyond. His ability to see and celebrate the humanity in every subject has cemented his place as a true visionary. This exhibition, Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form, invites you to step into his world – a world where beauty is redefined, where differences are celebrated, and where the human spirit shines through in every frame.
As you explore these images, consider the stories they tell and the questions they pose. How do we define beauty? What does it mean to see and be seen? And how can art challenge us to look beyond the surface and connect with the essence of another human being? In celebrating the life and work of George Dureau, we celebrate the power of art to transform, to inspire, and to unite us all.
Press release from the Bob Mizer Foundation
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
B.J. Robinson
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled (Bob Lang)
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
Bob Mizer Foundation
920 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA
Opening hours:
Tues – Sat 12 – 6pm
Curator: Clément Chéroux, Director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (FHCB), Paris, in collaboration with the Weegee Archive at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee: Society of the Spectacle at the International Center of Photography, New York
I have so many current photography exhibitions that there will be mid-week postings for the next two weeks.
I have posted on this exhibition before when it was presented at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, January – May 2024 (“To see ourselves as others see us”) and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, September 2024 – January 2025 (“Self Seen”) – with a slightly different title but the same exhibition – but it is always interesting to imbibe the creativity and culture photography of Weegee’s work.
While there are the famous photographs as seen in previous postings, there are also new photographs to examine, one’s that you hardly ever see: for example [Clothing salesman, Easter Sunday, Harlem, New York] (c. 1940, below); [Mrs. Bernice Lythcott and son looking through window shattered by rock-throwing hoodlums, Harlem, New York] (October 18, 1943, below); the infrared photograph [Lovers at the movies, New York] (c. 1943, below); Ladies keep their money in their stockings… (1944, below); and Night… a black velvet curtain has dropped over the white sky… (March 2, 1944, below) – all taken during the Second World War.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the ICP for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
On the Spot
December 9, 1939
International Center of Photography
Purchase, with funds provided by Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Clothing salesman, Easter Sunday, Harlem, New York]' c. 1940 from the exhibition 'Weegee: Society of the Spectacle' at the International Center of Photography, New York, Jan - May 2025](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/weegee-clothing-salesman.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Clothing salesman, Easter Sunday, Harlem, New York]' c. 1940 from the exhibition 'Weegee: Society of the Spectacle' at the International Center of Photography, New York, Jan - May 2025")
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
[Clothing salesman, Easter Sunday, Harlem, New York]
c. 1940
International Center of Photography
Purchase, with funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) [Afternoon crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn] July 21st, 1940 from the exhibition 'Weegee: Society of the Spectacle' at the International Center of Photography, New York, Jan - May 2025](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/7_sm.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) [Afternoon crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn] July 21st, 1940 from the exhibition 'Weegee: Society of the Spectacle' at the International Center of Photography, New York, Jan - May 2025")
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
[Afternoon crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn]
July 21, 1940
International Center of Photography
Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
'[Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of killing a policeman, New York]' January 16, 1941 from the exhibition 'Weegee: Society of the Spectacle' at the International Center of Photography, New York, Jan - May 2025](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/3-weegee_anthony-esposito-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of killing a policeman, New York]' January 16, 1941 from the exhibition 'Weegee: Society of the Spectacle' at the International Center of Photography, New York, Jan - May 2025")
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
[Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of killing a policeman, New York]
January 16, 1941
International Center of Photography
Purchase, with funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel
Purchase Fund, 1982
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
The career of photographer Weegee (born Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968) is often divided into two distinct phases, one gritty, the other glamorous. Celebrated for his sensationalist images of crime scenes, fires, car crashes, and the onlookers who witnessed these harrowing events across New York City in the 1930s and ’40s, Weegee also spent time in his career documenting the joyful crowds, premieres, and celebrities of Hollywood. His documentary images on both coasts gave way to experimental portraits late in his life, which were distorted using a kaleidoscope and other tricks from his technical toolbox. Weegee: Society of the Spectacle aims to reconcile these two sides of Weegee through an investigation of his focus, throughout his career, on a critique of 20th century popular culture and its insatiable appetite for spectacle.
Weegee: Society of the Spectacle is curated by Clément Chéroux, Director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (FHCB), Paris, in collaboration with the Weegee Archive at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York. The exhibition opens at ICP after a run at the FHCB and the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid. The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication Weegee: Society of the Spectacle (Thames & Hudson).
Text from the ICP website
Installation views of the exhibition Weegee: Society of the Spectacle at the International Center of Photography, New York
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Circus performer Miss Victory (Eglie Zacchini) shot out of a cannon at the speed of 360 feet a second, New York]' June 28, 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/weegee-circus-performer-miss-victory.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Circus performer Miss Victory (Eglie Zacchini) shot out of a cannon at the speed of 360 feet a second, New York]' June 28, 1943")
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
[Circus performer Miss Victory (Eglie Zacchini) shot out of a cannon at the speed of 360 feet a second, New York]
June 28, 1943
Gelatin silver print
13 1/2 x 10 3/4 in. (34.3 x 27.3cm)
Gift of Lee C. Sievan, 1984
© International Center of Photography
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Mrs. Bernice Lythcott and son looking through window shattered by rock-throwing hoodlums, Harlem, New York]' October 18, 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-mme-bernice-lythcott.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Mrs. Bernice Lythcott and son looking through window shattered by rock-throwing hoodlums, Harlem, New York]' October 18, 1943")
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
[Mrs. Bernice Lythcott and son looking through window shattered by rock-throwing hoodlums, Harlem, New York]
October 18, 1943
International Center of Photography. Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
Simply Add Boiling Water
December 18, 1943
International Center of Photography
Purchase, with funds provided by Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Lovers at the movies, New York]' c. 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/weegee-lovers-at-the-movies.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Lovers at the movies, New York]' c. 1943")
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
[Lovers at the movies, New York]
c. 1943
International Center of Photography
Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
Ladies keep their money in their stockings…
1944
International Center of Photography
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
Night… a black velvet curtain has dropped over the white sky… a few mothers went looking for their kids… found them here… dragged them home for supper… but they are back again… but that’s the same Empire State Building in the Background….
March 2, 1944
International Center of Photography
Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
The International Center of Photography (ICP) is pleased to announce Weegee:
Society of the Spectacle, an exhibition presented in partnership with Fondation
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris and curated by Clément Chéroux, Director of the
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.
This exhibition revisits Weegee’s bold, boundary-pushing perspective and
celebrates his pioneering role in documenting spectacle, from crime and tragedy on New York City’s streets to distorted portraits of iconic Hollywood celebrities. The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication created by the Fondation and Thames & Hudson that explores the impact of Weegee’s art and his critical view of urban spectacle. ICP is excited to present the new English-language edition of this important study of Weegee’s work.
Weegee: Society of the Spectacle marks the sixth major presentation of Weegee’s work at ICP and the first since it relocated to Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighbourhood, the very same one that Weegee transformed into an urban stage in his photographs. The exhibition arrives at a time when his commentary on the blurred lines between reality and performance and news and entertainment feel newly relevant and urgent in the age of smartphones and viral media where every individual has become both a voyeur and a consumer of spectacle.
Drawn largely from ICP’s Weegee collection, itself comprised of his entire studio archive and also the most comprehensive holdings of the photographer’s work in the world, Weegee: Society of the Spectacle is a re-examination of the photographer’s visual commentary on the society of his time, connecting his early career documenting New York City streets to his later work in Hollywood’s
glamorised world of celebrity and working with experimental image distortions. Long regarded as two distinct periods in his career, the works in Weegee: Society of the Spectacle challenge this division by underscoring how Weegee’s exploration of spectacle persisted across different contexts – from crime scenes and fires to red carpet premieres. Weegee’s masterful depiction of the ‘society of spectators’ captures both the unfiltered, everyday urban experience and the glossy allure of fame.
“While he may never have imagined the centrality of images to contemporary life, Weegee’s provocative and prescient perspective on urban life forces us to reflect on how we now exist simultaneously as both consumers and the consumed,” Elisabeth Sherman, Senior Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections at ICP, said. “In an age where technology and constant image sharing shape our reality, Weegee’s work challenges us to reconsider the camera’s role not only as a witness but as an active participant in the creation of spectacle.”
Clément Chéroux, Director at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, stated,
“Weegee’s works highlight his ability to capture life’s extremes, from high society to the underworld. Often working at night, Weegee’s images of crime, fire and urban unrest reveal the harsh realities of 1930s and 1940s New York. His later shift to Hollywood did not distance him from this focus on spectacle but rather amplified his satirical approach, as he created playful distortions of celebrities that critiqued the American obsession with fame.”
The exhibition will highlight three recurring themes in Weegee’s work. The
Spectacle of the News focuses on his nighttime photos of crime scenes, car
accidents and fires, where the onlookers are as important as the events
themselves. The Society of Spectators shows Weegee’s lens turned towards the
people on the fringes of the main action – from high-society parties to street
scenes – emphasising that spectatorship is part of the spectacle. Hollywood
Distortions highlights Weegee’s later years, which saw him experiment with
techniques that satirised Hollywood stars and the world of celebrity through
exaggerated photo-caricatures, offering a pointed critique of the culture of fame.
The publication accompanying the exhibition, Weegee: Society of the Spectacle,
further explores these themes, presenting essays by leading photography scholars including Clément Chéroux, Isabelle Bonnet, David Campany and Cynthia Young alongside rare archival material that deepens the viewer’s understanding of Weegee’s complex legacy. The book, published by Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and Thames & Hudson, will be available for purchase at ICP’s bookstore and through select retailers.
Press release from ICP
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[St. Louis Gag Shot]' c. 1950](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/1_hd.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[St. Louis Gag Shot]' c. 1950")
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
[St. Louis Gag Shot]
c. 1950
International Center of Photography
Bequest of Wilma
Wilcox, 1993
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
Photographers at Premiere
c. 1951
International Center of Photography
Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
Weegee
c. 1958
International Center of Photography
Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Mona Lisa distortion]' c. 1958](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/weegee-mona-lisa.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Mona Lisa distortion]' c. 1958")
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
[Mona Lisa distortion]
c. 1958
International Center of Photography
Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
President John F. Kennedy (distortion)
December 2, 1962
International Center of Photography
Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
© International Center of Photography/Getty Images
Weegee: Society of the Spectacle book cover
International Center of Photography
84 Ludlow Street, New York, NY 10002
between Delancey Street and Broome Street
Opening hours:
Monday 10.30am – 6.30pm
Tuesday CLOSED
Wednesday 10.30am – 6.30pm
Thursday 10.30am – 8pm
Friday 10.30am – 6.30pm
Saturday 10.30am – 6.30pm
Sunday 10.30am – 6.30pm
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Jean Pearson
c. 1948
From the series In My Room
Gelatin silver print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words.
So many words, so much verbiage about the work of American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013).
I’d rather not add to that noise.
It is well to reinforce the meaning of an image with text but it is not necessary.
Just be aware …. of the beauty of the image and your feelings towards it.
Lucidly, appreciate the integrity of the image.
Nothing more but certainly nothing less.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. It’s wonderful to see the earlier black and white work, breadcrumb trail of the colour work to come.
Many thankx to Foam for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Photographs are often treated as important moments, but really they are fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world.”
Saul Leiter
“I may be old-fashioned. But I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty – a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don’t think one should have to apologise for it.”
Saul Leiter, In No Great Hurry, 2013
“His photos feel – as Akiko Atake puts it – like “quiet stolen glimpses”; moments plucked from the everyday and preserved in the eye of Leiter’s camera.”
Sophie Mulgrew. “Feb 9 Book Review: Forever Saul Leiter,” on the Musee Magazine website Nd [Online] Cited 18/03/2025
“I’ve always felt a closeness to Japan in Leiter’s work; the photographs in the snow; the women under their umbrellas; the improbable perspectives and revolutionary compositions reminiscent of Japanese woodblocks, ukiyo-e; the presence of the seasons and the verticality of the compositions evoking Japanese scroll paintings, kakajiku; the beauty he found in cracks and broken surfaces, in the unfinished, the worn out, the imperfect – the endurance of the elements and the effects of time. There is a “mono no aware”* beauty to his photographs, in the color work especially – an acute awareness of the beauty of the transient, of the ephemeral, which might explain, in part, their magical and poetic essence.”
Paul Vermare. “Saul Leiter, the New York Nabi,” on the Blind Magazine website, July 3, 2023 [Online] Cited 08/04/2025
“Leiter was destined to become a rabbi like his father, but moved to New York to be a painter, then choosing photography – which appalled his father. Beginning in 1948, Leiter using an Argus C3 camera, then a Leica and a Rolleiflex
In the 2012 documentary, In No Great Hurry, Saul Leiter said: “There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden.” These tender and graceful depictions of “the things that are hidden” – images that Leiter rarely showed – retain their essential mystery, defying interpretation.”
Anonymous. “Saul Leiter’s nude friends and lovers – in pictures,” on The Guardian website 15th August 2018 [Online] Cited 18/03/2025
* mono no aware = a Japanese concept that describes a poignant awareness of the transient nature of existence, a sensitivity to the beauty of things that are fleeting, and a gentle sadness at their passing
Leiter’s love of beauty, Bonnard, Japan, Buddhism, Ukiyo-e prints, Japanese scroll paintings, “ma” (space), kyūdō, haiku.
“The unorthodox and seemingly disproportionate compositions… the emphasis on shapes; the presence of calligraphy; unusual viewpoints and perspectives, everyday subject matter; the ubiquity of women; and a fondness for the ordinary and the ephemeral”
Paul Vermare. “Saul Leiter, the New York Nabi,” on the Blind Magazine website, July 3, 2023 [Online] Cited 08/04/2025
~ Leiter’s complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.
~ Leiter was a keen observer as life unfolded before him, somehow finding a way to reliably pluck a sublime split-second out of a mundane moment. ‘I like to take things that are very common and to find something in them,’ he once said.
~ Photographs are often considered important moments, but according to Leiter they are tiny fragments of an unfinished world. Such is his own world: little fragments of images juxtaposed and conjoined, amassing and forming vast, ever-expanding fields.
~ He photographed that which obstructs, hides, encloses, and thus reveals new depths of reality.
~ Everything is a matter of balance, exactitude and humility in the works of this man, who nonetheless accorded great importance to imperfection.
Anonymous. “‘There’s nothing quite like them’: Saul Leiter’s photos and paintings – in pictures,” on The Guardian website Wed 9 Aug 2023 [Online] Cited 08/04/2025
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Exacta
1948
Gelatin silver print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
He photographed that which obstructs, hides, encloses, and thus reveals new depths of reality.
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Selfportrait
1950s
Gelatin silver print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Ana
1950s
Gelatin silver print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Sidewalk
1954
Gelatin silver print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Hats
c. 1948
Gelatin silver print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Installation view of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Untitled
Nd
Gelatin silver print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Foam is proud to present a major retrospective exhibition of the celebrated American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Leiter is seen as one of the most important photographers of the 1950’s in the United States and a pioneer of colour photography. This exhibition brings together over 200 works, consisting of photography, both black-and-white and colour, as well as his abstract paintings. His eclectic oeuvre reveals a practice using shadow, light, and reflections to craft layered compositions.
