Epiphany: a moment in which you suddenly see or understand something in a new or very clear way.
Stephen Shore’s photographs are the most insightful epiphanies in this posting, picturing as they do “what he ate, the rest stops he visited, the people he met.” In other words, the wor(l)d as he saw it.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“With the unspoken rules that exhibitions in the Met’s contemporary photography gallery must be drawn exclusively from the museum’s permanent collection and be organised as surveys of the period from the late 1960s to the present, it’s no wonder that these long running shows are often so broad that their themes seem to dissolve into edited collections of everything. The newest selection of images is tied up under the umbrella of “everyday epiphanies”, a construct that implies a delight in the ordinary, the quotidian, or the familiar, but in fact, reaches outward beyond these routine boundaries to works that have a wide variety of conceptual underpinnings and points of view. With some effort, it’s possible to follow the logic of why each piece has been included here, but when seen together, the diversity of the works on view diminishes the show’s ability to deliver any durable insights… The works that function best inside this theme are those that capture moments of unexpected, elemental elegance, often as a result of the way the camera sees the world.”
Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) Semiotics of the Kitchen (still) 1975 Video Purchase, Henry Nias Foundation Inc. Gift, 2010 Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) Untitled (Man Smoking) 1990 From the Kitchen Table Series Gelatin silver print Image: 71.8 × 71.8cm (28 1/4 × 28 1/4 in.) Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Since the birth of photography in 1839, artists have used the medium to explore subjects close to home – the quotidian, intimate, and overlooked aspects of everyday existence. Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969, an exhibition of 40 works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents photographs and videos from the last four decades that examine these ordinary moments. The exhibition features photographs by a wide range of artists including John Baldessari, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Fischli & Weiss, Jan Groover, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Elizabeth McAlpine, Gabriel Orozco, David Salle, Robert Smithson, Stephen Shore, and William Wegman, as well as videos by Martha Rosler, Ilene Segalove, Brandon Lttu, and Svetlana and Igor Kopytiansky.
Daily life, as it had been lived in Western Europe and America since the 1950s, was called into question in the late 1960s by a counterculture that rebelled against the prior “cookie-cutter” lifestyle. Everything from feminism to psychedelic drugs to space exploration suggested a nearly infinite array of alternative ways to perceive reality; and artists and thinkers in the ’60s and ’70s proposed a “revolution of everyday life.” A four-part work by David Salle from 1973 exemplifies the artist’s flair for piquant juxtaposition at an early stage in his career. In depicting four women in bathrobes standing before their respective kitchen windows in contemplative states, Salle goes against the grain of feminist orthodoxy – revealing a penchant for courting controversy that he would expand in his later paintings; pasted underneath the black-and-white images of the women are brightly coloured labels of their preferred coffee brands, with the arbitrarily differentiated brands signifying an insufficient substitute for true freedom in the postwar era. Martha Rosler’s bracingly caustic video Semiotics of the Kitchen and Ilene Segalove’s wistfully funny The Mom Tapes complete a trio of works investigating the role of women in a rapidly changing society.
In the 1980s, artists’ renewed interest in conventions of narrative and genre led to often highly staged or produced images that hint at how even our deepest feelings are mediated by the images that surround us. In the wake of the economic crash of the late 1980s, photographers focused increasingly on what was swept under the carpet – the repressed and the taboo. Sally Mann’s Jesse at Five (1987) depicts the artist’s daughter as the central figure, half-dressed, dolled-up, and posed like an adult. Mann often created these frank images of her children and caused some controversy during the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, her photographs of her children are remarkable for the artist’s assured handling of a potentially explosive subject with equanimity and grace.
During the following decade, artists created photographs and videos that confused the real and the imaginary in ways that almost eerily predicted the epistemological quandaries posed by the digital revolution. Meanwhile, a trio of recently made works by Erica Baum, Elizabeth McAlpine, and Brandon Lattu combine process and product in novel ways to comment obliquely on the shifting sands of how we come to know the world in our digital age.
Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
As a teenager in the 1960s, Shore was one of two in-house photographers at Andy Warhol’s Factory. During his first cross-country photographic road trip, Shore adopted the catholic approach of his mentor, accepting into his art everything that came along – what he ate, the rest stops he visited, the people he met. He then processed his colour film as “drugstore prints”, the imprecise, colloquial term for the kind of amateur non-specialised snapshots that filled family photo albums. The entire series of 229 prints was shown for the first time in 1974 and acquired by the Metropolitan from that exhibition.
Curator: Brian Piper, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings at NOMA
André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) Leger’s Studio 1926-1927 Gelatin silver print Image: 3 1/8 x 4 1/4in. (8 x 10.8cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum purchase, Women’s Volunteer Committee Fund
There are some rare and beautiful photographs in this posting. I have never seen the Kertész (Leger’s Studio 1926-1927) with its wonderful structure and tonality nor the unusual Mapplethorpe (Staircase, 1140 Royal 1982). I particularly like the Bellocq (Bedroom Mantel, Storyville c. 1911-1913) with its complex medley of shapes and images.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The New Orleans 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.
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Untitled (Self-Portrait Reflected in Window, New Orleans) c. 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 7 x 10 3/4 in. (17.6 x 27.2cm) Mount: 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.5cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum purchase through the National Endowment for the Arts Grant
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Canal Street, New Orleans 1955 Gelatin silver print Image: 11 x 13 4/5 in. (28 x 35.2cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum purchase through the National Endowment for the Arts and Museum Purchase Funds
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) Louisiana 1947, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver print Image: 9 5/8 x 14 3/16 in. (24.4 x 36cm) Paper: 12 x 16 in. (30.3 x 40.4cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum purchase, General Acquisition Fund
Theodore Lilienthal (American, 1829-1894) Charles Hotel, New Orleans c. 1867 Albumen print Image: 10 3/4 x 13 13/16 in. (27.2 x 35.1cm) Mount: 17 x 22 1/4 in. (43.3 x 56.6cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum Purchase
Featuring masterworks by photographers Edward Weston, William Henry Fox Talbot, André Kertész, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more, the New Orleans Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, Photography at NOMA, explores the Museum’s rich permanent photography collection through a selection of some of its finest works from the early 1840s to the 1980s.
The first comprehensive presentation of works from NOMA’s collection since the 1970s, the exhibition includes over 130 of the most important photographs in the Museum’s collection and presents rare and unusual examples from throughout photography’s history. On view November 10, 2013 through January 19, 2014, the exhibition highlights the tremendous depth and breadth of the Museum’s collection and includes photographs made as works of art as well as advertising images, social documents, and more. The photographers featured in the exhibition range from some of the most recognisable names in the field, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Lewis Hine, to unknown photographers – reflecting the vast spectrum of photographic activity since the medium’s inception in the 19th century.
“NOMA began collecting photographs seriously in the early 1970s when photography was not commonly found in American art museum collections. Today our holdings include nearly 10,000 works, representing a broad range of creative energy and achievement,” said Susan Taylor, NOMA’s Director. “Our collection has strong roots in New Orleans history. Our city has long been an epicentre for the work of established and emerging photographers and we are delighted to share this aspect of New Orleans history with our audiences.”
“Since its origins, photography has infiltrated every aspect of modern life, from art to war, and religion to politics and many of these applications are represented in NOMA’s extensive collection,” said Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs. “Despite the collection’s long history, it remains one of the best kept secrets in this country. Photography at NOMA is an opportunity to re-examine and bring to the fore the diverse range of works found in the collection.”
Since the 1970s, NOMA has built an extensive collection of photographs that represents a wide range of achievement in that medium from the 1840s to the present. Today the collection comprises nearly 10,000 works with images by some of the most significant photographic artists including Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Ilse Bing, and Edward Steichen, among many others. The collection includes examples that reflect photography’s international scope, from an 1843 view from his hotel window in Paris by William Henry Fox Talbot to a view of Mount Fuji by Kusakabi Kimbei, but it is also strong in photographs made in and around New Orleans by regional and national photographers such as E. J. Bellocq, Walker Evans, Clarence John Laughlin, and Robert Polidori.
