William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Front Facade 1993 Polaroid Courtesy of the artist
A selection of photographs of Fay by William Wegman. Gotta love that dog!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Akron Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Miss Mit 1993 Polaroid Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) On Set 1994 Polaroid Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Patriotic Poodle 1994 Polaroid Courtesy of the artist
The Akron Art Museum is deeply honoured to be one of only two venues to present William Wegman: Fay, a wonderfully witty and moving exhibition about the artistic collaboration between William Wegman (b. 1943) and his celebrated Weimaraner Fay (1984-1995).
The breadth of Wegman’s audience is truly remarkable. In addition to being internationally renowned in art circles, he is one of the few artists to successfully disseminate his work – especially the photographs, videos and books featuring his beloved Weimaraner dogs – through the mass media.
Wegman is a conceptual artist who works in many different media. Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1943, he graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1965 with a BFA in painting. Subsequently, he enrolled in the Master’s painting and printmaking program at the University of Illinois. In 1970, he moved to southern California and began exhibiting his photographs. He was one of the earliest artists to explore video and has used photography for over four decades.
While living in California, Wegman acquired Man Ray, a Weimaraner whom he named after the surrealist French photographer. The dog became his partner in both life and art during their 12 year collaboration. Man Ray became so famous that, upon his passing, he was named ‘Man of the Year’ by the New York City newspaper The Village Voice.
Grief-stricken by Ray’s death, Wegman made the decision not to get another dog, but some years later he came to meet another Weimaraner:
“When we first met in Memphis, Tennessee, she was six months old and her name was Cinnamon Girl. I named her Fay after Fay Wray, of course, but also after my first colour Polaroid with Man Ray and the nail polish, which I had titled Fay Ray. Her fur was taupe, lighter and warmer-toned than Man Ray’s, and she had yellow eyes like in a Rousseau painting. I had no intention of photographing Fay. Man Ray was irreplaceable. I didn’t want to mar my memory of him.
… In a short time Fay matured from a coltish youth into a Garboesque beauty. My pictures grew with her. Now she was the muse, the adored one. Skin-deep beauty became the soul of my work.” ~ William Wegman, Polaroids, New York, 2002
Fay had a chameleon-like quality very different from Man Ray’s concrete presence. The bond between the artist and his muse is undeniable. Images of Fay balanced upon an ironing boarding in Sphinx (1987) and coolly starting into the lens from beneath a black net in Netted (1988) show her deep trust in Wegman. His work with Fay captures the canine in a spectrum of emotions. Her huge, expressive citron eyes convey in one shot tragedy and in the next, joy. A series of photographs show Fay swathed in human clothing, posed as a woman, with the human arms and legs of her co-model. The canine appears part human, her expression incredibly familiar. Fay also posed with a variety of props, from roller-skates to masks of fruit, flowers and other found objects.
The Akron Art Museum is fortunate to be able to include in this exhibition not just black and white photographs but also large format Polaroids and chromogenic (colour) prints, from the artist’s personal collection. In addition to 56 still photographs, extensive selections from Wegman’s videos featuring Fay will be on continuous view in the exhibition.”
Text from the Akron Art Museum website
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Basic Shapes In Color 1993 Chromogenic colour print 24″ x 20″ Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Fay Ray 1988 Gelatin silver print 16.2 x 16.2cm. (6.4 x 6.4 in.) Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Oaken 1992 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Lawn Chair 1988 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Retriever 1994 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) U-Tree 1992 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
William Wegman (American, b. 1943) Untitled (Ghent Fay with Apples) 1990 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artist
Akron Art Museum One South High Akron, Ohio 44308
Opening hours Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: 11.00am – 5.00pm Thursday: 11.00am – 8.00pm Closed: Monday and Tuesday
“Levitt’s superb lush colour photographs taken after 1970 engage the viewer not in memory but in the moment, not in nostalgia but in joy.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
“For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world … Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy …”
Charles Baudelaire. The Painter of Modern Life 1863
“At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”
James Agee
Speaking of pioneers of colour photography the wonderful American photographer Helen Levitt died recently at the end of March.
Here is a selection of her colour work from the 1970s – 1980s. With two Guggenheim Foundation grants in 1959 and 1960 she switched from black and white to colour dye-transfer prints photographing the theatre of the street, the serendipity of the decisive moment previsualised and captured through awareness and an intimate knowledge of her subject matter. Unfortunately in a burglary in 1970 most of her colour transparencies and prints were stolen from that initial period.
What remains, as Sally Mann would say, are the eloquent bones of the matter: superb lush colour photographs taken after 1970 that engage the viewer not in memory but in the moment, not in nostalgia but in joy.
In colour she found “beauty in correspondences.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
… Her pictures were mostly of Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. She shot them in black and white, as silver gelatin prints, in the 1930s and 1940s and in colour dye-transfer prints in the 1960s and 1970s. In between, she got into movie-making for a while. Her theme was the same, the streets of New York. Apart from a trip in 1941 to Mexico City, she never found a better subject in her life.
The grittier parts were her particular joy. Her world was run-down streets, rubble-filled building sites, warehouses and litter-strewn front steps. This was urban photography with a vengeance: small scraps of sky, no trees. When she was going with Walker Evans in 1938, borrowing his camera as well (“of course”) as sleeping with him, he used to be afraid of going as far uptown as she did. Some of her young male subjects, lounging around in their zoot suits and fedoras, had an unmistakable air of menace. But mostly she brought back images of gossiping women and her favourite, scrambling children. A right-angle viewfinder allowed her to take the picture without them knowing, even, as Evans showed her, when riding right beside them in the subway.