Saul Leiter (1923-2013) began painting and photographing in his teenage years, gaining an early recognition for his paintings. After moving to New York in 1946, he turned to photography as a profession while continuing to paint. His abstract forms and groundbreaking compositions possess a painterly quality that distinguishes them from the works of other photographers of that era. His work significantly contributed to the emergence of what is now known as the New York School of photography.
In 1957, he began working for major publications like Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, balancing his commercial success with his personal passion for street photography in his Manhattan neighbourhood. Leiter’s groundbreaking work in colour photography gained widespread acclaim with the release of his first book, Early Colour (2006). By the time of his death in 2013, Leiter had achieved international recognition, with his work featured in numerous museum exhibitions and publications worldwide.
Text from the Foam website
Installation views of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam
Saul Leiter remained dedicated to painting throughout his career, producing many gouaches (opaque watercolours), which were essential to his artistic expression. While most of his works are abstract, with large areas of colour, some feature playful lines that suggest landscapes or figures. His expressive use of colour is distinctive, often favouring muted tones like soft violets, mauves, and faded ochres or yellows. Although Leiter is best known for his photography, his paintings reflect a similarly poetic and intimate vision of the world.
Text from the Foam Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam showing Leiter’s photograph The Pull (c. 1960, below)
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Pull
c. 1960
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Leiter was a keen observer as life unfolded before him, somehow finding a way to reliably pluck a sublime split-second out of a mundane moment. ‘I like to take things that are very common and to find something in them,’ he once said.
Installation view of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam showing Leiter’s photograph
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Harlem
1960
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Foam is proud to present a major retrospective exhibition of the celebrated American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Leiter is seen as one of the most important photographers of the 1950’s in the United States, and a pioneer of colour photography. This exhibition brings together over 200 works, consisting of photography, both black-and-white and colour, as well as his abstract paintings. His eclectic oeuvre reveals a practice using shadow, light, and reflections to craft layered compositions.
For nearly sixty years, Leiter photographed daily, capturing everyday moments of New York City life. With various techniques and mediums, and the use of telephoto lenses, Leiter would enhance the painterly quality of his images and transform seemingly mundane street scenes into visual poetry. New York, a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, became the backdrop for Leiter’s aesthetic discoveries.
By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of colour to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in colour. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and colour. Once lost to obscurity, his work was rediscovered in the mid 2010s for its ground-breaking role in the emergence of colour photography.
By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of colour to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in colour. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and colour. Once lost to obscurity, his work was rediscovered in the mid 2010s for its ground-breaking role in the emergence of colour photography.
Leiter was a self-taught photographer whose strong sense of curiosity made him a lifelong student. He maintained his experimental and spontaneous approach throughout his career, which is evident in both his street photography and fashion work.
Upon his death in 2013, Leiter left behind a remarkable collection of approximately 15,000 black-and-white prints, at least 40,000 colour slides, a similar number of black-and-white negatives and over 4000 paintings, only a handful of which have been seen publicly. The exhibition An Unfinished World offers visitors the chance to admire the endless poetry of Saul Leiter’s artistic practice through his paintings, photography and unique view on the world around him.
Press release from Foam
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Footprints
c. 1950
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Untitled
Nd
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Untitled
Nd
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Untitled
Nd
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Untitled
Nd
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Everything is a matter of balance, exactitude and humility in the works of this man, who nonetheless accorded great importance to imperfection.
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Untitled
Nd
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
“This ambidextrous painter and photographer recognised no limits. If, in the silence of his studio, his movement inscribed on paper imperceptible little rhythmic abbreviations, like an everyday exercise, his gaze penetrated the tumult of the city, challenging what draws the eye and scrutinising what is not seen.”
“If only we give them just a little more attention, these voices also tell us that the images are fragments containing enigmas, and that they journey through time and endure, intact, despite the darkness that may prevail in the world.”
Anne Morin
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Taxi
1957
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Leiter’s complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Untitled
Nd
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Red Curtain
1956
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
“For nearly sixty years, Leiter photographed daily, capturing everyday moments of New York City life. With various techniques and mediums, and the use of telephoto lenses, Leiter would enhance the painterly quality of his images and transform seemingly mundane street scenes into visual poetry. New York, a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, became the backdrop for Leiter’s aesthetic discoveries. By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of color to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in color. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and color.”
Dimitris Lempesis. “PHOTO: Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World,” on the Dream Idea Machine website Nd [Online] Cited 15/03/2025
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Lanesville
1958
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Cap
c. 1960
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation
Foam
Keizersgracht 609
1017 DS Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: + 31 20 5516500
Opening hours:
Monday – Wednesday 10am – 6pm
Thursday – Friday 10am – 9pm
Sat – Sun 10am – 6pm
Curators: Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, Hujar’s close friend the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Ethyl Eichelberger
1979
Gelatin silver print
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Ethyl Eichelberger (American, 1945-1990) was an Obie award-winning drag performer, playwright, and actor.
As with humans, there are certain photographers that I am attracted to more than others due to the abundant energy of their images:
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Chris Killip (British, 1946-2020)
Mario Giacomelli (Italian, 1925-2000)
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Minor White (American, 1908-1976)
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
And then there is Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987).
Using contextless backgrounds and simple settings, Hujar’s non-judgmental portraits of friends and lovers rely on the slight twist of the head, the drop of a shadow, the photographer’s look and subjects pose, performance, that curves and bends reality into a presence that is magnetic, magical, eternal.
Hujar’s direct, intimate photographs, suggestive of both love and loss, proffer a mirror to strength and determination / to friendship / to love. His pictures gather, together, a feeling for the freedom of people and places, that essence of being true to yourself (getting to the bone as Harrison Adams puts it). A direct connection between the photographer and subject captured by the camera revealed to the world.
You might have guessed I am in love with his photographs.
Thus, it is a great delight to post on this exhibition at Raven Row in London which looks to be an absolute delight, Hujar’s photographs simply and beautifully presented in the space.
His images reveal themselves over time, expounding his love of life and his intimate and free engagement with the world around him.
That is Hujar’s music, his signature.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Harrison Adams. Photography in the First Person: Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin and Sally Mann (Dissertation). Yale University, 2018 quoted on the “Peter Hujar” Wikipedia page Nd [Online] Cited 14/03/2025
Further postings on this incredible artist on Art Blart can be found at
Exhibition: Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture at the Art Institute of Chicago, May – October 2023
Exhibition: Peter Hujar: Speed of Life at Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 2019 – January 2020
Exhibition: Peter Hujar: Speed of Life at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, January – April 2017
Many thankx to Raven Row for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
One aspect of this intimate quality was Hujar’s ability to connect with his sitters. One of his models was quoted after an unsuccessful session as saying:
“We couldn’t ‘reveal’. As an actor you have to reveal. And Hujar’s big thing was that you had to reveal. I know that now, but I didn’t know it at the time. In other words, blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No posing. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, real who-you-are…You must strip down all the nonsense until you get to the bone. That’s what Peter wanted and that was his great, great talent and skill.”
Harrison Adams. “Peter Hujar: Shamelessness Without Shame,” in Criticism 63 (4), Wayne State University Press, 2021, p. 319
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Penny, 1981; T.C., 1975 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; David Wojnarowicz, 1981; Cookie Mueller, 1981; Larry Ree (I), 1975 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Georg Osterman (Backstage, Eunuchs of the Forbidden City, Ridiculous Theatrical Company), Westbeth, New York, 1973
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
This is the first exhibition to take on the full breadth of Peter Hujar’s later photography. Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his work was largely unknown to a broader art world. Now it is widely admired for its austere elegance and emotional charge. Hujar’s principal concern was with forms of portraiture – of his friends and denizens of the downtown scene, whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio or sought out backstage. He also turned his attention to animals, whom he photographed with particular empathy, as well as to architectural, landscape and street photography.
Eyes Open in the Dark concentrates on his later work, when his emergence from a debilitating depression in 1976 brought about a new expansiveness. The exhibition also reveals the darkening tone of his photography in the early 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community, and his work entered into dialogue with the younger artist David Wojnarowicz. Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark is curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, and Hujar’s close friend, the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury. As well as lifetime prints it will include prints of little-known works specially prepared by Gary Schneider, working closely with the artist’s Estate.
Text from Raven Row
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – White Turkey, Pennsylvania, 1985 (below); Leroy Street, West Village, New York, 1976; Nicolas Abdallah Moufarrege, Paris, 1980; John Flowers (Backstage, Palm Casino Revue, New York), 1974 (below) Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Cow (Barbed Wire), Hyrkin Farm, Westtown, New York, 1978
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
White Turkey, Pennsylvania
1985
Gelatin silver print
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
John Flowers (Backstage, Palm Casino Revue)
1974
Gelatin silver print
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Stephen Varble (III), Soho, New York
1976
Gelatin silver print
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Stephen Lloyd Varble (American, 1946-1984) was a notorious American performance artist, playwright, and fashion designer in lower Manhattan during the 1970s. His work challenged mainstream conceptions of gender and exposed the materialism of the established, institutionalised world.
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Jose Arango (Backstage, Palm Casino Revue, New York), 1974 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; John Erdman and Gary Schneider, Monhonk Mountain House, New Paltz, New York, 1984 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Horse, West Virginia, 1969 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; David Brintzenhofe, 1983 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Paul Hudson, 1979; Butch and Buster, Hyrkin Farm, Westtown, New York, 1978 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Boy Crying, 1979; Ethyl Eichelberger (II), 1981 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Sarah Jenkins, NY (II), 1984; Paul Thek (II), 1975
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Ethyl Eichelberger (II), 1981 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Sarah Jenkins, NY (II), 1984; Paul Thek (II), 1975; Self-Portrait (II), 1975 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Ann Wilson (III), 1975; Lavinia Co-op, 1980
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Lola Pashalinski, 1974 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Bill Elliot, 1974; Gary Schneider (I), 1979 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Girl Sleeping in Doorway, 1976
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Torso (Pascal Imbert), 1980; Manny, Manny and Vince, 1981 Collection Vince Aletti; Keith Cameron, 1981 Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman; Donkey, Italy, 1978; Nude, 1978; Lynn Davis, 1985
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
This is the first exhibition to take on the full breadth of Peter Hujar’s later photography. Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his work was largely unknown to a broader art world. Now it is widely admired for its austere elegance and emotional charge.
Hujar’s principal concern was with forms of portraiture – of his friends and denizens of the downtown scene, whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio or sought out backstage. He also turned his attention to animals, whom he photographed with particular empathy, as well as to architectural, landscape and street photography. Eyes Open in the Dark concentrates on his later work, when his emergence from a debilitating depression in 1976 brought about a new expansiveness. The exhibition also reveals the darkening tone of his photography in the early 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community, and his work entered into dialogue with the younger artist David Wojnarowicz.
Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark is curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, and Hujar’s close friend, the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury. As well as lifetime prints it will include prints of little-known works specially prepared by Gary Schneider, working closely with the artist’s Estate.
The exhibition is free to attend and open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm, no booking required. Please note that some images in this exhibition feature explicit sexual content.
Text from the Raven Row website
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Richie Gallo (Backstage, The Life & Times of Joseph Stalin,
Brooklyn Academy of Music)
1973
Gelatin silver print
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Person in Veil (Backstage, The Life & Times of Joseph Stalin, Brooklyn Academy of Music)
1973
Gelatin silver print
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Canal Street Pier, New York (Stairs)
1983
Gelatin silver print
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing Andy Warhol’s Peter Hujar [ST156], 1964; Peter Hujar [ST157], 1964; Peter Hujar [ST158], 1964; Peter Hujar [ST159], 1964 Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Paul Thek, Oakleyville, Fire Island, New York, 1967; Self-Portrait (II), 1980; Self-Portrait (I), 1980
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing at centre, Paul Thek, Florida, 1957
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Self-Portrait (III), 1980 (below); Self-Portrait, 1958; Paul Thek, Oakleyville, Fire Island, New York, 1973
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Self-Portrait
1980
Gelatin silver print
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Peter Hujar’s David Wojnarowicz, 1985; David Wojnarowicz’s photographs of Peter Hujar, Untitled, 1987 showing Hujar in his death bed. Collection of Gary Schneider and John Erdman
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Bruce de Sainte Croix, 1976; Bruce de Sainte Croix, 1976; Bruce de Sainte Croix, 1976
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Hudson River (III), 1976; East River (II), 1976; Hudson River (IV), 1976
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing from left to right – Christopher Street Pier #5, New York, 1976; Christopher Street Pier #4, New York, 1976; Christopher Street Pier #1, New York, 1976; Easter Sunday, St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, 1976
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled, from Sex Series (for Marion Scemama), 1989 Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and PPOW, New York
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled
1989
From Sex Series (for Marion Scemama) 1988-1989
Gelatin silver print
One of Wojnarowicz’s most remarkable pieces here is the “Sex Series (for Marion Scemama),” a miracle of technical prowess and visual intensity. Wojnarowicz began it in 1988, a year after the photographer Peter Hujar, his close friend and former lover, died of AIDS. These photomontages combine stock photographs with circular insets salvaged from Hujar’s porn collection [among other insets of, for example, police, medical, money, religion and life], which he’d thrown away after his diagnosis.
Much of Wojnarowicz’s work is about sex in an age of death. During the AIDS crisis, sexual activity, particularly that of gay men, was demonized. Resisting the dogma and censorship of the Right’s conservatism and the Left’s moralism alike, the “Sex Series” vibrates with anxious and desirous energy, a mood amplified by the eerie reversal of the printing process, in which light and dark have been inverted to create a near negative.
Olivia Laing. “Brush Fires in the Social Landscape,” on the Book Forum website April/May 2015 [Online] Cited 14/03/2025
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark at Raven Row, London showing Contact sheets, 18 April, Easter Sunday, 1976
© 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Photo: Marcus J Leith
Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane
London e1 7ls
Opening hours:
Wednesday to Sunday 11am – 6pm
Curators: Nathalie Herschdorfer, Director of Photo Elysée, and Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery.
Deborah Turbeville (American, b. 1932-2013)
Untitled
Passage Vivienne, Paris, France, November 1980
From the series Comme des Garçons
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
There are some haunting photographs in this posting on the work of American photographer Deborah Turbeville but unfortunately I can make little comment on her work.
Despite trawling through numerous sites looking at her images – there is not much online – and more importantly having not seen the exhibition, I find that I have no real handle on the photographic series.
A couple of photographs from the Passport, Comme des Garçons, Block Island and Unseen Versailles series, plus a few photocollage which investigate the nature of photography and its fragility in this posting doesn’t allow me to understand the full sweep of her artistic work… which is a great pity.