Photography at NOMA features works by Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Edward Weston, among many others.
Press release from the NOMA website
Felix Moissenet (American, b. circa 1814) Freeman c. 1855 Sixth plate daguerreotype Image: 3 1/4 x 2 3/4 in. (8 x 6.8cm) Case (open): 3 5/8 x 6 3/8 in. (9.2 x 16.1cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum purchase
Thomas Augustine Malone (British, 1823-1867) Demonstration of the Talbotype December 11, 1848 Calotype (Talbotype) negative 7 3/8 x 9 2/16 in. (18.8 x 23.3cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum purchase
Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989) Staircase, 1140 Royal 1982 Gelatin silver print Image: 15 1/5 x 15 1/5 in. (38.5 x 38.5cm) Paper: 20 x 16 in. (50.6 x 40.4cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Promised gift from H. Russell Albright, MD
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877) View of the Paris Boulevards from the First Floor of the Hôtel de Louvais, Rue de la Paix 1843 Salted paper print from a paper negative Image: 6 3/8 x 6 3/4 in. (16.2 x 17.1cm) Paper: 7 1/2x 9 in. (19 x 23cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum purchase, 1977 Acquisition Fund Drive
Morton Schamberg (American, 1881-1918) Cityscape 1916 Gelatin silver print Image: 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (24 x 19cm) Mount: 15 3/4 x 13 in. (40 x 33cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum purchase, Women’s Volunteer Committee Fund
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) A Mangled Staircase (No. 2) 1949 Gelatin silver print Image: 13 1/2 x 10 13/16 in. (34.2 x 27.5cm) Mount: 17 x 14 in. (43 x 35.5cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Bequest of Clarence John Laughlin
E. J. Bellocq (American, 1873-1949) Bedroom Mantel, Storyville c. 1911-1913 Glass negative Plate: 10 x 8 in. (25.2 20.2cm) Museum purchase
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) [Mechanic and Steam Pump] c. 1930 Gelatin silver print Image: 9 1/2 x 7 in. (24.3 x 17.6cm) Paper: 10 x 8 in. (25.2 x 20.3cm) The New Orleans Museum of Art Museum Purchase
The New Orleans Museum of Art One Collins Diboll Circle, City Park New Orleans, LA 70124 Phone: (504) 658-4100
Curator: Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at NOMA
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Another great photographer with a social conscience. Fantastic to observe the dynamics of the proof sheets and how the images were cropped for final publication. The angles, the angles of Red’s young brother are illuminating, to see how the photographer framed his subject, what worked, what didn’t. There is a relatively new boxed set of the complete works of this artist published by Stiedl titled Gordon Parks Collected Works (2012).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The New Orleans 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.
“”The Making of an Argument” evaluates the editorial decisions made by the magazine and, in doing so, comments on how the context in which a picture is presented can drastically alter its message. “In order to meet the expectations set up by the subtitle and the opening text, an overwhelming majority of the pictures selected underscore violence, fear, frustration, aggression, or despair. Of the twenty-one images reproduced, only five strike a lighter note,” writes Russell Lord, the curator of photographs at NOMA. Lord also notes that the ways the images were cropped and darkened further functioned to convey the magazine’s intended message.”
Genevieve Fussell. “Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument,” on The New Yorker website October 28, 2013 [Online] Cited 19/01/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
This image shows both the full frame image that Gordon Parks shot and the cropped selection, framed in editor’s marking pen, that was ultimately published in Life magazine. The cropped version dramatically heightens the intensity of the image, bringing the viewer closer to the fight (see proof sheet below).
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
The opening spread of “Harlem Gang Leader,” Life, November 1, 1948
This exhibition explores the making of Gordon Parks’ first photographic essay for Life magazine in 1948, “Harlem Gang Leader.” After gaining the trust of one particular group of gang members and their leader, Leonard “Red” Jackson, Parks produced a series of photographs that are artful, poignant, and, at times, shocking. From this large body of work (Parks made hundreds of negatives) the editors at Life selected twenty-one pictures to print in the magazine, often cropping or enhancing details in the pictures in the process. Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument traces this editorial process and parses out the various voices and motives behind the production of the picture essay.
The exhibition considers Parks’ photographic practice within a larger discussion about photography as a narrative device. Featuring vintage photographs, original issues of Life magazine, contact sheets, and proof prints, the exhibition raises important questions about the role of photography in addressing social concerns, its use as a documentary tool, and its function in the world of publishing…
“This project raises important questions about the role of photography in addressing social concerns, its use as a documentary tool, and its function in the world of publishing,” said Susan M. Taylor, NOMA’s Director. “We are delighted to be working with The Gordon Parks Foundation on this exhibition since it is a project that addressed many of the major issues that Parks would explore throughout his career.”
In 1948, Gordon Parks began a professional relationship with Life magazine that would last twenty-two years. For his first project, he proposed a series of pictures about the gang wars that were then plaguing Harlem, believing that if he could draw attention to the problem then perhaps it would be addressed through social programs or government intervention. As a result of his efforts, Parks gained the trust of one particular group of gang members and their leader, Leonard “Red” Jackson, and produced a series of pictures of them that are artful, emotive, poignant, touching, and sometimes shocking. From this larger body of work, twenty-one pictures were selected for reproduction in a graphic and adventurous layout in Life magazine.
At each step of the selection process – as Parks chose each shot, or as the picture editors at Life re-selected from his selection – any intended narrative was complicated by another curatorial voice. Curator Russell Lord notes, “By the time the reader opened the pages of Life magazine, the addition of text, and the reader’s own biases further rendered the original argument into a fractured, multi-layered affair. The process leads to many questions: ‘What was the intended argument?’ and ‘Whose argument was it?’.”
Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument examines these questions through a close study of how Parks’ first Life picture essay was conceived, constructed and received.”
Press release from the NOMA website
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Untitled, Harlem, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
The New Orleans Museum of Art One Collins Diboll Circle, City Park New Orleans, LA 70124 Phone: (504) 658-4100
Curators: Brian Wallis, Chief Curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP), and Julie Maguire, Director of the Brett Weston Archive
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Air vents, New York] 1945 Image: 10 3/4 x 13 13/16 in. (27.3 x 35.1cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Out of the 84 images online on eMuseum I have picked just 13 from the exhibition for this posting. While the press release is loquacious in its praise for these 8 x 10 view camera photographs – and Weston’s subjective and abstract view of the city with it’s flattened and abstracted deep space “distinguished by an attention to the formal values of linearity, depth, and contrast” – only the few that I have focused on here really work to any considerable degree.
Most of the photographs are mundane, prosaic experiments in form, shape and detail. Church door, Bowery, New York and Wrought iron fence, New York (both c. 1945, below) are better examples of detail photographs by Weston, but other than their formal qualities they are pretty boring images. More interesting is the photograph Stoop with broom, arrow, and pushcart, New York (1944, below) with its cacophony of shapes and angles, form, light and shadow.
