Curators: Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography; Will Michels, collections photographer and exhibition co-curator; Natalie Zelt, curatorial assistant
Salvor Hardin in Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series
Part three of the biggest posting on one exhibition that I have ever undertaken on Art Blart!
As befits the gravity of the subject matter this posting is so humongous that I have had to split it into 4 separate postings. This is how to research and stage a contemporary photography exhibition that fully explores its theme. The curators reviewed more than one million photographs in 17 countries, locating pictures in archives, military libraries, museums, private collections, historical societies and news agencies; in the personal files of photographers and service personnel; and at two annual photojournalism festivals producing an exhibition that features 26 sections (an inspired and thoughtful selection) that includes nearly 500 objects that illuminate all aspects of WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY.
I have spent hours researching and finding photographs on the Internet to support the posting. It has been a great learning experience and my admiration for photographers of all types has increased. I have discovered the photographs and stories of new image makers that I did not know and some enlightenment along the way. I despise war, I detest the state and the military that propagate it and I surely hate the power, the money and the ethics of big business that support such a disciplinarian structure for their own ends. I hope you meditate on the images in this monster posting, an exhibition on a subject matter that should be consigned to the history books of human evolution.
**Please be aware that there are graphic photographs in all of these postings.**Part 1, Part 2, Part 4
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Civilians
21. Civilians spans World War II through 2008. The subsection “Dead and Wounded” includes Grief, Kerch, Crimea, by Dmitri Baltermants, of civilians in 1942 searching the bodies of Russian Jewish family members who had been executed by Germans soldiers as they retreated. A 2003 photograph, taken by Ahmed Jadallah for the news agency Reuters while he lay wounded from shrapnel, shows bodies in the street in the largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. “Daily Life” shows a Congolese woman breastfeeding as a tank rolls by, in a 2008 image by Walter Astrada; Londoners sleeping in an underground train station in 1940, by Bill Brandt; a woman eating bread in Amsterdam during the Hongerwinter famine of 1944, by Cas Oorthuys; a 1940/1941 meeting in New York of members of the Bund, an American Nazi party, by Otto Hagel; a monk burning himself in Saigon in 1963, in protest against alleged religious persecution by the South Vietnamese government, by Malcolm Browne; and a man uncovering an anti-personnel land mine in Angola in 2004, by Sean Sutton. Pictures of civilian “Grief” are common, and the images here include a woman in Tehran inspecting photographs of the missing, by Gilles Peress; a man at an airport, grieving alone and holding a folded American flag, by Harry Benson; a father digging a grave for his daughter in a soccer field in Somalia, by Howard Castleberry; and a woman mourning in Afghanistan in 1996, at the grave of her brother who was killed by a Taliban rocket, by James Nachtwey. (46 images)
Otto Hagel (American born Germany, 1909-1973) German-Americans at a meeting in New Jersey of the Deutsche Bund 1940-1941 Silver gelatin print
Dmitri Baltermants (Russian born Poland, 1912-1990) Grief, Kerch, Crimea Spring 1942 Silver gelatin print
“War, is, above all, grief. I photographed non-stop for years and I know that in all that time I produced only five or six real photographs. War is not for photography. If, heaven forbid, I had to photograph war again, I would do it quite differently. I agonise now at the thought of all the things that I did not photograph.”
Dmitri Baltermants quoted in “The Russian War, 1941-1945” (J. Cape, London, 1978)
Cas Oorthuys (Dutch, 1908-1975) Portrait of starving woman in the hunger winter, Amsterdam 1944-1945 Silver gelatin print
Harry Benson (Scottish, b. 1929) Grieving man, holding flag 1971 Gelatin silver print
Children
22. Children have been consistently photographed during wartime as both victims and soldiers. Images in this section include Sir Cecil Beaton’s Three-year-old Eileen Dunne in Hospital for Sick Children, England (1940); children viewing the bodies of other children who were hanged as collaborators in Russia in the 1940s, by Mark Redkin; Philip Jones Griffiths’ image of a young boy, Called “Little Tiger” for killing two “Vietcong women cadre” – his mother and teacher, it was rumored (1968); children playing “execution” in Italy, by Enzo Sellerio; two orphaned boys smoking cigarettes in post-World War II Japan, by Hayashi Tadahiko; a father home on leave reading the newspaper with his son, who wears his dad’s helmet, by Andrea Bruce; and the 2005 photograph, by Chris Hondros, of a blood-splattered Iraqi girl whose family was mistakenly ambushed by U.S. troops. (13 images)
Andrea Bruce (American, b. 1973) Untitled [A father home on leave reading the newspaper with his son, who wears his dad’s helmet] 2006 From the series When the War Comes Home Gelatin silver print
Portraits
23. Portraits are the most common type of photograph made during conflicts. Dispersed throughout the exhibition, lining the main walkway through the galleries, are the faces of leaders, the enlisted, heroes and war criminals, as well as group portraits. One of the earliest prints in the exhibition is a daguerreotype from the Mexican-American War of a high-ranking officer. Matthew Brady, one of the most famous photographers of the 19th century, was renowned for coverage of the Civil War; his Major‑General Joseph Hooker, c. 1863, is on view. Among the most recent is a self-portrait by American Cpl. Reynaldo Leal USMC. Leal – who was born and grew up in Edinburg, Texas, and now lives in El Paso – served in Iraq conducting combat patrols through the villages along the Euphrates. (40 images)
Matthew B. Brady (American, 1823-1896) Colonel William Gates, believed to have been taken upon his return from the Mexican War c. 1848 Half plate daguerreotype, gold toned Library of Congress
Mathew B. Brady (American, 1823-1896) Major-General Joseph Hooker c. 1863 Salted paper print, hand coloured The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase with funds provided by the S. I. Morris Photography Endowment
24. War’s End is identifiable at the moment a photograph is taken. The subsection “Victory/Defeat” is the visual manifest of the outcome of war, from the Japanese signing peace documents on board the USS Missouri, by Carl Mydans; to German generals discussing terms of surrender in the woods just four days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in 1945, by E. G. Malindine; and the raising of the Hammer and Sickle over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945, by Evgeny Khaldey. Also included is Simon Norfolk’s Victory arch built by the Northern Alliance at the entrance to a local commander’s headquarters in Bamiyan. The empty niche housed the smaller of the two Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, from the series Afghanistan: Chronotopia.“Retribution” contains a 1945 image, by Lee Miller, of a concentration-camp guard who was beaten by prisoners after their liberation; and a photograph by Robert Capa of a Frenchwoman who had been impregnated by a German soldier, as she walks through a jeering crowd with her head shaved in punishment and carrying her baby. The photographs in “Homecoming” establish an emotive connection: a family reunion on the tarmac at an Air Force base in California in 1973, by Sal Veder; a mother and son embracing at the Ben-Gurion Airport in Israel in 1976, by Micha Bar-Am; and a man who has returned from duty in Bosnia in 1995 to discover that his home and everyone in it is gone, by Ron Haviv. (23 images)
Robert Capa (Hungarian-American, 1913-1954) Collaborator woman who had a German soldier’s child, Chartres, 18 August 1944 1944 Gelatin silver print 33 x 49cm
Evgeny Khaldey (Russian, 1917-1997) The Flag of Victory 1945 Gelatin silver print
E. G. Malindine (British, 1906-1970) No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Malindine E G (Capt), Morris (Sgt) German Military Forces Seek Surrender Terms, May 1945 1945 Gelatin silver print Public domain
Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery with the German delegates outside his headquarters at 21st Army Group
Carl Mydans (American, 1907-2004) Japanese signing peace documents on board the ‘USS Missouri’ 1945 Gelatin silver print
Simon Norfolk (British born Nigeria, b. 1963) Victory arch built by the Northern Alliance at the entrance to alocal commander’s headquarters in Bamiyan. The empty niche housed the smaller of the two Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 2001 From the series Afghanistan: Chronotopia
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1001 Bissonnet Street Houston, TX 77005
Curator: Celina Lunsford, an independent curator and the Artistic Director for the Fotografie Forum in Frankfurt
Imogen Cunningham exhibition poster
This is the first posting on one of my favourite photographers of all time: Imogen Cunningham. The sensuality of this artist, from the early Pictorialist studies (including her ground breaking depiction of the male nude, her husband artist Roi Partridge) to the later Modernist nudes, portraits, industrial landscapes and botanical photographs is of the highest order. Cunningham reminds me of a photographic version of Georgia O’Keeffe without the undoubted darkness that inhabits some of O’Keeffe’s work.
The portrait of Frida Kahlo Rivera (1931, below) is a magnificent study of a proud woman with delicate use of natural light framing the face and gently clasped hands. Note the textures within the photograph – the dress, the shawl, the wicker chair and the wall – and also notice the reflective light falling behind the sitter upper left to balance the frontal light coming from bottom right. Masterful. Cunningham’s famous Two Callas (1929, below) is an glorious study of form, light and texture, a sensual symphony for the eyes, the background a kind of mutable black that allows the viewer’s gaze to be immersed in the subject. The viewer’s voyeuristic gaze is further engaged by the voluptuous suggestiveness of the copious hair and out of focus breast of Phoenix Recumbent (1968, below) where, “the object of the gaze is not aware of the current viewer (though they may originally have been aware of being filmed, photographed, painted etc. and may sometimes have been aware that strangers could subsequently gaze at their image).” (Daniel Chandler “Notes on ‘The Gaze'” on the Aberystwyth University website [Online] Cited 12/01/2013 no longer available online)
Finally, the photograph of Imogen Cunningham and Twinka Thiebaud by Judy Dater (1974, below) seems to me to capture the spirit of the human being Imogen Cunningham with indelible grace. Youth, beauty, age, wisdom. A constantly inquisitive mind, wanting to know, wanting to see things more clearly, taking photographs right up until her final years. There she is with her twin-lens Rollei dressed as if from another century, the quizzical nature of her left hand and the look that passes between Imogen and Twinka, the space between them seeming to shimmer with possibility. That space seems to wash away the years of Imogen’s life to when she was young, lying naked near some trees (Self-Portrait 1906, below). It is a truly memorable image. In the sensitivity of this image, Dater embodies everything that I admire in Cunningham’s work: light, texture, sensitivity to subject, an understanding of beauty and an irrepressible, joyous sensuality.
A fitting tribute to one of the world’s great photographers.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fundación Mapfre, Madrid for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a a larger version of the image.
Co-curators: Jan Howard, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, and Deborah Bright, photography professor and chair of the Fine Art Department at Pratt Institute
Unknown artist (American) Providence Panorama from Grosvenor or Bannigan Building c. 1900 Six cyanotype prints RISD Museum Mary B. Jackson Fund
I hope you enjoy this HUGE posting. There are some rare photographs and little known artists. I have kept the photographs in the sections of the exhibition as explained by the accompanying wall text. Three essays from the catalogue investigating history, landscape and photography can be found as pdfs below, essential reading for anyone interested in the subject (especially the first two essays):
Many thankx to the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design for allowing me to publish the text and most of the photographs in the posting (the others I researched myself). Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“An understanding of landscape theory therefore suggests that not every photograph of land is a landscape, and not every landscape necessarily features the land. The standard definition points to places – places in the world, or places seen in pictures – which take on the quality of a thing. But “landscape” is probably better understood as that set of expectations and beliefs – about both the environment and the conventions of its representation – that we project upon the world. These conventions and expectations are subject to historical change and are culturally specific…”
Douglas Nickel. ‘Photography, Perception, and the Landscape’ 2012 in ‘America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now’ catalogue, p. 26
“Once continental expansion had reached its limits, however, and no existential threats to white settlement remained, American landscape images began to reflect a new criticality – at turns romantic and realistic – that persists to this day. Indeed, for the last century, landscape photography has consistently mirrored Americans’ anxieties about nature, or rather its imminent loss, whether due to industrialisation, pollution, population growth, real estate profiteering, or bioengineering. Alternately portraying nature as a balm for the alienated modern soul or a dystopian fait accompli, modern and postmodern photographic landscapes mark a progressively disquieting understanding of humanity’s relationship to the natural universe.”
Deborah Bright. Photographing Nature, Seeing Ourselves 2012 in America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now catalogue, p. 32
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) Gardiners River Hot Springs, Diana’s Baths 1871 From U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories Albumen print RISD Museum Jesse Metcalf Fund
In this photograph William Henry Jackson captures the painter Thomas Moran, who was also part of the 1871 survey team. Shot from slightly below and at a distance, the photograph emphasises the textures of the mineral deposits in the foreground, while Moran’s figure seems dwarfed by the rock formations around him. Jackson often included figures in his photographs to impart a sense of scale. This inclusion of a single figure also heightens the impression that the photograph has captured a moment of discovery, the first contact between intrepid explorers and an uncharted land.
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Cape Horn, Columbia River 1867 Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Cape Horn, Columbia River exemplifies not only the fine detail characteristic of Carleton Watkins’s images, but also his close attention to pictorial structure. Unlike many of the photographers represented in this gallery, Watkins worked independently of industrial concerns or government sponsorship. To make images that would appeal to an audience more familiar with traditional art forms, Watkins borrowed long-established conventions of landscape paintings, in particular carefully modulated lighting effects and harmonious compositions. Like the painters he emulated, Watkins depicts the West as a romantic wilderness and place of spiritual refuge.