The only way to really understand and feel Turbeville’s work is to visit The Photographers’ Gallery and immerse yourself in the artist’s world. Unfortunately I cannot do that.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Photographers’ 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’m making photographs, I think of films”
Deborah Turbeville, 1985
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage highlights the work of a truly innovative, American fashion photographer, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013) who transformed fashion imagery into avant-garde art. Her signature dreamlike and melancholic style became recognisable with her earliest works in the 1970s: enigmatic female figures, cloudy skies, wintry nature and abandoned, decaying surroundings. She deliberately distanced herself from the typical glamourous, polished aesthetic that dominated fashion at the time.
An interview on the exhibition Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage with Nathalie Herschdorfer, Exhibition Curator, and Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator, The Photographers’ Gallery.
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Walking down Passage Vivienne (Escalier dans Passage Vivienne)
Paris, France, November 1980
From the series Comme des Garçons
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville’s signature dreamlike and melancholic style became recognisable with her earliest works in the 1970s: enigmatic female figures, cloudy skies, wintry nature and abandoned, decaying surroundings. She deliberately distanced herself from the typical glamourous, polished aesthetic that dominated fashion at the time.
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage presents Turbeville’s trailblazing photographic explorations, from fashion photos to her very personal work. Bringing together unique pieces, the exhibition reveals Turbeville’s highly personal artistic universe, which has been credited with transforming fashion imagery into avant-garde art.
She experimented with the developing process, from the darkroom to the studio table. She ripped, cut and tore her photographs; manipulated, pinned and glued them together to create unique hybrid objects. Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is a new appreciation of Turbeville’s ground-breaking contribution to the history of photography.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
Jacqueline Onassis commissioned Turbeville to photograph the Palace of Versailles during her tenure as an editor at the American publishing house Doubleday. With help from Onassis she gained access to the labyrinth of hidden chambers and antechambers which were off limits to tourists. She photographed barren rooms, Baroque furniture covered with sheets, broken statues, and curtains thick with dust. The curator of the estate initially blocked the introduction of props, but Onassis eventually gained her permission to bring in models in period costumes. Unseen Versailles won the American Book Award in 1982 and enabled Turbeville to find a readership outside fashion magazines.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (until 23 February 2025), celebrates Turbeville’s trailblazing photographic explorations, from fashion photos to her very personal work. To coincide with the exhibition, we’re looking at some of her photographic series in more detail, starting with the Passport series!
Turbeville’s Passport series of collages, which accompanied a novella she wrote with the same name, demonstrates her very cinematic, narrative approach to photography.
Fixed to wrinkled brown paper with unusually large T-pins, the series heavily features portrait photographs. The gelatin silver prints all have slightly varying hues of black and white; their torn edges overlap, each revealing a different fragment. The torn sections of women’s faces stand out against grainy backgrounds, like a ghostly white sky. Turbeville selected images, largely from her archives, showing repeated shots positioned together, repurposing her work to create new experimental compositions that felt cinematic in style. Alongside the images, fragments of her unpublished novella are cut out and pasted, so that the series can be read narratively as well as visually.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Turbeville considered photography to be more than just a means of pictorial representation. Curious about the materials and nature of photography, she was inescapably interested in its fragility. Her photocollages suggested new possibilities for photography, which had, until then, cleaved very closely to reality. Collage became a form of manual work which allowed her to create three-dimensional objects and a chance to gather up her own images and give them new depth. She embraced the visible imperfections in a handmade, narrative style that gives her work a unique stylistic voice.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery Instagram page
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Maquillage
1975
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Bathhouse, New York
New York, 1975
From the series Bathhouse
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Jean Muir and Three Unknown Models
1975
© The Estate of Deborah Turbeville
For her second spread in Vogue Magazine, Deborah Turbeville photographed designers with their models and muses in a February 1975 editorial titled “European Fashion: The Movers”. Here, she captured the British doyenne of dressmaking, Jean Muir, with her friends modelling her designs.
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Untitled
Block Island, Rhode Island, 1976
From the series Block Island
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Untitled
Block Island, Rhode Island, 1976
From the series Block Island
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Versailles
Versailles, France, 1980
From the series Unseen Versailles
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville is remembered today as a pioneering figure in fashion photography, known for her melancholic, dreamlike imagery that diverged from conventional standards. Born in 1932 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, USA, she initially pursued acting before being discovered by fashion designer Claire McCardell, who employed her as an assistant and model. Through McCardell, Turbeville met Diana Vreeland, then editor of Harper’s Bazaar, which launched her editorial career. However, she soon lost interest in conventional editorial work, turning instead to photography as an outlet for artistic expression and experimentation.
In the 1960s, after buying her first camera, Turbeville began early experimentation in photography. Her creative direction was refined through a workshop with photographer Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel. Moving from fashion editing to photography, she worked for magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, though she always insisted she was not a traditional fashion photographer. Rather, she used fashion within her work to tell emotionally charged stories, setting herself apart from the industry’s glamorous norms.
One of her most iconic works is the Bathhouse series for Vogue in 1975, featuring models posed in a dilapidated bathhouse. The images conveyed vulnerability, decay and isolation, starkly contrasting with the glossy fashion photography of the time. Although controversial, the series exemplified Turbeville’s atmospheric aesthetic – soft focus, grainy textures and muted tones. She often distressed her photographs to give them an aged appearance, blurring the lines between fashion photography and fine art.
Turbeville’s work rejected the conventions of fashion industry ideals, choosing instead to explore themes of memory, loss and feminine vulnerability. Her approach stood in contrast to contemporaries like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, whose images typically celebrated female sensuality. In contrast, Turbeville’s subjects appeared introspective and distant, encouraging viewers to engage with them on a deeper, emotional level.
In 1981, Turbeville was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to photograph the abandoned rooms of the Palace of Versailles, which resulted in the book Unseen Versailles. The images of faded grandeur reflected her fascination with decay and received critical acclaim, winning an American Book Award.
Her body of work extended beyond fashion to other notable publications, including Studio St. Petersburg, The Voyage of the Virgin Maria Candelaria, and Newport Remembered. Throughout her career, she consistently merged fashion with fine art, creating images defined more by atmosphere and emotion than style alone.
Her photocollages show her experimental approach to constructing compositions. Her photographs are just one element among several. She builds up mysterious narratives through overlapping layers of pinned, ripped, cut, creased and taped images, found objects and printed texts. These layers are built up on heavy brown paper – a complete departure from the glossy white pages of fashion magazines. Her Passport series of collages, which accompanied a novella she wrote with the same name, demonstrates her very cinematic, narrative approach to photography.
Turbeville’s influence on future generations of photographers is significant. She opened doors for more experimental, avant-garde approaches to fashion photography, transforming it from a commercial medium into a space for artistic exploration. Her rejection of industry norms allowed her to create a distinctive visual language that continues to inspire photographers and artists today.
Turbeville once remarked that she was more interested in creating “atmosphere and mood” than simply photographing clothes, a sentiment that underpinned her career. By embracing imperfection, decay and the passage of time, she redefined fashion photography as more than a vehicle for selling clothes.
Turbeville’s career represents a turning point in fashion photography. Her dreamlike, melancholic style and innovative approach broke industry conventions, transforming fashion photography into a medium for personal and artistic expression. Her legacy continues to inspire, and her influence remains enduring long after her death in 2013.
Anonymous. “How Deborah Turbeville tore up the rules,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 16/01/2025
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Page from Passport
c. 1990
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Page from Passport
c. 1990
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Page from Passport
c. 1990
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Page from Passport
c. 1990
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Luisa, Posos, January 1991
1991
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do. I’m not really a fashion photographer.”
Deborah Turbeville in The New Yorker
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage opens at The Photographers’ Gallery this Autumn, from 9 October 2024 – 23 February 2025. Presenting the work of the truly innovative American photographer, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013), the exhibition will feature a selection of her personal vintage photocollages and editorial work.
Deborah Turbeville revolutionised the world of fashion photography, transforming it from its commercial clean standard into an art form. Turbeville deliberately distanced herself from the typical glamorous, polished aesthetic that dominated fashion at the time. Her signature dreamlike and melancholic style became recognisable with her earliest works in the 1970s: enigmatic female figures, cloudy skies, wintry nature and abandoned, decaying surroundings.
Turbeville’s work for the fashion industry launched her career, which lasted over four decades. Between 1975 and 2013, her photographs were published in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and New York Times Magazine. She also worked for fashion houses including Comme des Garçons, Guy Laroche, Charles Jourdan, Calvin Klein, Emanuel Ungaro and Valentino. At a time when fashion photography was dominated by men, Turbeville chose a path that ran counter to that of her male peers, like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin.
Soft focus and overexposure brought a surreal and dusty tone to her black, white and sepia-toned work. Her models resemble ghostly apparitions as they wander through deserted buildings and landscapes. The exhibition includes her most controversial photograph, Bath House, New York City, 1975, part of a swimsuit photoshoot for Vogue, which featured five models, slouching and stretching in an abandoned bathhouse. The picture was so unlike the traditional fashion imagery of the time it prompted a public outcry.
Turbeville was undeterred and continued to produce images with an element of decay, saying “the idea of disintegration is really the core of my work.”
Other works on show include images from Turbeville’s 1981 American Book Award-winning series Unseen Versailles, and her first photocollage magazine, Maquillage (1975).
Turbeville’s experimentation extended from the darkroom to the studio table as she unpicked the developing process. She ripped, cut and tore her photographs; manipulated, pinned and glued them. Her handmade collages are hybrid objects – as much diaries as book maquettes, sketchbooks as photographic novels – all from a pre-digital age.
Describing her work, she said “I destroy the image after I’ve made it, obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there.”
Turbeville developed a highly personal artistic universe, which has been credited with transforming fashion imagery into avant-garde art. Although she did not achieve the same recognition as her male counterparts in her lifetime. Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is a new opportunity to consider and celebrate Turbeville’s ground-breaking contribution to the history of photography.
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is organised by The Photographers’ Gallery, produced by Photo Elysée in collaboration with MUUS Collection. The exhibition is curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, Director of Photo Elysée, and Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery.
The accompanying catalogue Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is published by Thames & Hudson and available at The Photographers’ Gallery’s bookshop at £55.
Deborah Turbeville was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, USA in 1932. She moved to New York with ambitions to study drama when she was 19. Instead she was discovered by the fashion designer Claire McCardell, who hired Turbeville as an assistant and house model. While working for McCardell, she met Diana Vreeland, the famed editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Their introduction led to Turbeville being offered a job as an editor at the magazine.
Disinterested in her editorial work at Harper’s Bazaar and later at Mademoiselle, she began experimenting with photography in the 1960s. She took part in a workshop led by Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel in 1966. From there, she began her photographic career, mainly working for magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Mirabella.
In 1981, Turbeville was commissioned by Jaqueline Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, to photograph disused rooms in the Palace of Versailles. The book, Unseen Versailles, won an American Book Award, for its rare look into the Palace’s off-limits decaying grandeur.
Turbeville published many books of her photography, including Studio St. Petersburg, The Voyage of the Virgin Maria Candelaria and Newport Remembered. Posthumous publications include Comme des Garçons 1981, a series of photographs she took during the 1980s in collaboration with the fashion house and its designer, Rei Kawakubo.
Turbeville died in 2013, having left an indelible mark on the world of photography. Her work is collected by major institutions worldwide, including the National Portrait Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery
Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013)
Untitled (Metamorphosis of Ella M.)
Paris, France, early 1990s
From the series L’École des Beaux Arts
© Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection
Stephan Lupino (Croatian, b. 1952)
Portrait of Deborah Turbeville
Nd
Gelatin silver print
© Stephan Lupino
The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW
Opening hours:
Mon – Wed: 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday – Friday: 10.00 – 20.00
Saturday: 10.00 – 18.00
Sunday: 11.00 – 18.00
Curator: John Stauffer, the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Unidentified photographer
Frederick Douglass
c. 1841
Sixth-plate daguerreotype
Collection of Gregory French
In this first known photographic image of Douglass, taken only one year after the first commercial daguerreotype studio opened in the United States, he appears somewhat dazed or “statue-like,” as he might have said. In 1841, the exposure time for a daguerreotype of this size could run up to fifteen seconds, depending on the time of day and the amount of available daylight in the daguerreotypist’s studio.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
I seem to be envisioning the nineteenth-century at the moment, which is a condition entirely more pleasurable than contemplating the dreadful state of the world at the moment with its environmental desecration, greed, killing of animal and human life and the unconscionable conduct of governments. Ego, greed, religion, power, masculinity, war, nationalism, possession. A toxic mix.
Here we have photographs of a majestic human being, a former slave, social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman – who fought for freedom, who fought against discrimination and racism. And still it goes on today…
“A new memorial to Emmett Till was dedicated on Saturday in Mississippi after previous historical markers were repeatedly vandalized. The new marker is bulletproof.
Till, 14, was kidnapped, beaten and killed in 1955, hours after he was accused of whistling at a white woman. His body was found in a river days later. An all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted two white men of murder charges…
This is the fourth historical marker at the site. The first was placed in 2008. Someone tossed it in the river. The second and third signs were shot at and left riddled with bullet holes. The new 500lb steel sign has a glass bulletproof front.”1
His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, held an open casket funeral in Chicago to let the world see how badly her son had been beaten and mutilated. “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.”
At the end I’ll be glad when I have left this world because I am so disappointed with the human race. High hopes indeed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Associated Press. “Emmett Till: new memorial to murdered teen is bulletproof,” on The Guardian website Sun 20 Oct 2019 [Online] 06/04/2024
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The bullet-riddled historical sign for Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager whose 1955 slaying helped propel the civil rights movement
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Unidentified artist (formerly attributed to Elisha Livermore Hammond)
Frederick Douglass
c. 1845
Oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Frederick Douglass became the most influential African American of the nineteenth century by turning his life into a testimony on the evils of slavery and the redemptive power of freedom. After he escaped from bondage in 1838, Douglass quickly emerged as an outspoken advocate for equality and abolition. Aware of the power of telling one’s own story, he frequently spoke about his life, published three genre-defining autobiographies, and founded the influential newspaper, The North Star, in 1847. Douglass also posed for countless photographs, which he considered less susceptible to artists’ racial prejudices.
This painting was likely based on the engraved frontispiece of Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), a gripping account of his struggle for freedom. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass went on to address the psychology of slavery and the racism that continued to define the lives of the newly free.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Southworth & Hawes (active 1843–1862)
Frederick Douglass
c. 1845
Whole-plate daguerreotype
Onondaga Historical Association Museum, Syracuse, NY
Douglass likely sat for this daguerreotype in the Boston studio of Southworth & Hawes before he left for England in August 1845. The Twelfth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar, held at Faneuil Hall in December 1845, offered for sale “an excellent Daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass,” according to The Liberator (January 23, 1846). The daguerreotype was “the gift of Mr. Southworth” and “elicited much attention.” John Chester Buttre created an engraving from the daguerreotype, which appeared in Autographs for Freedom (1854), a gift book edited by Douglass’s friend Julia Griffiths to raise money for his North Star newspaper.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Southworth & Hawes (active 1843–1862)
Frederick Douglass (detail)
c. 1845
Whole-plate daguerreotype
Onondaga Historical Association Museum, Syracuse, NY
Augustus Washington (American, c. 1820–1875)
John Brown 1800-1859
c. 1846-1847
Quarter-plate daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; purchased with major acquisition funds and with funds donated by Betty Adler Schermer in honor of her great grandfather, August M. Bondi
One of the nation’s first African American daguerreotypists, Augustus Washington was also a prominent abolitionist in Hartford, Connecticut, when he made this portrait of the militant abolitionist John Brown. At the time, Brown was working to establish a “Subterranean Pass Way,” a network of armed men in the Alleghenies for conducting fugitives to freedom in Canada.
