Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
With this retrospective of the work of Walker Evans (1903-1975) Fotomuseum Winterthur presents one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent photographers. His lucid and detailed portrayals of American life, especially his images of rural poverty during the Great Depression, made photographic history and went on to influence countless photographers. Walker Evans took an extremely innovative approach, capturing the very essence of the American way of life.
The exhibition, featuring some 120 works (the majority of which are from the most important private collection of Walker Evans’ works) represents every phase of his career: his early street photographs of the 1920s, his poignant documentation of 1930s America and pre-revolutionary Cuba, his landscapes and architectural photography, his subway portraits, storefronts, signage, the later colour Polaroids and more besides. As early as the 1930s, Walker Evans, in a departure from conventional notions of art and style, sought a new direct approach to reality. It is this that makes him a truly modern photographer.
The exhibition was curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim and Carlos Gollonet. Realisation in Winterthur: Urs Stahel. A cooperation with the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.
With this major retrospective of the work of Walker Evans (1903-1975) Fotomuseum Winterthur pays homage to one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent photographers. His insightful and detailed portrayals of American life, especially his images of rural poverty during the Great Depression, made photographic history and went on to influence countless photographers. The 130 works in this retrospective exhibition represent every phase of his career: his early street photographs of the 1920s, his poignant documentation of 1930s America and pre-revolutionary Cuba, his landscapes and architectural photography, his subway portraits, storefronts, signage, and more besides.
On his return from France, where he had tried unsuccessfully to launch a literary career inspired by his love of Flaubert and Baudelaire, Walker Evans turned to photography. From the very start, with his keen eye for street life and the visual freshness of his unexpected slant on what he saw, his work spoke the language of European Modernism. But it was not long before Evans found his true voice – and it was at once profoundly personal and unequivocally American.
Some years before, the direct, undistorted and innovative gaze of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), whose work Evans knew and admired, had quietly paved the way for the split between documentary auteur photography and the purely descriptive photographic tradition. Atget’s unconventional angles, his de-centralised view and his focus on the seemingly trivial all had a major impact on Evans.
Walker Evans’ work is a far remove from what had, until then, been accepted as art photography. He was not interested in superficial beauty, but in a new objectivity. He subscribed to a style that observed undistorted facts and sought to capture things precisely as they were, seemingly without intervention, emotion or idealisation. For the first time in art photography, there were such unusual subjects as a pair of old boots or a subway passenger lost in thought. The artistic quality was based solely on the clarity, intelligence and authenticity of the photographer’s gaze. In this, Walker Evans’ oeuvre represents both a high point and a turning point in the formal and visual evolution of photography.
As the creator of this new, direct style, often referred to as straight photography, which drew upon scenes of sometimes blatant banality and rolled back the boundaries between the ‘important’ and the ‘trivial’, Walker Evans introduced the aesthetics of Modernism into American photography. This seemingly cold detachment spawned a style rich in expressive substance that was not only capable of embracing the lyricism and complexity of the American tradition, but of doing so without a trace of false romanticism, sentimentality or nostalgia. At long last, there was a forward-looking and enduring alternative to the traditional conventions of photography.
Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website [Online] Cited 05/06/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Curator: Karen Haas, The Lane Collection Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Palma Cuernavaca 1925 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 24.4 x 16.5cm (9 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
What a privilege to be able to post these photographs that appear in the exhibition. Breathe, look, enjoy!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Desde la Azotea 1924 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.4 x 24.4cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In the decades following the Revolution of 1910, foreign artists and intellectuals flocked to Mexico in order to experience its warm climate and lively cultural scene. They were inspired by Mexico‘s exotic tropical landscape, its ancient monuments and colonial architecture, the work of its modern muralists, and the country‘s indigenous arts and crafts. During two extended trips to Mexico made between 1923 and 1926, American photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) created some of his earliest modernist photographs, which form the core of the exhibition, Viva Mexico! Edward Weston and His Contemporaries, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Featured are approximately 45 works, among them about 30 rare photographs by Weston and selected images by Tina Modotti, Brett Weston, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Paul Strand. These photographs from the 1920s and ’30s are drawn from the Museum’s own collection, as well as The Lane Collection, which is on long-term loan to the MFA. Additionally, a compelling 1939 portrait of Frida Kahlo by Hungarian-born photographer Nickolas Muray has been lent from a local private collection. Viva Mexico! is on view May 30 through November 2 in the MFA’s Herb Ritts Gallery.
“Viva Mexico! highlights Weston’s pivotal years in this highly creative environment, which had a lasting impact on his work and inspired some of his earliest experiments in still life, landscape, and cloud studies,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. “This exhibition allows us to focus on a critical juncture in Weston’s career, and to present one of the strengths of The Lane Collection – its holdings of the photographer’s early modernist work.”