Here and there
Her birthplace was in Brooklyn, where her father was in the wholesale knitwear business. She aspired to something more artistic, but found she couldn’t draw. For a time she trained in ballet, which taught her to appreciate the musculature of posing bodies and the spontaneous grace of her child subjects. After dropping out of high school she went to work in the darkroom of Florian Mitchell’s commercial portrait-photography studio on $6 a week. There she was hooked.
A good image, she thought, was just lucky. But her New Yorker’s instinct seemed to tell her exactly where to wait for one. A broken-down car would soon attract people to lie under it, peer under the hood or try to push it. A cane chair, put out on the sidewalk, would draw an elderly man with cigar and newspaper, or a plump young woman in a housecoat wilting in the heat. With luck dogs would come out too, rough-haired mutts or poodles with fresh-shampooed coats. The open back of a truck would reveal delivery men moping on piles of sacks, or dozing among pink and blue bales of cloth. Any abandoned thing – a tea-chest, a mirror frame, the pillared entry of an empty building – would soon sport knots of children diving in, climbing up, fighting and contorting their small bodies in every kind of way.
Her pictures did not have names. “New York”, and the year, was the label on most of them. They did not need explaining; they were “just what you see”. Many had a backdrop of posters, graffiti or billboards, which gave a commentary of sorts. “Special Spaghetti 25 cents.” “Post No Bills.” “Nuts roasted daily.” “Buttons and Notions, One Flight Up.” “Bill Jones Mother is a Hore.” Her earliest project with her first, secondhand camera was to photograph children’s chalk drawings on the pavements. She never tried to speculate on them. What mattered was the patterns they made.
In the 1960s, when she got two Guggenheim grants, she began to shoot the streets in colour. The tricky developing ultimately frustrated her, and the streets, too, had changed. The children had retreated indoors to watch television. But where she had found grace and texture in black and white, colour now provided beauty in correspondences. The multi-coloured balls in bubble-gum machines could be picked up in a girl’s dress, or the red of a stiletto shoe matched with the frame of a shop window. Her broken-down cars were now lurid beasts against the stucco walls. And out of her peeling, greenish doorways could come women in furs, or pink hair-curlers, or orange-striped socks.
She did not rate her own work highly. Though her original prints eventually sold for tens of thousands of dollars, she let them pile up in her apartment in boxes labelled “Nothing good” or “Here and there”. Her hopes when she started were for photographs that would make a socialist statement of some sort, but she abandoned that on Cartier-Bresson’s advice. A “nice picture”, as she reluctantly admitted some of hers were, was a work of art that had value in itself, as well as a celebration of the random, teeming work of art that is the city of New York.
Anonymous. “Helen Levitt,” on The Economist website April 8th 2009 [Online] Cited 16/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt by John Szarkowski, Powerhouse Books, 2005 is available from the Amazon website. The photograph above is used on the cover of the book.
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Women by Car, Laguna Beach, California c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“Art is life seen through man’s inner craving for perfection and beauty – his escape from the sordid realities of life into a world of his imagining. Art accounts for at least a third of our civilization, and it is one of the artist’s principal duties to do more than merely record life or nature. To the artist is given the privilege of pointing the way and inspiring towards a better life.”
Paul Outerbridge
If Outerbridge only photographed intermittently after 1943, then what photographs they are.
Perhaps some of the most important colour photographs of their generation were made after he moved to California influencing the next generation of colour photographers (as noted below in the press release).
What else can one say – his aesthetic sensibility is so far ahead of his time, so prescient of future colour spaces in photography. I know how “no regular income” feels as an artist, but he still had the courage and vision to make the work.
I am in awe of the man: the visual complexity but eloquent simplicity of his photographs is simply amazing, simply… his own.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Downtown Central Library for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Recently discovered colour images of California and Mexico taken during the 1940s and 1950s by the late visionary photographer Paul Outerbridge, who was considered “a master of colour photography,” will be exhibited at the Central Library’s First Floor Galleries, 630 W. Fifth St., downtown, from March 28 through June 28 2009.
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Balboa Beach, California c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“[Outerbridge] was a designer and illustrator in New York before turning to photography in the 1920s. In 1925, having established himself as an innovative advertising photographer and graphic designer, he moved to Paris and worked for the French edition of Vogue magazine. There he met Edward Steichen, with whom he developed a friendly rivalry. Around 1930, having returned to New York, Outerbridge began to experiment with colour photography, in particular the carbro-colour process. He focused primarily on female nudes – striking, full-colour images that were ahead of their time. The growing popularity of the dye transfer process lead to cheaper color photographs and Outerbridge, who stuck fast to the carbro process as superior in its richness and permanence, saw his commercial work dry up, leaving him without a regular source of income. In 1943 Outerbridge moved to California, where he photographed only intermittently.”
Text from the Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 14/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Reclining Nude c. 1937 Pigment dyed digital print
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Motel Bar, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1948 Dye transfer print 16″ x 20″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Hotel Lobby, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
As one of America’s earliest masters of colour photography, Paul Outerbridge established his reputation by making virtuoso carbro-colour prints of nudes and still-lives in the 1930s. As pictures, they are as brilliant and innovative today as when they earned their place as classics in the history of photography.