In Washington’s daguerreotype, Brown apparently holds the Pass Way flag and pledges allegiance to his scheme, which never materialised. In 1853, Washington and his family emigrated to Liberia, the former West African colony founded by the American Colonization Society, which gained independence in 1847.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the preeminent African American voice of the nineteenth century, is remembered as one of the nation’s greatest orators, writers, and picture makers. Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1818, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was the son of Harriet Bailey, an enslaved woman, and an unknown white father. He escaped bondage in 1838 and changed his surname to Douglass.
Over six decades, Douglass published three autobiographies, hundreds of essays, and a novella; delivered thousands of speeches; and edited the longest-running Black newspaper in the nineteenth century, The North Star (later Frederick Douglass’ Paper and Douglass’ Monthly). During the Civil War, he befriended and advised President Abraham Lincoln and met every subsequent president through Grover Cleveland. He was also the first African American to receive a federal appointment requiring Senate approval (U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia).
Douglass became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century and remains a public face of the nation. As an art critic, he wrote extensively on portrait photography and understood its power. He explained how this “true art” (as opposed to pernicious caricatures) captured the essential humanity of each subject. True art was an engine of social change, he argued, and true artists were activists: “They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavour to remove the contradiction.”
Organised into seven sections, this exhibition highlights the long arc and significance of Frederick Douglass’s life: from slave and fugitive to internationally acclaimed abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and statesman after the Civil War. We come to recognise his influences in the Civil War and postwar eras; and the significance of his afterlife, in which his portraits and writings continue to inspire people to seek “all rights for all,” one of his mottos. The range of objects shown here reflects Douglass’s openness to new forms of media and technology to advance the cause of human rights.
John Stauffer, the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Douglass’ ascension into the most preeminent African American voice in the 1800s and one of the handful of most influential and famous Americans in the nation’s history owes itself equally to his merits and good fortune.
“Douglass had an extraordinary work ethic, he was immensely curious and dedicated,” Stauffer explained. “And physically strong and tall – over six feet, a half-foot taller than the average man – which helped him survive slavery.”
Size does matter. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were also comparative giants for their day. American presidents, on average, stand a great deal taller, literally, than the average citizen.
Douglass’ physical size and strength allowed him to outlast a sadistic “slave breaker,” Edward Covey, in a protracted fight as a teen. After suffering numerous whippings, Douglass stood up to the man. As long as he lived, he referred to the fight as the turning point in his life as a slave.
“He was also lucky to have been born and raised in the upper South and not sold into the Deep South or murdered for his rebelliousness as a slave and his constant battles against slavery and racism as a free man,” Stouffer added. “Had he been born in the Deep South, where most enslaved people lived, his chances of escaping to free soil would have been almost nil.”
Douglass’ circumstances were hardly favourable, but he did win something of a genetic and geographic lottery at birth.
He also caught a rare break, learning to read and write as a young boy, skills most slaveowners prohibited.
“In Baltimore, Douglass asked his mistress, Sophia Auld, to teach him to read, which she did, having never overseen an enslaved person before,” Stouffer said. “Her husband, Hugh Auld, found out and told her in front of Douglass, ‘if you learn him to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and this accomplished, he’ll be running away from himself.’ Hearing this, Douglass ‘understood the direct pathway to freedom,’ as he said.”
Chadd Scott. “Art, Activism And Frederick Douglass At National Portrait Gallery,” on the Forbes website Aug 22, 2023 [Online] Cited 21/04/2024
Unidentified photographer
Frederick Douglass
c. 1850 (after c. 1847 daguerreotype)
Sixth-plate daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
When sitting for a photograph, Douglass would pose as an artist or performer, forming part of a pas de trois with the photographer and the camera. He always dressed up and, as the activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton noted, often appeared “majestic in his wrath.”
Before the mid-1860s, Douglass typically stared into the camera lens with a dramatic look. He wanted the focus on himself. Here, he fills the frame, appearing as an accomplished, dignified activist, and projecting a visual voice of democracy. Through his images, voice, and writings, Douglass sought to “out-citizen” whites, many of whom questioned African American rights.
In the years following his escape from bondage in 1838, Frederick Douglass emerged as a powerful and persuasive spokesman for the cause of abolition. Douglass’s effectiveness as an antislavery advocate was due in large measure to his firsthand experience with the evils of slavery and his extraordinary skill as an orator whose “electrifying eloquence” astonished and enthralled his audiences. Convinced that a peaceful end to slavery was impossible, Douglass embraced the Civil War as a fight for emancipation and called for the enlistment of black troops. Throughout the decades that followed, he remained a tireless champion for civil rights.
In 1845, when the publication of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass revealed biographical details that could have led to his capture as a fugitive from slavery, Douglass left the United States for an extended stay in Great Britain. He was warmly welcomed by British abolitionists, who raised the funds to purchase his freedom, thereby enabling Douglass to return to the United States in 1847 as a free man. In this daguerreotype, believed to date from the time of his return, Douglass confronts the camera with an intensity that became the hallmark of his photographic portraits.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Ezra Greenleaf Weld (American, 1801-1874)
Fugitive Slave Law Convention, Cazenovia, New York
1850
Half-plate copy daguerreotype
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Set Charles Momjian
On August 21, 1850, two days after the Senate passed the Fugitive Slave Act [Passed on September 18, 1850 by Congress, The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was part of the Compromise of 1850. The act required that slaves be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. The act also made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and trying escaped slaves], about two thousand abolitionists convened near Gerrit Smith’s home. Douglass presided as president. Participants approved Smith’s “Letter to the American Slaves,” urging captives to avenge their enslavers. “You are prisoners of war in an enemy’s country,” Smith declared.
Here, Douglass sits at the edge of the table next to Theodosia Gilbert, the fiancée of William Chaplin, who was in prison for aiding fugitives. Behind Douglass stands Gerrit Smith [see photo below], in mid-speech, gesticulating. On either side of Smith, in checkered shawls and day bonnets, are Mary and Emily Edmonson, whose freedom had been orchestrated by Chaplin.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Ezra Greenleaf Weld, known simply as “Greenleaf,” operated a daguerreotype studio in Cazenovia, New York, during a time of intense social and political turmoil. He opened his first studio in his home in 1845, when America began to witness the volatile events that led to the Civil War. At that time, instruction manuals on the daguerreotype process were widely available, and most small towns had at least one studio. In an 1850 advertisement in his local newspaper, Greenleaf offered “Miniatures executed in the finest style, and put in Rings, Pins, Lockets and cases, of great variety size and price.”
Greenleaf seems to have been very successful with his daguerreotype business. By 1851 he had leased new quarters on the top floor of a building, where he placed a skylight to receive northern light for his studio sessions. During the Civil War years, he made numerous pictures in and around Cazenovia.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Southworth & Hawes (active 1843–1862)
William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879
c. 1851
Half-plate daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
After escaping enslavement, Douglass subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, and read it as devoutly as his bible. “The paper became my meat and drink,” he recalled.
Garrison promoted Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, which made him famous and prompted him to flee to the British Isles to avoid capture and re-enslavement. British friends then purchased his freedom, and he returned to the United States in 1847, a free man. Wanting to launch his own paper, Douglass soon moved his family to Rochester, New York, a railroad and antislavery hub that lacked an abolitionist paper. The move ruptured his friendship with Garrison until after the Civil War.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will present One Life: Frederick Douglass, an exhibition exploring the life and legacy of one of the 19th century’s most influential writers, speakers and intellectuals. Douglass was a radical activist who devoted his life to abolitionism and rights for all. This exhibition shows the intimate relationship between art and protest through prints, photographs and ephemera. One Life: Frederick Douglass is guest curated by John Stauffer, the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and consulting curator Ann Shumard, the National Portrait Gallery’s senior curator of photographs.
“Frederick Douglass was the preeminent African American voice of the 19th century and among the nation’s greatest orators, writers and picture-makers,” Stauffer said. “Born into slavery, he became a leading abolitionist, civil rights activist and the most photographed American of the 19th-century, a public face of the nation. This comprehensive exhibition includes objects from all phases of his life as a way to highlight the power of his remarkable impact. It explores his friendship with President Abraham Lincoln, for example, as well as his enduring influence on artists and activists in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Douglass was born on the Eastern shore of Maryland in 1818. Having escaped slavery in 1838, he traveled to New York, where he married Anna Murray. After the couple moved to Massachusetts, he began attending abolitionist meetings. Douglass went on to publish three autobiographies and a novella, deliver thousands of speeches and edit the longest continually running Black newspaper of the 19th century, The North Star (later Frederick Douglass’ Paper and Douglass’ Monthly). As a political insider and policy influencer during the Civil War, he befriended and advised President Abraham Lincoln. Douglass changed traditional rules of representation by explaining how “true art” could be an engine of social change.
The exhibition will showcase over 35 objects, including the ledger documenting Douglass’ birth in February 1818; a pamphlet of his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” oration; two of his three autobiographies – My Bondage and My Freedom and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself; a letter from Douglass to Lincoln; portraits of activists in Douglass’ circle, such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; portraits by the prominent Black photographers Augustus Washington and Cornelius Marion Battey; and portraits of the Black leaders Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, all of whom carried on his legacy.
Press release from the National Portrait Gallery
Ezra Greenleaf Weld (American, 1801-1874)
Gerrit Smith 1797-1874
c. 1854
Two-thirds daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of an anonymous donor
Gerrit Smith, the upstate New York abolitionist and philanthropist, was a close friend of Douglass from the late 1840s to the Civil War. In 1846, Smith gave away 120,000 acres of land in the Adirondacks, known as “Timbuctoo,” to three thousand Black residents of New York State. Smith welcomed Douglass to New York with a deed for forty acres and provided crucial financial support to his newspaper. “You not only keep life in my paper but keep spirit in me,” Douglass wrote. Smith helped convert Douglass into a political abolitionist, one who interpreted the Constitution as an antislavery document.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Unidentified photographer
John Brown 1800-1859
c. 1857 (after c. 1855 daguerreotype)
Salted paper print
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Douglass described John Brown as someone who, “though a white gentleman, is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.” They became friends, and in 1859, Brown urged Douglass to join him in raiding the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Douglass, however, refused and told Brown he thought he was entering a “steel trap.” Brown and sixteen others were killed, either during the raid or after they were found guilty of treason. Douglass later credited Brown with starting the war that ended slavery.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Frederick Douglass believed that Brown’s “zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine – it was as the burning sun to my taper light – mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”
Douglass, Frederick (1881). John Brown. An Address at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College, May 30, 1881. Dover, New Hampshire: Dover, N. H., Morning Star job printing house. p. 9. Retrieved March 9, 2022
Unidentified photographer
Frederick Douglass
c. 1860
Salted paper print
Image: 6 × 4.5cm (2 3/8 × 1 3/4″)
Sheet: 10.1 × 7.9cm (4 × 3 1/8″)
Mount: 17 × 13.6cm (6 11/16 × 5 3/8″)
Mat: 45.7 × 35.6cm (18 × 14″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Douglass’s visual persona continually evolved, which undermined one of the key intellectual foundations of chattel slavery and racism that cast the self as fixed, unable to rise. Perhaps the most noticeable markers of Douglass’s continual evolution are his hairstyle and facial hair. In this salted paper print, he experiments with a mid-scalp part, unique among the 168 separate photographs. Five years later, in a carte de visite, he sports a ponytail, also distinct from his typical hairstyle.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Douglass’ words were powerful; his image, arguably, more so.
“Douglass, along with most Americans, believed that photography was a ‘truthful’ representation and the great democratic art,” Stouffer explained. “He also recognised that the sitter had agency in the outcome of a photographic portrait. He understood his role as an artist or performer, part of a pas de trois with the photographer and the camera. He always dressed up. His photographic portraits, along with those of numerous other African Americans, starkly contrasted the racist caricatures of Blacks created by whites.”
A long American tradition of white artists caricaturing African Americans in prints and paintings influenced public perception. White painters in the antebellum era almost always cast the devil as a Black man. Monkeys and happy slaves were other tropes.
Douglass, meanwhile, always presented himself, in dress, pose, and expression, as a dignified and respectable citizen.
“Photography was a truth-telling medium he emphasised. It bore witness to African Americans, and all humans, essential humanity, and it countered the racist caricatures by whites drawing freehand,” Stouffer said. “Douglass argued that photography inspired people to eradicate the sins of their society. It led them to activism. It stemmed from the power of imagination, which allowed people to appreciate photographs as accurate representations of some greater reality. It encouraged them to realise their ideals in an imperfect world.”
As Douglass put it: “Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers – and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be in the reflection of what is, and endeavour to remove the contradiction.”
This is a key message of the exhibition.
“Poets, prophets, and reformers were artists and activists. Activism inspired art and vice versa. Poets, prophets, and reformers saw their community or nation as it was – with all its gross inequalities, injustices, and prejudices – and they contrasted it with what ought to be. The contradiction inspired them to remove structural inequalities, injustices, and prejudices,” Stouffer explained. “Douglass and most other abolitionists, along with many antislavery advocates, considered themselves poets, prophets, and reformers. As a group, they sat for their photographic portraits with greater frequency, distributed them more effectively, and were more taken with photography, than other groups.”
Douglass went so far as to say that “the moral and social influence of pictures” was more important than “the making of its laws.”
Chadd Scott. “Art, Activism And Frederick Douglass At National Portrait Gallery,” on the Forbes website Aug 22, 2023 [Online] Cited 21/04/2024
Johnson, Williams &. Co. (active 1860s and 1870s)
James McCune Smith 1813-1865
c. 1860
Albumen silver print
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division; The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
James McCune Smith (April 18, 1813 – November 17, 1865) was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist and author. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree. His M.D. was awarded by the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. After his return to the United States, he also became the first African American to run a pharmacy in the nation.
In addition to practicing as a physician for nearly 20 years at the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan, Smith was a public intellectual: he contributed articles to medical journals, participated in learned societies, and wrote numerous essays and articles drawing from his medical and statistical training. He used his training in medicine and statistics to refute common misconceptions about race, intelligence, medicine, and society in general. He was invited as a founding member of the New York Statistics Society in 1852, which promoted a then new science. Later he was elected as a member in 1854 of the recently founded American Geographic Society. He was never admitted to the American Medical Association or local medical associations,[1] very likely as a result of the systemic racism that Smith confronted throughout his medical career.