William H. Bell (American, 1830-1910) Perched Rock, Rocker Creek, Arizona 1872 From the album Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian Albumen print Jesse Metcalf Fund. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Surveying the Field
At the end of the American Civil War photographers turned their lenses toward both the wild territories of the West and scenic tourist destinations in the newly established national parks. Although these images are now commonly exhibited in art museums, they were not originally considered art objects, nor were the photographers who made them considered artists. Instead, many of the photographers represented here were hired to document the projects of governmental agencies and the progress of federal survey expeditions to the western territories. Others produced images for the growing tourist market or recorded the construction of tracks through the country’s interior for railroad companies. The majority of these images were published in governmental reports and presentation albums.
The albumen prints produced in America through the 1880s were made from glass-plate negatives created by the laborious process of coating glass plates the size of the prints with a thick photosensitive solution called collodion. These plates had to be prepared on-site, exposed, and developed before the collodion dried, so photographers traveled with portable darkrooms. The prints were made later in a studio by placing paper coated with albumen (solution suspended in egg whites) under a glass-plate negative and exposing the paper to sunlight. By contact printing on this glossy surface, the image was recorded in minute detail.
Timothy O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Water Rhyolites, Near Logan Springs, Nevada 1871 From the album Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian Albumen print RISD Museum Jesse Metcalf Fund
Timothy O’Sullivan and William H. Bell, official photographers on survey expeditions through Nevada and Arizona from 1871 to 1873, disavowed the traditional conventions of landscape painting in favour of unadorned observation. Spare and anti-picturesque, O’Sullivan’s radical views – depicting the western territories as foreign-looking, even hostile – accorded perfectly with the interests of those invested in seeing these empty territories studied, secured, and settled. One scholar has postulated that O’Sullivan’s photographs were intentionally crafted to look like products of technology – optically precise, printed on glossy albumen papers – a look that stood for industrial progress within a milieu that valued the machine-made over the handmade. In Perched Rock, Rocker Creek, Arizona and Rock Carved by Drifting Sand, Below Fortification Rock, Arizona, the two photographers treat unusual rock formations like specimens, isolating them from the surrounding landscape to be examined and measured.
Luminous Realms
Kodak’s introduction of the handheld camera in 1888 made photography an affordable and popular leisure-time amusement, creating a generation of amateur photographers seemingly overnight. At the same time, photographers with artistic ambitions feared that the mechanical, point-and-shoot approach of the new “button pressers” would jeopardise the medium’s elevation to the status of high art. In response, this group of artists – who called themselves Pictorialists – emphasised the photographer’s expertise and embraced labor-intensive processes to create expressive and impressionistic images. Many favoured platinum prints because of their wide range of tones, soft contrast, and matte surface – qualities of more traditional artistic media such as drawings and etchings. The Pictorialists’ landscape photographs are especially evocative. Rather than capturing a particular place and time, they transformed the landscape into a backdrop for human emotions and actions through visual effects and the inclusion of figures.
Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925) Morning 1905 From Camera Work, No. 23, July 1908 Photogravure RISD Museum Walter H. Kimball Fund
Laura Gilpin (American, 1891-1979) Footprints in the Sand 1931 Platinum print RISD Museum Museum purchase with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts
Laura Gilpin portrays the Colorado sand dunes in the soft-focus style of the Pictorialists, but the reductive forms of her composition are strikingly modern. The sinuous lines of the wind-sculpted dunes are echoed in the subtle patterning of the figure’s footprints. His presence not only provides a sense of scale, but suggests that the human impact on the landscape can be small, fleeting, and beautiful.
Abstracting Nature
In the 1920s, photographers began to question whether Pictorialism was the style best suited to win acceptance for photography as a fine art. On the east coast, Alfred Stieglitz, who had formerly championed Pictorialism, became its most vocal critic. In northern California, a group of photographers who would come to call themselves Group f/64 developed a new style. Opposing the soft focus, painterly approach, the f/64 photographers embraced a hard-edged, sharp-focus machine aesthetic. Optical reality was transformed into surface pattern, rhythm, tone, and line in prints precisely detailed on glossy, gelatin silver papers. Indeed, f/64 refers to the smallest aperture on their large-format cameras, which resulted in sharp focus from foreground to background.
This period revitalised landscape photography, with many photographers looking to views of nature as a place to escape from the problems of urban life. These photographers captured instants of intensified vision that only the camera offered, creating the photograph mentally before it was realised physically. Whether majestic views of dramatic natural features or abstracted details of quiet settings, these images expressed metaphysical, ethical, or personal reflections on humankind’s relationship to nature.
This photograph depicts the iconic tourist destination of Yosemite as sublime and untouched. By removing any evidence of human impact, Ansel Adams allows us to escape (at least temporarily) from the intrusions of culture. High contrast adds visual drama to an already majestic view, capturing the textures of the rock wall and the light filtering through the blowing snow. Throughout his life, Adams embraced the notion that nature could provide the harried, urbanised citizen of the modern age with a place of spiritual refuge. A long-time member of the Sierra Club, he was a devoted and vocal advocate for wilderness conservation and his photographs were crucial to the conservation effort.
Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985) Father and Sons Walking in the Face of a Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma 1936 Gelatin silver print RISD Museum Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gilman Angier
In 1936 Arthur Rothstein traveled to the Oklahoma panhandle, the area of the country most affected by drought, wind, and erosion. In his image (above) he captured one of the few families in the area that had not yet abandoned their farm. His portrayal of the farmer and his sons fighting to make their way home through the elements can be read as a larger statement about the struggle between man and nature. Rothstein’s dark, low contrast print further conveys the oppressive atmosphere of the dust storm.
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Martha’s Vineyard, 114B 1954 Gift of Mr. Robert B. Menschel. Courtesy Aaron Siskind Foundation Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
In Martha’s Vineyard 114B, Aaron Siskind focuses on two small rocks nestled in a stone wall. As Siskind explained, he “began to feel the importance of how these rocks hovered over each other, touched each other, pushed against each other.” He likened this contiguity to family relationships, especially that between mother and child. He believed that the pair of rocks pictured in the photograph would – consciously or not – evoke emotions in the viewer, and that these emotions were both deep-seated and universal. In his depiction of the landscape, he found metaphors for what he called “human drama.”
Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999) Arizona Landscape 1943 Gelatin silver print Promised gift from the collection of Marc Harrison
Frederick Sommer’s photographs of the Arizona desert, made between about 1939 and 1945, omit the horizon line to create an overall field of pattern where scale and orientation are confounded. The vast space of the desert is pulled to the surface of the image, making the work less a landscape and more an independent construction. Sommer intently considered much of his work before executing it. He might study an area of the desert for days before deciding how to take the picture and then spend weeks in the darkroom perfecting the print.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) View of Easton, Pennsylvania 1936 From the portfolio American Photographs II Gelatin silver print RISD Museum Gift of James Dow
By compressing distance and flattening perspective, Walker Evans collapses the two cityscapes of Easton, Pennsylvania, and Phillipsburg, New Jersey, into one plane. Evans’s aesthetically neutral style seems to depict the world without the intervention of the photographer’s point of view. At the same time, he forces the details of every building and smokestack to the surface of the image, making the plight of the cities and their inhabitants – the Depression had crippled the shipping and manufacturing industries that were the lifeblood of both towns – impossible to ignore.
Jack Warren Welpott (American, 1923-2007) White Sands 1977 Gelatin silver print RISD Museum Gift of Aaron Siskind
Joe Deal (American, 1947-2010) (RISD Provost 1999–2005, Faculty 2005-2009) Indio, California 1978 From The Fault Zone 1981 Portfolio of 19 gold-toned gelatin silver prints RISD Museum Museum Purchase: Georgianna Sayles Aldrich Fund and Gift of James D. and Diane D. Burke
Joe Deal (American, 1947-2010) (RISD Provost 1999–2005, Faculty 2005-2009) Santa Barbara, California 1978 From The Fault Zone 1981 Portfolio of 19 gold-toned gelatin silver prints RISD Museum Museum Purchase: Georgianna Sayles Aldrich Fund and Gift of James D. and Diane D. Burke
Inspired by conceptual art, Joe Deal generally developed his work in series, choosing a particular location and adhering to a strict visual formula. As in The Fault Zone, his landscapes were typically square in format, viewed from above, lacking a horizon, and empty of people. Edges and divisions in nature and the landscape fascinated him, and the fault lines in California, though invisible on the surface, in many ways define that landscape. Using maps from the Los Angeles County engineering office that indicated where the fault lines were apt to be, Deal looked for sites that would metaphorically suggest volatility. The first image in the series is the only one that was actually taken on the San Andreas Fault; all others symbolically represent the fault lines with torn or disrupted terrain.
Topographic Developments
By the time the landmark exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape opened in 1975, the accelerating degradation of the environment had become an inescapable reality. Inverting the Ansel Adams principle of exclusion, the exhibit voiced the belief that the landscape could no longer be portrayed as a refuge from the ills of industrial life: any consideration of the modern environment had to include both wilderness areas and the vacant lot next door.
The New Topographics photographers captured recently constructed tract homes, industrial parks, and highway culture with medium and large format cameras. As aesthetically neutral as real estate snapshots, the photographs showed the facts without offering their opinions about the rapid development they recorded. Seemingly stripped of expressivity, their photographs have the appearance of objective or “topographic” renderings rather than subjective impressions. In emphasising the landscape of the American West and experimenting with anti-Romantic landscape imagery, these photographers looked back to the works of 19th-century survey photographers and to Walker Evans’s documentary style.
In Nevada, Lewis Baltz alternates unbuilt views with home construction, trailer parks, and roads in a documentation of a rapidly changing landscape in the desert valleys surrounding Reno, an area he once described as “landscape-as-real-estate.” Baltz, like Joe Deal and Harold Jones, whose works are on view in this gallery, developed projects as portfolios, believing that a single photograph cannot capture a complete portrait of a place. In Baltz’s series, a multifaceted, occasionally contradictory image of Nevada emerges through the accumulation of photographs.
Barrow scratched through his landscape negatives, calling attention to the materiality of the medium itself and the fact that regardless of how much information is given, reality remains an accumulation of belief, knowledge, and one’s own experience.
Harold Jones moved to Tucson sight unseen in 1974. The Tucson Portfolio documents his first years living in, exploring, and adapting to this unfamiliar landscape. In an accompanying text he relates his initial impressions of the Southwest, a landscape he had only seen in Westerns and “in the background of Roadrunner cartoons.” It was, he writes, “white bright and oven hot. Driving through the spiney leafless plants of the desert gave me the impression of being on an ocean floor – except someone had removed the water. A primordial landscape in a sea of light. Shocking and enchanting, at the same time.”
Frank Gohlke (American, b. 1942) Near Crowley, Texas 1978 Gelatin silver print RISD Museum Gift from the Collection of Joe Deal and Betsy Ruppa
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Atlantic City, New Jersey 1971 Gelatin silver print RISD Museum Museum purchase with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) Utah 1964 From the portfolio Garry Winogrand, 1978 Gelatin silver print Gelatin silver prints RISD Museum Gift of Frederick J. Myerson
In the 1960s nature was apt to be viewed from a car window or in a rear-view mirror rather than from a hilltop. The large-format magisterial views of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were replaced by a 35mm “grab-shot” style that captured the flux and contradictions of modern life with a fresh immediacy. Photographers were among the restless peripatetics crisscrossing the continent on new interstates and side roads, retrieving evidence of the “Americas” they found. The grainy, gritty aesthetic matched the sensations and energy of this environment.
America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now accompanies a major exhibition of that title tracing a history of photographs of the American landscape primarily through the collection of the RISD Museum. The show takes a broad look at the ever-evolving definition of American landscape photography – from seemingly pristine views of nature captured with 19th-century view cameras to images of the decaying contemporary urban streets composed from Google Street View. The RISD Museum’s collection of American landscape photography begins at the end of the Civil War in 1865, when photographers traveled west with government survey teams and railroad companies to record the country’s extraordinary natural features and resources. Ever since, the landscape has remained a compelling subject for photographers who have revealed through their images our nation’s ambition and failings, beauty and degradation, politics and personal stories.
The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design announces its major fall exhibition, America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, a broad panorama of our country’s topographies and correlating narratives that reveals a nation’s ambitions and failings, beauty and loss, politics and personal stories through about 150 photographs spanning nearly 150 years. “The landscape has inspired and challenged artists since the earliest days of our nation,” says Museum Director John W. Smith. “The remarkable works in this exhibition not only capture photography’s evolving relationship with the landscape but also trace the larger narrative of America itself.”
From the earliest images in the show, it is clear how purpose guided style. Carlton Watkins’ 1860s painterly and atmospheric views of the sublime landscape portray the wilderness as a place of spiritual renewal and a refuge from urban problems. In contrast, Timothy O’Sullivan, employed for the government’s geological surveys in the 1870s, made purposefully spare and anti-picturesque images that seemingly provide proof of empty territories needing to be studied, secured, and settled.