Outerbridge left New York in the 1940s, choosing to settle in California, and eventually taking up residency in the Mediterranean-style ocean side town of Laguna Beach. Little is known of Outerbridge’s last body of work in the 8 years preceding his death in 1958. But Outerbridge’s recently printed transparencies from the 1950s affirms that he fully understood the possibilities inherent in colour photography despite it being the early days of its use in photographic art. Outerbridge went on to make a body of work that presaged the style and imagery of colour photographers working a full quarter of a century later.
Employing a 35mm camera rather than the large-format equipment of the studio, Outerbridge captured vivid pictures while on the fly. His images were composed using the same precision of form and colour that characterised his 1930s studio work, but, in this series, Outerbridge applied his earlier techniques to the energetic world of the street. This was a new landscape for Outerbridge, who, seeing in the new spectrum of colour, depicted the people and places from his adopted Southern California, and, with great relish and sensitivity, from the Mexican towns just south of the border. In the tradition of such photographers as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Anton Bruehl, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, all of whom made significant photographic forays into Mexico, Outerbridge ventured south from Laguna. In his 1949 black Cadillac, Outerbridge frequented the seaport towns along the Baja peninsula. One of his favourite stops was Mazatlan, on Mexico’s western coast, where he took particular pleasure in surveying the urban architecture, absorbing – and documenting – the city streets teeming with people, the brightly coloured topography.
Among the scenes Outerbridge etched onto film: carnival carriages with passengers dressed and bound for a grand party; a group of fashionable men relaxing in an outdoor hotel lobby drinking Cokes and beer while a small orchestra plays on in the afternoon sun; and a lone girl in a lime-green dress and white sweater walking past a gas station whose painted-red details add vibrant flourishes to the scene. Outerbridge was keenly aware that the beauty of everyday objects was also tied to the larger meanings anchored in the social landscape, but he cared less for this fact than for the expression of pure colour and form as seen through and by the lens.
These extraordinary pictures recall the 1970s photographs of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who strove to codify these same formal and subjective aesthetics into a bold definition of the new colour vocabulary. Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs from California and Mexico will bring a heretofore undiscovered and unrecognised sequence of photographs that bridges the formal gap between the past and the present. Outerbridge’s visionary handling of colour confirmed that he had instinctively known the potential of the colour medium, and, luckily for us, he created an astounding body of photographs to prove it.
Text from the Curatorial Assistance website [Online] Cited 19/01/2019. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Gas Station, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1950 Dye transfer print 16″ x 20″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Self-portrait on Lounge, Oceanside Resort, California c.1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“Outerbridge, who died in 1958, built his reputation in the early 1920s in New York and Paris making elegant black and white photo abstractions primarily of nudes and still lifes that rivalled those of his peers, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston. In the 1930s, Outerbridge mastered the exquisite tri-carbro-colour print process and went on to make some of the most important colour photographs in art and advertising of that time.
Moving to California in 1943 and taking up residence in Laguna Beach, Outerbridge made his last important body of work throughout California and Mexico. Between 1948 and until his death in 1958 he codified a new language in colour photographs that anticipated the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and others known for their “New Color” work in the 1970s.
“The curious position of prosperous American tourists amid the daily poverty experienced by some Mexicans is one of the recurring themes in the work, but with Outerbridge there is no political polemic,” says co-curator Phillip Prodger. “Outerbridge was thinking of his photographs as jig-saw puzzles made up of many different highly coloured pieces, each placed with meticulous care.”
Among Outerbridge’s subjects are carnival carriages with passengers dressed and headed for a grand party; a group of fashionable men relaxing in an outdoor hotel lobby drinking Coke and beer while a small orchestra plays; a girl in a lime-green dress and white sweater walking past a gas station whose painted-red details add a vibrant flourish to the scene.”
Text from the Downtown Central Library press release [Online] Cited 14/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Model with Satin Dress, Laguna Beach, California c. 1950 Tricolor carbon print 20″ x 16″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Party, Laguna Beach c. 1950 Tricolor carbon print 20″ x 16″
Los Angeles Central Library 630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, CA 90071 Phone: (213) 228-7000
Curator: Valerie L. Hillings, Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Richard Estes (American, b. 1932) Telephone Booths 1967
Many thankx to the Deutsche Guggenheim for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the artwork for a larger version of the image.
“My paintings are about light, about the way things look in their environment and especially about how things look painted. Form, colour and space are at the whim of reality, their discovery and organisation is the assignment of the realist painter.”
Richard Estes (American, b. 1932) Supreme Hardware 1974
Audrey Flack (American, 1931-2024) Queen 1976
Audrey Flack (American, 1931-2024) Strawberry Tart 1974 Oil on canvas 24 x 30 inches
Don Eddy (American, b. 1944) Untitled 1971
Chuck Close (American, 1940-2021) Leslie 1973
Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016) McDonalds Pick Up (installation view) 1970 41 x 41 inches Oil on canvas Collection of Marilyn and Ivan Karp
Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016) Airstream 1970
Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016) Dicks Union General 1971 Oil on canvas
By the end of the 1960s, a number of young artists working in the United States had begun making large-scale realist paintings directly from photographs. With often meticulous detail, they portrayed the objects, places, and people that defined urban and suburban everyday life in America. In contrast to the Pop artists, they did not present their ubiquitous, often mundane, subject matter in a glamorised or ironic manner. They sought instead to achieve a great degree of objectivity and precision in the execution of their work in an effort to stay more or less faithful to the mechanically generated images that served as their source material. They developed various means of systematically translating photographic information onto canvas. In prioritising the way the camera sees over the way the eye sees, they underscored the complexity of the relationship between the reproduction and the reproduced as well as the impact of photography on the perception of both daily life and reality in general.