He has been most well known for his leadership as an abolitionist: a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with Frederick Douglass he helped start the National Council of Colored People in 1853, the first permanent national organisation for blacks. Douglass called Smith “the single most important influence on his life.” Smith was one of the Committee of Thirteen, who organised in 1850 in Manhattan to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law by aiding refugee slaves through the Underground Railroad. Other leading abolitionist activists were among his friends and colleagues. From the 1840s, Smith lectured on race and abolitionism and wrote numerous articles to refute racist ideas about black capacities.
Both Smith and his wife were of mixed African and European descent. As he became economically successful, Smith built a house in a mostly white neighbourhood; in the 1860 census he and his family were classified as white, along with their neighbours. (In the census of 1850, while living in a predominately African-American neighbourhood, they had been classified as mulatto.) Smith served for nearly 20 years as the physician at the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York. After it was burned down in July 1863 by a mob in draft riots in Manhattan, in which nearly 100 blacks were killed, Smith moved his family and practice to Brooklyn for their safety. Many other blacks left Manhattan for Brooklyn at the same time. The parents stressed education for their children. In the 1870 census, his widow and children continued to be classified as white.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Unidentified photographer
Sojourner Truth c. 1797-1883
1864
Albumen silver print
Image/Sheet: 8.7 × 5.6cm (3 7/16 × 2 3/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Sojourner Truth was possibly more famous for her carte-de-visite photographs than for her actual presence at abolition meetings. Her carefully chosen images made her a familiar figure to millions of viewers. They depicted a respectable matron. Truth’s famous maxim that she included with her portrait, “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” links her image (shadow) to her actual self (substance) and to the growing demand for photographs during the war years.
Truth’s image becomes an extension of herself and her nation. The yarn forms the contours of the eastern United States, with Florida’s panhandle and Texas clearly visible. As a representative American woman, Truth’s piety, simplicity, and abolitionism were shaping the United States.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
L. Schamer (active c. 1870)
Louis Prang Lithography Co. (active 1856-1899)
Representative Women
1870
Lithograph
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
This portrait unites seven leading female suffragists. Clockwise from the top are portraits of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore, Lydia Maria Child, Susan B. Anthony, and Sara Jane Lippincott, who surround Anna Dickinson, the most popular woman on the lecture circuit; in a sense, Douglass’s counterpart. The visual power of the image stems from its ability to reveal both the cohesiveness of the movement and the strong personalities within it.
Douglass knew these women and, as a leading male advocate for women’s rights, often collaborated with them and attended their conventions. But when Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, granting suffrage to Black men but not to women, their cohesion crumbled. Anthony and Stanton argued that white women should have suffrage before Black men. Douglass supported the amendment but continued to advocate for women’s suffrage.
Between 1860 and 1880, it became common for American reformers to gather on stages – then called lyceums – to promote abolition, temperance, education reform, and women’s rights. Lyceum associations allowed suffragists to speak. In their lectures, suffragists addressed men and women of diverse backgrounds – across state, racial, and economic divides – and reached wider audiences than through women’s organisations alone.
Representative Women is a combinative portrait that brings together seven women who were active on the lecture circuit. The visual power of the image stems from its ability to reveal both the cohesiveness of the movement and the strong individual personalities within it. Clockwise from the top are portraits of Lucretia Coffin Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore, Lydia Maria Francis Child, Susan B. Anthony, and Sara Jane Lippincott, who surround the central figure of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson. At the time, Dickinson was more popular than Mark Twain and held the distinction of being the highest paid woman on the lecture circuit.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Unidentified photographer
Frederick Douglass
1856
Quarter-plate ambrotype
Image/Sight: 8.8 × 6.7cm (3 7/16 × 2 5/8″)
Mat (brass): 10.8 × 8.3cm (4 1/4 × 3 1/4″)
Case open: 12 × 19.2 × 1.3cm (4 3/4 × 7 9/16 × 1/2″)
Case closed: 12 × 9.5 × 1.9cm (4 3/4 × 3 3/4 × 3/4″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired through the generosity of an anonymous donor
In the years following his escape from bondage in 1838, Frederick Douglass emerged as a powerful and persuasive spokesman for the cause of abolition. His effectiveness as an antislavery advocate was due in large measure to his firsthand experience with the evils of slavery and his extraordinary skill as an orator. His “glowing logic, biting irony, melting appeals, and electrifying eloquence” astonished and enthralled his audiences. As this ambrotype suggests, Douglass’s power was also rooted in the sheer impressiveness of his bearing, which abolitionist and activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton likened to that of “an African prince, majestic in his wrath.”
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
George Francis Schreiber (American, 1803-1892)
Frederick Douglass
1870
Albumen silver print
Image/Sheet: 9.4 x 5.9cm (3 11/16 x 2 5/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Donald R. Simon
George Kendall Warren (American, 1834-1884)
Frederick Douglass
1876
Albumen silver print
Image/Sheet: 9.7 × 5.7cm (3 13/16 × 2 1/4″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
8th and F Sts NW
Washington, DC 20001
Opening hours:
11.30am – 7.00pm daily
Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City
1983
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
In a February 2017 posting on Art Blart on Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency I commented:
“There is little love and tenderness here, little magic or generosity of spirit. Goldin’s attitude to the world at the time seems to be one of hostility and resentment. It’s all very well portraying the underbelly of society – the depravity, violence and degradation – but if your point of departure is one of anger and animosity, this is always going to be reflected in your art. I remember going out with my friends partying in the 1980s, the drugs, the sex, the pushing it to the edge, but you know what – we cared about each other. Nothing could be further from the truth in Goldin’s hedonistic (not heuristic) approach to her aura. …”
Over six years later it was time to reevaluate my feelings towards the work by looking again. Had my feelings changed in the intervening years? Or was I just being an obtuse human at the time who couldn’t see what everyone else could see, the genius of the work?
I have reflected long and hard on my feelings in relation to these photographs. Perhaps I was too close to the subject matter, that the series cut too close to the bone: many years of partying in London taking drugs, so many friends and lovers lost to HIV/AIDS. But that is not the case.
The problem for me with this work is its rather sad detachment from life and a pervading sadness attached to each of these photographs. While Goldin announces that “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture” I feel the opposite is true: Goldin seems uber detached when taking these photographs. The artist goes “diving for pearls” hoping to create some magical, random psychological subtexts where the subconscious is made visible, but she doesn’t ever know whether it’s her or the camera’s subconscious that is revealed or who (the camera or the artist) is doing the work. So much for knowing thyself, being responsible to the world, to others, and to oneself, intellectually, morally, and practically.
While the diaristic photographs of this “seminal” body of work feature intimate moments of love and loss, moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering captured in photographs of “unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism” where is the real Goldin in all of this observational performance (Goldin says her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’.) I’ll just leave that one there…
What I would really like to see is the full 700 slide sequence, live, with the music that was supposed to go with these slides. I want to feel the context of these photographs and their intimacies in the flesh with the freshness and passion of what was happening at the time in New York:
Images and words and music
the real memory
the real experience
HIV/AIDS
death
life
bitterness
love
anger
immediacy
Mark Morrisroe
David Wojnarowicz
Peter Hujar
Cookie Mueller
Keith Haring
Kiki Smith
addiction
music with the ballad of sexual dependency = I put a spell on you
witness… to life, to the hurt
conformity and denial
rebellion
Each period reframes issues surrounding gender, sex, drug use and death … and what it means to be free. These images would feel totally different in 1980s New York but today, they feel cold, desperate and sad and I can’t identify with them or their photographic pathology, their study of suffering.
Have my feelings changed towards this work six years on. Yes they have. I more fully appreciate their photographic snapshot composition, their colour, their diaristic bravado. But I still don’t like their energy…. nor their masochistic indulgence.
Perhaps I just want to feel the real memory, the real experience (the energy and atmosphere of being in New York at the time) not viewed through the prism of this distanced, distancing monologue.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The photographs in Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency depict the everyday lives, often in intimate detail, of people in Goldin’s immediate community during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Please be advised that works of art in this exhibition depict explicit nudity, sexual acts, drug use, and the impacts of violence against women. Viewer discretion is advised. This exhibition is not suitable for children under the age of 15.
‘For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.’
Nan Goldin
‘The people who have been photographed extensively by me feel that my camera is as much a part of their life as any other aspect of their life with me. It then becomes perfectly natural to be photographed. It ceases to be an external experience and becomes a part of the relationship, which is heightened by the camera, not distanced. The camera connects me to the experience and clarifies what is going on between me and the subject.’
Nan Goldin, wall text from the exhibition
“Since David Armstrong and I were young he always referred to photography as “diving for pearls.” If you took a million pictures you were lucky to come out with one or two gems. … I never learned control over my machines. I made every mistake in the book. But the technical mistakes allowed for magic. … Random psychological subtexts that I never would have thought to intentionally create. The subconscious made visible – though whether mine or the camera’s I don’t know …”
Nan Goldin. “Diving for Pearls,” quoted in Hilton Als. “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress,” on The New Yorker website, July 4, 2016 [Online] Cited 18/11/2021
‘Nan Goldin’s nostalgic snapshots depict intimate moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering. Her frames are marked by unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism. Goldin’s most famous work, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ (1985), is a slideshow that presents nearly 700 images from her life in New York [and around the world] during the 1970s and ’80s; throughout the reel, the artist lies in bed with her lover, drag queens kiss in bars, and the AIDS epidemic ravages the photographer’s community.’
Anonymous text from the Artsy website
Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.
Installation views, Nan Goldin: the ballad of sexual dependency, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri / Canberra, 2023
Photos: Karlee Holland
The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. Nan Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – began life as a slide show screened in the clubs and bars of New York where Goldin and her friends worked and played. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which has recently become part of the National Gallery’s collection.
Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place, and do so in a way that has real social purpose. Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths. The ballad has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.
Goldin refers to The ballad as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships—relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.
Text from the NGA website
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Mark tattooing Mark, Boston
1978
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Couple in Bed, Chicago
1977
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Buzz and Nan at the Afterhours, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Flaming car, Salisbury Beach, N.H.
1979
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Brian’s face, West Berlin
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Nan and Brian in bed, New York City
1983
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Suzanne in the green bathroom, Pergamon Museum, East Berlin
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Millie with the cheeseburger radio at home, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Edwidge behind the bar at Evelyne’s, New York City
1985
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Greer on the bed, New York City
1983
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Dieter on the train, Sweden
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Brian with the Flintstones, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie and Vittorio’s wedding, New York City
1986
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Twisting at my birthday party, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Bruce on top of French Chris, Fire Island, N.Y.
1979
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
French Chris on the convertible, New York City
1979
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Philippe H. and Suzanne Kissing at Euthanasia, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Rise and Monty Kissing, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Heart-Shaped Bruise, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Nan and Dickie in the York Motel, New Jersey
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin is one of the world’s most influential photographers and her iconic series of 126 photographs The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. The National Gallery recently acquired the last, complete edition of this cornerstone work, which will be shown at the Gallery from 8 July.
Decades in the making, Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – is a deeply moving portrayal of life in the 1970s and 1980s, as the artist and her loved ones navigate a time of unrelenting energy and extremes.
National Gallery Curator of Photography Anne O’Hehir said Goldin’s rich and evocative series explores themes of sexual identity, community, and love and loss against the backdrop of New York City and has shaped a generation who’ve fallen in love with the unvarnished intimacy of her storytelling.
‘Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place and do so in a way that has real social purpose,’ O’Hehir said.
‘Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would soon be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths.
‘The ballad of sexual dependency has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.’
O’Hehir said this engaged and at times moving series urges you to empathise with stories and experiences that are rarely depicted. ‘Goldin is committed to making public that which is usually hidden and private, and to the truthful recording of her life,’ O’Hehir said.
Goldin refers to The ballad of sexual dependency as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships – relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.
The ballad of sexual dependency began its life as a slideshow presented by Goldin at parties and in clubs and bars in New York City’s downtown art scene. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which are now part of the national collection.
The opening of The ballad of sexual dependency at the National Gallery coincides with the release of Goldin’s acclaimed documentary All The Beauty And The Bloodshed on DocPlay. Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about Goldin’s life, work and activism, focussing on her recent fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis. The biographical film will also be screened at the National Gallery on Saturday 22 July.
Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency is free and will be on display at the National Gallery in Kamberri / Canberra from 8 July 2023 – 28 Jan 2024. This exhibition is part of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th Anniversary celebrations and continues the Know My Name gender equity initiative. Nan Goldin’s exhibition The ballad of sexual dependency is supported by DocPlay, the streaming home of the world’s best documentaries.
Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography
Press release from the National Gallery of Australia
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
The Hug, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Mark Dirt, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Thomas shaving, Boston
1977
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Scarpota at the Knox bar, West Berlin
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Brian on the Bowery roof, New York City
1982
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
C.Z. and Max on the beach, Truro, Mass.
1976
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Vivienne in the green dress, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Bruce with his portrait, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin
“Ballads of Sexual Dependency” Nan Goldin poster
“Ballads of Sexual Dependency” Nan Goldin poster
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency Slide Show by Nan Goldin poster
National Gallery of Australia
Parkes Place, Canberra
Australian Capital Territory 2600
Phone: (02) 6240 6411
Opening hours:
Open daily 10.00am – 5.00pm
(closed Christmas day)
Curator: Dr. Josie R. Johnson, Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Cypress Root and Rock, Seventeen Mile Drive
1929
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
On November 18, 1929, Edward Weston drove north from his home in Carmel to traverse the scenic coastal route of Seventeen Mile Drive. He made nine photographs of cypress roots and rocks that day, including this image. Less than three weeks earlier, the stock market had crashed, setting off a panic that plunged the United States into the Great Depression. Money troubles plagued Weston throughout his life, but on this November day, he was completely enthralled with the landscape. He wrote in his daybooks soon after that these photographs were “among the best seen and most brilliant technically I have yet done.”
Wall label from the exhibition
While I admire the clever recontextualisation of the work of American photographers from the 1930s in this exhibition – into the sections Natural Wonders, Divine Figures, Everyday Splendors, Living Relics, The World of Tomorrow, Street Theater and Surreal Encounters – I am unsure that those photographers would ultimately see their work as a fusion of reality and dream, their documentary photographs “being both real and dream-like” that the concept of this exhibition proposes.
While all photographers use their imagination to visualise and take their photographs, to then extrapolate that these images are both reality-dream is, to my mind, a theoretical fancy that takes a kernel of the truth and views the images through a contemporary lens. Nothing wrong with that I hear you say and as the photographer Richard Misrach observes, “Photographs, when they’re made, can shift meaning with time, and often do.” And I agree that the meaning of photographs changes over time, is an ever fluid and shifting feast.