In her essay for America in View‘s accompanying catalogue, photographer Deborah Bright, chair of the Fine Art Department at Pratt Institute, suggests that some of the historical shifts in environmental consciousness seen in the photographs “illuminate how the works also reflect changing conceptions of landscapes as bearers of cultural meaning.” Ansel Adams, whose mid-20th-century views of nature’s majesty and vastness represent many people’s ideals of American landscape photography, omitted human impact on the land. Widely used by the Sierra Club, his stunning images of untouched wilderness encouraged conservation in the face of an increasingly industrial society.
By the 1970s, artists including the late RISD provost and photography professor Joe Deal saw that the environment entailed both wilderness and the vacant lot next door. Their “New Topographics” imagery depicts recently constructed tract homes, industrial parks, and highway culture – inverting Adams’ exclusion. “‘Landscape’ is probably better understood as that set of expectations and beliefs… we project upon the world,” explains Brown University art historian Douglas Nickel, in the catalogue. “Not every photograph of land is a landscape, and not every landscape necessarily features the land.”
The past 20 years reveal a return to romantic views of the landscape, even in its degraded state, often including figures to create narratives. Justine Kurland’s landscape under an overpass shows a stunning place of fantasy and escape. RISD alumnus Justin Kimball explores fantasies of finding wilderness in public parks – where instead we find others seeking the same.
Press release from the RISD website
Barbara Bosworth (American, b. 1953) Niagara Falls 1986 Gelatin silver print Private collection
Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) (RISD MFA 1967) Old Hanford City Sites and the Columbia River, Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington 1986 Toned gelatin silver prints Promised gift of Dr. and Mrs. William G. Tsiaras
Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) (RISD MFA 1967) Alluvial Fan, Natural Drainage near Yuma Proving Ground and the California Arizona Border 1988 Toned gelatin silver prints Promised gift of Dr. and Mrs. William G. Tsiaras
Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) (RISD MFA 1967) Aeration Pond, Toxic Water Treatment Facility, Pine Bluff, Arkansas 1989 Toned gelatin silver print RISD Museum Mary B. Jackson Fund
Emmet Gowin’s carefully constructed prints of strip mining sites, nuclear testing fields, large-scale agriculture, and other scars in the natural landscape seductively draw us in to examine what these lushly patterned and toned images represent. Predating Google Earth, these photographs are shot from the air and provide information about the environment that questions our role as stewards of the planet. A master darkroom printer, Gowin makes images come alive through hand-toning. Each print is transformed from grayscale into hues ranging from warm highlights to cool shadows, emphasising the illusion of three-dimensionality.
Terry Evans (American, b. 1944) Terraced Plowing with a Grass Waterway 1991 From the series Inhabited Prairie Gelatin silver print RISD Museum Gift of Jan Howard and Dennis Teepe in honour of Joe Deal
Neither the striking abstract design of the terraced field nor the effectiveness of this type of farming are what interests Terry Evans. She is drawn to the specific place and how the marks on the land, as she has said, “contain contradictions and mysteries that raise questions about how we live on the prairie. All of these places are beautiful to me, perhaps because all land, like the human body, is beautiful.”
Justine Kurland (American, b. 1969) Smoke Bombs 2000 From the series Runaway Girls Colour chromogenic print RISD Museum Mary B. Jackson Fund
The neglected space under a New Jersey highway overpass was an ideal spot for three girls to act out Justine Kurland’s fictive story about fugitive teenagers. The figurative grouping recalls pastoral scenes in historical paintings so that the danger of the girls’ pursuit in this dicey no-man’s land is temporarily suspended in the hazy romantic fantasy of escape. The strong light streaming across the scene and the overall beauty of the composition suggests a desire to pursue the sublime even in the most degraded landscapes.
Justin Kimball (American, b. 1961) Deep Hole, New Hampshire 2002 From the series Where We Find Ourselves Gift of the artist in honour of Joe Deal Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Deep Hole, New Hampshire captures light filtering through the trees as a dozen young men and women distribute themselves among rocky outcroppings, poised for adventure in the water below. The composition recalls the quiet drama of Thomas Eakins’s 19th-century painting of nude swimmers. This reference drew Kimball to the picture as it played out in front of him, along with the palpable sense of elation in the youths’ encounter with the landscape, no matter the deteriorating state of the site due to its heavy use. Kimball’s series Where We Find Ourselves explores the fantasy of finding wilderness in state and national parks, where we only find other people looking for it, too.
Current representations of the American landscape reveal a continually fraught relationship with the environment. Recent landscape photography reflects its history while constructing new notions of what such an image can be. Some artists continue to see the landscape as a place of refuge or spirituality. Others focus on its more disturbing psychological impact, even haunted with battle scars. Some pick up from the 1970s New Topographics approach with a more pointed investigation of environmentalism, documenting and questioning the impact of industry and development on the natural world. Still others have found that with the introduction of the figure the landscape can act as a stage, albeit one charged with political and social resonance.
Notable shifts have also been driven by new processes and techniques. The photographs of the last several decades are predominantly in colour and are much larger than their precedents. While many artists working today use digital technology, their motive is rarely to alter or fabricate imagery but instead to have easier and better control over how these larger images are presented. Surprisingly, many of today’s photographers are using large format cameras very similar to those of the 19th century to create negatives or digital files capable of being enlarged to the scale of contemporary work.
Steven B. Smith (American, b. 1963) (RISD Faculty 1996-present) Coolers, Ivins, Utah 2007 From the series Irrational Exuberance Colour inkjet print RISD Museum Gift of Heather Smith in honour of Joe Deal
Steven Smith’s subject matter follows in the tradition of the 1970s New Topographic artists. What differentiates Smith’s view of a recently suburbanised desert from his predecessors is the humour with which he captures the extravagant building in this arid place. In this image, from the aptly titled series Irrational Exuberance, fluorescent-coloured coolers, like the red rocks, become part of the landscape, even creating their own waterfall.
Joe Deal often found his picture at the border between the built and unbuilt landscape. The driveway makes for a convenient spot to fly a kite, surrounded as it is here with a bit of open space remaining in a new development. In the distance to the right the residential growth that will soon cover this piece of land is visible through the atmospheric smog. In the distance to the left are still untouched hills. The inclusion of people – evidence of a rapidly exploding community near the intersection of the Pomona and Orange freeways – marks a shift in Deal’s photography to embracing the landscape as a site for narrative.
Uta Barth (German, b. 1958) Field #14 1996 Colour chromogenic print RISD Museum Gift of the Buddy Taub Foundation, Jill and Dennis Roach, Directors
Uta Barth radically softens the camera’s focus to remove all signs of historical specificity and to saturate a flat industrial-looking non-place with a dream-like atmosphere. As such she creates a generic landscape as viewed through a heavily fogged window, with an uncanny sense that is deeply familiar.
Henry Wessel (American, b. 1942) Night Walk, Los Angeles, No. 28 1995 From the series Night Walk: LA Gelatin silver print RISD Museum Gift of Mark Pollack
Millee Tibbs (American, b. 1976) (RISD MFA 2007) Self-Portrait in the Fog 2009 From the portfolio Self Portraits Colour inkjet print RISD Museum Gift of the artist in honour of Joe Deal
Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019) U.S. 285, New Mexico 1955 Silver gelatin photograph
Installation views of America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now at the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) 224 Benefit Street, Providence, RI 02903 Phone: 401 454-6500
Exhibition dates: both 21st September, 2012 – 6th January, 2013
Co-curators: Anne Lacoste (then curator at the Musée de l’Elysée), Agnès Sire (director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson), and Sam Stourdzé (then director of the Musée de l’Elysée)
This is a meta-post where I have brought together photographs from the second exhibition Freaks, The Monstrous Parade: Photographs from Enrico Praloran Collection and all the good quality images of Todd Browning’s cult film Freaks (1932) that were available online, since the museum only provided me with three media images (the first three) on a fascinating subject. By reflection, the photographs from Freaks have a strange correlation to the photographs that appear in the Howard Greenberg, Collection.
There is an interesting discussion by Amanda Ann Klein on her blog (see link below) about her students reaction to the film that she taught as part of her Trash Cinema class. She observes that, “Freaks preaches acceptance and… the belief that we are all “God’s children.” And yet, the film was intended to “out horror” Frankenstein through its fantastic display of disabled bodies…” but that her students did not see it as an exploitation film, in fact they approved of the revenge taken by the freaks on Cleopatra and Hercules at the end of the film, even though this seemed to replicate the very imagery Browning denounced earlier in the film. Klein insightfully notes that “it did prove to be an interesting example of how a film’s reception can change dramatically over time.”
The content of a work of art is never fixed by the author as the context and meaning of the work is never fixed by the viewer. As David Smail notes the truth changes according to, among other things, developments in our values and understandings. There can be many truths depending on our line-of-sight and point-of-view but a subjective non-final truth has to be actively struggled for:
“Where objective knowing is passive, subjective knowing is active – rather than giving allegiance to a set of methodological rules which are designed to deliver up truth through some kind of automatic process [in this case the image], the subjective knower takes a personal risk in entering into the meaning of the phenomena to be known … Those who have some time for the validity of subjective experience but intellectual qualms about any kind of ‘truth’ which is not ‘objective’, are apt to solve their problem by appealing to some kind of relativity. For example, it might be felt that we all have our own versions of the truth about which we must tolerantly agree to differ. While in some ways this kind of approach represents an advance on the brute domination of ‘objective truth’, it in fact undercuts and betrays the reality of the world given to our subjectivity. Subjective truth has to be actively struggled for: we need the courage to differ until we can agree. Though the truth is not just a matter of personal perspective, neither is it fixed and certain, objectively ‘out there’ and independent of human knowing. ‘The truth’ changes according to, among other things, developments and alterations in our values and understandings … the ‘non-finality’ of truth is not to be confused with a simple relativity of ‘truths’.”
Smail, David. Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984, pp.152-153.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Greyhound Bus Terminal, 33rd and 34th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Manhattan 1936 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Collection
The Musée de l’Elysée presents different approaches to collecting photography by means of these original exhibitions.
Howard Greenberg, Collection
Howard Greenberg has been a gallery owner for over thirty years and is considered today one of the pillars of the New York photography scene. While his position as a dealer is well established, little was known of his passion for collecting, presently revealed to the public for the first time. The primary reason to explain why it took so long to discover this collection is because building such a collection demands time. Only in time can the maturity of a collection be measured; the time necessary to smooth trends, confirm the rarity of a print, and in the end, validate the pertinence of a vision. In an era of immediacy, when new collectors exhibit unachieved projects or create their own foundation, great original collections are rare. Howard Greenberg’s is certainly one of the few still to be discovered.
The quality of a collection does not rely on the sole accumulation of master pieces but can best be assessed through a dialectical movement: a collection is the collector’s oeuvre, a set of images operating a transformation in the perception not only of the photographs, but also of photography. This renewed perception is two-fold in the Greenberg collection; through the surprising combination of two approaches, the experimental practice of photography that questions the medium as such, bringing it to the limits of abstraction on one hand, and on the other, a documentary practice, carried out through its recording function of the real. This apparently irreconcilable duality takes on a particular signification in the Greenberg collection, an investigation of the possibilities offered by photography, a quest for photography itself, questioning what it is.
Howard Greenberg and his collection have largely contributed to the writing of a chapter of history. While contributing to the recognition of long neglected figures of the New York post-war photography scene, filling a gap, as gallery owner, Howard Greenberg, the collector, ensured the preservation of a coherent body by building over that period a unique collection of major photographs.
This collection of over 500 photographs was patiently built over the last thirty years and stands out for the high quality of its prints. A set of some 120 works are exhibited for the first time at the Musée de l’Elysée, revealing different aspects of Howard Greenberg’s interests, from the modernist aesthetics of the 20s and 30s, with works by Edward Steichen, Edward Weston or the Czech School, to contemporary photographers such as Minor White, Harry Callahan and Robert Frank. Humanist photography is particularly well represented, including among others, Lewis Hine and Henri Cartier-Bresson. An important section is dedicated to the Farm Security Administration’s photographers, such as Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, witnesses to the Great Depression years of the 30s. Above all, the collection demonstrates the great influence of New York in the history of 20th century photography with the images of Berenice Abbott, Weegee, Leon Levinstein or Lee Friedlander conveying its architecture and urban lifestyle. Commending its work and prominent position, and wishing to make his private collection available to a large audience, Howard Greenberg selected the Musée de l’Elysée to host his collection.
The Musée de l’Elysée and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson jointly produce this exhibition which, after Lausanne, will subsequently be presented in Paris.
Press release from the Musée de l’Elysée website
Freaks, The Monstrous Parade: Photographs from Enrico Praloran Collection
American director Tod Browning (1880-1962) has a particular attraction for the uncanny. Freaks, his cult movie shot in 1932, is inspired by a short story written by Clarence Aaron “Tod” Robbins. Set in a circus, the performers are disabled actors. The movie caused a scandal when it was released and Freaks was soon censored, reedited, shortened, sometimes removed from theatres, and in cases banned in some countries. Not until the 60s, when it was presented at the Cannes Festival, was the movie acclaimed to the point of becoming a reference for artists such as Diane Arbus or David Lynch.