The Lane Collection, which includes gifts and loans to the MFA, comprises modern American paintings, photographs, and works on paper assembled by the late William H. Lane and his wife, Saundra B. Lane, a Trustee of the MFA. During the late 1960s, the Lanes acquired a large number of Weston’s vintage photographs, which are now widely acknowledged to be the most important collection of the photographer’s work in private hands.
“Acquiring more than 2,000 Edward Weston photographs directly from his sons was an amazing learning experience for us and we were thrilled to be able to immerse ourselves in the work of such a major artist in such great depth,” said collector Saundra Lane. “The Mexico pictures by Edward, Brett, and Tina Modotti are some of my personal favourites. These works inspired me to more recently acquire two early Manuel Alvarez Bravo photographs, El soñador (The Dreamer) and Nude, included in the exhibition, each of them a quintessentially Mexican subject and clearly made under the influence of Weston and Modotti.”
In an early biography of Edward Weston, writer and editor Nancy Newhall described Mexico as his “Paris,” the place where he greatly expanded his range as an artist. His total of more-than two years in Mexico – Weston’s only travel outside the US – offered him the opportunity to move away from his Pictorialist style, with its soft focus and ethereal, romantic qualities, toward more abstract forms and sharper resolution of detail. Heroic portrait heads, avant-garde nudes, urban views, cloud studies and landscapes, and images of Mexican toys and folk art are among the subjects he captured with his large-format camera. This period of experimentation with isolated objects also resulted in some of Weston’s earliest forays into still life, as can be seen in Chayotes (1924), a close-up of the beautiful, spiny squash arranged in a painted wooden bowl.
In 1923, Weston made the difficult decision to close his portrait photography studio in Tropico (now Glendale), California, and move to Mexico, as he wrote in his journal – to start life anew. He left behind his wife and three of his four young sons and traveled to Mexico City with his lover, Italian-born actress Tina Modotti (1896-1942) and his oldest son Chandler. Modotti ran Weston’s new studio, served as his translator and muse, and under his tutelage began to make highly accomplished photographs of her own. Together they became immersed in the vibrant community of artists and intellectuals centred there, which included painters Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Xavier Guerrero, and Rafael Salas, as well as the poet Luis Quintanilla, writer D.H. Lawrence, anthropologist Frances Toor, and journalist Carleton Beals. Although Weston and Modotti always remained outsiders looking in, the several exhibitions of their work during their Mexican sojourn helped spark a lively interest in modernist photography in their adopted country, where until this time photography had been admired mainly as a documentary tool, rather than a fine art.
“This exhibition will be a wonderful opportunity for our visitors to experience Weston’s stunning Mexican photographs firsthand, many of which are rarely seen platinum prints taken in the period just before he made his classic black-and-white images of peppers and shells,” said Karen Haas, The Lane Collection Curator of Photographs, who organised Viva Mexico! “These rich, warm-toned prints, when seen in context with photographs by his contemporaries in Mexico during the 1920s and ’30s, promise to be a revelation even to those who know Weston’s work well.”
Many of the earliest images that Weston produced in Mexico were portraits and nudes, both subjects that he had specialised in previously but now took on a very different look and feel. Soon after his arrival, he began a series of monumental portraits of friends and acquaintances, all of them shot very close-up and from slightly below eye level, their heads filling the picture frame and their features heroicised. These include Galván Shooting (1924), Tina Modotti (1924), Victoria Marin (1926), and Rose Roland Covarrubias (1926). He also made a stunning group of nudes of Modotti posing on their sun-baked rooftop patio, all three of which he titled Tina on the Azotea (1924), as well as an incredibly simple and sculptural image, Nude (1926) of fellow American expatriate Anita Brenner. The Brenner nude, along with Palma Cuernavaca (1925), Aqueduct (1924), and Excusado (1925) all share a similarly stark, abstract, and timeless quality – what Weston described as an attempt to render “the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.”
Abstract architectural details began to make their way into Weston’s work as well and he was drawn to capture light and shadow on a variety of surfaces, from the zigzag stone patterns of the ancient Ruinas de Mitla (1926) to the angled forms of the convent stairwell and skylight in San Pedro y San Pablo (1924). Viva Mexico! also showcases Weston’s experimentation with landscape photography, both urban and rural. The striking view from his studio roof is recorded in Desde la Azotea (1924), in which the geometry of the buildings below is heightened by the elevated vantage point and steeply raking light, and in Michoacán (1926), where he captures the beautifully undulating silhouette of the pastoral countryside. Much less common among his subjects from this period are some of Weston’s little-known photographs made in outdoor markets and fairs, such as Mercado, Oaxaca (1926) and Bowls, Oaxaca (1926). These open-air street images closely relate to another group of pictures, including Torito (1925), a playful little papier-maché bull, and Fish Gourd and Striped Serape (1926), which reflect Weston’s newfound interest in the vernacular Mexican toys and folk objects that he collected and lovingly documented in his studio while waiting for clients to arrive for portrait sittings. These whimsical photographs also serve as fascinating precursors to Weston’s high modernist still lifes of less than a decade later.