While most photographs in the posting have some interesting qualities, the only real show stopper is Air vents, New York (1944, below). This is a beautifully resolved modernist image which contrasts the air vents as sculptural objects with the city skyline beyond. Here Weston manipulates deep space (without deep focus / large depth of field) as part of the mise en scène, placing the significant props in different planes of the picture while successfully flattening the whole tableau vivant at the same time. The rendition of light is handsomely controlled, the air vents becoming Brancussi-like sculptures or some form of alien creature.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the International Center of Photography and the Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [42nd Street at First Avenue, New York] c. 1945 Image: 7 3/4 x 9 3/4 in. (19.7 x 24.8cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Oceano Dunes, California] 1934 Image: 10 5/8 x 13 13/16 in. (27 x 35.1cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Stoop with broom, arrow, and pushcart, New York] 1944 Image: 10 1/4 x 13 5/8 in. (26 x 34.6cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Airshafts, New York] c. 1945 Image: 13 13/16 x 10 11/16 in. (35.1 x 27.1cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Courtyard, New York] c. 1945 Image: 19 x 15 1/4 in. (48.3 x 38.7cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (1911-1993) is widely regarded as one of the leading photographers of the 20th century. He is known primarily for his bold compositions based on Western landscapes and natural forms, and for his extraordinary printing style. Weston was among a small group of California photographers in the 1930s, known as the Group f/64, who favoured large-format view cameras, straight and uncropped images, and stark black-and-white prints, often contact printed. This group included Ansel Adams and Brett Weston’s father, Edward Weston. But Brett Weston’s style became even more radical when he was drafted into the army during World War II, and, in 1944, sent to the Army Pictorial Center in New York. There, in addition to routine Army work, Weston explored the streets of New York with his large 8 x 10 view camera. Over the next two years, Weston took over 300 photographs, each distinguished by an attention to the formal values of linearity, depth, and contrast. Turning away from the documentary style that characterised much of the photography of New York in the preceding decade, notably Berenice Abbott’s project Changing New York (1939), Weston pioneered a highly subjective and abstract view of the city, often focusing on details such as the finial on an iron railing or ivy on the side of a building. In pictures like Air Vents (1944) and Whelans Drugstore (1944), Weston flattened and abstracted the deep space of the New York cityscape creating rich, two-dimensional black-and-white images. This approach would govern the most prolific period of Weston’s work in the late 1940s and 1950s, when he utilised this highly polished style to photograph Western dunes, beaches, rocks, and vegetation.
This exhibition includes over 100 photographs, drawn largely from the collection of the International Center of Photography. The exhibition is a collaboration between the International Center of Photography, the Brett Weston Archive, and the host Gallery of the Americas. It is organised by Brian Wallis, Chief Curator at the International Center of Photography, and Julie Maguire, Director of the Brett Weston Archive.
Please note that this exhibition is at the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery between 51st and 52nd Streets.
Press release from the ICP website
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [House, Ewing Street, Staten Island, New York] c. 1945 Image: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm) Paper: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Sutton Place, New York] c. 1945 Image: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm) Paper: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Skylight and fences, Midtown, New York] c. 1945 Image: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Wrought iron fence, New York] c. 1945 Image: 9 9/16 x 6 13/16 in. (24.3 x 17.3cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of Christian K. Keesee, 2012
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Church door, Bowery, New York] c. 1945 Image: 9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in. (24.1 x 19.2cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [Pillars and tree, New York] 1944 Image: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of the Brett Weston Archive, from the collection of Christian Keesee, 2003
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) [St. Francis Grocery & Fruit, New York] c. 1945 Image: 9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in. (24.1 x 19.2cm) Gelatin silver print Gift of Christian K. Keesee, 2012
International Center of Photography 79 Essex Street, New York, NY 10002 between Delancey Street and Broome Street
Curator: Karen Hellman was as an assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the Getty Museum
Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019) Trolley – New Orleans 1955 Gelatin silver print Image: 22.9 x 34cm (9 x 13 3/8 in.) Trish and Jan de Bont
Another fascinating exhibition from the J. Paul Getty Museum that features classic photographs and some that I have never seen before. In my opinion, the two most famous photographs of windows have to be Minor White’s rhapsodic Windowsill Daydreaming, Rochester (1958, below) and Paul Strand’s Wall Street (1915, below, originally known as Pedestrians raked by morning light in a canyon of commerce) which, strangely, is not included in the exhibition.
I can’t understand this omission as this is the seminal image of windows in the history of photography.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Wall Street 1915 Platinum print
This photograph is not in the exhibition
In this photo, taken by morning light 1915, the recently built J.P. Morgan Co. building appears sinister and foreboding and dwarfs (perhaps consumes even) the humanity of suited men and women, their long shadows dragging behind them, walked alongside its facade.
Paul Strand studied under Lewis Hine and Alfred Steiglitz. Although he set up in New York as a portrait photographer, Strand often visited Stieglitz’s gallery to see the new European painting which it exhibited. In 1914-1915, under the influence of this new form of art, Strand turned from soft-focus Pictoralism towards abstraction. It was in this spirit that the above photo was taken, originally named, “Pedestrians raked by morning light in a canyon of commerce”. Strand did not intended to show Wall Street in a bad light, he admitted. However, as the Great Depression happened (criticism was squarely towards Wall Street back then as it is today) and Strand turned more communist, he later spoke of “sinister windows” and “blind shapes” inherent in the above picture.
The photo, now simply titled “Wall Street”, was one of six Paul Strand pictures Stieglitz published in Camera Work. In three of the six pictures, humanity strides out from abstract ideas, and each figure was a study in itself – an irregular item complimented by modular formats that surround it. Another set of eleven Strand photos were published in the magazine’s final issue in 1917, and those pictures, overwhelmingly endorsed by Stieglitz as ‘brutally direct’ made Strand’s reputation.
Alex Selwyn-Holmes. “Wall Street by Paul Strand,” on the Iconic Photos blog, December 2010 [Online] Cited 12/01/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985) Girl at Gee’s Bend 1937 Silver gelatin print Image: 40 x 49.7cm (15 3/4 x 19 9/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) [The Milliner’s Window] Before January 1844 Salted paper print from a Calotype negative Image: 14.3 x 19.5cm (5 5/8 x 7 11/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
In many respects, the window was where photography began. As early as 1826, the sill of an upstairs window in the home of the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce served as a platform for his photographic experiments. His View from the Window at Le Gras is today considered to be the first photograph. Since then, the window motif in photographs has functioned formally as a framing device and conceptually as a tool for artistic expression. It is also tied metaphorically to the camera itself which is, at its most rudimentary, a “room” (the word camera means “chamber”) and its lens a “window” through which images are projected and fixed. The photographs in At the Window: A Photographer’s View, on view October 1, 2013 – January 5, 2014 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, explore varying aspects of the window as frame or mirror – formally or metaphorically – for photographic vision.
“The Getty Museum’s extensive collection allows us to explore themes and subjects within the history of photography that highlight not only the most famous masters and iconic images they produced, but also less obvious subjects, methods and practitioners of the medium whose contributions have not yet been fully acknowledged. At the Window is one such an exhibition, and holds in store many surprises, even for those who know the field well,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The exhibition also allows us to celebrate a substantial body of work that was recently added to the collection with funds provided by the Museum’s Photographs Council, whose mission it is to help us support the growth of the collection, and a number of highly important loans from private collections.”
Shop Windows and Architecture
Featured in the exhibition is an exceedingly rare early photograph, William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Milliner’s Window (before January 1844) which depicts not an actual window but a carefully constructed one: shelves were placed outdoors and propped in front of black cloth, while various ladies’ hats were arranged to simulate the look of a shop display. Throughout the history of photography, actual shop fronts have been a popular subject and reflections in their windows a source for unexpected juxtapositions. This motif is well represented in the exhibition with photographs by William Eggleston, Eugène Atget, and Walker Evans.
Photographers have also taken an interest in the distinctive formal arrangements made possible by the architectural facades found in a cityscape. André Kertész’s Rue Vavin, Paris (1925), a view from his apartment window, is one of the first photographs he took upon arriving in Paris from Budapest. Photographers like Alfred Stieglitz carefully framed their views of urban exteriors, using the window as a unifying device within the composition.
The Window as Social Documentary
While windows provide an opportunity to observe life beyond a single room, the camera’s lens opens a window to the world at large. Arthur Rothstein believed in photography’s ability to enact social change – his Girl at Gee’s Bend (1937) features a young girl framed in the window of her log-and-earth home in Alabama, highlighting the schism between magazine images and the actual lives of most Americans at the time. Similarly, Robert Frank’s Trolley – New Orleans (1955) frames racial segregation through windows in a trolley, while Sebastião Salgado’s Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (negative 1995; print 2009) uses the barely separated windows of a housing structure to evoke the cramped quarters and dire economic situation of its inhabitants.