The Musée de l’Elysée presents a selection of some fifty vintage black and white silver prints, gathered by Enrico Praloran, a collector based in Zurich. This unique set is the opportunity for an encounter with the movie’s strange protagonists, Johny Eck, the Half Boy, Daisy and Violet Hilton, the Siamese sisters, Martha Morris, the “Armless Marvel”, or the Bearded Lady and the Human Skeleton. They all are artists for real, coming from the Barnum Circus.
The plot is transcribed in images through stills from the movie’s major scenes, completed by set or shooting photographs, taking us behind the scenes, including on the footsteps of Tod Browning himself.
Press release from the Musée de l’Elysée website
Tod Browning (director) Freaks (Cleopatra followed by the freaks) 1932 Still photograph 1932 Courtesy of Praloran Collection, Zurich
Tod Browning (director) Freaks (Johnny Eck) 1932 Still photograph Courtesy of Praloran Collection, Zurich
Tod Browning (director) Freaks 1932 Still photograph Courtesy of Praloran Collection, Zurich
Freaks centres on an enchanting performer, Cleopatra, who entices a “midget,” named Hans, into falling in love with her. They were called midgets then, now they are referred to as little people. The “midget” is in fact engaged to another woman who is incidentally, also a “midget,” named Freida. Cleopatra was at first only trying to fool around with Hans and get money from him occasionally. She soon realised that Hans had inherited quite a large amount of money. She devises a plan to marry Hans and later poison him to inherit the money. Arguably, the most famous scene in Freaks is Hans and Cleo’s wedding reception. The “freaks” reluctantly decide to accept her despite her “normality” and chant the notoriously disturbing yet hilarious quote, “We accept you, one of us! Gooble Gobble!” Afterwards, Hans then becomes very ill by Cleo’s hand. He soon figures out her plan and the freaks become offended. They knew she could not be one of them. The film ends with a horrific and disturbing chase in the rain where the “freaks” follow her slowly and Cleo screams for her life. Her and her lover, the “muscle man,” are caught and not killed, but worse. They become freaks themselves. They are mutilated, castrated, and deformed until they are the subject of a freak show. They became one of the “freaks” they hated so much…
One of the most gut-wrenching things about this films is the fact that every “freak” in the film was a real person with the same deformity their characters had. This gives the story a profound sense of reality, making the betrayal of Hans by Cleo all the more tragic. The film was extremely controversial when released and hated by audiences. The scenes where Cleo and the muscle man were mutilated had to be cut from the film in order to be shown in theatres. That footage has since been lost. In a viewing of the film, a sudden jump takes place after the freaks catch Cleo. The audience feels cheated. We have waited so long to see Cleo get her punishment. Part of that dissatisfaction adds to the mystique of this bizarre trip. The film was forgotten about until the mid 1970s where it was rediscovered as a counterculture cult film. A counterculture film runs counter to the the norm of society. Freaks is a great example of fame by taboos and controversy. It explores themes of humanity that are still relatively unexplored today.
Text from the Cult Films and Cultural Significance website December 6, 2011 [Online] Cited 14/09/2020. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Freaks is a tale of love and vengeance in a traveling circus…
In her essay “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” Elizabeth Grosz attempts to unpack our fascination with freak shows. She concludes that the individuals most frequently showcased in these spectacles, including Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, “pinheads” (microcephalics), midgets, and bearded ladies “imperil the very definitions we rely on to classify humans, identities and sexes – our most fundamental categories of self-definition and boundaries dividing self from otherness” (57). In other words, while we comfort ourselves by breaking down the world into neat binary oppositions, such as Male/Female, Self/Other, Human/Animal, Child/Adult, “freaks” blur the boundaries between these reassuring oppositions. She concludes, “The freak confirms the viewer as bounded, belonging to a ‘proper’ social category. The viewer’s horror lies in the recognition that this monstrous being is at the heart of his or her identity, for it is all that must be ejected or abjected from self-image to make the bounded, category-obeying self possible” (65). We need the freak to confirm our own static, bounded identities. And yet, I think there is a certain terror that we may not be as bounded as we think. If the hermaphrodite can transcend traditional gender categories, then perhaps our own genders are more fluid. For many that is a truly horrifying thought.
For example, in one of the film’s earliest scenes we witness the “pinheads” Schlitze, Elvira and Jenny Lee dancing and playing in the forest. From a distance they look like innocent, happy children. But as the camera approaches, it is clear that they are neither children, nor are they quite adults either. Thus it is the ambiguity here, rather than the disability itself, which is momentarily disturbing…
Grosz also mentions that “Any discussion of freaks brings back into focus a topic that has had a largely underground existence in contemporary cultural and intellectual life, partly because it is considered below the refined sensibilities of ‘good taste’ and ‘personal politeness’ in a civilised and politically correct milieu” (55).
Amanda Ann Klein. “Teaching Todd Browning’s FREAKS,” on the Judgemental Observer blog, September 13, 2009 update September 1, 2014 [Online] Cited 14/09/2020. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
~ Grosz, Elizabeth. “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.). Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp. 55-68
~ Hawkins, Joan. “‘One of Us’: Tod Browning’s Freaks,” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.). Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp. 265-276
~ Norden, Martin F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994
Tod Browning (director) Freaks (Cleopatra and freaks) 1932 Still photograph
Tod Browning (director) Publicity photo for Freaks, featuring much of the cast with director, Tod Browning 1932 Still photograph
Tod Browning (director) Freaks (with Siamese Twins Daisy and Violet Hilton) 1932 Still photograph
Tod Browning (director) Freaks 1932 Still photograph
Tod Browning (director) Freaks (shooting the wedding banquet) 1932 Still photograph
Tod Browning (director) Freaks (with Cleopatra and Hans at the wedding banquet) 1932 Still photograph
Tod Browning (director) Freaks (Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra after her transformation into chicken woman) 1932 Still photograph
Theatrical poster for Freaks
1932
God’s Children
In this scene from Freaks (1932, Tod Browning), we meet several of the film’s characters.
The Freaks Revenge
In this scene from Freaks (1932, Tod Browning), the freaks take their revenge on Hercules and Cleopatra.
Musée de l’Elysée 18, avenue de l’Elysée CH – 1014 Lausanne Phone: + 41 21 316 99 11
“In the last analysis, good photography is a question of art.”
“I wanted to show the thing that had to be corrected: I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated.”
Lewis Wickes Hines
Something that you really don’t get in reproductions is the absolutely beautiful tonality of Hine’s social documentary photography. Even less so when the images provided by the institution are degraded by scratches, dust, spots and colour irregularities. Despite these media images being 300 dpi when I received them from the museum media department they were in very average condition. For example, the image of Christmas Fiddles (below) was in such poor condition when enlarged that I had to spend over half and hour cleaning up the image to make it pictorially legible to the viewer at a larger size.
This is not an unusual occurrence and, unbeknownst to the readers of the archive, I spend many hours quickly cleaning the digital files before they are presented to you. Some individual images and sets of images are of such poor quality that I simply cannot use them at all. I will do a posting on this issue soon, but suffice to say that museums that spend thousands of hours and dollars staging impressive photographic exhibitions really let themselves down in the promotion of the exhibition if they provide dodgy scans and unusable media images to people that promote the exhibition for free. In this world of media saturated images it should be the norm that the “quality” of the image outweighs the indifferent quantity. With faster and faster download speeds larger images can be viewed more readily online and therefore scans provided by institutions must live up to this enlarged capacity.
Hopefully you can get some idea of the work of this socially conscious photographer, an American photographer who saw the camera as both a research tool and an instrument of social reform, whose images helped change the world with regard to child labour. Unfortunately success and reputation counted for nought. He died impoverished in 1940, shortly before a resurgence of public interest in his work raised him to the highest level of American photographers. What an infinite sadness.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Netherlands Museum of Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Lewis Hine: Photography for a Change at the Netherlands Museum of Photography, Rotterdam
From 15 September 2012 to 6 January 2013, the Netherlands Museum of Photography will present the first large retrospective in the Netherlands of the work of the renowned American photographer Lewis Hine. Hine was an enthusiastic photographer who wished to improve people’s lives through his photos. His pictures of immigrants on Ellis Island, of child labour, and of workers busy on the Empire State Building high above New York belong to the visual icons of the 20th century. The internationally touring exhibition contains more than 200 photos and documents, many in their original state and originating from the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York State. Lewis Hine is an initiative of three European institutions: Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Paris), Fundación MAPFRE (Madrid) and the Netherlands Museum of Photography (Rotterdam). It is with great pride that the Netherlands Museum of Photography can now present this exhibition that harmonises perfectly with its aim to pay attention to the canon of international documentary photography.
Lewis W. Hine (Wisconsin, 1874 – New York, 1940), a sociologist and photographer, belongs to the group of famous photographers such as Joel Meyerowitz, Robert Frank, Robert Capa, Eugène Atget to whom the Netherlands Museum of Photography has previously devoted impressive exhibitions. Hine is known as a 20th-century pioneer of social documentary photography. It is characteristic of Hine that he strongly believed in the camera’s powers of conviction. Thus, armed only with a heavy camera he fought for social justice. For the National Child Labor Committee he travelled more than 75,000 kilometres through the United States to photograph children working in agriculture, the mines, factories, sewing attics, and on the streets. His photos were partly responsible for reforms in these fields. The themes in Hine’s work – child labour, situations of human indignity, and the vulnerability of immigrants and refugees – are still current. Despite his present reputation, his early successes and the fact that many governmental organisations made use of his photos, he died totally impoverished in 1940.
Empire State Building and Building the Rotterdam
In 1932 Lewis Hine published the famous photographic book entitled Men at Work, which covered the construction of the Empire State Building. From the most audacious vantage points he took photos of the 381-metre building, showing the strength and willpower of humankind, man’s contribution to industry. The tall buildings on the Wilhelminapier have determined the skyline of Rotterdam for many years, just as the Empire State Building did in New York around 1930. The Wilhelminapier is now under full development. De Rotterdam Building, designed by Rem Koolhaas of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architectural) will be completed in 2013-2014. The photographer Ruud Sies has followed the genesis of the largest building in the Netherlands for four years now. The project entitled Building the Rotterdam – a work in progress by Ruud Sies was inspired by the work of Lewis Hine and establishes the connection with the Wilhelminapier as a historical location. To the Netherlands Museum of Photography, this is a reason to include this project in the exhibition of the work of Lewis Hine.
Exhibition
With 170 vintage photos from the period 1903-1937 as well as 42 documents, this exhibition of Hine’s work is the first extensive and well-documented overview in the Netherlands and even in Europe. Hine’s entire oeuvre is on show, ranging from his earliest portraits of immigrants on Ellis Island to his work in Europe after the First World War. The Lewis Hine touring exhibition was on display in Paris toward the end of 2011, and in Madrid at the beginning of this year. For this international journey, Hine’s work has undergone preventative preservation treatment and is exposed to a minimum amount of light. After the exhibition in the Netherlands, the work will return to the George Eastman House in America to relax in a dark depot.”
Press release from the Netherlands Museum of Photography website
Lewis Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1874. He moved to New York City in 1901 to teach at the Ethical Culture School. There Hine used photographs as educational tools, and soon began to photograph immigrants at Ellis Island. He hoped his photographs would encourage people to “exert the force to right wrongs.” While continuing to teach at ECS, Hine began to do freelance work for the National Child Labor Committee, an association that transformed his professional life.
In 1908, the NCLC provided Hine a monthly salary to photographically document children in factories, mills, canneries, textile mills, street trades, and agricultural industries. Through his photographs he sought to alert the public to the extent of child labor in America, and the degree to which it denied these children their childhood, health, and education. In one year, Hine covered 12,000 miles in his quest to end abusive child labor. By 1913, Hine was considered the leading social welfare photographer in America.
Hine enjoyed a long and successful career following his work for the NCLC. He worked for the American Red Cross (1917-1920), photographing refugees and civilians in war-torn Europe, a new series of photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island (1926), a series of photographs documenting the construction of the Empire State Building (1930), photographs of drought-ridden communities in Arkansas and Kentucky (1931), as well as work for the Tennessee Valley Authority.
In 1936-1937 Hine was appointed head photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Progress Administration. The ageing Hine, however, was disappointed at the rebuff of his attempts to secure work with the Farm Services Administration, where director Roy Stryker considered Hine old fashioned and difficult. Lewis Hine died in 1940, shortly before a resurgence of public interest in his work raised him to the highest level of American photographers.
Text from Child Labour in Virginia: Photographs by Lewis Hine web page [Online] Cited 21/12/2012. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
~ Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe ~ Paul Strand / Rebecca Strand ~ Emmet Gowin / Edith Gowin ~ Harry Callahan / Eleanor and Barbara Callahan ~ Robert Mapplethorpe / Patti Smith ~ Nicholas Nixon / The Brown Sisters ~ Andy Warhol / Serial Photography / Photo Booth Portraits ~ Mario Testino / Kate Moss ~ Baron Adolf de Meyer / Baroness Olga de Meyer ~ Edward Weston / Charis Weston ~ Lee Friedlander / Maria Friedlander ~ Paul Caponigro / The woods of Connecticut ~ Bernd and Hilla Becher / grids ~ Gerhard Richter / Overpainted Photographs ~ Masahisa Fukase / wife and family ~ Seiichi Furuya / Christine Furuya-Gößler ~ Sally Mann / children and husband ~ William Wegman / dogs
Australia?