But can you imagine any of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers out in the field saying to themselves, “Oh! let’s take a dreamscape of these poor travelling people trying to survive the deprivations of hunger, poverty and joblessness”. It just wouldn’t happen. They didn’t think like that because it was a different era. They were concerned with representing with clarity and focus, with compassion and imagination not the melding of reality and dream, but the visceral feeling of the life being lived under the most trying of circumstances.
Following on from thoughts on the stunning landscape photographs of Ansel Adams in the last posting, one has to agree with Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne when she says that,
“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”1
All photographs are a mediated view of reality, captured through the imagination of the artist and (usually) the gaze of the camera lens… but that does not necessarily mean that they are a melding of reality and dream: of course they can be – but in the context of 1930s American photography what is more likely is that the artists where attempting to create something that transcends the moment. As that fantastic American landscape photographer Robert Adams observes,
“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect – a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”2
To my mind American photographers of the 1930s took photographs not only to document but also to honor what was greater and more interesting than they were. Not as a melding of reality-dream as this exhibition proposes, but as an exploration of what is possible through the interface of the image and imagination, the interface as Ansel Adams put it “between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself.”
Finally, the unknown to me photographs of Wright Morris are superb because of their very capricious fidelity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Isobel Crombie. Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15
2/ Robert Adams. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1994, p. 179
Many thankx to the Cantor Arts Center for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In the fall of 1930, Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, yet Bass-Becking penned this statement one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. This exhibition of over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks offers an alternative understanding of 1930s photography in the US by taking Bass-Becking’s phrase as its point of departure.
The work of five photographers featured in the Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at the Cantor Arts Center – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Woven into this display is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries that present new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, this exhibition contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination.
“If you have a conscious determination to see certain things in the world you are a potential propagandist; if you trust your intuition as the vital communicative spark between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself, what you tell in the super-reality of your art will have greater impact and verity. … without the elements of imaginative vision and taste the most perfect technical photograph is a vacuous shell.”
Ansel Adams. “Exhibition of Photographs” (1936), reproduced in Andrea Gray. Ansel Adams: An American Place, 1936. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1982, p. 38 quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 17.
The present exhibition [exhibition of contemporary photography in November 1930 at Harvard University] attempts to prove that the mechanism of the photograph is worthy and capable of producing creative work entirely outside the limits of reproduction or imitation. … Photography exists in the contemporary consciousness of time, surprising the passing moment out of its context in flux, and holding it up to be regarded in the magic of its arrest. It has the curious vividness and unreality of street accidents, things seen from a passing train, and personal situations overheard or seen by chance – as one looks from the window of one skyscraper into the lighted room of another forty stories high and only across the street.
Lincoln Kirstein, introductory note, Photography 1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1930, n.p. quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 26.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Migrant Mother, California
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
The Cantor Arts Center is pleased to present Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941, an exhibition featuring over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks. This material collectively pushes against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, and instead illustrates that artists of this era frequently used photography to ignite the imagination. The exhibition and the expansive art historical narratives it illuminates result from Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s study over the past three years of the Cantor’s Capital Group Foundation (CGF) Photography Collection – a major gift of over 1,000 twentieth-century American photographs.
Currently serving as the museum’s CGF Curatorial Fellow for Photography, Johnson comments: “The Cantor’s holdings of American photography from the 1930s are especially rich, and the generous terms of the Capital Group Foundation Fellowship enabled me to delve deeply into this fascinating chapter of photo history. Sifting through these prints allowed me to set aside what I thought I knew about this material and take a fresh look, giving me a new appreciation for the novel approaches these artists developed in the midst of a profoundly difficult historical moment.”
The work of five photographers from the CGF Collection – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Its conceit draws from a curious phrase by Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking about the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Though few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, Bass-Becking penned this statement in the fall of 1930, one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. Reality Makes Them Dream exemplifies the spirit of experimentation that Bass-Becking describes by highlighting an undercurrent of artistic practices in the United States that were sometimes more akin to those of Surrealism taking place concurrently in Europe.
To tease out these under-examined connections, and de-emphasise the association of American photography of the 1930s with the unbiased documentation of real people and events, works by the five core CGF artists are interwoven with a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, both iconic and overlooked, such as Walker Evans, Hiromu Kira, and Dorothea Lange. Edward Weston’s bold experimentation with forms both natural and man-made – exemplified by highly evocative works such as Pepper No. 35 (1930) and Egg Slicer (1930) that inspired Bass-Becking’s comment – blends harmoniously with contemporary prints from the community of Japanese-American photographers in Los Angeles that often supported Weston’s work. Examples of fashion and editorial photography, including colour images by Toni Frissell and Paul Outerbridge, draw connections across the galleries with photographs of airplanes, household items, and tourist sites made by seasoned artists and amateur hobbyists alike. Helen Levitt’s surreal tableaux on the streets of New York echo Berenice Abbott‘s studies of the metropolis with multiple layers of history jumbled into the same block. Ansel Adams’s pristine images of the Sierra Nevada hang alongside little-known photographs by Seema Weatherwax, his darkroom assistant in the late 1930s who was similarly enchanted with nature but developed a vision all her own. Despite gaining the respect of not only Adams, but also Weston, Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, Weatherwax shared her own work publicly for the first time in 2000 at the age of 95. Her photographs evidence her technical abilities and, not unlike her peers on view in this exhibition, find beauty in the everyday. Altogether, these photographs effectively illustrate Johnson’s three year exploration of the collection which revealed that despite the very real financial, political, and cultural challenges of the Great Depression, certain photographers chose not to focus on the camera’s cold mechanical precision, but rather used it as a medium to spark their imaginations – fusing reality and dream into one. …
The first exhibition curated by a CGF fellow, Reality Makes Them Dream is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. It features an essay by Johnson and contributions from the community of photography scholars at Stanford University – Kim Beil, associate director of the ITALIC arts program for undergraduates; Yechen Zhao (PhD in art history ’22); Anna Lee, photography curator for special collections at the Stanford Libraries; Rachel Heise Bolten (PhD in English ’22); Altair Brandon-Salmon (PhD candidate in art history); Marco Antonio Flores (PhD candidate in art history); and Maggie Dethloff, PhD, assistant curator of photography and new media at the Cantor.
Press release from the Cantor Arts Center
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
Gano Grain Elevator, Western Kansas
1940, printed 1979-1981
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
In Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s exhibition … Johnson interweaves the Capital Group Foundation Collection images with additional works by other artists, building narratives that nuance our understanding of American photography in the 1930s. Her essay pushes against longstanding narratives that overemphasise the purity of straight photography and the veracity of documentary photography in this decade. Her research reveals instead that many artists used the medium of photography to fuse reality and dream into one.
Johnson divides Reality Makes Them Dream into seven sections exploring subjects commonly photographed in the 1930s as being both real and dream-like. Looking beyond well-traveled approaches to photographs captured in the decade defined by the Great Depression, “Natural Wonders” features awe inspiring organic forms from still life and nature photography. “Divine Figures” presents methods of elevating the human figure to the status of a god-like being in portraiture, nude studies, dance photography, and photographs of modern labourers. “Everyday Splendors” explores the transformation of commonplace scenes and objects into vibrant masses of shapes and textures. The portraits, architectural photographs, and still life images in “Living Relics” exemplify the tendency of these photographers to depict emblems of a purer and more noble past that they hoped to reclaim. “The World of Tomorrow” considers the opposite end of the temporal spectrum, where photographers captured glimpses of a futuristic, machine-driven utopia in urban or industrial scenes. “Street Theater” encompasses street photography and urban architectural studies that approach their subjects as if they are actors and stage sets in their own make-believe world. Finally, “Surreal Encounters” highlights Surrealist strands in the work of American photographers as they emphasised the uncanny and fantastical in the physical world around them.
Veronica Roberts, Director of the Cantor Arts Center
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Sculptor’s Tools, San Francisco, California
1930, printed c. 1974
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1930, a meeting with the photographer Paul Strand inspired Ansel Adams to abandon the use of soft-focus camera settings and textured printing papers in pursuit of “absolute realism.” However, Adams did not renounce the photograph’s capacity to convey an artist’s imaginative vision; instead, he launched a crusade for photography to be recognised as a “pure art form.” This image of the tools belonging to the San Francisco sculptor Ralph Stackpole stages Adams’s main argument at the time: Photography is no less a form of art than sculpture, so long as the artist’s tools (a camera or a hammer and chisel) are employed directly, without imitating another medium.
Wall label from the exhibition
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Sumner Healy Antique Shop
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Judge Leonard Edwards
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Woven into this exhibition is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, adding breadth to this survey of American photography of the 1930s and presenting new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. This project interprets the term “American” loosely, encompassing photographers who lived in the United States for extended periods but who did not necessarily hold citizenship, as well as locations including Alaska and Hawaii, which were then still US territories. Thirteen of the forty-two photographers featured in this catalogue were born outside the United States, reflecting diasporic patterns that brought Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s and European immigrants – especially Jews fleeing antisemitism – in the 1910s and mid-1930s.7 Many turned to photography as a way to earn a living, and their photographs often expressed their enchantment with the dramatic natural landscapes or unfamiliar cultural practices they encountered in their newly adopted nation.
Together, this material demonstrates that Bass-Becking’s idea [Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream”] offers an interpretive lens for a much wider swath of photography than either he or Weston might have realized. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary in style and purpose , this project contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination, even while pursuing an increasingly transparent approach that mirrored the world as they saw it. From the delicate curve of a seashell to the jostle of a crowded city street, reality made the photographers and their audiences dream.
Footnote 7. Another ten were second- and/or third-generation immigrants.
Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 11.
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Dogwood, Yosemite National Park, California
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams is best known today for the majestic landscape photographs he made throughout his life, but in the 1930s he gravitated toward tightly framed images of a more intimate scale. This photograph of dogwood blossoms exemplifies Adams’s close looking at nature from this period. Even among the grand vistas of Yosemite, he often turned his lens to humbler sights while retaining the same density of detail across the picture plane, illuminating multitudes in a patch of moss or a pile of pine needles. Adams explained at the time: “Honest simplicity and maximum emotional statement suggests the basis of a critical definition of photography as an Art Form – that is, as a means of more than factual statement.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Cedric Wright (American, 1889-1959)
Wildflowers
1930s-1940s
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
George Cedric Wright (April 13, 1889 – 1959) was an American violinist and a wilderness photographer of the High Sierra. He was Ansel Adams’s mentor and best friend for decades, and accompanied Adams when three of his most famous photographs were taken. He was a longtime participant in the annual wilderness High Trips sponsored by the Sierra Club. …
In an article published in 1957, which included eight full-page photographs, Wright described his thoughts about how high mountain beauty resembles great music: “Beauty haunts the high country like a majestic hymn, sings in cold sunny air, the brilliant mountain air – makes of sunlight a living thing – floats in cloud forms – filters changing floods of light ever clothing the mountains anew. Beauty arrives in deep voice of river and wind through forest, swelling the chorus, giving sonority universal proportions.”[Wright, Cedric. “Trail Song: An Artist’s Profession of Faith” Sierra Club Bulletin. San Francisco: Sierra Club. 42 (6): 50-53]. He dedicated these words to Sierra Club leader William Edward Colby, and they became part of the introduction to Wright’s posthumous book, Words of the Earth.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Bradford Washburn (American, 1910-2007)
Mount La Perouse
c. 1933
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Bradford Washburn became a well-known mountaineer and aerial photographer while still in college. In the early 1930s, he climbed and surveyed multiple peaks in the Fairweather Range of southeastern Alaska, including Mount La Perouse. Although Washburn’s photographs functioned as topographical records and route maps, he also displayed them in artistic contexts, where they elicited deeply poetic and emotional responses from viewers. In the 1940 issue of U.S. Camera Magazine, an editor wrote of Washburn’s Alaskan photography: “Sea and mountain and plain, join island and cape and bay in a beauty that is the true setting for the fantasy of northern lights and midnight sun. … Here is an America that is no more a last frontier or hinterland, but a fruitful part of America, present – a glowing promise to America, future.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Henry Bradford Washburn Jr. (June 7, 1910 – January 10, 2007) was an American explorer, mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer. He established the Boston Museum of Science, served as its director from 1939-1980, and from 1985 until his death served as its Honorary Director (a lifetime appointment). Bradford married Barbara Polk in 1940, they honeymooned in Alaska making the first ascent of Mount Bertha together.
Washburn is especially noted for exploits in four areas.
1/ He was one of the leading American mountaineers in the 1920s through the 1950s, putting up first ascents and new routes on many major Alaskan peaks, often with his wife, Barbara Washburn, one of the pioneers among female mountaineers and the first woman to summit Denali (Mount McKinley).
2/ He pioneered the use of aerial photography in the analysis of mountains and in planning mountaineering expeditions. His thousands of striking black-and-white photos, mostly of Alaskan peaks and glaciers, are known for their wealth of informative detail and their artistry. They are the reference standard for route photos of Alaskan climbs.
3/ He was responsible for creating maps of various mountain ranges, including Denali, Mount Everest, and the Presidential Range in New Hampshire.
4/ His stewardship of the Boston Museum of Science.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Hy Hirsh (American, 1911-1961)
Untitled
Late 1930s
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Hyman Hirsh (October 11, 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – November 1961, Paris, France), was an American photographer and experimental filmmaker. He is regarded as a visual music filmmaker, as well as one of the first filmmakers to use electronic imagery (filmed oscilloscope patterns) in a film. …
Hirsh’s early photographs were influenced by California photography movement Group f/64, who had first exhibited in 1932 at the de Young Museum where Hirsh later worked. In 1932. Hirsh’s photo work from that period used sharply focused black and white renderings and little manipulation in their process. Hirsh was then influenced by the social documentary of the Farm Security Administration [FSA] photographers who recorded the impact of the Great Depression on displaced workers and their families. Hirsh followed suit, exploring social issues through visages of vacant lots, rusted machinery, and other images of urban decay. Recognition for these photographs led to seven exhibitions in Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1935 to 1955. A 1936 group show entitled “Seven Photographers” at L.A.’s Stanley Rose Gallery put him alongside the leading figures of West Coast photography, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston. Hirsh also appeared in the publication U.S. Camera in 1936, 1937 and 1939.
In 1943 San Francisco Museum of Art featured Hirsh in a solo exhibition. By now Hirsh had moved away from the straight-ahead aesthetic of Ansel Adams and Group f64, and his artistic photography took more cues from the world of experimental film. He made surrealist self-portraits by superimposing negatives of himself with broken sheets of glass. Later in Paris, as a study for one of his films, he shot colour slides of old wall posters that were peeling, exposing layers of posters underneath.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Bananas
1930
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Despite his many accolades, Edward Weston struggled to support himself throughout his career as a photographer. He found an important group of patrons in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, where several artist groups sustained a lively community of photographers in the 1920s and ’30s. The play of light, movement, and space in Shinsaku Izumi’s The Shadow (below) exemplifies their experimental ethos. In this context, the photographer Toyo Miyatake (1895-1979) organised three exhibitions of Weston’s photography between 1925 and 1931. At the final exhibition, he purchased this print (above) from Weston, perhaps because he shared Weston’s excitement for the pictorial possibilities of the rhythms and textures in a bunch of bananas.