Over the course of her time in Mexico, Modotti rapidly went from photographer’s apprentice and model to fine art photographer in her own right. Although her career as a photographer was relatively brief, her powerful pictures from this period sometimes rival those of her lover and teacher, Edward Weston. Modotti was a rare woman in a mostly male profession, but she brought to her work a deep-seated interest in the people and the politics of Mexico in the 1920s. Unlike Weston, who preferred to work in the studio rather than the street, Modotti straddled the worlds of fine art photography and radical social activism. Her commitment to the struggles of the people can be seen in her iconic Worker’s Hands (1927), and her fascination with Mexico’s public demonstrations and celebrations is captured in Effigies of Judas (1924). She was so impassioned by these causes, in fact, that Modotti joined the Communist party and continued to work in Mexico for several years after Weston finally returned home in 1926. Before he left for California, however, Weston and Modotti collaborated on a photographic commission to illustrate a book on Mexican history and culture entitled Idols Behind Altars, which was written by their friend Anita Brenner and published in 1929. A copy of the book is among the case materials featured in the exhibition, as is American photographer Laura Gilpin’s book, Temples in Yucatan: A Camera Chronicle of Chichén Itzá (1948), which showcases her pictures of the ancient Mayan ruins taken during her two trips there in the early 1930s and mid ’40s.
Viva Mexico! also offers visitors to the MFA a rare chance to see some of Brett Weston’s (1911-1993) earliest serious photographs made during Edward Weston’s second extended trip to Mexico in 1925 and 1926 (after an eight-month-long hiatus in California). The second eldest of Weston’s four sons was only 14 years old when he accompanied his father to Mexico City and went with him to live in the house and studio that Weston shared with Modotti. Rather than the large-format camera and platinum prints that his father preferred, Brett Weston was given a 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 Graflex camera and printed his pictures on less expensive gelatin silver papers, which captured the precise detail and texture that his father admired in his work. The boy quickly fell under the spell of photography and his time in Mexico proved to be an ideal preparation for his own future as a professional photographer. Two of Brett Weston’s highly abstract architectural views, Tin rooftops (1926) and Ventilator (1926), are on view in the exhibition.
The only Mexican-born artist in the exhibition, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002), is represented with three works, El soñador (The Dreamer) (1931), Nude (1935), and Las lavanderas sobreentendidas (Washerwomen Implied), Draped Yucca Plants, Mexico (1932). As a young, aspiring photographer in Mexico City, Bravo first met Modotti in 1927, soon after Weston’s departure. He was greatly inspired by the look and spirit of Modotti’s work as well as the Weston prints that she shared with him. Bravo is perhaps best-known for the stunning female nudes that he made over the course of his long career, but Viva Mexico! features a rare male figure study, Nude (1935). With its androgynous curves and simplified form, it clearly relates to Weston’s nudes of his son Neil made a decade earlier. Bravo’s photographs always have a profoundly Mexican essence to them, but especially during the 1920s and ’30s; they also demonstrate the influence of the European Surrealists as can be seen in the slightly unsettling, yet lovely work El soñador (The Dreamer).“
Viva Mexico! also showcases the work of American photographer and documentary filmmaker Paul Strand (1890-1976), who lived in Mexico during the mid-1930s. Although he and Weston had met in New York in 1922 and were aware of each other’s careers, their sojourns in Mexico did not coincide. The situation that Strand found on crossing the border in 1932 was very different than the more optimistic period of cultural Renaissance that Weston had experienced during the mid-1920s. Like Modotti, whose social concerns and unsentimental approach he shared, Strand was inspired to make portraits of Mexico’s indigenous peoples and the country’s dramatic landscapes. Landscape, Near Saltillo (1932) was one of the earliest images Strand shot in Mexico; taken in the north of the country on his initial trip down to Mexico City, it features the glowing white form of an adobe building set off by spiny, tall cacti and a vast expanse of sky. Also on view is Día de Fiesta (1933), a starkly simple image of three men and a child standing against a sunlit wall, which was made just prior to the production of Redes (Nets, or The Wave, in the US), his documentary film focusing on the struggles of a group of fisherman near Veracruz.”
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [Online] Cited 03/06/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Chayotes 1924 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.4 x 24.3cm (7 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Ruinas de Mitla 1926 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.1 x 24.1cm (7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) San Pedro y San Pablo 1924 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.4 x 24.4cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina on the Azotea, with kimono 1924 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 16.2 x 23.8cm (6 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina On The Azotea c. 1924 Palladium print Sheet: 22.2 x 17.5cm (8 3/4 x 6 7/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina Modotti 1924 Palladium print Sheet: 22.7 x 17cm (8 15/16 x 6 11/16 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life, bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam, combined with steel and wire and pollen to make up your firm and delicate being.