Nobody that I can think of except Sue Ford.
Notice how all the artists are men except two: Sally Mann and Hilla Becher.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Introduction
Alfred Stieglitz, one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, argued that “to demand the [single] portrait… be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.” Stieglitz’s conviction that a person’s character could not be adequately conveyed in one image is consistent with a modern understanding of identity as constantly changing. For Stieglitz, who frequently made numerous portraits of the same sitters – including
striking photographs of his wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe – using the camera in a serial manner allowed him to transcend the limits of a single image.
Drawn primarily from the National Gallery of Art’s collection, the Serial Portrait exhibition features twenty artists who photographed the same subjects – primarily friends, family, or themselves – multiple times over the course of days, months, or years. This brochure presents a selection of works by seven of these artists. Like Stieglitz’s extended portrait of O’Keeffe, Emmet Gowin’s ongoing photographic study of his wife, Edith, explores her character and reveals the bonds of love and affection between the couple. Milton Rogovin’s photographs of working-class residents of Buffalo, New York, record shifts in the appearance and situation of individuals in the context of their community over several decades.
A number of photographers in the exhibition have made serial self-portraits that investigate the malleability of personal identity. Photographing themselves as shadows, blurs, or partial reflections, Lee Friedlander and Francesca Woodman have made disorienting images that hint at the instability of self-representation. Ann Hamilton has employed unusual props and materials to transform herself into a series of hybrid objects. Finally, work by Nikki S. Lee takes the idea of mutable identity to its logical conclusion as the artist photographs herself masquerading as members of different social and ethnic groups.
Emmet Gowin (born 1941) met Edith Morris in 1961 in their hometown of Danville, Virginia, just as he had decided to abandon business school to study art. Several years later at the Rhode Island School of Design, his teacher Harry Callahan, who made numerous photographs of his wife, Eleanor, encouraged Gowin to photograph the subject he knew most intimately – his family and in particular Edith, whom he married in 1964.
The Gowins’ artistic and marital collaboration has endured for half a century, yielding an extraordinary series of quiet, attentive portraits. In some photographs, such as Edith, Danville, Virginia, 1963 (fig. 4, above), Edith appears contemplative, even reserved. The somber beauty of this work stems in part from Gowin’s use of a tripod-mounted, large-format camera, which requires a lengthy exposure but produces photographs with exquisite details, such as the delicate shadow of a twig that falls across Edith’s face. To make the dramatic circular shadow that surrounds her in Edith, Danville, Virginia, 1971 (fig. 5, above), Gowin attached a lens meant for a 4 x 5 camera to a large 8 x 10 camera. This focus draws our attention to her figure, but the screen door simultaneously frames and obscures her form, resulting in a play between presence and elusiveness. While Gowin’s photographs are born of a deep intimacy, they refuse to lay bare his wife’s soul or expose the couple’s private passions.
The same delicate balance between revelation and reserve marks a group of portraits made during the couple’s travels in Central and South America. Edith and Moth Flight, 2002 (fig. 6, below), made at night using a ten-second exposure, combines Gowin’s enchantment with natural beauty and his interest in the nuances of his wife’s gestures and moods. Placing a pulsing ultraviolet light behind Edith’s head, Gowin recorded the luminous traces left by moths as they danced around her blurred face, transforming her into a ghostly and even otherworldly presence, visible yet just out of our reach.
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) House #3, Providence, Rhode Island 1976 Gelatin silver print 16.1 x 16.3cm (6 5/16 x 6 7/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Francesca Woodman
Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) began making photographs at age thirteen, and by the time she entered the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975, she was already a skilled photographer. Using herself as the subject of nearly all her work, Woodman put her body in the service of exploring such themes as feminine identity, sexuality, mythology, and the relationship of the body to its surroundings. Conjuring visions of a complex inner world, Woodman’s photographs are powerful for their ability to suggest psychic turmoil within images of serene, ethereal beauty.
Woodman’s interest in the emotional affect of space can be seen in House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 (fig. 14, above). Using an abandoned house as a makeshift studio, Woodman often photographed herself merging with her surroundings, including doors, walls, and windows, dissolving physical or psychic boundaries. She also frequently moved during long exposures or allowed the camera to record only part of her body in order to obscure her figure. By invoking a ghostly presence, Woodman’s photographs often present her as someone who refuses to commit to a solid image of herself.
Woodman’s lush and intimate photographs thus offer a tantalising glimpse of a mysterious, private world. Yet they are more than romantic expressions of a young woman’s subjective experience. Notes in Woodman’s diary suggest, for instance, that Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978 (fig. 15, below), alludes to the Greek mythological story of Leda, who was seduced by the god Zeus in the form of a swan.
Toward the end of her brief but prolific career (Woodman committed suicide when she was twenty-two) the artist began working on a much larger scale, using her body more as a structural element. Caryatid, New York, 1980 (fig. 16, below), made as part of a monumental photo-installation called Temple Project, draws both its title and inspiration from the columns carved in the shape of women that were used in ancient Greek and Roman architecture. Although Woodman displays her figure in a more expansive and direct manner than in her earlier work, the gesture that obscures her face and leaves her partial and unknowable is typical for the artist, who always preferred suggestion over declaration.
Text from the NGA website
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island 1975-1978 Gelatin silver print 10.5 x 10.5cm (4 1/8 x 4 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of the Collectors Committee and R. K. Mellon Family Foundation
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) Caryatid, New York 1980 National Gallery of Art, Washington William and Sarah Walton Fund and Gift of the Collectors Committee
Figure 17. Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956) body object series #13, toothpick suit/chair 1984 Gelatin silver print, printed 1993 11 x 11cm (4 5/16 x 4 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Ann Hamilton
An artist known for multimedia environments, performances, and videos, Ann Hamilton (born 1956) made the first photographs in the body object series in 1984 with objects left over from an installation she had presented as an MFA student at Yale. Later images from the series were based on subsequent performances and installations, documenting both the objects used and the actions performed with them. Hamilton appears in each photograph with objects attached to or touching her body, her face only rarely visible. The results are striking, unsettling, and often witty.
Despite emerging from Hamilton’s installation and performance practice, the photographs in the series stand on their own as works of art. Paying close attention to the material qualities of familiar objects, Hamilton models creative new uses for them, changing their function and meaning. In body object series #13, toothpick suit/chair, 1984 (fig. 17, above), for example, thousands of toothpicks transform Hamilton’s clothes into a porcupine-like hide while a chair becomes a burdensome instrument of torture. The image elicits visceral emotions – alienation, hostility, fear – though it does so with a dose of absurdist humour.
As self-representations, the photographs in the body object series depart radically from any traditional notion of portraiture. Instead of insisting on Hamilton’s uniqueness as an individual, these images present her body almost as an object on a par with other objects. Some of the photographs are linked directly to her biography: Hamilton had studied textile design before getting her MFA, and the toothpick suit refers to her love of fabrics. In other photographs she makes abstract concepts more graspable through the senses. Sound is given tactile and visual form as tissue paper in body object series #14, megaphone, 1986 (fig. 18, below), while in body object series #15, honey hat, 1989 (fig. 19, below), Hamilton wrings her hands in honey to suggest the idea of washing one’s hands of guilt. Based on an installation in which the artist embedded money – 750,000 pennies – in a layer of honey, this image also gives new meaning to the phrase “sticky fingers” and highlights the connections between language, images, and objects that Hamilton explores in both her photographs and installations.
Text from the NGA website
Figure 18. Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956) body object series #14, megaphone 1986 Gelatin silver print, printed 1993 11 x 11cm (4 5/16 x 4 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
Figure 19. Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956) body object series #15, honey hat 1989 Gelatin silver print, printed 1993 11 x 11cm (4 5/16 x 4 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
The National Gallery of Art explores how the practice of making multiple portraits of the same subjects produced some of the most revealing and provocative photographs of our time in The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years, on view in the West Building’s Ground Floor photography galleries from September 30 through December 31, 2012. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition features 153 works by 20 artists who photographed the same subjects – friends, family, and themselves – numerous times over days, months, or years to create compelling portrait studies that investigate the many facets of personal and social identity.
“The Gallery’s photography collection essentially began with the donation of Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘key set,’ so it is fitting that this exhibition opens with portraits by Stieglitz, who understood that a person’s character was best captured through a series of photographs taken over time,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “Although the exhibition is drawn largely from the Gallery’s significant collection of photographs, we are grateful to the lenders who have allowed us to present more fully the serial form of portraiture that Stieglitz championed.”
Since the introduction of photography in 1839, portraiture has been one of the most widely practiced forms of the medium. Starting in the early 20th century, however, some photographers began to question whether one image alone could adequately capture the complexity of an individual. As Alfred Stieglitz, the era’s leading champion of American fine art photography, argued: “to demand the [single] portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture will be condensed into a single still.”
Along with Stieglitz, some of the 20th century’s most prominent photographers – Paul Strand, Harry Callahan, and Emmet Gowin – used the camera serially to transcend the limits of a single image. Each of these photographers made numerous studies of their lovers that sought to redefine the expressive possibilities of portraiture while probing the affective bonds of love and desire. By employing the camera’s capacity to record fluctuating states of being and mark the passage of time, other photographers such as Nicholas Nixon and Milton Rogovin have documented individuals – in families or communities – over four decades. Capturing subtle and dramatic shifts in appearance, demeanour, and situation, these series are poignant and elegiac memorials that remind us of our own mortality.
Other photographers have made serial self-portraits that explore the malleability of personal identity and the possibility of reinvention afforded by the camera. By photographing themselves as shadows, blurs, or partial reflections, Ilse Bing, Lee Friedlander, and Francesca Woodman have created inventive but elusive images that hint at the instability of self-representation. Conceptual artists of the 1970s and 1980s such as Vito Acconci, Blythe Bohnen, and Ann Hamilton have explicitly combined performance and self-portraiture to stage continual self-transformations. The exhibition concludes with work from the last 15 years by artists such as Nikki S. Lee and Gillian Wearing, who take the performance of self to its limits by adopting masquerades to delve into the ways identity is inferred from external appearance.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art website
In the 1960s Lee Friedlander (born 1934) sought, by his own account, to create images of “the American social landscape and its conditions.” Other photographers in his New York circle, including Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, also explored the chaotic beauty and contradictions of modern life. Friedlander, however, was the only member of this group to turn repeatedly to self-portraiture in order to understand the world around him. He stalked city streets with camera in hand, recording not only the haphazard incidents of daily life but also his own presence, often as a shadow or a reflection.
In the shop window of Westport, Connecticut, 1968 (fig. 11, above), for example, a reflection of Friedlander’s legs appears to merge with the shapely limbs of a woman in a bathing suit who points a camera at the viewer. The woman is an illusion, a cutout advertisement – but she is also a stand-in for the camera-wielding Friedlander, whose torso and head also appear faintly, as a shadow cast against her legs.
By letting the reflection in a window obscure what is inside, or allowing his shadow to intrude into the frame, Friedlander violates many of the rules of “good” photography. Works such as New York City, 1966 (fig. 12, below) testify to Friedlander’s ability to transform such “mistakes” into witty, ironic juxtapositions. In this case, the startling intrusion of Friedlander’s shadow onto the back of a fellow pedestrian is visually confusing, simultaneously threatening and humorous, as Friedlander’s spiky hair merges with the woman’s fur collar. A sly commentary on the predatory nature of such street photography, the looming shadow that engulfs the subject is also an effect of Friedlander’s equipment, a 35mm Leica with a wide-angle lens. In order to fill the picture frame with his chosen subject, Friedlander had to make the picture at close range, resulting in the inclusion of his own shadow.
Even in self-portraits in which Friedlander makes himself fully visible to the camera, the artist often makes humorously self-deprecating deadpan images, appearing, for example, as a disheveled driver on a manic mission in Haverstraw, New York, 1966 (fig. 13, below). Edgy but unpretentious, brimming with pictorial detail, Friedlander’s self-portraits are visual puzzles that explore the place of the self in the chaos of contemporary urban life.
Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Self-Portrait with Leica 1931 Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1988 26.7 x 29.7cm (10 1/2 x 11 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Ilse Bing Wolff
Figure 1. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe probably 1918 Platinum print 18.4 x 23.1cm (7 1/4 x 9 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was already an accomplished photographer, publisher, and champion of modern art when he the first encountered the work of Georgia O’Keeffe in 1916. He made his first photographs of her in 1917 and sent them to her with the note, “I think I could do thousands of things of you – a life work to express you.” Over the next two decades Stieglitz made more than three hundred photographs of O’Keeffe, whom he married in 1924, creating what he called a “composite portrait.” This extraordinary body of work charts the couple’s relationship and expresses Stieglitz’s conviction that portraiture should function as a kind of “photographic diary.”
Many of the photographs Stieglitz made of O’Keeffe in the early years of their relationship, including Georgia O’Keeffe, c. 1918 (fig. 1, above), are palpably erotic, reflecting the intense passion they shared. Revealing herself to the lens with a bewitching vulnerability, O’Keeffe exudes a tenderness and seductiveness that belie the strain of holding the pose during the long exposures required by Stieglitz’s large-format camera. Often, his photographs express both his desire and admiration for O’Keeffe, at times verging on idealisation of the person he called “Nature’s child – a Woman.” Yet his portraits also look beyond her face to find eloquence in all parts of her body, as in the print Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands and Thimble (fig. 2, below), where her hands display an almost tactile physicality. Here, Stieglitz used a printing technique that resulted in tonal reversal, causing deep shadows to print as bronze tones and creating the dark outlines that dramatise O’Keeffe’s graceful fingers and emphasise the metallic gleam of the thimble.