A number of terms were proposed in quick succession to describe this novel approach to painting, chief among them Super-Realism, Hyperrealism, and Photorealism. The artists identified as Photorealists neither formed a coherent group nor considered themselves to be part of a movement, and a number of them actively challenged their association with the label. Nevertheless, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the seventeen artists in Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s – Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Franz Gertsch, Ralph Goings, Ron Kleemann, Richard McLean, Malcolm Morley, Stephen Posen, John Salt, Ben Schonzeit, and Paul Staiger – were exploring a related set of issues, methods, and subjects that led critics, curators, and art historians to both exhibit and write about their work as a coherent trend in contemporary art. Picturing America focuses on this formative, defining period in the history of Photorealism.
The exhibition includes thirty-one paintings, a number of them the most iconic and masterful works of 1967-1982, for example Richard Estes’s Telephone Booths (1967, above) and Chuck Close’s Leslie (1973, above). Picturing America is divided into four sections, three exploring key themes of Photorealist painting during the 1970s – Reflections on the City, Culture of Consumption, and American Life – and a fourth dedicated to a portfolio of ten lithographs made on the occasion of Documenta 5 in 1972, which featured the first major group showing of Photorealism.
Text from the Deutsche Guggenheim website
Picturing Americas – American Photorealism in the 70s
Vernissage video of “Picturing Americas”, an art exhibition about American Photorealism in the 1970s, presented in Berlin by Deutsche Guggenheim, a joint venture between Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York. The exhibition (March – May 2009) was the first major showing of American Photorealism in Germany since “documenta 5” in 1972.
The video includes interviews of Valerie Hillings, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and interviews with the following artists: Ron Kleemann, Robert Bechtle, Tom Blackwell. You can also enjoy stills of selected pictures shown at the exhibition. Video courtesy of VernissageTV (VTV).
Text from the YouTube website
Robert Bechtle (American, 1932-2020) Foster’s Freeze, Escalon 1975
Charles Bell (American, 1935-1995) Gum Ball No. 10: “Sugar Daddy” 1975 Oil on canvas 66 x 66 inches
Charles Bell was born in 1935 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although Bell became interested in art at a young age, he never received formal training. In 1957, he completed a BBA at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and did not decide to pursue an artistic career until the early 1960s after touring in the U.S. Navy. At this point in time, he was working in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was drawn to the vibrantly colored paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Other artistic influences Bell has cited range from Pop art to the realisms of Jan Vermeer and Salvador DalÃ. It was through the painter Donald Timothy Flores, however, that Bell learned technique, most notably trompe l’oeil, while working in the former’s San Francisco studio. Under Flores, Bell painted mostly small-scale landscapes and still lifes, which earned him the Society of Western Artists Award in 1968.
In 1967 Bell relocated to New York, where he set up his first studio. Two years later he began showing at New York’s Meisel Gallery run by Louis K. Meisel, who popularized the term “Photorealism” and helped establish the style as a movement. Bell embraced a photo-based technique in his work not only for the way it renders imperceptible details visible, but also for how he saw the close-up photographic view as emblematic of contemporary visual experience steeped in a daily bombardment of media imagery. Bell carried out his Photorealist works by photographing his subjects in still-life compositions and painting from his image.
Although Photorealism emerged as a national phenomenon, certain general qualities distinguish the coastal approaches to the movement. While the majority of the West Coast Photorealists preferred landscapes, particularly images of cars, trucks, and homes within an overall landscape, Bell, like many of the New York–based Photorealists, focused on still life. Bell transformed everyday subject matter by enlarging ordinary objects like Raggedy Ann dolls and gumball machines to an unusually grand scale. His subjects are typically familiar objects associated with childhood, consumer culture, and play, and thus capable of resonating with a broad audience. By focusing on larger-than-life subjects, Bell’s paintings also deny narrative readings of his work. He has described his approach to selecting subject matter as more of an emotional than intellectual process. The hyperrealistic precision of his technique, combined with an exaggerated scale, produces a sensation that oscillates between familiarity and unfamiliarity, thus engaging the viewer sensually and emotionally. The exploration of light remains a persistent theme throughout Bell’s oeuvre, from his earliest treatments of light on mostly opaque surfaces to his interest in reflected and refracted light on transparent materials, as seen in the gumball machine series (1971-77). These investigations gave way to his subsequent interest in objects illuminated from within, such as pinball machines, which he began in 1977.
Text from the Guggenheim website [Online] Cited 01/04/2009. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Robert Bechtle (American, 1932-2020) Alameda Gran Torino 1974
Ron Kleemann (American, 1937-2014) Big Foot Cross 1977-1978 Acrylic on canvas 54 x 78 inches
Curator: Jeff L. Rosenheim, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown artist (American) Front Street, Looking North, Morgan City, LA 1929 Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (8.9 x 14 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
This looks a very interesting exhibition – I wish I could see the actual thing!
Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs and art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This exhibition will focus on a collection of 9,000 picture postcards amassed and classified by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), now part of the Metropolitan’s Walker Evans Archive. The picture postcard represented a powerful strain of Indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development. The dynamic installation of hundreds of American postcards drawn from Evans’s collection will reveal the symbiotic relationship between Evans’s own art and his interest in the style of the postcard. This will also be demonstrated with a selection of about a dozen of his own photographs printed in 1936 on postcard-format photographic paper.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Street Scene, Morgan City, Louisiana 1935 Film negative 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
“Sold in five-and-dime stores in every small town in America, postcards satisfied the country’s need for human connection in the age of the railroad and Model T when, for the first time, many Americans regularly found themselves traveling far from home. At age twelve, Walker Evans began to collect and classify his cards. What appealed to the nascent photographer were the cards’ vernacular subjects, the simple, unvarnished, “artless” quality of the pictures, and the generic, uninflected, mostly frontal style that he later would borrow for his own work with the camera. Both the picture postcard and Evans’s photographs seem equally authorless – quiet documents that record the scene with an economy of means and with simple respect. Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard proposes that the picture postcard represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development.”
Text from the Steidl website
The American postcard came of age around 1907, when postal deregulations allowed correspondence to be written on the address side of the card. By 1914, the craze for picture postcards had proved an enormous boon for local photographers, as their black-and-white pictures of small-town main streets, local hotels and new public buildings were transformed into handsomely coloured photolithographic postcards that were reproduced in great bulk and sold in five-and-dime stores in every small town in America. Postcards met the nation’s need for communication in the age of the railroad and Model T, when, for the first time, many Americans often found themselves traveling far from home. In the Walker Evans Archive at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a collection of 9,000 such postcards amassed by the great American photographer, who began his remarkable collection at the age of 10. What appealed to Evans, even as a boy, were the vernacular subjects, the unvarnished, “artless” quality of the pictures and the generic, uninflected, mostly frontal style that he later would borrow for his own work. The picture postcard and Evans’ photographs seem equally authorless, appearing as quiet documents that record a scene with both economy of means and simple respect. This volume demonstrates that the picture postcard articulated a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’ artistic development.
Unknown artist (American) Main Street, Showing Confederate Monument, Lenoir, N. C. 1930s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (8.9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Walker Evans was the progenitor of the documentary style in American photography, and he argued that picture postcard captured a part of America that was not recorded in any other medium. In the early 20th century, picture postcards, sold in five-and-dime stores across America, depicted small towns and cities with realism and hometown pride – whether the subject was a local monument, a depot, or a coal mine.
Evans wrote of his collection: “The very essence of American daily city and town life got itself recorded quite inadvertently on the penny picture postcards of the early 20th century .… Those honest direct little pictures have a quality today that is more than mere social history .… The picture postcard is folk document.”
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard is the first exhibition to focus primarily on works drawn from The Walker Evans Archive. The installation is designed to convey the incredible range of his collection and to reflect the eclectic and obsessional ways in which the artist organised his picture postcards. For example, Evans methodically classified his collection into dozens of subject categories, such as “American Architecture,” “Factories,” “Automobiles,” “Street Scenes,” “Summer Hotels,” “Lighthouses,” “Outdoor Pleasures,” “Madness,” and “Curiosities”.
Marty Weil. “Walker Evans’ Picture Postcard Collection on the ephemera: exploring the world of old paper website Feb 24, 2009 [Online] Cited 12/06/2022. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Unknown artist (American) Tennessee Coal, Iron, & R. R. Co.’s Steel Mills, Ensley, Ala. 1920s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (8.9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) View of Easton, Pennsylvania 1935 Postcard format gelatin silver print
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) View of Ossining, New York 1930-1931 Gelatin silver print 4 1/8 x 7 13/16 in. (10.5 x 19.8cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999
Unknown artist (American) Holland Vehicular Tunnel, New York City 1920s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Santa Fe station and yards, San Bernardino, California c. 1910 Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Men’s Bathing Department, Bath House, Hot Springs National Park, Ark. 1920s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
In 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, the US Postal service handled 700 million picture postcards. Evans would later recall his fondness for those “honest, direct, little pictures that once flooded the mail.” By the age of twelve he was a collector and through his lifetime, an obsessive. “Yes, I was a postcard collector at an early age. Every time my family would take me around for what they thought was my education, to show me the country in a touring car, to go to Illinois, to Massachusetts, I would rush into Woolworth’s and buy all the postcards.” For Evans, the addition of hand-colouring added a great deal of aesthetic value. …
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard reproduces hundreds of cards from his collection including the three magazine features mentioned above. Also the fine addition of an “illustrated transcript” of his now famous Lyric Documentary lecture at Yale in 1964 makes this a bit more interesting than the title may suggest. …
Later in life Evans had friends around the country while on photo trips keeping an eye for postcards that might interest. He had a particular love for ones produced by the Detroit Publishing Company which were considered the “Cadillac” of postcards. Lee Friedlander related the following from a recent interview: “The Detroit Publishing Company had a formula. If a town had 2,000 people or so, it got a main street postcard; if it had 3,500, it got the main street and also a courthouse square. Walker liked the formula. He had everyone looking for this or that. He told me once in Old Lyme, “If you run across any ‘Detroits,’ get them for me.” I found sixty or seventy cards for him. He loved them.”