The Window as a Conceptual Tool
Artists have used the window in other novel ways, whether to create an enigmatic mood or suggest a suspenseful scene. In Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (2002) from the series Twilight, the image of a woman standing in a room and turned toward a window creates a suspended, unsettling moment of anticipation that is never resolved. In her Stranger series (2000), Shizuka Yokomizo actively engages subjects by sending letters to randomly selected apartment residents, asking them to stand in front of a window at a particular date and time in order to be photographed. Uta Barth’s diptych …and of time (2000), where the path of a window’s light and shadow is followed across the wall of the artist’s living room, illustrates something the artist phrased as “ambient vision.”
“The window has been a recurrent and powerful theme for photographers from the beginning of the medium,” explains Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “In a collection such as the Getty’s that is particularly rich in work by important photographers from the beginnings of the medium to the present day, the motif provides a unique way to travel through the history of photography.”
The Window in Photographs (Getty Publications, $24.95, hardcover) investigates the recurrence of windows both as a figurative and literal theme throughout the history of photography. From the very vocabulary we use to describe cameras and photographic processes to the subjects of world-renowned photographers, windows have long held powerful sway over artists working in the medium. When documented on film, windows call into question issues of representation, the malleability of perception, and the viewer’s experience of the photograph itself, and the window’s evocative power is often rooted in the interplay between positive and negative, darkness and light, and inside and out.
Yet despite the ubiquity of windows in photography, this subject has been rarely addressed head on in a single exhibition or publication. From the birth of the Daguerreotype to the development of digital imagery, this volume presents a full account of the motif of the window as a symbol of photographic vision. Its eighty featured colour plates, all drawn from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, allowing the window’s many uses in photography to be highlighted and explored stylistically. Including images from all-star contributors such as Uta Barth, Gregory Crewdson, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Minor White, The Window in Photographs is a remarkable examination of a theme that has inspired photographers for over a century. This book is published to coincide with the exhibition At the Window: The Photographer’s View at the J. Paul Getty Museum from October 1, 2013 to January 5, 2014.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Penny Picture Display, Savannah / Photographer’s Window Display, Birmingham, Alabama / Studio Portraits, Birmingham, Alabama 1936 Gelatin silver print Image: 25.6 x 19.9cm (10 1/16 x 7 7/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Petit Bacchus, 61, rue St. Louis en l’Ile (The Little Bacchus Café, rue St. Louis en l’Ile) 1901-1902 Albumen silver print Image: 22.1 x 17.8cm (8 11/16 x 7 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The J. Paul Getty Museum puts on some amazing exhibitions, and this is no exception. For me the strength of this artist lies in his black and white work. I am not so enamoured with the camera obscura, unexpected juxtapositions of objects or tent-camera images. They seem prosaic and lack the magic of the black and white work.
The artist’s distinctive take on domestic interiors and family life is beguiling. Damp footprints on a bathroom floor with the most glorious light; the dark maw of a open paper bag; toy blocks ascending skywards; jumble of letters on a monolithic refrigerator door; the shadow of a house made into a house (amazing!); and the portents of darkness to come as Brady looks at his shadow. You cannot forget these images, they impinge on your consciousness. As for the colour images, they seem insignificant, superfluous when compared with these resonances.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Over the past 25 years, Abelardo Morell (American, born Cuba, 1948) has become internationally renowned for photographs that push the boundaries of the medium while exploring visual surprise and wonder. Throughout his career, he has looked at things with a fresh vision and investigated simple optics in myriad forms. Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door, on view October 1, 2013 – January 5, 2014 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, traces the artist’s innovative work as he has continued to mine the essential strangeness and complexity of photography. The exhibition was organised by The Art Institute of Chicago, in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
“Abelardo Morell is one of this country’s great contemporary photographers whose very distinctive achievement is celebrated in this first major survey of his work,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The exhibition also celebrates the growth of the holdings of Morell at three major museums, which have recently been augmented through the generosity of Dan Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, who have promised significant groups of works by the artist to each institution’s permanent collection.”
Morell came to the United States as a teenager. He attended Bowdoin College in Maine, and later completed an MFA in photography at Yale University. In 1986 he began creating large-format pictures around his home, examining common household objects with childlike curiosity. As a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, he experimented with optics in his teaching and initiated a series of images in which he turned entire rooms into camera obscuras, capturing the outside world as projected onto interior surfaces. These visual experiments and endless exploration of the medium are at the heart of the work on view in the exhibition.
From a Child’s Perspective
The earliest photographs in the exhibition date from the mid-1980s, when the birth of his son, Brady, led Morell to a radical shift in his work. Looking inward at his own family life, Morell found novel subject matter in domestic interiors. He set aside his hand-held camera in favor of a large-format view camera that necessitated a more deliberate style and elicited a wealth of tactile detail from his subjects. Of this shift, Morell writes: “I started making photographs as if I were a child myself. This strategy got me to look at things around me more closely, more slowly, and from vantage points I hadn’t considered before.” This technique can be seen in Refrigerator (negative, 1987; print, 2012), where Morell portrays a common refrigerator as a giant monolith with jumbled letters on it, evoking the preverbal vision of a child. This concept recurs in Toy Blocks (negative, 1987; print, 2012), where toy blocks photographed from a steep perspective on the floor are made to seem like a mysterious Tower of Babel, as they might to a small child.
Camera Obscura Experiments
The basis for all photography, the principle of the camera obscura (Latin for “dark chamber”) has been known since antiquity. In 1991, Morell began transforming entire rooms into cameras by covering the windows and inserting a small hole. He used a second camera to photograph the superimposition of the outside world as projected onto various interiors. Morell started by making black-and-white pictures in his own home before traveling before traveling in search of other compelling subjects for his uncanny, disorienting images. Morell made a pilgrimage to photograph Lacock Abbey, the country house of William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877), one of the inventors of photography. Talbot’s era was an ideal model for the camera obscura work, as the general interest in a variety of intersecting subject matter at that time mirrored Morell’s own interest in uniting science, art, philosophy, and religion.
In 2005, Morell turned to creating camera obscura works in colour, eventually incorporating technical refinements that made his photographs less raw and immediate and more explicitly constructed. In View of the Brooklyn Bridge in the Bedroom (2009), bold red sheets serve as a reminder of the bed as a site of intimacy, contrasting with the public space of the Brooklyn Bridge. This strange juxtaposition also evokes a dreamlike state, as the outdoor image floats just above the bed.
Tent Camera Images
In 2010, following the example of 19th century photographers such as Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) and William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942), Morell set out to capture the grandeur of the American wilderness. At Big Bend National Park in Texas, he began experimenting with a portable tent camera featuring a periscope lens on top, which projected the scene outside onto the ground. Morell found it appealing that what was overlooked because it was underfoot – something so common and shared – formed the backdrop for these images. In Tent Camera Image on Ground: El Capitan from Cathedral Beach, Yosemite National Park, California (2012), Morell followed Carleton Watkins’s path into Yosemite, where he used the tent camera to create a landscape that is no longer fresh and pristine, but set against such modern visual disruptions as bike tracks in the dirt.
Additional Experiments
Also on view in the exhibition are additional visual experiments employed by Morell, including a simulation of Eadweard Muybridge’s early use of stop-motion using a water pitcher and wine glass, as well as optical curiosities like dappled sunlight under trees, which Morell said results from hundreds of “tiny cameras” that form in the minute spaces between leaves. While in residence at two museums – the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1998, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven in 2008 – Morell created photographs that involve unexpected juxtapositions that explore how the presentation of art affects its meaning. By moving sculptures and paintings in close proximity to one another, he created what he called “an impossible conversation” between works of art. In Nadelman / Hopper (negative, 2008; print, 2012), he positioned a bust by Elie Nadelman (American, 1882-1946) in front of a painting by Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967) for a composition in the vein of Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico (Italian, 1888-1978).
“Morell is driven by his unflagging intellectual curiosity and his love of the medium of photography,” said Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs and curator of the exhibition at the Getty Museum. “His work is grounded in the past, but it also contains an unexpected twist that causes us to reexamine what we think we know. I am delighted to be able to share this unique collection of photographs with our visitors.”
Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door is on view October 1, 2013 – January 5, 2014 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition was on view at the the Art Institute of Chicago from June 1 – September 2, 2013, and will be on view at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta from February 22 – May 18, 2014. The exhibition is curated by Paul Martineau, associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Elizabeth Siegel, associate curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Brett Abbott, curator of photography at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, where it travels after the Getty. Funding for the exhibition catalogue was provided by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Generous in-kind support for the exhibition was provided by Tru Vue Inc. and Gemini Moulding Incc.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Unidentified artist [Bird in Basin with Thread Spool and Patterned Cloth] c. 1855 Daguerreotype Plate: 2 3/4 x 3 1/4 in. (6.9 x 8.2cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
The next two weeks sees a lot of exhibitions finish their run on the 5th January 2014.
Here is a bumper posting which contains one of my favourite photographs of all time: Danny Lyon’s Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville (1966, below). From a distance, this looks to be a very interesting exhibition on a large topic, delineated for the viewer into four main sections. The task of the curator cannot have been easy, picking 113 images to represent a “democracy” of images out of a collection of over 7,000 images. Of course there can never be a true “democracy” of images as some will always be more valued within our culture than others. There is a meritocracy in this exhibition which features images by masters of the medium but this is balanced by the inclusion of images by anonymous photographers, little known photographers and vernacular and street photography.
What is most impressive is the specially developed website which includes many images from the different sections of the exhibition. These images are of good quality and, along with relevant text, help the viewer place the images in context. Related content is also suggested from the full photographic collection at The Smithsonian which has been placed online with good image quality. This is a far cry from many exhibitions at state galleries in Australia where there are hardly any dedicated exhibition websites. Most of the photographic collection from these galleries is not available online and if it has been scanned, the image quality is generally poor. How many times have I searched a state gallery or library collection and come up with the answer: “Image not available” ?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“More often, though, the moments, places, people and views that have been collected here feel offhand and stumbled upon, telling a fragmentary, incomplete tale. Sometimes it’s literally a glance, as in “Girl Holding Popsicle,” a 1972 image by Mark Cohen, who rarely even looked through his viewfinder. Other times, it’s more like a long stare, as in William Christenberry’s 1979 “China Grove Church – Hale County, Alabama,” a locale that the Washington-based artist and Alabama native returned to again and again. These 113 pictures are, at the same time, quietly telling, revealing bits of America in oblique, prismatic ways.”
Part of Michael O’Sullivan’s review of the exhibition in The Washington Post.
American Characters
Photographers have captured the texture of everyday life since the medium’s arrival in the United States in 1839. Photographic portraits have made both the iconic and the commonplace serve as stand-ins for all of us, forging a shared language of political and social understanding. In charting the passing parade of history – the faces of the anonymous and the famous; evolving stories of immigration, disenfranchisement, and assimilation; as well as emblematic objects and celebrated landmarks lodged within our collective memory – photographs reveal the complexities of America.
In Portrait of My Father with Newspaper, Irving Sultan reads the Los Angeles Times as light pours in behind him. This carefully composed portrait reveals the artist’s father almost entirely through reflections and shadows. Thin newsprint shields his body from the camera, while only a vague profile of his face is discernible on the right half of the spread. Prompted by the discovery of a box of home movies, Larry Sultan embarked on an eight-year enquiry into his parents’ lives. He stayed in their home for weeks at a time, interviewing them about their marriage and photographing their domestic activities.
In Girl Holding Popsicle a young girl twists shyly as she poses before a graffiti-inscribed brick wall. Mark Cohen took this photograph spontaneously as he passed through a back alley. Cohen does not hesitate to get assertively close to the strangers he meets in his hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Many of his photographs are made without looking through a viewfinder, and so remain a mystery even to Cohen until they are developed.
Unidentified artist [Gold Nugget] c. 1860s Albumen silver print Image: 2 1/8 x 3 5/8 in. (5.4 x 9.2cm) Sheet: 2 3/8 x 3 7/8 in. (6.1 x 9.8cm) irregular Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro
Mathew B. Brady (American, 1823-1896) Reviewing Stand in Front of the Executive Mansion, Washington, D.C., May, 1865 1865, printed early 1880s Albumen silver print Sheet and image: 6 1/2 x 9 in. (16.5 x 22.9cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase through the Julia D. Strong Endowment
In the weeks and months following the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, Kevin Bubriski photographed people who gathered at Ground Zero. Frozen in awe, struck with disbelief, and overcome with loss, people stood before the destroyed building site to confront the horrible tragedy. More than ten years later, Bubriski’s photographs preserve the emotional impact of this infamous day through images of those who witnessed its aftermath first-hand.
This photograph, from a series that documents contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans, presents Deborah Luster’s interpretation of the last view of the crime victim lying face up on the ground. The title is the entry from the New Orleans Police blotter, but the photograph is Luster’s meditation on looking, seeing, and the power of images to haunt our imagination.
Unidentified artist [Two Workmen Polishing a Stove] c. 1865 Albumen silver print Sheet and image: 14 1/8 x 11 in. (35.9 x 28cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Girl and Jar – San Ildefonso 1905 Photogravure 16 5/8 x 12 1/4 in. (12.3 x 31.1cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Transfer from the United States Marshal Service of the U.S. Department of Justice
Between 1900 and 1930, Edward S. Curtis traveled across the continent photographing more than seventy Native American tribes. The photographs, compiled into twenty volumes, presented daily activities, customs, and religions of a people he called “a vanishing race.” Curtis hoped to preserve the legacy of Native peoples in lasting images. To this end, Curtis often costumed his subjects and set up scenes, mixing tribal artefacts and traditions to match his romantic vision of the people he studied. In this intimate portrait, a young Tewa woman named Povi-Tamu (“Flower Morning”) balances a large jug with help from a hidden fiber ring. She is from the San Ildefonso Pueblo of New Mexico, which is famed for its rich tradition of fine pottery. Curtis associated the serpentine design of the vessel with the serpent cult, which he noted was central to Tewa life.
Oliver H. Willard (American, active 1850s-1870s, died 1875) Portrait of a Young Woman c. 1857 Salted paper print 8 7/8 x 6 3/4 in. (22.5 x 17.1cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase through the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, 1999.29.1
Spiritual Frontier
The earliest photographs made in America describe an awesome land blessed with such an abundance of natural beauty that it seemed heaven sent. Images of waterfalls, mountains, and vast open spaces conveyed the beauty, the grandeur, the sublimity, and dynamics of a great spiritual endeavour. In the nineteenth century photographers pictured wilderness landscapes that symbolised American greatness. More recently, photographers have described a landscape no less romantic, but now recalibrated to account for the interaction of nature and culture.
Eadweard Muybridge (English, 1830-1904) Valley of the Yosemite from Union Point 1872 Albumen silver print Sheet: 17 x 21 1/2 in. (43.2 x 54.6cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Charles T. Isaacs
Eadweard Muybridge went to great lengths to photograph the best possible views of the West. He chopped down trees if they obstructed his camera, and ventured to “points where his packers refused to follow him.” Muybridge was determined to produce the most comprehensive photographs ever made of Yosemite and the surrounding region. His views were sold widely in both large-format prints and stereograph cards, which are viewed through a device that creates the illusion of three-dimensional space. This allowed Muybridge to transport his audience, if just for a moment, to a faraway place caught on film.
Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019) Butte, Montana 1956, printed 1973 Gelatin silver print Image: 8 3/4 x 13 in. (22.2 x 33cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase
As both a photographer and writer, Robert Adams is committed to describing the western American landscape as both awe-inspiring and scarred by man. In New Housing, Longmont Colorado, Adams contrasted the vast space of the distant landscape view with a foreground image of the wall of a newly constructed suburban tract house. Adams invites a consideration of the balance between myth and reality and the land as home as well as scenic backdrop.