After Stieglitz exhibited more than forty portraits of O’Keeffe, including some provocative nudes, in 1921, the painter was dismayed to find that her own art began to be interpreted in a sexualised way, and she rarely posed unclothed after 1923. O’Keeffe’s desire to control her image, along with the increasingly attenuated nature of their relationship after 1929, when she began spending several months a year working in New Mexico while he stayed in New York, further strained their partnership. In Georgia O’Keeffe, 1930 (fig. 3, below), the artist stands before one of the paintings she had made in New Mexico. Gazing steadily at the camera, she appears as a monumental force at one with her art, confident yet untouchable.
Text from the NGA website
Figure 2. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands and Thimble 1919 Palladium print 24 x 19.4cm (9 7/16 x 7 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Figure 3. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe 1930 Gelatin silver print 23.9 x 19.1cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Figure 7. Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (Lower West Side series) 1974 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
Milton Rogovin
Milton Rogovin (1909-2011) belongs to a rich photographic tradition of documenting the social and personal histories of people who would otherwise be forgotten. He did so serially, returning over many years to encapsulate not just single moments but entire lifetimes. Rogovin started his career as an optometrist in Buffalo, New York. In 1957, after he refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his association with the Communist Party, the local paper labeled him the “Top Red in Buffalo.” His optometry practice folded as a result, leaving his family of five to survive on the salary of his wife, Anne. With free time suddenly available, Rogovin turned to photography with a strong sense of purpose. “My voice was essentially silenced,” he recalled, “so I decided to speak out through photographs.”
Rogovin’s candid, powerfully direct pictures gave voice to those who traditionally had none: immigrants, minorities, and working-class people. Even though he traveled around the world making photographs of workers, his best-known work was made closer to home. In 1972 he began photographing residents of Buffalo’s Lower West Side, the city’s poorest and most ethnically diverse neighbourhood. With his bulky twin-lens Rolleiflex camera, the photographer was sometimes suspected of working for the police or the FBI. Over time, however, Rogovin gained the trust of his sitters by visiting regularly and by giving them prints of their portraits. Dignified and occasionally tender, these photographs depict the circumstances of each subject with sober honesty.
Several times over the next three decades, Rogovin sought out and re-photographed many of his original subjects, capturing the changes wrought by time and circumstance. The series Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (figs. 7-10) registers changes in the sitter’s situation over the course of twenty-eight years, from 1974 to 2002. In 2003 the oral historian Dave Isay, working
alongside Rogovin, interviewed West, who related the story of his decades of heavy drinking. Reflecting on a photograph Rogovin had made of him in 1985 (fig. 8), West said, “That… picture actually changed my life”; it prompted him to stop drinking for six months before relapsing. A later brush with death led to permanent recovery and the founding of a program to help local youth reject drugs and alcohol. In this and other serial portraits, Rogovin honoured the everyday lives of his subjects, offering a powerful visual legacy of a community he respected and loved.
Text from the NGA website
Figure 8. Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (Lower West Side series) 1985 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gft of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
Figure 9. Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (Lower West Side series) 1992 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gft of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
Figure 10. Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (Lower West Side series) 2002 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
Curators: Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography; Will Michels, collections photographer and exhibition co-curator; Natalie Zelt, curatorial assistant
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The Valley of the Shadow of Death 1855
This is the biggest posting on one exhibition that I have ever undertaken on Art Blart!
As befits the gravity of the subject matter this posting is so humongous that I have had to split it into 4 separate postings. This is how to research and stage a contemporary photography exhibition that fully explores its theme (NGV please note!). The curators reviewed more than one million photographs in 17 countries, locating pictures in archives, military libraries, museums, private collections, historical societies and news agencies; in the personal files of photographers and service personnel; and at two annual photojournalism festivals producing an exhibition that features 26 sections (an inspired and thoughtful selection) that includes nearly 500 objects that illuminate all aspects of WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY.
I have spent hours researching and finding photographs on the Internet to support the posting. It has been a great learning experience and my admiration for photographers of all types has increased. I have discovered the photographs and stories of new image makers that I did not know and some hidden treasures along the way. I hope you enjoy this monster posting on a subject matter that should be consigned to the history books of human evolution.
**Please be aware that there are graphic photographs in all of these postings.**Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
On November 11, 2012, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, debuts an unprecedented exhibition exploring the experience of war through the eyes of photographers. WAR / PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath features nearly 500 objects, including photographs, books, magazines, albums and photographic equipment. The photographs were made by more than 280 photographers, from 28 nations, who have covered conflict on six continents over 165 years, from the Mexican-American War of 1846 through present-day conflicts. The exhibition takes a critical look at the relationship between war and photography, exploring what types of photographs are, and are not, made, and by whom and for whom. Rather than a chronological survey of wartime photographs or a survey of “greatest hits,” the exhibition presents types of photographs repeatedly made during the many phases of war – regardless of the size or cause of the conflict, the photographers’ or subjects’ culture or the era in which the pictures were recorded. The images in the exhibition are organised according to the progression of war: from the acts that instigate armed conflict, to “the fight,” to victory and defeat, and images that memorialise a war, its combatants and its victims. Both iconic images and previously unknown images are on view, taken by military photographers, commercial photographers (portrait and photojournalist), amateurs and artists.
“‘WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY’ promises to be another pioneering exhibition, following other landmark MFAH photography exhibitions such as ‘Czech Modernism: 1900-1945’ (1989) and ‘The History of Japanese Photography’ (2003),” said Gary Tinterow, MFAH director. “Anne Tucker, along with her co-curators, Natalie Zelt and Will Michels, has spent a decade preparing this unprecedented exploration of the complex and profound relationship between war and photography.” “Photographs serve the public as a collective memory of the experience of war, yet most presentations that deal with the material are organised chronologically,” commented Tucker. “We believe ‘WAR / PHOTOGRAPHY’ is unique in its scope, exploring conflict and its consequences across the globe and over time, analysing this complex and unrelenting phenomenon.”
The earliest work in the exhibition is from 1847, taken from the first photographed conflict: the Mexican-American War. Other early examples include photographs from the Crimean War, such as Roger Fenton’s iconic The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) and Felice Beato’s photograph of the devastated interior of Fort Taku in China during the Second Opium War (1860). Among the most recent images is a 2008 photograph of the Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the remote Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan by Tim Hetherington, who was killed in April 2011 while covering the civil war in Libya. Also represented with two photographs in the exhibition is Chris Hondros, who was killed with Hetherington. While the exhibition is organised according to the phases of war, portraits of servicemen, military and political leaders and civilians are a consistent presence throughout, including Yousuf Karsh’s classic 1941 image of Winston Churchill, and the Marlboro Marine (2004), taken by embedded Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco of soldier James Blake Miller after an assault in Fallujah, Iraq. Sinco’s image was published worldwide on the cover of 150 publications and became a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
The exhibition was initiated in 2002, when the MFAH acquired what is purported to be the first print made from Joe Rosenthal’s negative of Old Glory Goes Up on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima (1945). From this initial acquisition, the curators decided to organise an exhibition that would focus on war photography as a genre. During the evolution of the project, the museum acquired more than a third of the prints in the exhibition. The curators reviewed more than one million photographs in 17 countries, locating pictures in archives, military libraries, museums, private collections, historical societies and news agencies; in the personal files of photographers and service personnel; and at two annual photojournalism festivals: World Press Photo (Amsterdam) and Visa pour l’Image (Perpignan, France). The curators based their appraisals on the clarity of the photographers’ observation and capacity to make memorable and striking pictures that have lasting relevance. The pictures were recorded by some of the most celebrated conflict photographers, as well as by many who remain anonymous. Almost every photographic process is included, ranging from daguerreotypes to inkjet prints, digital captures and cell-phone shots.
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath is organised into 26 sections, which unfold in the sequence that typifies the stages of war, from the advent of conflict through the fight, aftermath and remembrance. Each section showcases images appropriate to that category while cutting across cultures, time and place. Outside of this chronological approach are focused galleries for “Media Coverage and Dissemination” (with an emphasis on technology); “Iwo Jima” (a case study); and “Photographic Essays” (excerpts from two landmark photojournalism essays, by Larry Burrows and Todd Heisler).
Media Coverage and Dissemination
1. Media Coverage and Dissemination provides an overview of how technology has profoundly affected the ways that pictures from the front reach the public: from Roger Fenton and his horse-drawn photography van (commissioned by the British government to document the Crimean War), to Joe Rosenthal’s 1940s Anniversary Speed Graphic (4 x 5) camera, to pictures taken with the Hipstamatic app of an iPhone by photojournalist Michael Christopher Brown in Egypt during the protests and clashes of the Arab Spring. (22 images / objects)
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The artist’s van [Marcus Sparling, full-length portrait, seated on Roger Fenton’s photographic van] 1855 Salted paper print 17.5 x 16.5cm Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Manufactured by Graflex, active 1912-1973 Anniversary Speed Graphic (4 x 5), “Scott S. Wigle camera” (First American-made D-Day picture) c. 1940 Camera Collection of George Eastman House (Gift of Graflex, Inc.)
An Advent of War
2. The photographs in An Advent of War depict the catalytic events of war. These moments of instigation are rarely captured, as photographers are not always present at the initial attack or provocation. Photographs that Robert Clark took on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the aerial view of torpedoes approaching Battleship Row during the Pearl Harbor attack, taken by an unknown Japanese airman on December 7, 1941, both convey with clarity the concept of war’s advent. (11 images).
Unknown photographer (Japanese) War in Hawaiian Water. Japanese Torpedoes Attack Battleship Row, Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 Gelatin silver print The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Will Michels
Recruitment & Embarkation
3. Recruitment & Embarkation shows mobilisation: the movement toward the front. Mikhail Trakhman captures a Russian mother kissing her son goodbye in Kolkhoz farmer M. Nikolaïeva bids her son Ivan goodbye before he joins the partisans (1942), while a 1916 photograph by Josiah Barnes, known as the “Embarkation Photographer,” shows an archetypal moment: young Australian soldiers waving goodbye from a ship as they depart their home country to fight in World War I. (7 images)
Josiah Barnes (Australian, 1858-1921) Embarkation of HMAT Ajana, Melbourne July 8, 1916 Gelatin silver print (printed 2012) On loan from the Australian War Memorial
Known as “the embarkation photographer”, the Kew, Melbourne photographer Josiah Barnes took an interest in photographing Australian troopships as they departed for war from Melbourne. He had two sons, “Norm and Victor, who left for war in 1916 (both returned to Australia after their service),” which may have fuelled his interest.
Mikhail Trakhman (Russian, 1918-1976) Kolkhoz farmer M. Nikolaïeva bids her son Ivan goodbye before he joins the partisans 1942 Gelatin silver print
A kolkhoz was a form of collective farm in the Soviet Union which, alongside sovkhoz (state farm), formed the main components of the socialised farm sector which emerged after the October Revolution of 1917 as an antithesis to feudalism, aristocratic landlords, serfdom and individual farming.
Mikhail Trakhman
Mikhail Trakhman was born in Moscow in 1918. After graduating from school, he began working at the newsreel studio and at the same time studying for courses in the field of assistant operator. From 1938 he became the photo reporter of the Uchitelskaya Gazeta, and in 1939 he was drafted into the army and participated in the Soviet-Finnish war. During the Great Patriotic War, Mikhail Trakhman worked as a press photographer for the Soviet Information Bureau. His main instrument was the famous “Leica” camera, but often military weapons fell into his hands. He shot in besieged Leningrad, in Pskov and in Belarus, participated in the liberation of Poland and Hungary. The most famous are his photographs from the partisan series taken in the rear of the German troops. In his diaries, he wrote: “I take a lot of things, although I know that 80% of the shot will go to the basket, but I need to shoot it, since such things happen once in a lifetime.” Thanks to these photos, he entered the history of war reporting. Mikhail Trakhman was awarded the Order of the Red Star and the medal “For the Defense of Leningrad” and “Partisan Medal”, which he especially valued.
Anonymous. “Mikhail Trakhman,” on the Lumiere Brothers Gallery website [Online] Cited 06/09/2020. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Training
4. Training explores photographs of soldiers in boot camp or more-advanced phases of instruction and exercise. World War II Royal Navy officers gather around a desk to study different types of aircraft in a photograph by Sir Cecil Beaton. Also included is the iconic Vietnam-era photograph of a U.S. Marine drill sergeant reprimanding a recruit in South Carolina, from Thomas Hoepker’s series US Marine Corps boot camp, 1970. In one photograph, shot by a Japanese soldier and published in 1938 by Look magazine, Japanese soldiers use living Chinese prisoners in bayonet practice. (13 images)
5. Daily Routine features moments of boredom, routine and playfulness. A member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps wears a gas mask as he peels onions. A 1942 photograph by Sir Cecil Beaton catches the off-guard expression of a Royal Navy man at a sewing machine, mending a signal flag. (13 images)
Anonymous photographer Soldiers trying out their gas masks in every possible way. Putting the respirator to good use while peeling onions. 40th Division, Camp Kearny, San Diego, California 1918 National Archives and Records Administration
HMS Alcatara was an RML passenger liner of 22,209 tons and 19 knots launched in 1926, and taken up by the Royal Navy for conversion to an armed merchant cruiser to counter the threat posed by German surface raiders against shipping. When Jim Hingston joined her as an ordinary seaman at Freetown she was still largely in merchant dress, with wood panelling throughout. Much to the regret of her crew this was removed during their stay at Simonstown – the wisdom of that was apparent to them only too soon.