Part of Modotti’s epitaph which can be found on her tombstone, composed by Pablo Neruda
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Galván Shooting (Manuel Hernández Galván, Mexico) 1924 Gelatin silver print 22.5 x 18.7cm (8 7/8 x 7 3/8 in.) Mary L. Smith Fund Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Rosa Rolanda (de Covarrubias) 1926 Gelatin silver print 21.9 x 16.5 cm (8 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.) Sophie M. Friedman Fund Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Excusado (Toilet) 1925 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 24.3 x 19.1cm (9 9/16 x 7 1/2 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Tina Modotti (American born Italy, died Mexico, 1896-1942) Manos de trabajador, Mexico (Worker’s Hands, Mexico) 1927 Gelatin silver print 19.2 x 21.7cm (7 9/16 x 8 9/16 in.) Sophie M. Friedman Fund Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Tina Modotti’s closely cropped picture of a worker’s dusty hands conveys the realities of hard work. In 1923, the Italian-born film actress accompanied her lover, photographer Edward Weston, to Mexico City, where Weston taught her to use a large-format camera. She worked as his studio assistant, quickly mastering the technique and making striking portraits, close-up images of flowers, and still lifes of her own. Modotti’s compassion for the indigenous culture and political struggles of the Mexican people led her to join the Communist Party in 1927 and to focus on socially concerned subjects, using her camera as a tool to document the proud faces and weathered hands of the peasant labourers, artisans, and revolutionaries of her adopted country.
Text from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website
Screenshot
Tina Modotti (American born in Italy, died in Mexico, 1896-1942) Hands Washing 1927 Gelatin silver print
Tina Modotti (American born Italy, died Mexico, 1896-1942) Effigies of Judas 1924 Gelatin silver print
Perhaps it’s just me, but I seem to have become a little jaded towards the recent photographs of William Eggleston.
Other than the green reflection of lights in rainwater (above) the photographs seem to have lost their unique voice, the social insight that gave his earlier work it’s zing – provocative images that challenged how we live through a meditation on subject matter, construction of space, and tone of “colour”. How the colour that surrounds us inflects our very being.
In these photographs it feels like there has been little development in his style over the years with a consequent lessening of their visual impact. Now Eggleston’s colour just feels like a party trick, performed by rote with little consequential meaning to either the colour or the image. Perhaps the way we look at the world (and how we picture it) has finally overtaken the director’s prescient creative vision – his auteurship, his authorship.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fondation Cartier for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.
“In Eggleston’s best work, the work that made him famous, color is intrinsic to the meaning of the photograph. Its not simply a garnish to draw the eye. His best photographs are not ‘about’ the color; they are about larger issues that the color is used in the service of. This is what’s missing in his Paris pictures. The color here is pure ornament, eye candy to seduce you into forgetting that the picture has nothing to say.”
Anonymous. “William Eggleston Mails It In From Paris,” on the Leicaphilia website April 21, 2014 [Online] Cited 06/02/2019. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
For the last three years, American photographer William Eggleston has photographed the city of Paris as part of a commission for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Taken throughout different seasons, these new images by one of the fathers of colour photography portray the local and the cosmopolitan, the glamorous and the gritty, the everyday and the extraordinary.
This exhibition also provides an exceptional occasion to bring together William Eggleston’s distinctive pictures and his recent paintings, an unknown aspect of his work that has never before been presented to the public.
William Eggleston’s recent book Paris, published by Steidl and commissioned by FoundationCartier, is a collective body of work that comprises his oeuvre of color drawings and recent Paris photographs. Similar to Ben Shahn, Charles Scheeler, Diego Rivera, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha, Eggleston has reached out beyond photography to express his creative talents.
The photographs and drawings are intertwined throughout the book, creating an interesting visual cadence. The page spreads illustrate various layout designs, including a single image of either a photograph or drawing on a spread, pairs of drawings and photographs and pairs of drawing facing a photograph. All of the drawings and photographs are contained within the boundaries of the page. …
We know mostly of Eggleston’s photographs, but from the dating on one of the drawings included in this book, we can determine that Eggleston has been working with the drawing medium since 1968. It is interesting to speculate as to how one medium may have influenced the other for Eggleston. As an example, the earlier photographs by Shahn and Scheeler seem to have had an influence on how these two artists subsequently worked their framing, pictorial space, mass & line quality in their subsequent paintings.
The Paris photographs that Eggleston made of graffiti or his tight framing in conjunction with a longer lens to compress the pictorial space are visually similar in style to his drawings. The subjects he photographs are framed to create similar vibrant color masses and lines as his drawing, abstracting reality into basic graphic components. …
Eggleston’s photographs are constructed like spontaneous glances; partial views of what might be consider a traditional subject, creating color abstractions of lines, patterns and mass. Trees, pipes, people, walls, garbage, décor, wall paper, display windows are bisected and truncated, with edges and lines following out of the photographs borders. These images seem to be created by a restless and nervous energy.