Charles L. Weed (American, 1824-1903) Mirror Lake and Reflections, Yosemite Valley, Mariposa County, California 1865 Albumen silver print Sheet and image: 15 1/2 x 20 1/4 in. (39.4 x 51.4cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Charles T. Isaacs
Like Carleton Watkins, his better-known competitor, Charles Weed recognised the pictorial dividend to be gained by showing Yosemite’s glorious geological features in duplicate, using the valley’s lakes as reflecting ponds. Weed first traveled to what was then known as “Yo-Semite,” in 1859, but with a relatively small camera; he returned in 1865 with a larger model capable of using what were called mammoth plates. Like Watkins, he sold his prints to buyers eager to own a photograph of majestic natural beauty.
At just over 4,700 feet above the valley, Half Dome is the most iconic rock formation in Yosemite National Park. Adams squeezed the monolith into the frame to emphasise the majesty of its scale and the drama of its cliff. As it thrusts out of the brilliant white snow, Half Dome stands as a symbol of the unspoiled western landscape. Ansel Adams made his first trip to the Sierra Nevada mountain range when he was fourteen years old, and he returned every year until the end of his life, often for month-long stretches. Throughout his career Adams traveled widely – from Hawaii to Maine – to photograph the most picturesque vistas in America. After his death in 1984, a section of the Sierra Nevada was named the Ansel Adams Wilderness in his honour.
John Pfahl’s photographs embody the conflict between progress and preservation. Throughout the 1980s he focused on oil refineries and power plants. He chose the sites strategically based on their location in picturesque landscapes, where he observed a “transcendental” connection between industry and nature. In Goodyear #5 a nuclear power plant occupies the horizon. The setting sun provides a romantic colour palette as light filters through clouds of billowing steam. The landscape is reduced to an abstract composition that celebrates colour and texture. Pfahl’s intention with this series, titled Smoke, was to “make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought.” This photograph complicates popular notions of power plants by revealing an uncommonly beautiful view of a controversial structure.
A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum celebrates the numerous ways in which photography, from early daguerreotypes to contemporary digital works, has captured the American experience. The photographs presented here are selected from the approximately 7,000 images collected since the museum’s photography program began thirty years ago, in 1983. Ranging from daguerreotype to digital, they depict the American experience and are loosely grouped around four ideas: American Characters, Spiritual Frontier, America Inhabited, and Imagination at Work.
The exhibition’s title is inspired by American poet Walt Whitman’s belief that photography provided America with a new, democratic art form that matched the spirit of the young country and his belief that photography was a quintessentially American activity, rooted in everyday people and ordinary things and presented in a straightforward way. Known as the “poet of democracy,” Whitman wrote after visiting a daguerreotype studio in 1846: “You will see more life there – more variety, more human nature, more artistic beauty… than in any spot we know.” At the time of Whitman’s death, in 1892, George Eastman had just introduced mass market photography when he put an affordable box camera into the hands of thousands of Americans. The ability to capture an instant of lasting importance and fundamental truth mesmerised Americans then and continues to inspire photographers working today. Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of the museum’s pioneering photography collection, the exhibition examines photography’s evolution in the United States from a documentary medium to a full-fledged artistic genre and showcases the numerous ways in which it has distilled our evolving idea of “America.”
The exhibition features 113 photographs selected from the museum’s permanent collection, including works by Edward S. Curtis, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Roy DeCarava, Walker Evans,Irving Penn, Trevor Paglen, among others, as well as vernacular works by unknown artists. A number of recent acquisitions are featured, including works by Ellen Carey, Mitch Epstein, Muriel Hasbun, Alfredo Jaar, Annie Leibovitz, Deborah Luster, and Sally Mann. Landscapes, portraits, documentary-style works from the New York Photo League and images from surveying expeditions sent westward after the Civil War are among the images on display, and explore how photographs have been used to record and catalogue, to impart knowledge, to project social commentary, and as instruments of self-expression.
Photography’s arrival in the United States in 1840 allowed ordinary people to make and own images in a way that had not been previously possible. Photographers immediately became engaged with the life of the emerging nation, the activity of new urban centers, and the possibilities of unprecedented access to the vast western frontier. From the nineteenth to the twentieth century, photography not only captured the country’s changing cultural and physical landscape, but also developed its own language and layers of meaning.
A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum is organised around four major themes that defined American photography. “American Characters” examines the ways in which photographs of individuals, places, and objects become a catalogue of our collective memory and have contributed to the ever-evolving idea of the American character. “Spiritual Frontier” investigates early ideas of a vast, inexhaustible wilderness that symbolised American greatness. “America Inhabited” traces the nation’s rapid industrialisation and urbanisation through images of speed, change, progress, immigration, and contemporary rural, urban, and suburban landscapes. “Imagination at Work” demonstrates how photography’s role of spontaneous witness gradually gave way to contrived arrangement and artistic invention. The exhibition is organised by Merry Foresta, guest curator and independent consultant for the arts. She was the museum’s curator of photography from 1983 to 1999.
Connecting online
A complementary website designed for viewing on tablets includes photographs on view in the exhibition, an expanded selection of works from the museum’s collection and a timeline of American photography. It is available through tablet stations in the exhibition galleries, online, and on mobile devices.”
Press release from the Smithsonian American Art Museum website
America Inhabited
Photography’s early presence in America coincided with the rise of an industrial economy, the growth of major urban population centers, and the fulfilling of what some saw as the Manifest Destiny of spanning the continent from sea to sea. Images of progress and industry, as well as of city and suburbs, quickly added themselves to photography’s catalogue of places and people. Some of these images reflect idealistically, and at times nostalgically, on the beauty and humanity of our own backyards. Others stand as social documents that can be seen as critical and ironic, inviting outrage as well as compassion about the way we now live our lives.
Caught before they run off into the streets, three masked youngsters pause on their front stoop. Expressive postures and mysterious disguises give this trio a theatrical quality. Helen Levitt, who found poetry in the uninhibited gestures of children, used a right-angle viewfinder to capture boys and girls roaming freely and playing with found objects. Working in New York City during the years surrounding World War II, her photographs show the drama of life that unfolded on the sidewalks of poor and working-class neighbourhoods.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville 1966, printed 1985 Gelatin silver print Image: 8 3/4 x 12 7/8 in. (22.2 x 32.7cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase made possible by Mrs. Marshall Langhorne Photo courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Tricycle (Memphis) About 1975, printed 1980 Dye transfer print Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Amy Loeserman Klein
An ordinary tricycle is made monumental in this playful colour photograph. Taken from below, it suggests a child’s perspective – elevating this rusty tricycle to a symbol of innocence and freedom. The quiet Memphis suburb in the background typifies the safe neighbourhoods where children could spend hours playing after school. This print was made with the expensive and exacting dye imbibition process, which was typically used for fashion and advertising at the time. Eggleston began experimenting with colour photography in the mid-1960s. Inspired by trips to a commercial photography lab, he developed an approach that imitates the random, imperfect style of amateur snapshots to describe his immediate surroundings combined with a keen interest in the effects of colour.
In this untitled photograph Aaron Siskind focused on the regular grid of boarded-up windows on a derelict tenement building. Once portals into intimate domestic spaces, the windows represent loss in a community plagued by poverty, unemployment, and racial discrimination. Building upon the traditions of social documentary photographers before him, Siskind used his camera to raise public awareness of Harlem’s struggle, even as he created a modernist work of art.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead 1936, printed 1974 Gelatin silver print Sheet and image: 9 3/8 x 12 in. (23.9 x 30.5cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Lee and Maria Friedlander
During the summer of 1936, Walker Evans joined writer James Agee in rural Alabama to work on a magazine assignment on cotton farming. Evans and Agee met with three tenant farm families and documented every detail of their experiences. The result, which the magazine declined to publish, was released as the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941. It contains some of the most iconic and contentious photographs to document the Great Depression. Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead reads like a modern novel. Every crack in the wood, every speck of paint tells part of the story. Evans drew special attention to the scarcity of cooking tools at the family’s disposal. These everyday utensils illustrate a metaphor for the struggle to meet basic needs.