There were some 53 such ships in all, poorly armed, in Alcantara‘s case with eight 6 inch and two 3 inch guns, the former having a range of some 14,200 yards (13,000 metres). Such armament could not be much more than defensive, the intention being that the AMCs should radio the position of the German ship and not only give merchant shipping a chance to escape but delay the commerce raider long enough to allow regular RN warships to get to the scene.
Alcantara‘s opponent, the Thor, was laid down in 1938 as a freighter of 9,200 tons displacement and a speed of 18 knots, but commissioned as a commerce raider on 14 March 1940. Though she had only 6 150 mm guns they had a much greater range, at 20,000 yards, than Alcantara and other British AMCs. She also carried a scout floatplane. During the engagement with Alcantara on 28 July 1940 the Thor inflicted significant damage but the Alcantara successfully closed, and after being hit the Thor withdrew in order to avoid the risk of being crippled or being forced to abort her mission. In later encounters with AMCs the Thor severely damaged the Carnarvon Castle and sank Voltaire.
HMS Alcantara later had her 6 in armament upgraded and was equipped with a seaplane, but as the threat of surface raiders receded she was converted to her more natural role of troopship in 1943.
Reconnaissance, Resistance and Sabotage
6. Images of Reconnaissance, Resistance and Sabotage are scarce by nature, as they reveal spies in the act and could be used against those depicted or their families. A U.S. soldier on night watch sits atop a mountain in Afghanistan, wrapped in a blanket and peering into night-vision equipment, in a photograph by Adam Ferguson. A photograph by T. E. Lawrence (known as Lawrence of Arabia) documents the bombing of the Hejaz Railway during the Arab Revolt. Cas Oorthuys’ photograph Under German Occupation (Dutch Worker’s Front), Amsterdam (c. 1940-1945), taken with a camera hidden in his jacket, shows the back of a fellow countryman who is helping to conceal the photographer, with German troops in the distance. Also included is Arkady Shaikhet’s 1942 photograph Partisan Girl depicting Olga Mekheda, who was renowned for her ability to get through German roadblocks – even while pregnant. (10 images)
T.E. Lawrence (British, 1888-1935) Untitled [A Tulip bomb explodes on the railway Hejaz Railway, near Deraa, Hejaz, Ottoman Empire] 1918 Collection of the MFA Houston
Cas Oorthuys (Dutch, 1908-1975) Under German Occupation (Dutch Worker’s Front), Amsterdam c. 1940-1945 Gelatin silver print 13 7/8 × 11 5/8 in. (35.2 × 29.5cm) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase funded by Anne Wilkes Tucker in honor of the 50th wedding anniversary of Max and Isabell Smith Herzstein
Adam Ferguson (Australian, b. 1978) September 4, Tangi valley, Wardak province, Afghanistan, a soldier of the U.S. Army 10th Mountain Division was attentively monitoring a highway September 4, 2009
“To me, this picture epitomises the abstract idea of the ‘enemy’ that exists within the U.S. led war in Afghanistan: a young infantryman watches a road with a long-range acquisition sight surveying for insurgents planting Improvised Explosive Devices. U.S. Army Infantrymen rarely knowingly come face to face with their enemy, combat is fleeting and fought like cat and mouse, and the most decisive blows are determined by intelligence gathering, and then delivered through technology that maintains a safe distance, just like a video game.”
7. Patrol & Troop Movement conveys the mass movements of peoples and personnel by land, sea and air, from the movement of troops and supplies to patrols by all five divisions of military service: Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Air Force. Combat patrols are detachments of forces sent into hostile terrain for a range of missions, and they – as well as the photographers accompanying them – face considerable danger. João Silva’s three sequenced frames show, through his eyes, the tilted earth just after he was felled by an IED while on patrol in Afghanistan in 2010; he lost both legs in the incident. A tranquil, 1917 image by Australian James Frank Hurley depicts silhouetted soldiers walking in a line, their reflections captured in a body of water. A 1943 photograph by American Warrant Photographer Jess W. January USCGR shows members of the U.S. Coast Guard observing a depth-charge explosion hitting a German submarine that stalked their convoy. (14 images)
Frank Hurley (Australian, 1885-1962) Supporting troops of the 1st Australian Division walking on a duckboard track 1917
Warrant Photographer Jess W. January USCGR, American USCG Cutter Spencer destroys Nazi sub April 17, 1943 Gelatin silver print The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Wait
8. The Wait depicts a common situation of wartime. Susan Meiselas captures a tense moment during a 1978 street fight in Nicaragua, when muchachos with Molotov cocktails line up in an alleyway, ready to initiate an attack on the National Guard. Robert Capa shows two female French ambulance drivers in Italy during World War II, leaning against their vehicle, knitting, as they wait to be called. (8 images)
9. The Fight is one of the most extensive sections in the exhibition. Dmitri Baltermants shot Attack – Eastern Front WWII (cover image of the exhibition catalogue) in 1941 from the trench, as men charged over him. Sky Over Sevastopol (1944), by Evgeny Khaldey, is an aerial photograph of planes on their way to a bombing raid of the strategically important naval point. Joe Rosenthal’s Over the Top – American Troops Move onto the Beach at Iwo Jima (1945) pictures infantrymen emerging from the protection of their landing craft into enemy fire. Staged photographs, presented as authentic documents, tend to proliferate during wartime, and several examples are included here. In 1942 the Public Relations Department of the War issued an assignment to photographers to create “representative” images of combat in North Africa for more dynamic images; official British photographer Len Chetwyn staged an Australian officer leading the charging line in the battle of El Alamein, using smoke in the background from the cookhouse to create a lively image. (21 images)
Len Chetwyn (English, 1909-1980) Australians approached the strong point, ready to rush in from different sides November 3, 1942 Silver gelatin photograph
Dmitri Baltermants (Russian, 1912-1990) Attack – Eastern Front WWII 1941 Silver gelatin photograph
The Wait and Rescue
10. The Wait and Rescue bookend The Fight. Among the photographs in Rescue are Ambush of the 173rd AB, South Vietnam (1965), by Tim Page, showing soldiers immediately combing through a battleground to assist the wounded; American Lt. Wayne Miller’s image of a wounded gunner being lifted from the turret of a torpedo bomber; and Life magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith’s 1944 photograph of an American soldier rescuing a dying Japanese infant. Smith wrote about that moment, stating “hands trained for killing gently… extricated the infant” to be transported to medical care. (8 images)
Lt. Wayne Miller (American, 1918-2013) Crewmen lifting Kenneth Bratton out of turret of TBF on the USS SARATOGA after raid on Rabaul November 1943 Silver gelatin photograph
More information: Kenneth C. Bratton – Mississippi (WWII vet). He was born in Pontotoc, MS, December 17, 1918. He passed away April 15, 1982. Lt. Bratton won a purple heart for his bravery during the attack on Rabaul November 11, 1943.
Wayne Forest Miller (September 19, 1918 – May 22, 2013) was an American photographer known for his series of photographs The Way of Life of the Northern Negro. Active as a photographer from 1942 until 1975, he was a contributor to Magnum Photos beginning in 1958. …
War photographer
Miller then served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy where he was assigned to Edward Steichen’s World War II Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. He was among the first Western photographers to document the destruction at Hiroshima.
The Grumman TBF Avenger (designated TBM for aircraft manufactured by General Motors) is an American World War II-era torpedo bomber developed initially for the United States Navy and Marine Corps, and eventually used by several air and naval aviation services around the world.
The Avenger entered U.S. service in 1942, and first saw action during the Battle of Midway. Despite the loss of five of the six Avengers on its combat debut, it survived in service to become the most effective and widely-used torpedo bomber of World War II, sharing credit for sinking the super-battleships Yamato and Musashi (the only ships of that type sunk exclusively by American aircraft while under way) and being credited for sinking 30 submarines. Greatly modified after the war, it remained in use until the 1960s.
11. Aftermath, with four subsections, features photographs taken after the battle has ended. “Death” on the battlefield is one of the earliest types of war images: Felice Beato photographed the dead in the interior of Fort Taku in the Second Opium War (1860). George Strock’s Dead GIs on Buna Beach, New Guinea (1943), which ran in Life magazine with personal details about the casualties, was the first published photograph from any conflict of American dead in World War II. In 1966, Associated Press photographer Henri Huet documented an American paratrooper, who was killed in action, being raised to an evacuation helicopter. Incinerated Iraqi, Gulf War, Iraq, taken by Kenneth Jarecke, was published in Europe, but the American Associated Press editors withheld it in the United States. “Shell Shock and Exhaustion” shows impenetrable exhaustion after battle. In Don McCullin’s Shell-shocked soldier awaiting transportation away from the front line, Hué, Vietnam (1968), the man looks forward with the “thousand-yard stare.” Robert Attebury photographed Marines so exhausted after a 2005 battle in Iraq that lasted 17 hours that they fell asleep where they had been standing, amid the rubble of a destroyed building. “Grief and Battlefield Burial” were taken at the site of the conflict, including David Turnley’s 1991 picture of a weeping soldier who has just learned that the remains in a nearby body bag are those of a close friend. “Destruction of Property” shows collateral damage from war. Christophe Agou, for instance, photographed the smouldering steel remains of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 2001. (39 images)
David Turnley (American, b. 1955) American Soldier Grieving for Comrade Iraq, 1991
Ken Kozakiewicz (left) breaks down in an evacuation helicopter after hearing that his friend, the driver of his Bradley Fighting Vehicle, was killed in a “friendly fire” incident that he himself survived. Michael Tsangarakis (centre) suffers severe burns from ammunition rounds that blew up inside the vehicle during the incident. All of the soldiers were exposed to depleted uranium as a result of the explosion. They and the body of the dead man are on their way to a MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital).
Prisoners of War (Civilian and Military)/Interrogation
12. Prisoners of War (Civilian and Military)/Interrogation is a frequently photographed subject because such pictures can be made outside an area of conflict. Moreover, the people in control often documented their prisoners as a show of power. The photographs in this section include the official recording of a prisoner of war before his execution by the Khmer Rouge, taken by Nhem Ein. (14 images)
13. Iwo Jima is a case study within the exhibition that presents the complete thematic narrative in photographs from a specific battle. Included in this section is the inspiration for the exhibition: Joe Rosenthal’s iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning Old Glory Goes Up on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, a photograph he took as an Associated Press photographer in World War II showing U.S. Marines and one Navy medic raising the American flag on the remote Pacific island. (25 images)
We were asked to choose our favourite photograph, one that we could nominate as a great photograph. I chose a slightly different take on proceedings.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to my fellow speakers for their talks and to Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography Naomi Cass for inviting me to speak at a wonderful evening. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Alexander Gardner (American, 1821-1882) Lewis Paine 26th April, 1865 Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
This is not my favourite photograph
A minute’s silence…
This is not my favourite photograph Nor may it be a great photograph… More interestingly to me, it is a remarkable photograph – one that you are able to make remarks on.
It is also a photograph that has haunted me for years.
Taken by Alexander Gardner in April 1865, this photograph is a portrait of Lewis Thornton Powell (aka Lewis Payne or Paine) who was one of the conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln which had happened the same month. The photograph has a background of dark metal, and was taken on one of the ironclads U.S.S. Montauk or Saugus, where the conspirators were for a time confined. Paine was executed in July 1865 just eight short weeks later.
Alexander Gardner (American, 1821-1882) Three photographs of Lewis Paine 26th April, 1865
This is the triptych of photographs by Gardner in the form they are usually displayed, like a three-panel renaissance altar-piece. The left and right hand photographs were taken within minutes of each other, with the camera in the same position, whereas in the centre photograph the camera has been lowered to show more of the body, and the image has been cropped at the top. In the central plate the figure of Paine has been raised up in the frame – almost prematurely brought back to life by his placement.
The centre image is the only one where Paine stares directly at the camera. He surveys the viewer with a gaze I find enigmatic.
This is a very modern face, a very contemporary face. His hair is just like Justin Beiber’s.
Who brushed his hair across for this picture, and would it normally be this long, or has it just been ignored because of his fate?
He still has good muscle tone – has he been exercising in his cell?
And finally his clothing – is it navy issue, as his top appears to have been given to him, perhaps the coarse, navy blue wool of the Northern states.
Noel Cordle Hot Dead Guys: Lewis Powell Posted on September 5th, 2010 Mere Musings blog [Online] Cited 01/12/2012 no longer available online
There’s even a web page dedicated to him on “hot dead guys” where there’s that awkward moment when one of Lincoln’s conspirators is so sexy its ridiculous…
He wasn’t all bad. Biographers of Powell describe him as a quiet, introverted boy who enjoyed fishing and caring for sick and injured animals. Apparently, Lewis was an intelligent, sensitive, soul with great potential.