With these drawings, paintings and photographs, Eggleston shows a interesting handling of these mediums and offers an insight as to how influential the period of Abstract Expressionism is to his photographic process.
Extract from Douglas Stockdale. “William Eggleston – Paris,” on The PhotoBook Journal website September 12, 2009 [Online] Cited 06/02/2019. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Drawn from the Artist Rooms collection, which was assembled and conceived by the prominent art dealer and collector Anthony d’Offay
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Tattooed Man at a Carnival, Md. 1970 Gelatin silver print 15 x 14 5/8 in. (38.3 x 37.3 cm)
Diane Arbus is one of my favourite photographs – how I would love to see this exhibition!
I have posted some photographs from the exhibition, including all ten images from the Box of Ten 1971 that features in the show.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Museum of Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A young man with curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966 Gelatin silver print
One of National Museum Cardiff’s main art exhibitions in 2009 reveals the work of legendary New York photographer Diane Arbus (1923 -1971), who transformed the art of photography. Diane Arbus, which comprises 69 black and white photographs including the rare and important portfolio of ten vintage prints: Box of Ten, 1971, is one of the best collections of Arbus’s work in existence. A large selection of these images will be on display at the Museum from 9 May until 31 August 2009.
Capturing 1950s and 1960s America, Arbus is renowned for portraits of people who were then classed on the outskirts of society nudists, transvestites, circus performers and zealots. In one of her most famous works, Identical Twins, Roselle, NJ of 1967, the twins are photographed as if joined at the shoulder and hip with only three arms between them.
Her powerful, sometimes controversial, images often frame the familiar as strange and the strange or exotic as familiar. This singular vision and her ability to engage in such an uncompromising way with her subjects has made Arbus one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century.
This singular vision and her ability to engage in such an uncompromising way with her subjects has made Arbus one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century.
Text from the National Museum of Cardiff website [Online] Cited 18/05/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A Jewish Giant at home with his parents in the Bronx 1967 Gelatin silver print
From 1969 to 1971 Arbus was absorbed in the creation of a limited edition portfolio, A box of ten photographs. The portfolio was intended to present her work as an artist in the manner of the special print editions offered by new artists’ presses such as Crown Point and Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). This group of pictures and its presentation was a very conscious statement of what she stood for, and how she regarded her own photography. The pictures range from the relatively early ones of the Nudists in their summer home and Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I., both of 1963; through the now iconic Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967 and Westchester Couple sunning themselves on their lawn, to the later pictures of the Jewish giant, the Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. and the King and Queen of a senior citizens’ dance, N.Y.C., all of 1970. There is clearly an attempt to be representative of the general idea, the larger plan behind her work. There is also a significant stylistic range, from the graceful daylight in the picture of the older couple in the nudist camp, to the later picture of the elderly king and queen, whom she photographed with sharp flash. She included Xmas tree, a work without human subjects. The prints for this portfolio were selected three years after the New Documents exhibition, before there was thought of another show. But the pictures constituted a kind of exhibition in and of themselves, to be examined one at a time, rather than all at once. From her letters, we know that the idea of a clear box was very important; it was to serve as both a container and a display case allowing the owner to reorder and display the pictures easily. Just as she had wanted the black border of the print to show in the New Documents exhibition, here she wished to exhibit the entire print as it appeared on the photographic paper …
Most of the pictures in the portfolio either depict families or refer to the family. Even the corner of the cellophane-looking room in Levittown is made by peering over the two outstretched arms of a family armchair, posed like the trousered knees of the empty chair in the picture of the Jewish giant. The idea of the family album was a private but expressive metaphor for her. As in a family album, each member is part of the larger group; they are related, perhaps even tolerated, and harmony may be rare and perhaps even uninteresting. But they are all considered with the same intelligent and human regard. She photographed the Jewish giant as a mythic figure, enclosed in a modest Bronx living room, an unconventional member of an otherwise conventional family: ‘I know a Jewish giant who lives in Washington Heights or the Bronx with his little parents. He is tragic with a curious bitter somewhat stupid wit. The parents are orthodox and repressive and classic and disapprove of his carnival career…They are truly a metaphorical family. When he stands with his arms around each he looks like he would gladly crush them. They fight terribly in an utterly typical fashion which seems only exaggerated by their tragedy… Arrogant, anguished, even silly.’
Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from the book Diane Arbus Revelations.1
1/ Phillips, Sandra. “The Question of Belief,” in Diane Arbus Revelations. London: Random House, 2003, pp. 66-67.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970 Gelatin silver print
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1963 Gelatin silver print
Exhibition dates: Grey Art Gallery, 12th May – 18th July, 2009; International Center of Photography, 15th May – 6th September, 2009
Fantastic to see such a talented artist, a truly ground-breaking artist, get the recognition he so richly deserves!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to both galleries for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Grey Art Gallery
John Wood (American, 1922-2012) Untitled 1986-1989 Stained gelatin silver print from paper stencil
John Wood (American, 1922-2012) Beach Drawing 1983 Gelatin silver print 14 15/16 x 19 1/8″ (37.8 x 48.5cm)
John Wood: On the Edge of Clear Meaning, on view at the Grey Art Gallery from May 12 through July 18, 2009, is the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date. Featuring the full range of his career from the 1960s to the present, the show includes over 150 photographs, mixed-media works, and artists’ books. A selection of Wood’s photomontages, Quiet Protest, will be on view concurrently at the International Center of Photography.
John Wood (born 1922) has consistently challenged traditional photography, often incorporating painting, drawing, and collage as well as cliché verre, solarisation, and offset lithography. The artist emphasises the role of drawing in his work: “Mark making, calligraphy, the kinetic motion of the movement of the hand, are very important to me; probably more important than anything else.” Transgressing the boundaries of “pure photography,” his eclectic practice has helped usher in alternative approaches to the medium. With their adroit manipulations of picture and text, his diaristic, multi-media compositions anticipate today’s digital imagery. On the Edge of Clear Meaning is Wood’s first museum retrospective, spanning his career from the early 1960s to the present.
His early childhood was marked by the Depression, and his family moved frequently. After serving in the Army Air Corps as a B-17 pilot during World War II, he enrolled at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Wood trained as a visual designer and photographer, studying with Harry Callahan and Art Sinsabaugh to hone both conceptual and formal issues in his work. He left Chicago to teach photography and printmaking at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University in Alfred, New York, where he would live for thirty-five years. He now resides in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife, Laurie Snyder, who teaches photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art. They migrate each summer to their home and studio in Ithaca, New York.
In keeping with the Grey Art Gallery’s tradition of presenting the work of under-represented artists, this exhibition introduces John Wood as a master of various multi-media processes and testifies to his insatiable curiosity about new materials and repeated use of favourite sources. Through disciplined but lively investigation of different media, the artist eroded traditional definitions of photography and produced work that is both powerful and subtle. As Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey, notes, “John Wood has been a life-long teacher, inspiring and training numerous students, artists, and arts professionals. We are honoured to bring the breadth of his work to New York City, home to many art schools, colleges, and universities.”
Text from the Grey Art Gallery website and press release [Online] Cited 10/05/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
John Wood (American, 1922-2012) Eagle Pelt 1985 Gelatin silver print 20 1/8 x 15 3/8″
John Wood (American, 1922-2012) Pear Tree, Cooling Tower, and Apples 1991 Collage, gelatin silver print, Polaroid SX70, and paper 19 1/4 x 15 3/8″
John Wood (American, 1922-2012) Blackbird, Some Have Hunger 1986 Collage, cyanotype, and graphite 20 x 24″
International Center of Photography
Quiet Protest is a series of photographic works by the noted mixed media artist and educator John Wood, spanning a period from the 1960s through the 1990s. Part of a larger retrospective at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, the “Quiet Protest” series explores political and social issues of the day through thoughtful photo montage pieces that exist in marked contrast to more traditional aggressive documentary photography. Rather than offering explanations or promoting solutions, Wood’s manipulated photographs present contemplative routes into issues ranging from the Vietnam War to domestic gun violence to ecological concerns. As Wood wrote in 1970, ” …maybe the time has come for creative photography to encompass the large problems without propaganda or journalism…”
Text from the International Center of Photography website [Online] Cited 10/05/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
John Wood (American, 1922-2012) Rifle, Bullets and Daises 1967
John Wood (American, 1922-2012) Triangle in the Landscape: Eleven Second 90 Degree Turn of a Paper Triangle August 6, 1985 (Hiroshima Day)
John Wood (American, 1922-2012)
John Cheney Wood (July 10, 1922 – July 20, 2012) was an American artist and educator who challenged traditional photography and often incorporated other mediums into his work. He was born in California in 1922. In 1943 he volunteered for the Army Air Corps, where he served as a B-17 pilot until 1945. At the time of his death he lived in Baltimore, Maryland, with artist Laurie Snyder.
Wood had the ability to work across a variety of artistic forms, from straight photography, collage, cliché verre, solarization, mixed media, offset lithography to drawing. Wood moved freely between conceptual and visual exploration, not adhering to a single style. Although he often raised questions about political, social and environmental issues, he avoided promoting personal solutions or adding narratives to the images. The artist instead preferred to focus on the viewer’s interpretation and the possibility for multiple meanings.