For this series, sponsored by the National Endowment of the Art’s Long Beach Documentary Survey Project, Judy Fiskin focused on the Long Beach Pike, an amusement park that was demolished soon after she made the photographs. By printing in high contrast and restricting the scale of her prints, Fiskin reduced form to its bare essentials. Devoid of superfluous detail, these photographs appear more like conjured images than documents of reality. Judy Fiskin systematically catalogues the world of architecture and design in order to study variations of historical styles. Her series carefully investigate esoteric subjects such as military base architecture, “dingbat” style houses in southern California, and the art of flower arranging.
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Brooklyn Bridge, Water and Dock Streets, Brooklyn 1936 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 18 x 14 3/8 in. (45.7 x 36.6cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Transfer from the Evander Childs High School, Bronx, New York through the General Services Administration
Berenice Abbott returned home in 1929 after nearly eight years abroad and found herself fascinated by the rapid growth of New York City. She saw the city as bristling with new buildings and structures which seemed to her as solid and as permanent as a mountain range. Aiming to capture “the past jostling the present,” Abbott spent the next five years on a project she called Changing New York. In Brooklyn Bridge, Water and Dock Streets, Brooklyn, Abbott presented a century of history in a single image. The Brooklyn Bridge, once a marvel of modern engineering, seems dark and heavy compared with the skeletal structure beneath it. The construction site at center suggests the never-ending cycle of death and regeneration. And the Manhattan skyline, veiled and weightless, hangs just out of reach, its shape accommodating the ambitious spirit of American modernism.
Nineteenth-century French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in America, nothing is ever quite what it seems. Yet the idea that “seeing is believing” is deeply ingrained in the American character. By yoking together style and subject under the guise of the real, today’s photographers borrow from photography’s rich past while embracing the conceptual framework of contemporary art. They read reality as something on the surface of a picture or, more complexly, as something located in the mind of its beholder.
Sonya Noskowiak (American born Germany, 1900-1975) Calla Lily c. 1930s Gelatin silver print Sheet: 7 3/8 x 9 3/4 in. (18.8 x 24.7cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase made possible through Deaccession Funds
Ray Metzker’s Composites series, begun in 1964, connected in a dramatic fashion his interests in contrasts of light and shadow, his strong sense of design, and his earlier explorations of the multiple image. Metzker studied at Chicago’s Institute of Design, where a rigorously formal, problem-solving approach to photography was taught. For this series he assembled grids of individual photographs to create complex image-fields. When viewed from a distance, this work reads as an abstract, rhythmic pattern of light and dark. On closer inspection, however, many crisply descriptive images are revealed. The Composites function somewhat like short filmstrips. The mystery of these brief narratives is exaggerated by the repetitive design and provides a unique opportunity, in Metzker’s words, “to deal with complexity of succession and simultaneity, of collected and related moments.”
Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009) Mud Glove – New York 1975, printed 1976 Platinum-palladium print Sheet and image: 29 3/4 x 22 1/4 in. (75.5 x 56.5cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the artist
Irving Penn was one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned almost seventy years, Penn worked across multiple genres, from celebrity portraits to fashion, from still lives to images of native cultures in remote places of the world. Throughout his career Penn also worked on a series of photographs of discarded objects: things that had been lost, neglected, or misused. Printed in platinum, these detailed photographs of objects such as a lost glove found in the gutter, are Penn’s photographic memento mori, offering beauty compromised by age or disuse.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Pepper no. 30 1930 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (24.3 x 19.2cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Auragia 1953, printed c. 1960s Gelatin silver print Sheet and image: 11 1/8 x 8 3/4 in. (28.3 x 22.2cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro
Ellen Carey created the series she calls Dings and Shadows by exposing photosensitive paper to light projected through primary and complementary colour filters. The artist first folds and crushes paper; then after exposing the paper to light from a colour enlarger, flattens it out again for processing. In doing so, Carey dissects the process of developing film, and evokes the hand-crafted nature of early photographic techniques.
Some images from the Timeline on the website
1843
Daguerreotypists Albert S. Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes begin a partnership, establishing Southworth & Hawes as the most highly regarded portrait studio in Boston, Mass. The studio caters to the city’s elite, and is visited by Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, among many other influential people of the time.
Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901) A Bride and Her Bridesmaids 1851 Daguerreotype Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase made possible by Walter Beck
1853
The New York Daily Tribune estimates that in the United States, three million daguerreotypes are being produced annually.
Unidentified artist Mother and Son c. 1855 Daguerreotype with applied colour Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
1857
Julian Vannerson and Samuel Cohner make the first systematic photographs of Native American delegations to visit Washington, D.C. They photograph ninety delegates representing thirteen tribes who conduct treaty and other negotiations with government officials.
Julian Vannerson (American, 1827-1875) Shining Metal 1858 Salted paper print Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
1861
American Civil War begins with shots fired on Fort Sumter by Confederate troops. Portrait photographer Mathew Brady is given permission by President Abraham Lincoln to photograph the First Battle of Bull Run, but comes so close to the battle that he narrowly avoids capture. Using paid assistants Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, George N. Barnard, and others, Brady’s studio makes thousands of photos of the sites, material, and people of the war. Civilian free-lance photographer Egbert Guy Fowx sells numerous negatives to Brady’s studio, which publishes and copyrights many of them. Many other images are credited to Fowx, including this group of Union officers.
Egbert Guy Fowx (American, 1821-1889) New York 7th Regiment Officers c. 1863 Salted paper print Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
1867
Eadweard Muybridge begins trip to photograph in Yosemite Valley. He publishes his photographs under the name “Helios,” which is also the name of his San Francisco studio. An exhibition of more than 300 photographic portraits of Native American delegates to Washington, D.C., opens in the Smithsonian Castle. Clarence R. King begins direction of the U.S. Geological Expedition of the Fortieth Parallel, appointing Timothy O’Sullivan as the official photographer. Photographer Carleton Watkins joins the survey in 1871.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada 1867 Albumen silver print Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
1869
Andrew J. Russell’s album, The Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views across the Continent; Taken along the Line of the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha, Nebraska, Volume I, is published. George M. Wheeler begins direction of the United States Geological Surveys West of the 100th Meridian for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Wheeler makes fourteen trips to the West over the next eight years. Photographer Timothy O’Sullivan accompanies him in 1871, 1873, and 1874.
Andrew Joseph Russell (American, 1829-1902) Sphinx of the Valley 1869 Albumen silver print Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
1967
The Friends of Photography is founded in Carmel, California, by Ansel Adams, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Brett Weston, and others, with the aim of promoting creative photography and supporting its practitioners. It remains in existence until 2001.
New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape opens at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, N.Y. It includes photographs by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr.
William Klein talks about his works, technique and process.
William Klein (1928-2022) is an American-born French photographer and filmmaker noted for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography. He was ranked 25th on Professional Photographer’s list of 100 most influential photographers.
Klein trained as a painter, studying under Fernand Léger and found early success with exhibitions of his work. He soon moved on to photography and achieved widespread fame as a fashion photographer for Vogue and for his photo essays on various cities. He has directed feature-length fiction films, numerous short and feature-length documentaries and has produced over 250 television commercials.
He has been awarded the Prix Nadar in 1957, the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in 1999, and the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2012.
Exhibition dates: 2nd November – 21st December, 2013
Enrico Natali (American, b. 1933) Ford Motor Company press conference, Detroit, 1968 1968 Gelatin silver print
The second tranche of images from the artist Enrico Natali demonstrate his command of visual space. Groups of people face away from the camera, then towards it (image above and below), people clutch at each other or walk in opposite directions (next two images). There is the comparison of races, between abject poverty and young people dressed in fur going to the prom. There is the silence of the singular women in the office, and the (op)posed camaraderie of the Detroit Bolt and Nut Company workers (1968, below). Above all, there is light and shade coupled with a sensitive understanding of how human beings interact – with themselves and the camera. Newlywed couple, Detroit, 1968 (1968, below) is a case in point: the clock on the wall, the record player with single, the hand on the shoulder and the ash lengthening on the cigarette complement the presence of the couple and the wonderful look on their faces. Somehow Natali adds genuine charisma to these people, a dignity and poignancy that makes these photographs memorable.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Exhibition dates: 2nd November – 21st December, 2013
Enrico Natali (American, b. 1933) Spectators at a public demonstration, Detroit, 1968 1968 Gelatin silver print
The stink of humanity
It takes about five or six photographs. Then, in a light bulb moment, you realise what the artist is doing and how good these images really are.