Descriptions of Lewis from “The Life, Crime and Capture”
.
Alexander Gardner (American, 1821-1882) Lewis Paine (detail) 26th April, 1865 Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
Could we say that he is left-handed given the different size of his fingers (?)
Roland Barthes (French, 1915-1980) Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire) 1980
Roland Barthes in his seminal work Camera Lucida said in Section 39: “He is dead and he is going to die…
“The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: this will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose, the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence.”
If we were to place this image within the metaphysical school of photography which peaked with Paul Caponigro and Minor White we could say:
Hovering above his head, has his spirit already begun to leave his body?
One reading of his gaze is that he is really interested in what the photographer is doing – almost the gaze of an apprentice wanting to apply these skills in the future.
Given his fate is he insane because of his interest?
What is really going on in his mind – what is his perspective?
Another reading could be as looking out to the future in the hope of finding that he will be judged in another way.
And another is the immediacy of his gaze – it is a gaze that is happening now!
The other thing that I find quite mysterious is the distance of the photographer from the subject.
Was it fear that stopped him getting any closer or are there deck fittings we cannot see that prevented his approach?
What brought Paine to this place?
Michel Foucault calls the methods and techniques through which human beings constitute themselves, “Technologies of the self.” Foucault argued that we as subjects are perpetually engaged in processes whereby we define and produce our own ethical self-understanding. According to Foucault, technologies of the self are the forms of knowledge and strategies that “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of immortality.”1
As we look into his eyes he knows that we know he is going to die, has already died but the intensity of that knowledge is brought into present time. What Paine emanates is a form of i-mortality.
I wonder, did Gardner ever show him the finished photographs before he died?
This is Barthes anterior future, a moment where truth is interpreted in the mind of the photographer, not out there but in here [points to head and heart], where past, present and future coalesce into single point in time – his death and our death are connected through his gaze, the knowledge of our discontinuity. Eons contracted into an eternal moment.
In this moment in time, what we are doing is we are making a list about the human condition when we talk about something that is remarkable. We are moving towards a language that defines the human condition…
But ultimately language can never fully describe the human condition, much as it may try… and this is why this photograph is remarkable, because it is ineffable, unknowable.
This photograph inhabits you, it haunts you like few others.
Early Wittgenstein described a world of facts pictured by thoughts. He said, “Don’t Think, But Look!”
I would add “Don’t think, but feel and look”
This photograph is a memoriam to a young man and his present death. As such it is a REMARKABLE photograph that haunts us all.
Dr Marcus Bunyan December 2012
1/ Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the self,” in L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton (eds.). Technologies of the self. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988,p. 18.
Postscript
George Cook (American, 1819-1902) Union ironclads firing on Fort Moultrie, S.C., (detail) 8th September 1863
“On the highest point of the battered dust heap that was the still untaken fortress of Sumter. the Confederate photographer, Cook, planted his camera on September 8, 1863, and took the first photograph of ironclads in action – the monitors W’echaten. Montauk and Passaic. as they were actually firing on the Confederate batteries at Fort Moultrie. The three low-freeboarded vessels, lying almost bows-on, at the distance of nearly two miles, look like great iron buoys in the channel, but the smoke from their heavy guns is drifting over the water, and the flames can almost be seen leaping from the turret ports. Although Fort Moultrie was the aim of their gunners, Cook, with his head under the dark cloth, saw on the ground glass a shell passing within a few feet of him. Another shell knocked one of plate-holders off the parapet into the rain-water cistern. He gave a soldier five dollars to fish it out for him. He got his picture – and was ordered off the parapet, since he was drawing upon the fort the fire of all the Union batteries on Morris Island. It seems incredible that such a daring photographic feat, and one of such historic interest, could have remained unpublished for nearly half a century – until one recalls the absence of any satisfactory method for reproducing photographs direct during the generation succeeding the war. Before photo-engraving became perfected, thirty years or more had passed, and most of the few negatives taken by Confederates had vanished through fire, loss, and breakage. Fortunately, this has been preserved one of the most vivid of any war.”
Francis Trevelyan Miller. “First Preface: Photographing The Civil War,” in The Photographic History of The Civil War In Ten Volumes. New York: The Review of Reviews, 1911, p. 24.
George Cook (American, 1819-1902) Union ironclads firing on Fort Moultrie, S.C., 8th September 1863 Photo courtesy of the Cook Collection, Valentine Richmond History
George Cook’s photograph of Union ironclads firing on Fort Moultrie, S.C., believed to be the world’s first combat photograph. Monitors engage Confederate batteries on Sullivan’s Island, Charleston, South Carolina. Photographed from one of the Confederate emplacements, the ships are identified as (from left to right): Weehawken, Montauk and Passaic. The monitor on the right appears to be firing its guns. Date is given as 8 September 1863, when other U.S. Navy ships were providing cover for Weehawken, which had gone aground on the previous day. She was refloated on the 8th after receiving heavy gunfire from the Confederate fortifications.
Kilburn Brothers (Edward and Benjamin Kilburn, American) Four monitors laid up in the Anacostia River, off the Washington Navy Yard c. 1866 Ships are (from left to right): USS Mahopac, USS Saugus, USS Montauk (probably), and either USS Casco or USS Chimo Photo mounted on a stereograph card, marked: “Photographed and published by Kilburn Brothers, Littleton, N.H.”
Anonymous photographer ‘Montauk’ at left, and ‘Lehigh’ at right, laid up at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania c. late 1902 or early 1903 U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph
Anonymous photographer Saugus, in Trent’s Reach on the James River, Virginia c. early 1865 Note the mine sweeping “rake” attached to her bow U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph
Anonymous photographer Officers pose on deck of the Saugus, in front of the gun turret, probably while the ship was serving on the James River, Virginia c. early 1865 Note ship’s bell and other details of the turret and deck fittings U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph
The glorious paintings of Fritz Winter show a beautiful synergy with the abstract photographs. The relationship between painting and photography has always been a symbiotic one, a close mutualist relationship that has benefited both art forms.
This is fully evidenced in this outstanding posting, where I have tried to sequence the artworks to reflect the nature of their individuality and their interdependence.
Great blessings on the curators that assembled this exhibition: an inspired concept!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In his lesser known early work, the German painter Fritz Winter (1905-1976) made an obsessive analysis of the aesthetic aspects of light. As a Bauhaus student he was influenced by the international avant-garde’s boundless euphoria for light between Expressionism and Constructivism. The light of large cities with headlights, cinemas and illuminated advertisements gave a new impulse to aesthetics; x-rays, radioactivity and microphotography made it possible to perceive previously unknown sources of energy and natural phenomena.
In his pictures of light beams and crystals created in 1934-1936, Winter devoted himself with virtuosity to aspects such as the reflection, radiation and refraction of light. His virtually monochrome paintings incorporate crystal shapes and bundles of rays; they focus on the earth’s interior and the infinite expanse of the cosmos; they block the pictorial space with dark grids or lend it a glass-like transparency.
For the first time, 25 Licht-Bilder by Fritz Winter will be juxtaposed with an international selection of 40 of the earliest abstract photographs in history of art. In the 1910s to 1930s artists experimented with the most varied of photographic techniques to ascertain the genuine qualities of photography beyond the merely representative. The New Vision in photography and abstract painting become immediately obvious through the display of vintage prints and paintings side by side.
The exhibition combines 25 exceptional paintings by Fritz Winter from German museums and private collections as well as 40 international lenders of photographic works including Centre Pompidou, Paris, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Neue Galerie Kassel, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Munich and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website
Exhibition dates: 5th September – 2nd December, 2012
Curator: Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Director of the Albertina
Ishiuchi Miyako (Japanese, b. 1947) 1906#38 Nd Courtesy by The Third Gallery Aya
“The past neglect of the body in social theory was a product of Western mind-body dualism that divided human experience into bodily and cognitive realms. The knowledge-body distinction identifies knowledge, culture, and reason with masculinity and identifies body, nature, and emotion with femininity. Viewing human reason as the principal source of progress and emancipation, it perceives “the rational” as separate from, and exalted over, the corporeal. In other words, consciousness was grasped as separate from and preceding the body (Bordo 1993; Davis 1997). Following feminist thinking about women’s bodies in patriarchal societies, contemporary social theories shifted focus from cognitive dimensions of identity construction to embodiment in the constitution of identities (Davis 1997). Social construction theories do not view the body as a biological given but as constituted in the intersection of discourse, social institutions, and the corporeality of the body. Body practices, therefore, reflect the basic values and themes of the society, and an analysis of the body can expose the intersubjective meaning common to society. At the same time, discourse and social institutions are produced and reproduced only through bodies and their techniques (Frank 1991, 91). Thus, social analysis has expanded from studying the body as an object of social control and discipline “in order to legitimate different regimes of domination” (Bordo 1993; Foucault 1975, 1978, 1980) to perceiving it as a subject that creates meaning and performs social action (Butler 1990). The body is understood as a means for self-expression, an important feature in a person’s identity project (Giddens 1991), and a site for social subversiveness and self-empowerment (Davis 1997).”
Orna Sasson-Levy and Tamar Rapoport. “Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements: The Israeli Case,” in ‘Gender & Society’ 17, 2003, p. 381. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Despite my great admiration for John Coplans’ photographs of his body, on the evidence of these press photographs and the attached video, this exhibition seems a beautiful if rather tame affair considering the subject matter.
Of course these photographs of the body can be understood as a means for self-expression and self-empowerment but there seems little social subversiveness in the choice of work on display.
The two Mapplethorpe’s are stylised instead of stonkingly subversive. The exhibition could have been taken photographs from his ‘X’ portfolio (the self portrait of him with a bull whip up his arse would have been particularly pleasing to see in this context). The exhibition could also have included some of the many artists using the body as protest during the AIDS crisis (perhaps some photographs by David Wojnarowicz or William Yang’s Sadness), the famous Burning Monk – The Self-Immolation (1963) by Malcolm Browne, photographs by Stellarc, Arthur Tress, Duane Michals, Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman to name but a few; even the Farm Security Administration photographs of share cropper families by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange would have had more impact than some of the photographs on display here.
Having not seen the entire exhibition it is hard to give an overall reading, but on the selection presented here it would seem that this was a missed opportunity, an exhibition where the body did not protest enough.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Albertina, Vienna for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
John Coplans (British, 1920-2003) Self Portrait Interlocking Fingers No 6 1999 Silver gelatin paper Albertina, Wien
The exhibition The Body as Protest highlights the photographic representation of the human body – a motif that has provided a wide variety of photographers with an often radical means of expression for their visual protest against social, political, but also aesthetic norms.
The show centres on an outstanding group of works by the artist John Coplans from the holdings of the Albertina. In his serially conceived large-format pictures, the photographer focused on the rendering of his own nude body, which he defamiliarised through fragmentation far from current forms of idealisation. Relying on extremely sophisticated lighting, he presented himself in a monumental and sculptural manner over many years. His photographs can be understood as amalgamations of theoretical and artistic ideas, which in the show are accentuated through selective juxtapositions with works by other important exponents of body-related art.
The body also features prominently in the work of other artists such as Hannah Wilke, Ketty La Rocca, Hannah Villiger, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Miyako Ishiuchi. By means of these positions, such diverse themes as self-dramatisation, conceptual photography, feminism, body language, and even transience are analysed within an expanded artistic range. Moreover, the exhibition offers a differentiated view of the critical depiction of the human body as it has been practiced since 1970.
Text from the Albertina website
Ketty La Rocca (Italian, 1938-1976) Craniologia 1973 Radiografie mit überblendeter Fotografie SAMMLUNG VERBUND
![Andrea Bruce (American, b. 1973) 'Untitled [A father home on leave reading the newspaper with his son, who wears his dad’s helmet]' 2006](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/andrea-bruce.jpg "Andrea Bruce (American, b. 1973) 'Untitled [A father home on leave reading the newspaper with his son, who wears his dad’s helmet]' 2006")
![Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869) 'The artist's van [Marcus Sparling, full-length portrait, seated on Roger Fenton's photographic van]' 1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/roger_fentons_waggon2.jpg "Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869) 'The artist's van [Marcus Sparling, full-length portrait, seated on Roger Fenton's photographic van]' 1855")
![T.E. Lawrence. 'Untitled [A Tulip bomb explodes on the railway Hejaz Railway, near Deraa, Hejaz, Ottoman Empire]' 1918](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/lawrence-a-tulip-bomb-explodes-on-the-railway-hejaz-railway.jpg)
![Fritz Winter (German, 1905-1976) 'Stufungen [Gradations]' 1934](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/fritz-winter-stufungen-1934-web.jpg "Fritz Winter (German, 1905-1976) 'Stufungen [Gradations]' 1934")
![Fritz Winter (German, 1905-1976) 'Weiß in Schwarz [White in Black]' 1934](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/fritz-winter-weic39f-in-schwarz-1934-web.jpg "Fritz Winter (German, 1905-1976) 'Weiß in Schwarz [White in Black]' 1934")
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