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Stable, Natchez, Mississippi March 1935 Gelatin silver print 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
Unknown artist (American) Future New York, The City of Skyscrapers 1910s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Woolworth and Municipal Buildings from Brooklyn Bridge, New York 1910s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Curve at Brooklyn Terminal, Brooklyn Bridge, New York 1907 Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
Unknown artist (American) Empire State Building, New York 1930s Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction 3 9/16 x 5 1/2 in. (9 x 14cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Walker Evans Archive, 1994
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
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Inge Morath (American born Austria, 1923-2002) From the series about Regensburg Museums 1999 Gelatin silver print
“To take pictures had become a necessity and I did not want to forgo it for anything.”
Inge Morath
The Magnum Foundation and the Inge Morath Foundation announce the sixth annual Inge Morath Award. The annual prize of $5,000 is awarded by the Magnum Foundation to a female documentary photographer under the age of 30, to support the completion of a long-term project. One award winner and up to two finalists are selected by a jury composed of Magnum photographers.
Inge Morath was an Austrian-born photographer who was associated with Magnum Photos for nearly fifty years. After her death in 2002, the Inge Morath Foundation was established to manage Morath’s estate and facilitate the study and appreciation of her contribution to photography.
Because Morath devoted much of her enthusiasm to encouraging women photographers, her colleagues at Magnum Photos established the Inge Morath Award in her honour. The Award is now given by the Magnum Foundation as part of its mission of supporting new generations of socially-conscious documentary photographers, and is administered by the Magnum Foundation in collaboration with the Inge Morath Foundation.
Past winners of the Inge Morath Award include: Kathryn Cook (US, ’08) for Memory Denied: Turkey and the Armenian Genocide; Olivia Arthur (UK, ’07) for The Middle Distance; Jessica Dimmock (US, ’06) for The Ninth Floor; Mimi Chakarova (US, ’06) for Sex Trafficking in Eastern Europe; Claudia Guadarrama (MX, ’05) for Before the Limit; and Ami Vitale (US, ’02), for Kashmir.
Text from The Inge Morath Foundation website [Online] Cited 01/03/2009. No longer available online
Inge Morath (American born Austria, 1923-2002) Visitor in the Metropolitan Museum 1958 Gelatin silver print
“I have photographed since 1952 and worked with Magnum Photos since 1953, first out of Paris, later out of New York. I am usually labeled as a photojournalist, as are all members of Magnum. I am quoting Henri Cartier-Bresson’s explanation for this: He wrote to John Szarkowski in answer to an essay in which Szarkowski stated that Cartier-Bresson labels himself as a photojournalist.
“May I tell you the reason for this label? As well as the name of its inventor? It was Robert Capa. When I had my first show in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1948 he warned me: ‘watch out what label they put on you. If you become known as a surrealist […] then you will be considered precious and confidential. Just go on doing what you want to do anyway but call yourself a photojournalist, which puts you into direct contact with everything that is going on in the world.'”
It is in this understanding that we have been working as a group and yet everyone following their own way of seeing. The power of photography resides no doubt partly in the tenacity with which it pushes whoever gets seriously involved with it to contribute in an immeasurable number of forms his own vision to enrich the sensibility and perception of the world around him.
[In the 1950s] the burden of the already photographed was considerably less than now. There was little of the feeling of being a latecomer who has to overwhelm the huge existing body of the photographic oeuvre – which, in photography as in painting and literature, necessarily leads first to the adoption and then rejection of an elected model, until one’s own work is felt to be equal or superior, consequently original.
Photography is a strange phenomenon. In spite of the use of that technical instrument, the camera, no two photographers, even if they were at the same place at the same time, come back with the same pictures. The personal vision is usually there from the beginning; result of a special chemistry of background and feelings, traditions and their rejection, of sensibility and voyeurism. You trust your eye and you cannot help but bare your soul. One’s vision finds of necessity the form suitable to express it.”
Inge Morath, Life as a Photographer, 1999
Text from The Inge Morath Foundation website [Online] Cited 01/03/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Many thankx to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses 2006 Digital pigment print
Famed photographer Gregory Crewdson will present the inaugural discussion in a series sponsored by the Photography Society of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City…
Crewdson’s work has been widely exhibited and reviewed. He makes large-scale photographs of elaborate and meticulously staged tableaux, which have been described as “micro-epics” that probe the dark corners of the psyche. Working in the manner of a film director, he leads a production crew, which includes a director of photography, special effects and lighting teams, casting director and actors. He typically makes several exposures that he later digitally combines to produce the final image.
“Crewdson is one of the most daring and inventive contemporary artists using photography,” said Keith F. Davis, Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins. “His meticulously crafted works are immensely rich in both narrative and psychological terms. They prod us to rethink our ‘usual’ relationship to photographs as physical objects and as records of worldly fact. Crewdson is a genuinely important figure in today’s art world. He has an international reputation and has influenced an entire generation of younger photographic artists.”
Attendance to the program is free.