Wall label from the exhibition
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Cornshocks and fences on farm near Marion, Virginia
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (June 7, 1910 – November 24, 1990) was an American photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression documenting poverty, the Jim Crow South, and deprivation. …
Post trained as a teacher, and went to work in a small town in Massachusetts. Here she saw the reality of the Depression and the problems of the poor. When the school closed she went to Europe to study with her sister Helen. Helen was studying with Trude Fleischmann, a Viennese photographer. Marion Post showed Fleischmann some of her photographs and was told to stick to photography.
While in Vienna she saw some of the Nazi attacks on the Jewish population and was horrified. Soon she and her sister had to return to America for safety. She went back to teaching but also continued her photography and became involved in the anti-fascist movement. At the New York Photo League she met Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand who encouraged her. When she found that the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin kept sending her to do “ladies’ stories”, Ralph Steiner took her portfolio to show Roy Stryker, head of the photography division of the Farm Security Administration, and Paul Strand wrote a letter of recommendation. Stryker was impressed by her work and hired her immediately.
Post’s photographs for the FSA often explore the political aspects of poverty and deprivation. They also often find humour in the situations she encountered.
In 1941 she met Leon Oliver Wolcott, deputy director of war relations for the U. S. Department of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt. They married, and Marion Post Wolcott continued her assignments for the FSA, but resigned shortly thereafter in February 1942. Wolcott found it difficult to fit in her photography around raising a family and a great deal of traveling and living overseas.
In the 1970s, a renewed interest in Post Wolcott’s images among scholars rekindled her own interest in photography. In 1978, Wolcott mounted her first solo exhibition in California, and by the 1980s the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art began to collect her photographs. The first monograph on Marion Post Wolcott’s work was published in 1983. Wolcott was an advocate for women’s rights; in 1986, Wolcott said: “Women have come a long way, but not far enough. … Speak with your images from your heart and soul” (Women in Photography Conference, Syracuse, N.Y.).
Text from the Wikipedia website
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Pepper No. 35
1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise, Kings Canyon National Park, California
c. 1935, printed 1979
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997)
Overview of the City
1935
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Ayleen Ito Lee
Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1935, 25 of Stackpole’s bridge photographs were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Peter Stackpole (1913-1997) was an American photographer. Along with Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, and Thomas McAvoy, he was one of Life Magazine‘s first staff photographers and remained with the publication until 1960. He won a George Polk Award in 1954 for a photograph taken 100 feet underwater, and taught photography at the Academy of Art University. He also wrote a column in U.S. Camera for fifteen years. He was the son of sculptor Ralph Stackpole.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997)
Mother and Daughter
1934
Gelatin silver print
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Langston Hughes, Chicago, Illinois, 1941
1941, printed 2002-2003
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
Martha Graham – Ekstasis (Torso)
1935
Gelatin silver print
Given in memory of Belva Kibler by Barbara Morgan
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan first attended a performance by Martha Graham’s modern dance company in 1935. The experience so deeply impressed her that she began photographing Graham and her fellow dancers regularly, becoming a recognised expert in the genre within a few years. Morgan typically captured a dancer’s entire body, but for Graham’s solo in Ekstasis, she explained: “When by moving a light which cast a certain shadow I suddenly felt a heroic scale evoked. … The torso expressed it all, and I felt as if I were on a lonely shore between Egypt and archaic Greece discovering a forgotten Venus.”
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
Class, Olympic High Diving Champion, Marjorie Gestring
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marjorie Gestring, a future Stanford undergraduate from Los Angeles, won the 1936 Olympic gold medal in women’s springboard diving at age 13. John Gutmann photographed Gestring the following spring at a diving exhibition held as part of the weeklong festivities for the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. For Gutmann, the “rigid geometry” of her dives struck him as an “absolutely modern machine style.” More broadly, his image of Gestring soaring through the air captures the ethos of a moment when, having just completed the longest suspension bridge in the world, humans seemed capable of any accomplishment.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Nude (Charis) Floating
1939, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Herbert Matter (American born Switzerland, 1907-1984)
Untitled
1940
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. Matter’s innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design. …
As a photographer, Matter won acclaim for his purely visual approach. A master technician, he used every method available to achieve his vision of light, form and texture. Manipulation of the negative, retouching, cropping, enlarging and light drawing are some of the techniques he used to achieve the fresh form he sought in his still lifes, landscapes, nudes and portraits. As a filmmaker, he directed two films on his friend Alexander Calder: “Sculptures and Constructions” in 1944 and “Works of Calder” (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Russell Lee (American, 1903–1986)
Jim Norris and wife, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico
1940
Dye transfer print
Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang (Chinese-American, 1910-1969)
Chief Owasippe
1939
Gelatin silver print
The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition Fund and the Asian American Art Initiative Acquisitions Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang came to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago. He photographed in his spare time, regularly submitting prints like this one to the national circuit of photography salons. At first glance, this photograph might appear to be a portrait of the man named in the title. In fact, “Owasippe” references a legend about a Potawatomi chief who died waiting for his sons to return from a journey. The story originated in Michigan around the turn of the 20th century; by the 1930s, it had been popularised around the Midwest by the Boy Scouts of America. Yang likely heard the tale in Chicago and photographed a model whose true identity remains unknown. Although the headdress was familiar to settler audiences as a shorthand for “Native,” the one in this photograph references different cultural traditions than those of the Potawatomi. Reality thus became fodder for a fantasy that captured the interest of many viewers in the late 1930s, when Yang’s photograph won multiple awards from camera club juries across the country.
Wall label from the exhibition
Chao-Chen Yang (1910-1969) was a Chinese American photographer based in Seattle, Washington. Born Hangchow, China, Yang received degrees in foreign relations and art education from the University of Hwin-Hwa, Shanghai, and became the director of the Department of Art at the Government Institute in Nanking. Coming to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, he took night courses in art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1935 to 1939. He was transferred to Seattle as Deputy Consul and founded the Seattle Photographic Society in 1941. He served as director of the Northwest Institute of Photography and concentrated in colour photo printing processes.
Text from the Smithsonian website
Lit dramatically from above, the face of the “chief” emerges stoically from beneath a feathered headdress, the sartorial signifier of “Indianness” lifted by white Americans from the Oceti Sakowin Oyate of the Northern Plains (plate 27 [here above]). Concentrating on some distant point beyond the frame, he squints as if staring into the sun, but the nondescript background suggests that the photograph was likely made in a studio setting. All the better to decontextualize and generalize its subject, because the aim is not to reproduce the specificity of an Indigenous person, but to practice the visual shorthand popularized decades earlier by the photographer Edward S. Curtis and his North American Indian portfolios (fig. 2).1 The stereotyping function of this picture is reinforced by its title: “Chief Owasippe” is not Oceti Sakowin Oyate, but an invented leader of the Potawatomi, whose name continues to adorn the oldest Boy Scout camp in the United States, founded in 1911 in Michigan by a group of businessmen from Chicago.
Yet this reductive representation of the “vanishing Indian” – whose authenticity and natural purity came from his exteriority to the temporal and societal boundaries of modernity – was produced by a recent arrival to the United States with no personal connection to the politics of Indigenous assimilation, domination, and expropriation that underpinned this representational type. Chao-Chen Yang, employee at the Chinese consulate in Chicago, made this picture while enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. The photograph is his attempt to speak a foreign language: not English per se but the dialect of American identity, which is so filled with fantasy and contradiction that it feels right, with the theme of this exhibition in mind, to call it a language of dreams. What fluencies must the photographer possess to move freely within another person’s dream?
By the time Yang took this photograph, American artists’ fetishistic valorization of Indigenous culture had turned away from the Plains tribes from which the chief’s feather headdress originates and toward the southwestern tribes in New Mexico. In the 1920s, writers and artists including D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Sloan, and Marsden Hartley projected an “authenticity” onto Pueblo visual culture, which justified their appropriation of its subject matter and form to create a native modernist aesthetic.2 Many photographers did the same, including Ansel Adams and Wright Morris (plates 47 and 48). For its time, Yang’s photograph spoke a dated form of Indigenous appropriation, but the numerous exhibition stamps on the version of the print held by his estate reveal that this image was widely received by photography clubs across America – New York, Denver, all the way to Seattle, where Yang would become deputy consul in 1941.
Vexingly, the racist exoticization and flattening of Indigenous identity performed by the photograph also demonstrate its creator’s fluency with the visual language of artistic-minded amateur photographers in America…
Yechen Zhao. “Photographic Fluency (Its Pleasures and Pains): Kyo Koike and Chao-Chen Yang,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 55.
Shinsaku Izumi (Japanese-American, 1880-1941)
The Shadow
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
In The Shadow (c. 1931, above), Izumi plays with the late-afternoon light, picturing a man riding a bike. In the upper-right-hand corner of the image, we see part of the front wheel; the entire rear wheel; the bicycle seat; and the cyclist’s feet, perfectly balanced and planted on pedals, riding past our line of vision. The rest of the image shows the bike traveling past a rectangular manhole cover, on the left side; and, on the right, the front wheel appears prominently as it casts a long shadow, with the individual spokes disappearing with each rotation. Against the brushed surface of the street, hard and soft patterns of gray emerge diagonally across the image…
The Shadow [is] a study of motion, light, and shadow, and, on another level, a metaphysical commentary on “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life.”
Susette Min. “Speculative Frameworks: Approaching the Interwar Years Work of Shinsaku Izumi and Nakaji Yasuim,” in Trans-Asia Photography Volume 5, Issue 1: Photography and Diaspora, Guest Edited by Anthony W. Lee, Fall 2014
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
One of the Wilkins family making biscuits for dinner on cornshucking day at Mrs. Fred Wilkins’ home near Tallyho, Granville County. North Carolina
1939
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Judith Hochberg and Michael Mattis
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Sonya Noskowiak (American, 1900-1975)
Washing, San Francisco, California
1937
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The United States General Services Administration, formerly Federal Works Agency, Works Projects Administration (WPA), allocation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sonya Noskowiak (25 November 1900 – 28 April 1975) was a 20th-century German-American photographer and member of the San Francisco photography collective Group f/64 that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She is considered an important figure in one of the great photographic movements of the twentieth century. Throughout her career, Noskowiak photographed landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Her most well-known, though unacknowledged, portraits are of the author John Steinbeck. In 1936, Noskowiak was awarded a prize at the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She was also represented in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Scenes from San Francisco” exhibit in 1939. Ten years before her death, Noskowiak’s work was included in a WPA exhibition at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California.
Noskowiak primarily focused on landscapes and portraits between the 1930s and 1940s. Noskowiak embraced straight photography and used it as a tool to give newer meaning to her photographs. She emphasized the forms, patterns, and textures of her subject, to enrich the documentation of it.
Her earliest works reflect the work of photographers of her period and their thoughts on Pictorialism. In her earliest works, such as City Rooftops, Mountains in Distance (the 1930s), there is a graphic quality to how she abstracted the piece. There is the dark, strong industrial structure that contrasts with the light sky. There are almost no logs seen on the buildings, as if they are they are blurred beyond readability. This is an example of the ‘New Objectivity’ movement, which focused on a harder, documentary approach to photography.
Noskowiak often composed her photographs to intersect her subjects, which gave a more dynamic feel to her photographs. Examples of these are provided by her works Kelp (1930) and Calla Lily (1932). The composition crops the boundaries of the kelp plant and flower and draws the viewer’s eye to the texture of the plants. The kelp is so abstracted that if not for the title it would be unrecognisable. In Calla Lily, her use of chiaroscuro gives a luminous, almost floating feeling to the photograph.
Her photograph Agave (1933) is an intimate viewing of the cactus plant – another example of a composition separating the object from what is made visible shown and emphasising the plant’s beautiful pattern.
Noskowiak utilised the same technique of straight photography in her pictorial portraits and commercial works. The same intimacy shown in Agave can be seen in portrait works such as John Steinbeck (1935) and Barbara (1941). In both, she creates an intimate atmosphere, in which the viewer feels as though they are there interacting with the subjects. Even in her more commercial works, Noskowiak’s style and technique still remained important. In her untitled 1930s photograph, you have a model with a broad-brimmed hat that conceals her face. The composition of the piece relieves viewers from thinking about the photograph as an advertisement. The cropping and position of the model offers closeness, and viewers get the feeling of being in the moment with the model more than simply responding to the photo as an advertisement.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Cement Worker’s Glove
1936, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Junk
1934
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Florence Alston Swift
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Henry Swift Collection
Seema Weatherwax (Jewish-American, 1905-2006)
Yosemite
1940
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Seema Aissen Weatherwax was a photographer and social activist who was part of the Film and Photo League, worked with Ansel Adams in Yosemite, and shot Woody Guthrie and migrant workers at a California FSA camp. …
Emigrating from Tsarist Russia with her parents in 1913 to escape persecution and the conscription act, Seema Aissen graduated from high school and began studying science courses in Leeds, England. A few years after her father’s death, her mother took the three daughters to Boston to join relatives, and Seema became involved in photography. She moved to Southern California in 1929, lived in Tahiti for a year, and upon returning to Los Angeles joined the Film and Photo League in 1934. Ansel Adams asked her to run his darkroom in Yosemite in 1938. The following year she assisted Adams with the first Camera Workshop in Yosemite. In 1941 Seema met the writer Jack Weatherwax, and together with folk singer Woody Guthrie visited the Shafter Farm Security Administration Camp, managed by noted civil rights advocate Fred Ross. At Shafter she photographed Dust Bowl refugees and their surroundings. The Weatherwaxes moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1984. Following the death of her husband, Seema continued her activism, including working with the NAACP and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and at the age of 95 organized the first exhibition of her work. She passed away in 2006, two months shy of her 101st birthday.
Text from the Online Archive of California website
Prints made by Seema at Yosemite reveal a photographer whose confidence in her technical abilities allows her to pursue photography in daunting weather conditions7 and to render transcendent beauty through everyday forms, both natural and man-made. Her work from this period focuses not only on postcard-ready vistas but also on the physical structures that locate and organise human experiences within these natural surroundings: like a slush-covered road impressed by tire tracks, or a fawn viewed through a gridded windowpane. 8 In one winter scene from 1940, titled simply Yosemite, tall wooden utility poles with triple cross-arms anchor a dozen snow-coated cables (plate 38 [above]). Set amidst dark tree trunks laced with white boughs, these power lines are resplendent in the snow. They stream down the vertical axis of the scene, indelible reminders of a Yosemite modernised for tourism – reminders that Adams typically left out of his artistic work. Seema’s prints from the 1940s are variously signed “Seema,” “Seema Aissen,” and later “Seema Weatherwax,” reflecting the surname she adopts upon marrying writer and political activist Jack Weatherwax in 1942.
Anna Lee. “Seema (Sophie) Aissen Weatherwax: Photographer,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 72.