John Wood (American, 1922-2012) Loon, Drawer and Bomb 1987 Collage, cyanotype, and toned silver gelatin print
John Wood: On the Edge of Clear Meaning book cover
Book
In his introductory essay to this monograph – featuring the diverse photo practice that has characterised John Wood’s nearly 50-year career – David Levi Strauss states, “In photo-historical terms, Wood is thought of as one of those renegades who went against ‘pure photography’ by incorporating drawing, painting, collage and every other technique he could get his hands on (not to mention explicit political content), into his practice, thus ushering in the multi-media of the 1960s that caused crisis in ‘straight photography.’ Long before it became the signal medium of the avant-garde, collage was a folk art, practiced by children, lovers and grandmothers.” This comprehensive volume accompanies a retrospective that begins in Rochester, New York at The George Eastman House, The Memorial Art Gallery and the Visual Studies Workshop, then travels to The International Center for Photography and The Grey Art Gallery in New York before concluding at Syracus’ Light Work gallery.
John Wood: On the Edge of Clear Meaning by David Strauss et al (Hardcover) 2008
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York, NY 1945 Gelatin silver print
Further to my earlier posting about the passing of renowned New York photographer Helen Levitt comes this wonderful exhibition at the Laurence Miller Gallery in New York.
How I wish I were in that city to see it – what a joy!
Below is a selection of 1940s black-and-white photographs from the exhibition.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Laurence Miller Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Kids Dancing, New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Kids graffiti, New York c. 1938 Gelatin silver print
Laurence Miller Gallery will present a memorial tribute to Helen Levitt from May 9 – June 26, 2009. Helen Levitt passed away in her Greenwich Village home on March 29, at the age of 95. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, a show of her work entitled Passages, which Helen had approved, was already in the works, and her death caused a momentary pause in how to proceed. It was decided that Helen would not have wanted her passing to intrude upon best laid plans. Hence, guided by her spirit, we celebrate her legacy with this exhibition, her twelfth at Laurence Miller Gallery.
Helen Levitt: A Memorial Tribute will present a series of passages, in both colour and black-and-white, from her extraordinary 70-year career. Featured will be her pictures of animals, which were among her earliest as well as last pictures taken; a little-known series of portraits taken on the subway using Walker Evans’ camera; children’s street drawings; elderly folks in conversation; and children at play, the photographs for which she is most well-known. Helen Levitt’s classic and rarely seen silent film, In the Street, from 1948, will be shown as well.
One of the tribute’s highlights will be a selection of never-before-exhibited “first proofs.” These early documents of her working methods are often unique. Some are vintage, others were printed as late as the 1970’s, but all were printed by Helen in her bathroom that doubled as the darkroom. Often they are variants of iconic images, and often they are sequences of several shots taken at the same time. They all reveal the photographer’s “dance” as she observes boys climbing up a tree, a large family gathering on the front stoop, two men seated beside a curious cat, or four boys peering into a pool hall. In combination with the film In the Street, the early sequences reinforce her reputation as a cinematographer, and are genuine and valuable records of the working methods of a canny and poetic photographer.”
Text from the Laurence Miller Gallery website [Online] Cited 12/05/2009. No longer available online
In the Street 1948 Directed and edited by Helen Levitt Cinematography by NYC photographers James Agee, Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb Re-edited version rereleased by Levitt in 1952 with musical score by Arthur Kleiner 16mm film photographed in Harlem
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1942 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Three Girls Playing Dress Up, New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (1913-2009) short biography
Helen Levitt’s playful and poetic photographs, made over the course of sixty years on the streets of New York City, have delighted generations of photographers, students, collectors, curators, and lovers of art in general. The New York Times described her as: “a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York”. Throughout her long career, Helen Levitt’s photographs have consistently reflected her poetic vision, humour, and inventiveness as much as they have honestly portrayed her subjects – men, women, and children acting out a daily drama on the sidewalks and stoops of New York City’s tenements.
She shot and edited the film In the Street with Janice Loeb and James Agee, providing a moving portrait of her still photography. Levitt’s first major museum exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, and a second solo show, of colour work only, was held there in 1974. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at several museums: first in 1991, jointly at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; in 1997 at the International Center for Photography in New York; and in 2001 at the Centre National la Photographie in Paris.
In 2007 “Helen Levitt: Un Art de l’accident poetique” opened at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris; in 2008, the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany chose Ms. Levitt as the recipient for the Spectrum International Photography Prize which was accompanied by a major retrospective; and FOAM Museum Amsterdam, mounted another major retrospective in October, 2008. She was a 2008 recipient of the Francis Greenburger award for excellence in the arts.
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida with Olmeca Figurine, Coyoacan 1939 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Forty-seven exquisite colour and black-and-white photographs of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo by the American photographer Nickolas Muray are featured in this exhibition organised and circulated by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services. Muray and Kahlo first met in Mexico in 1931 and soon began a love affair that lasted ten years and continued as an enduring friendship throughout their lives. The photographs, selected from the Nickolas Muray Archives, capture the exotic mystery and proud beauty of Frida Kahlo through the eyes of this accomplished portrait photographer, who loved her deeply. Organised at the Albright-Knox by Associate Curator Holly E. Hughes, the exhibition will also include reproductions of Kahlo’s letters to Muray, explanatory wall texts, and an educational brochure.