Text from ArtDaily.org website
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses 2005 Digital pigment print
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses 2005 Digital pigment print
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled (Sunday Roast)Â from the series Beneath the Roses 2005 Digital pigment print
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 4525 Oak Street Kansas City, MO 64111
Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) Palazzo Ducale Chandelier 1998
Visit the Dale Chihuly website and click on the “Work” link to see a truly remarkable artist at work!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) Chiostro di Sant’apollonia Chandelier 1996
Dale Chihuly is most frequently lauded for revolutionising the Studio Glass movement by expanding its original premise of the solitary artist working in a studio environment to encompass the notion of collaborative teams and a division of labour within the creative process. However, Chihuly’s contribution extends well beyond the boundaries both of this movement and even the field of glass: his achievements have influenced contemporary art in general. Chihuly’s practice of using teams has led to the development of complex, multipart sculptures of dramatic beauty that place him in the leadership role of moving blown glass out of the confines of the small, precious object and into the realm of large-scale contemporary sculpture. In fact, Chihuly deserves credit for establishing the blown glass form as an accepted vehicle for installation and environmental art beginning in the late twentieth century and continuing today.
Stylistically over the past forty years, Chihuly’s sculptures in glass have explored colour, line, and assemblage. Although his work ranges from the single vessel to indoor/outdoor site-specific installations, he is best known for his multipart blown compositions. These works fall into the categories of mini-environments designed for the tabletop as well as large, often serialised forms that are innovatively displayed in groupings on a wide variety of surfaces ranging from pedestals to bodies of natural water. Masses of these blown forms also have been affixed to specially engineered structures that dominate large exterior or interior spaces.
Over the years Chihuly and his teams have created a wide vocabulary of blown forms, revisiting and refining earlier shapes while at the same time creating exciting new elements, such as his Fiori, all of which demonstrate mastery and understanding of glassblowing techniques. Earlier forms, such as the Baskets, Seaforms, Ikebana, Venetians, and Chandeliers, from the late 1970s through the 1990s have been augmented since the early to mid-1990s with new blown elements. Chihuly and his teams primarily developed these while working in glass factories in France, Finland, Ireland, and Mexico. The resulting Reeds, Saguaros, Herons, Belugas, Seal Pups, and other forms are now juxtaposed with the earlier series, including Macchia, Niijima Floats, and Persians in lively new contexts.
“Since the early 1980s, all of Chihuly’s work has been marked by intense, vibrant colour and by subtle linear decoration. At first he achieved patterns by fusing into the surface of his vessels “drawings” composed of prearranged glass threads; he then had his forms blown in optic moulds, which created ribbed motifs. He also explored in the Macchia series bold, colourful lip wraps that contrasted sharply with the brilliant colours of his vessels. Finally, beginning with the Venetians of the early 1990s, elongated, linear blown forms, a product of the glassblowing process, have become part of his vocabulary, resulting in highly baroque, writhing elements. In recent years Chihuly has experimented with Polyvitro to create new interpretations of some of his glass forms.
Davira S. Taragin on the Dale Chihuly website [Online] Cited 01/03/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) The artist with his Chiostro di Sant’apollonia Chandelier (detail) 1996
Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) Colorado Springs Fountain installation 2005
Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) Basket Forest 2005
Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) Macchia Forest 2004
Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) Ponti Duodo e Barbarigo Chandelier 1998
Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) Saffron Tower 2008
Dale Chihuly (American, b. 1941) Saffron Tower 2008
“These encounters at the intersection of life and death are worthy of the best work of this brilliant artist. He continues to astound with his prescience, addressing what is undeniable in the human condition.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
February 2009
Bill Viola – Ocean Without a Shore | TateShots
Bill Viola’s video installation, Ocean Without a Shore, is presented in the atmospheric setting of the Church of San Gallo, Venice. Monitors positioned on three stone altars in the church show a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light, as if encountered at the intersection between death and life. Viola talks about his artistic intentions and the technical challenges of the piece.
Originally installed inside the intimate 15th century Venetian church of San Gallo as part of the 2007 Venice Biennale (see above) incorporating its internal architecture into the piece using the three existing stone altars as support for the video screens, the installation has been recreated in a small darkened room at The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. What an installation it is.
Deprived of the ornate surroundings of the altars of the Venetian chapel – altars of which Viola has said that, “… as per the original development of the origins of Christianity these alters actually are a place where the dead kind of reside and connect with those of us, the living, who are here on earth. And they really are a connection between a cross, between a tomb and an alter – a place to pray,”1 – the viewer is forced to concentrate on the images themselves. This is no bad thing, stripping away as it does a formalised, religious response to mortality.
In the work Viola combines the use of a primitive twenty five year old security black and white analogue video surveillance camera with a high definition colour video camera through the use of a special mirror prism system. This technology allows for the seamless combination of both inputs: the dead appear far off in a dark obscure place as grey ghosts in a sea of pulsating ‘noise’ and gradually walk towards you, crossing the invisible threshold of a transparent water wall that separates the dead from the living, to appear in the space transformed into a detailed colour image. As they do so the sound that accompanies the transformation grows in intensity reminding me of a jet aircraft. You, the viewer, are transfixed watching every detail as the ghosts cross-over into the light, through a water curtain.