They stink of humanity!
They are good because the humanity is not something that the photographer has been able to whip around to serve his photography. In fact, because of the milieu in which they were made, he might not have even been aware of it as an outstanding feature. But after looking at contemporary photography, Natali serves up something that is now missing in aces. As a full house in fact.
The strength of these photographs lies in their directness, intimacy and immediacy. The 35mm format adds to latter quality, as does the photographers ability to get his subjects to engage with the process of having their photograph taken. In different contexts, Natali seems to have a wonderful rapport with all sorts of people, whether it be office workers, people at home, students at school or men sitting under hair dryers. The look of the woman with sunglasses fourth in line in the photograph Women’s Convention, Detroit, 1968 (1968, below) is priceless.
Natali never defines his point of departure and just moves around it but in his case it doesn’t matter, for the “humanity” present in his work is obvious. Admittedly, there are elements that Natali borrows from people such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. And a photographer such as Lee Friedlander for example, by his intellect / aesthetic, tops the attribute of humanity under a layer of quality and a veneer of fame. But this work has a wonderful presence and substance, a respect for human beings and their worlds and real guts to the work. You can absolutely feel his love for the medium, the craft of photography, and the capturing of these self-contained moments.
Today, all too often (as in most of the photography in the Melbourne Now exhibition) we have a top layer of aesthetic / intellect etc… but there is rarely anything under it.
And that my friends, that gives me the shits.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Enrico Natali (American, b. 1933) Incident at Bell Isle Park, Detroit, 1968 1968 Gelatin silver print
Enrico Natali (American, b. 1933) Businessmen at a squash match, Detroit, 1968 1968 Gelatin silver print
Enrico Natali (American, b. 1933) Woman at a gym, Detroit, 1968 1968 Gelatin silver print
Enrico Natali (American, b. 1933) Husband and wife at home with their youngest child, Detroit, 1968 1968 Gelatin silver print
As the fall of Detroit began, as her middle class American Dreamers began moving to greener pastures, and while the Motor City’s status as one of the shining stars of the industrial revolution began to fade, Detroit became a locus for the racial conflict and political upheaval that swept the country during the late 1960s. Throughout this pivotal moment, Enrico Natali was present, empathically documenting Detroit, her people and their environments, and their lives and conditions in his compelling photographs.
Forty-one years later, Natali’s photographs of Detroit still resonate with hope and emotion, and indeed, have taken on an added pathos. These pictures capture the relative calm before the storm: people attending art exhibitions, sporting events, a high school prom; families posing together for portraits; secretaries smoking their afternoon cigarettes; children, parents and grandparents, workers of every stripe – machinists, waitresses, beauticians – plying their trades with what might be described in retrospect as innocence. The spirits of these nameless faces, young and old, are the ghosts that haunt what is now – very literally – this bankrupt metropolis.
Enrico Natali was born in 1933, in Utica, New York. During the 1960s he lived and photographed in various American cities, including New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Detroit. At the end of that decade he ceased work as a photographer and began a meditation practice that became his primary focus, as he built a home and raised his family in California’s Los Padres National Forest. In 1990 Natali and his wife Nadia founded the Blue Heron Center for Integral Studies, a Zen meditation center in Ojai, California. A handsome, timely and poignant publication, Detroit 1968, published by Foggy Notion Books, including an essay by Mark Binelli, author of the critically acclaimed Detroit City is the Place to Be (2012, Metropolitan Books), accompanies the exhibition.
Press release from the Joseph Bellows Gallery website
Enrico Natali (American, b. 1933) Young woman on a street, Detroit, 1968 1968 Gelatin silver print
![Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) '[Mechanic and Steam Pump]' c. 1930](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/79-84-hine-web.jpg "Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) '[Mechanic and Steam Pump]' c. 1930")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Air vents, New York]' 1945 from the exhibition 'City of Abstractions: Brett Weston in New York, 1944-45' at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, September 2013- January 2014](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/air-vents-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Air vents, New York]' 1945 from the exhibition 'City of Abstractions: Brett Weston in New York, 1944-45' at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, September 2013- January 2014")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[42nd Street at First Avenue, New York]' c. 1945 from the exhibition 'City of Abstractions: Brett Weston in New York, 1944-45' at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, September 2013- January 2014](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/42nd-street-at-first-avenue-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[42nd Street at First Avenue, New York]' c. 1945 from the exhibition 'City of Abstractions: Brett Weston in New York, 1944-45' at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York, September 2013- January 2014")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Oceano Dunes, California]' 1934](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/oceano-dunes-california-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Oceano Dunes, California]' 1934")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Stoop with broom, arrow, and pushcart, New York]' 1944](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/stoop-with-broom-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Stoop with broom, arrow, and pushcart, New York]' 1944")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Airshafts, New York]' c. 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/airshafts-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Airshafts, New York]' c. 1945")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Courtyard, New York]' c. 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/courtyard-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Courtyard, New York]' c. 1945")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[House, Ewing Street, Staten Island, New York]' c. 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/house-ewing-street-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[House, Ewing Street, Staten Island, New York]' c. 1945")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Sutton Place, New York]' c. 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/sutton-place-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Sutton Place, New York]' c. 1945")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Skylight and fences, Midtown, New York]' c. 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/skylight-and-fences-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Skylight and fences, Midtown, New York]' c. 1945")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Wrought iron fence, New York]' c. 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/wrought-iron-fence-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Wrought iron fence, New York]' c. 1945")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Church door, Bowery, New York]' c. 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/church-door-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Church door, Bowery, New York]' c. 1945")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Pillars and tree, New York]' 1944](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/pillars-and-tree-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[Pillars and tree, New York]' 1944")
![Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[St. Francis Grocery & Fruit, New York]' c. 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/st-francis-grocery-and-fruit-web.jpg "Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) '[St. Francis Grocery & Fruit, New York]' c. 1945")
![Edmund Collein (German, 1906-1992) '[Four Women Looking Through Window]' about 1928 from the exhibition 'At the Window: The Photographer's View' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, October 2013 - January 2014](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/edmund-collein-four-women-looking-through-window-web.jpg "Edmund Collein (German, 1906-1992) '[Four Women Looking Through Window]' about 1928 from the exhibition 'At the Window: The Photographer's View' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, October 2013 - January 2014")
![William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) '[The Milliner's Window]' before January 1844](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/william_henry_fox_talbot_the_milliners_window-web.jpg "William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) '[The Milliner's Window]' before January 1844")
![Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) '[From My Window at the Shelton, North]' 1931](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/alfred-stieglitz-from-my-window-at-the-shelton-north-web.jpg "Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) '[From My Window at the Shelton, North]' 1931")
![Unidentified artist. '[Bird in Basin with Thread Spool and Patterned Cloth]' c. 1855 from the exhibition 'A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum' at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, June 2013 - January 2014](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bird-in-basin-web.jpg "Unidentified artist. '[Bird in Basin with Thread Spool and Patterned Cloth]' c. 1855 from the exhibition 'A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum' at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, June 2013 - January 2014")
![Unidentified artist. '[Gold Nugget]' c. 1860s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/gold-nugget-web.jpg "Unidentified artist. '[Gold Nugget]' c. 1860s")
![Unidentified artist. '[Two Workmen Polishing a Stove]' c. 1865](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/two-workmen-polishing-a-stove-web.jpg "Unidentified artist. '[Two Workmen Polishing a Stove]' c. 1865")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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