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
Meeting House, Southbury, Connecticut
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris developed a personal practice of pairing his photographs with texts, publishing the first of many of these combination projects in 1940. The page-long text paired with a variation of this photograph does not describe an observed scene but rather a scene imagined by the narrator, who sits “like a man caught in a spell” seeing “what nobody’d seen before.” By presenting this text with his photograph of an unidentified, weather-worn wooden building, Morris vaguely evokes a moment from the past, but leaves its meaning open to interpretation. As with memories and daydreams, the viewer’s impressions are subjective and imprecise, if not total figments of the imagination.
Wall label from the exhibition
Wright Morris (1910-1998) was a renowned writer and affective photographer. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers. Devoid of figures, his photographs depict everyday objects and atmosphere. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style.
Born in Nebraska, Morris attended Pomona College in Claremont, California. After graduation he traveled throughout Europe, purchasing his first camera in Vienna. Morris returned to California in 1934 determined to become a writer, but also continued to photograph. In 1935, he bought a Rolleiflex camera and began photographing extensively. Morris first exhibited his photo-texts in 1940, at the New School for Social Research in New York. This same year the Museum of Modern Art purchased prints for their collection and New Directions published images that would become his first book.
In 1942, Morris received the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships, funding the completion of The Inhabitants. Published by Scribners, The Inhabitants (1946) documented domestic scenes of the South, Midwest, and Southwest and although visually influential enjoyed little financial success. His second photo-text book, The Home Place (1948) was a visual novel, with short fictional prose accompanying each photograph. Although groundbreaking, it remained unmarketable and after its publication Morris invested in his more successful career as a writer. In 1956, Morris won the National Book Award for his tenth book, the unillustrated A Field of Vision. Morris continued to write and publish while teaching English and creative writing from 1962-1974 at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California. Morris’s acclaimed novel, Plains Song won American Book Award for Fiction 1981.
The Museum of Modern Art proved supportive of Morris throughout his career, both exhibiting and purchasing his work. MoMA curator John Szarkowski prompted a reconsideration of Wright Morris with the publication of God’s Country and My People (1968), widely considered Morris’s most successful photo-text book. Morris’s exhibition career burgeoned in his later years with many shows including Wright Morris: Origin of a Species, a 1992 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and following his death, Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris at Stanford’s Cantor Center of Art in 2002.
Anonymous. “Wright Morris,” on the Center for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 04/07/2023
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
House in Winter, near Lincoln, Nebraska
1941, printed 1979-1981
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Wedding Cake House, Kennebunkport, Maine
1941, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Eroded Plank from Barley Sifter
1931, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Alma Lavenson (American, 1897-1989)
Eucalyptus Leaves
1933
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
The next year Lavenson made her own picture specimen, titled Eucalyptus Leaves, a forking branch against white ground (plate 49 [above]). The leaves are rounded, almost gingko-like, the stems slender and bending, a young plant or newer shoot, likely blue or silver dollar gum. It is hard to make sense of the light, which comes from the left, above, and the right – which is to say that there is an unnatural quality to the photograph. This looks like a studio picture, though Lavenson rarely worked indoors. But there are ways the photograph is in conversation with others made during this period, after she met Weston in 1930. It is a graceful picture, attentive to form and surface. Almost a decade later Lavenson would write, “In all my work – whether shacks or flowers or landscapes – I aim for perfection of texture and fineness of detail.”2 Up close the silver gelatin print has a lithographic quality, in its etched shadows and shining branch, the velvet opacity of the leaves.
Footnote 2. Alma R. Lavenson. “Virginia City: Photographing a ‘Ghost Town,'” in U.S. Camera Magazine 10 (June-July 1940), 66, quoted in Audrey Goodman. A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women’s Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021, p. 75.
Rachel Heise Bolten. “Eucalyptus Leaves,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 87.
Akira Furukawa (American born Japan, 1890-1968)
Cargo
1929
Bromoil
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Egg Slicer
1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ruth Bernhard (American born Germany, 1905-2006)
Kitchen Music
1930-1933
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Hiromu Kira (American, 1898-1991)
The Thinker
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Drilling Rig, The Texas Co.
1937
Gelatin silver print
Elizabeth K. Raymond Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen (American, 1917-1991)
Times Square in the Rain
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen began photographing Times Square when he first moved to New York City at age 21. Decades later, he still recalled the day he made this photograph, when he rode an elevator to the top of the Times Building, then waited to snap the shutter until the rain “turned the great X of Broadway and Seventh Avenue into silvery rivers.” Stoumen continued photographing this famed stretch of the city for nearly half a century, but he remembered the years around 1940 as special: “Those days Manhattan was the center of the world, and Times Square was its heart.”
Wall label from the exhibition
It was raining in New York. Streets slick as oil, people hurrying past the trams and buses in Times Square with their umbrellas up. September 1940: the penultimate year of peace for America. An ocean away, bombs were falling on London, nightly. But here, for now, people could still think of it as a European war.
Some of the crowds in Lou Stoumen’s photograph Times Square (plate 59 [above]) might have come to catch Gone with the Wind, Wallace Beery’s new western Wyoming, or Busby Berkeley’s latest musical spectacular Strike Up the Band, starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Times Square: Here are the cinemas and the burning neon lights and the billboards for cigarettes and automobiles and cold, fizzy drinks. All the things you can buy and see during an autumn in New York.
Lou Stoumen was 23 when he made the photograph: The elevator at 1475 Broadway took him up the first 19 stories and then he took the stairs up the final six flights, to the top, and walked out onto the roof ledge.1 From there he pointed his camera out at 46th Street and Broadway capturing the TIMES sign from behind. The building had once been the home of the New York Times, but the newspaper had departed in 1913 and now the sign stood as an announcement of a location, a cry too, an exclamation of the times. …
Margaret Bourke-White photographed Drilling Rig, The Texas Co. (1937) (plate 56) within the oil well’s tower, looking up at the vertiginous pipes that pumped petroleum from beneath the ground. The cutting shadows cast by the latticework of the rig patterns the image with a rigorous geometry, all forms reduced to a series of rectangles and triangles. Humanity has disappeared from view, to be replaced by science and engineering, unchallengeable, mathematically correct.
Bourke-White had begun working for the newly established Life magazine a year earlier, already one of America’s most prominent news photographers.5 Yet she had been fascinated with shooting machinery since the late 1920s, claiming that “the beauty of industry lies in its truth and simplicity; every line is essential therefore beautiful.”6 The drilling rig is undoubtedly elegant; shorn of context, it becomes impossible to establish its scale or relationship to its environment. It stands as an autonomous creation, a pure distillation of form as function. Irresistibly, its towering pipes and metal superstructure, disappearing into the distance at the top of the photograph, recall the skyscrapers of Stoumen’s New York. Their symbiosis is more than coincidence: It is the drilling rig that enables the tower block. This is the stuff that the World of Tomorrow is built upon.
1/ William A. Ewing. Ordinary Miracles: The Photography of Lou Stoumen. Los Angeles: Hand Press, 1981, p. 22.
5/ Stephen Bennett Phillips. Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, in association with Rizzoli, New York, 2002, p. 83.
6/ Margaret Bourke-White in 1930, quoted in Theodore M. Brown. Margaret Bourke-White: Photojournalist. Ithaca, NY: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1972, p. 31.
Altair Brandon-Salmon. “Sign of the Times,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, pp. 101-102.
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
“Switch to Dodge,” An American Altar, Detroit
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Corrugated Tin Façade
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Warehouse, Water and Dock Streets
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Daniel Mattis
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
Powerhouse and Palm Tree, near Lordsburg, New Mexico
1940, printed 1979-1981
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Center of town. Woodstock, Vermont. “Snowy night”
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott made this photograph halfway through her three-year appointment as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. Though most of her work (and that of the FSA overall) was understood at the time as “documentary” or factual in nature, this is one of several photographs by Post that tended to stir the imagination. For instance, Sherwood Anderson reproduced this photograph in his 1940 book on rural America, Home Town, to illustrate his metaphor for New England winters as times of peaceful slumber.
Wall label from the exhibition
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Untitled from St. Joseph’s House
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
Vincent Bressi Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Robert Disraeli (American born Germany, 1905-1988)
Sunday – After Church
1933
Gelatin silver print
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
Untitled
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt avoided the descriptive or symbolic titles favoured by the previous generation of photographers, preferring instead to leave her photographs untethered to specific people or locations within New York. The viewer is thus given free rein to make associations or compose narratives from the streetscapes in each photograph, just as the shoe shiner in this image may have conjured his own daydream from the action unfolding on the street.
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
Monster on Broadway, New York City
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
John Vachon (American, 1914–1975)
Girl on Lobster, Washington, D.C.
1938
Gelatin silver print
Gift of R. Joseph and Elaine R. Monsen
Cantor Arts Center Collection
By the early 1930s, discussions about Surrealism had spread from the art world into the mainstream, even if few Americans subscribed to, or even understood, its main tenets. Not long after, Americans began to use the words “surreal” and “surrealistic” to describe anything bizarre or dreamlike. Each of these three photographs could have fit this unofficial classification; by locating the extraordinary among the ordinary – a monster in the city, a woman riding a lobster, and another woman enacting the text on the magazine in her hands – each image is thoroughly uncanny.
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
Monument to the Chicken Center of the World, Petaluma, California
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
After photographing the town of Petaluma, north of San Francisco, John Gutmann sent dozens of prints to his agent in New York. He explained: “This little town of 9,000 inhabitants and its surrounding ranches is today one of the greatest, if not the greatest poultry center in the world. … Thousands and thousands of little chicken houses, covering the country, the low built hatcheries, the many signs and symbols, trucks fully loaded with poultry or eggs give a very unique character to this district.” Gutmann photographed this roadside monument several times, likely noticing the traces of past vandalism visible in this image.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Hot Coffee, Mojave Desert
1937, printed 1977 by Cole Weston
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Although Edward Weston regarded his photography with the utmost seriousness, his writings and accounts from friends reveal a spirited sense of humour. This photograph offers a rare example of this playful side. According to Charis Wilson, Weston’s travel companion at the time, they were struck by the absurdity of the hot coffee advertisement in the middle of the desert; the fact that the location bore the name “Siberia” added a second layer of irony.
Wall label from the exhibition
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985)
The Repulsive Bed
1941
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection
In the summer of 1941, Edward Weston visited Louisiana with Clarence John Laughlin as his guide. Before driving to the same building that Walker Evans had photographed six years earlier, they visited another antebellum plantation house where Laughlin photographed a friend among the ruins. Weston shared Laughlin’s fascination with the ornate architecture, laden with history as it slowly deteriorated back into swampy earth. Yet Laughlin understood these forces as an embodiment of Surrealism. For him, New Orleans was a place “unparalleled in its violence of decay” but also where “the human spirit reached a singular flowering” in the face of this destruction.
Wall label from the exhibition
Dubbed “The Father of American Surrealism,” Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) was the most important Southern photographer of his time and a singular figure within the burgeoning American school of photography. Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from his peers who championed realism and social documentary.
Referring to his own fraught relationships with women, Laughlin described this ethereal photograph of a woman lounging atop a collapsed, tattered bed in a decaying house as an “Image of those who endure marriage, without love, because of convention. [The] marriage bed becomes repulsive, and part of it turns into a monster head.” The veil across the woman’s face gives her a haunting look, as if she is fading away along with the house around her. The cracks in the wall reinforce the idea of a fractured, failing marriage, while the shadows envelop her in darkness.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, White Chapel, Louisiana
1935, printed 1974
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Walker Evans admired the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a French photographer whose images of Paris caught the interest of a new generation of photographers shortly before his death. Though neither photographer self-affiliated with Surrealism, Evans recognised that “in some of his work [Atget] places himself in a position to be pounced upon by the most orthodox of surrealists.” Evans occasionally emulated Atget’s style, as in this image of an empty Louisiana plantation house, leading some American critics to describe Evans’s photography in a manner befitting a Surrealist. One 1938 review stated, “In some miraculous way [Evans’s] objects or persons acquire a super-reality, the implications of which echo across the years to startle and haunt, to jolt and to enchant.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1997)
Uncommon Man
1936, printed 1983
From Nathan Lerner – Fifteen Photographs: 1935-1978
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the Mattis Family
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Jack Rabbit
1939
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Lisa and John Pritzker
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sommer’s Jack Rabbit (1939) was one of the first 100 negatives the artist made with his new 8 x 10 inch view camera recommended by his friend Edward Weston.1 Living in the arid climate of Arizona to protect his lungs against the recurrence of tuberculosis, the casualties of the desert – rabbits, horses, coyotes – became some of Sommer’s signature photographic subjects.2 Weston, too, had a penchant for photographing dead things. Weston’s preference was for the corpses of birds, often those of shore birds near his coastal California home.3 Photo historian Robin Kelsey has made an excellent comparison of the two artists’ “rival” treatments of deceased animals, grounded in their diametrically opposed aesthetic concerns. As in Jack Rabbit, Sommer used evenly dispersed light to create a visual field that privileged no one thing above the rest,4 reflecting both an aesthetic and a philosophical orientation concerned with the essential oneness of the world.5 On the other hand, Weston treated his dead birds in the same manner as his nudes or his peppers, expressing what he termed “the universality of basic form.”6 Using light to emphatically trace the contours of the birds’ forms, Weston visually separated them from their backgrounds and transformed them into abstract objects. Aligned with their concerns, the two artists typically chose different moments of death and decay to capture: For Sommer it was desiccated or decaying bodies and for Weston it was stripped bones or newly deceased bodies.
Although Weston’s Dead Man, Colorado Desert (1937) similarly focuses on the clearly defined form of a newly deceased body,7 there are crucial distinctions in its composition. Whereas Weston’s birds are photographed from above, aiding in their abstraction, the dead man is photographed from an angle to the side, which emphasizes both his human features and the bramble-filled space that he occupies (plate 83 [below]). His waist, legs, and one arm continue outside the frame to the top right. This makes Dead Man fundamentally different from Weston’s birds, because the man exists not as an abstract form, but as a body in space, a space that we can imagine Weston and his wife and collaborator Charis Wilson sharing and a space that we can imagine inhabiting ourselves.
Maggie Dethloff. “Violable Edges: Frederick Sommer’s and Edward Weston’s Photographs of Death in the Desert,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 131.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Dead Vulture, Mojave Desert
1937
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Dead Man, Colorado Desert
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection
While traveling through the Colorado Desert on a photography excursion for his Guggenheim Fellowship, Edward Weston came across the corpse of a recently deceased man. He had apparently become ill and stranded while traversing the harsh landscape. Despite the unexpected, and certainly disturbing, nature of this encounter, Weston seamlessly fit the subject into his photography practice. He made two photographs, one of which Life magazine published alongside a short narrative by Weston titled “Desert Tragedy.” In the text Weston explained: “He must have died that day. But whatever aid he got came too late, hunger and privation had wasted his body and the merciless sun had dried him up. But he was quite beautiful in death.”
Wall label from the exhibition
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