The performances of the actors (for that is what they are) are slow and poignant. As Viola has observed, “I spent time with each person individually talking with them and you know when you speak with people, you realise then that everybody has experienced some kind of loss in their life, great and small. So you speak with them, you work with them, you spend time and that comes to the surface while we were working on this project together, you know? I didn’t want to over-direct them because I knew that the water would have this kind of visual effect and so they were able to, I think, use this piece on their own and a lot of them had their own stories of coming back and visiting a relative perhaps, who had died.”1
The resurrected are pensive, some wringing the hands, some staring into the light. One offers their hands to the viewer in supplication before the tips of the fingers touch the wall of water – the ends turning bright white as they push through the penumbrae of the interface. As they move forward the hands take on a stricken anguish, stretched out in rigour. Slowly the resurrected turn and return to the other side. We watch them as we watch our own mortality, life slipping away one day after another. Here is not the distraction of a commodified society, here is the fact of every human life: that we all pass.
The effect on the viewer is both sad but paradoxically uplifting. I cried.
A friend who I went with said that the images reminded her not of the dead temporarily coming back to life, but the birth of a new life – the breaking of water at the birth of a child. The performers seemed to her to behave like children brought anew into the world. One of my favourite moments was when the three screens were filled with just noise and a figure then appears out of the beyond, a dim and distant outline creating a transcendental moment. Unfortunately there are no images of these grainy figures. As noted below Viola uses a variety of different ethnic groups and cultures for his performers but the one very small criticism I have is they have no real individuality as people – there are no bikers with tattoos, no cross dressers, no punks because these do not serve his purpose. There is the black woman, the old woman, the middle aged man, the younger 30s man in black t-shirt: these are generic archetypes of humanity moulded to Viola’s artistic vision.
Viola has commented, “I think I have designed a piece that’s open ended enough, where the people and the range of people, the kind of people we chose are from various ethnic groups and cultures. And I think that the feeling of more this is a piece about humanity and it’s about the fragility of life, like the borderline between life and death is actually not a hard wall, it’s not to be opened with a lock and key, its actually very fragile, very tenuous.
You can cross it like that in an instant and I think religions, you know institutions aside, I think just the nature of our awareness of death is one of the things that in any culture makes human beings have that profound feeling of what we call the human condition and that’s really something I am really interested in. I think this piece really has a lot to do with, you know, our own mortality and all that that means.”1
These encounters at the intersection of life and death are worthy of the best work of this brilliant artist. He continues to astound with his prescience, addressing what is undeniable in the human condition.
Long may he continue.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ TateShots. Venice Biennale: Bill Viola. 30 June 2007 [Online] Cited 23/09/2009. No longer available online
“The unfolding of consciousness, the revelation of beauty, present even after death, the moment of awe, the space without words, the emptiness that builds mountains, the joy of loving, the sorrow of loss, the gift of leaving something behind for the next traveler.”
Bill Viola
Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) Ocean Without A Shore (excerpt) 2007 Installation in the church of San Gallo, Venice
Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) Ocean Without A Shore (excerpt) 2007
“Ocean Without a Shore is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then break through an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realise that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.”
The work was inspired by a poem by the twentieth century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop:
Hearing things more than beings, listening to the voice of fire, the voice of water. Hearing in wind the weeping bushes, sighs of our forefathers.
The dead are never gone: they are in the shadows. The dead are not in earth: they’re in the rustling tree, the groaning wood, water that runs, water that sleeps; they’re in the hut, in the crowd, the dead are not dead.
The dead are never gone, they’re in the breast of a woman, they’re in the crying of a child, in the flaming torch.
The dead are not in the earth: they’re in the dying fire, the weeping grasses, whimpering rocks, they’re in the forest, they’re in the house, the dead are not dead.
Text from the Ocean Without A Shore website [Online] Cited 23/09/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation photographs of Ocean Without A Shore at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) Ocean Without A Shore (still) 2007 Original installation at church of San Gallo
Another fantastic group of Americurbana from this wonderful photographer!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gagosian Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Henri Cartier-Bresson famously said, “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks.” But I don’t think the world would have been a better place if these photographers had headed off to a war zone. The question is whether you can be a political photographer while you photograph rocks. My pictures don’t have a specific social commentary but I think they have social and political meaning.”
Alec Soth on the Gagosian Gallery website 2009
Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) Dynell, Bemidji, MN (Girl in store) 2007
Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) Josh, Joelton, Tennessee 2004
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present The Last Days of W., colour photographs taken by Alec Soth between 2000 and 2008.
Although originally conceived without explicit political intent, in retrospect Soth considers this selected body of work, which spans both terms of George W. Bush’s presidency, to represent “a panoramic look at a country exhausted by its catastrophic leadership.” Soth’s earlier series such as Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, and Dog Days, Bogotá – all subjective narratives containing disenfranchised figures and decaying landscapes – laid the conceptual groundwork for The Last Days of W. It provides a wry commentary on the adverse effects of the national administration, perhaps best exemplified by an unwittingly ironic remark that Bush made in 2000: “I think we can agree, the past is over.”
Following in the humanist tradition established by the great chroniclers of the American experience such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore, Soth captures diverse images of a country disillusioned with, and deceived by, its own identity, from mothers of marines serving in Iraq to teenage mothers in the Louisiana Bayou; from religious propaganda in the American workplace to the mortgage crisis in Stockton, CA. His incisive depiction of contemporary American reality confronts the ideals romanticised in the American Dream with the hastening decline of the American Empire.
Text from the Gagosian Gallery website 2009
The Last Days of W installation view at Gagosian Gallery
Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) Home Environment, Billings, MT 2008
Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) Republican National Convention, Saint Paul, MN 2008
Gagosian Gallery 980 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10075 Phone: 212.744.2313
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