Text from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery website [Online] Cited 01/05/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Many thankx to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida, Mexico, 1940 c. 1940 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida with her sister Cristina, Nickolas Muray, and Rosa Covarrubias, Coyoacán 1939 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida Painting the Two Fridas, Coyoacan 1939 Silver gelatin print
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida with Nick in her Studio, Coyoacán 1941 Silver gelatin print
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida with Magenta Rebozo, New York 1939 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida with Magenta Rebozo, New York 1939 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965)
In 1913, with the threat of war in Europe, Muray sailed to New York City, and was able to find work as a colour printer in Brooklyn.
By 1920, Muray had opened a portrait studio at his home in Greenwich Village, while still working at his union job as an engraver. In 1921 he received a commission from Harper’s Bazaar to do a portrait of the Broadway actress Florence Reed; soon after he was having photographs published each month in Harper’s Bazaar, and was able to give up his engraving job. In 1922 he also made a portrait of the dancer Desha Delteil.
Muray quickly became recognised as an important portrait photographer, and his subjects included most of the celebrities of New York City. In 1926, Vanity Fair sent Muray to London, Paris, and Berlin to photograph celebrities, and in 1929 hired him to photograph movie stars in Hollywood. He also did fashion and advertising work. Muray’s images were published in many other publications, including Vogue, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The New York Times.
Between 1920 and 1940, Muray made over 10,000 portraits. His 1938 portrait of Frida Kahlo, made while Kahlo sojourned in New York, attending her exhibit at the Julien Levy Gallery, became the best known and loved portrait made by Muray. Muray and Kahlo were at the height of a ten-year love affair in 1939 when the portrait was made. Their affair had started in 1931, after Muray was divorced from his second wife and shortly after Kahlo’s marriage to Mexican muralist painter Diego Rivera. It outlived Muray’s third marriage and Kahlo’s divorce and remarriage to Rivera by one year, ending in 1941. Muray wanted to marry, but when it became apparent that Kahlo wanted Muray as a lover, not a husband, Muray took his leave for good and married his fourth wife, Peggy Muray. He and Kahlo remained good friends until her death, in 1954.
After the market crash, Muray turned away from celebrity and theatrical portraiture, and become a pioneering commercial photographer, famous for his creation of many of the conventions of colour advertising. He was considered the master of the three-color carbro process. His last important public portraits were of Dwight David Eisenhower in the 1950s.
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida With Hand at Her Throat, Mexico City 1940 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida leaning on a sculpture by Mardonio Magaña, Coyoacán, Mexico 1940 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida in Pink and Green Blouse, Coyoacán 1938 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida on White Bench, New York 1939 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
An exhibition of photographs of the acclaimed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo taken by her friend and lover, the internationally renowned portrait photographer Nickolas Muray (1892-1965), will be on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery from May 8 through July 5, 2009. Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray, From the Collection of the Nickolas Muray Archives celebrates Kahlo’s life and work and comprises approximately fifty colour and black-and-white photographs, along with archival material, including excerpts from letters between Kahlo and Muray. The installation in Buffalo will feature Frida Kahlo’s Self- Portrait with Monkey, 1938, from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection.
Born in Hungary in 1892, Nickolas Muray came to the United States in 1913, marking the beginning of his forty-five-year career living and working in New York City. Originally hired by Condé Nast Publications to prepare illustrations for magazines, in 1920 Muray set up a photography studio at his home in Greenwich Village. Following an assignment in 1921 for Harper’s Bazaar magazine to photograph the Broadway star Florence Reed, Muray’s career as a portrait and celebrity photographer took off. Soon he was photographing “everybody who was anybody” and his work was regularly featured in such publications as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Ladies’ Home Journal.
Nickolas Muray and Frida Kahlo first met in Mexico in 1931 and soon began a love affair that lasted ten years and continued as a friendship that endured all their lives. The images included in this exhibition, dating from 1937 to 1940, were taken during the height of the couple’s on-again, off-again, ten-year love affair. The photographs included were selected from the Nickolas Muray Archives and capture the exotic mystery and proud beauty of Frida Kahlo through the eyes of this accomplished portrait photographer who loved her deeply.
Text from the Artdaily.org website
Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954) Self-Portrait with Monkey 1938 Oil on masonite 40.6 cm x 30.5cm (16.0 in x 12.0 in) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Of her 143 self-portraits, 55 include Kahlo’s pets. It is as though she saw them as an extension of her own self and being. Spider monkeys are known to have long, spindly legs and arms that look almost disproportionate to their body. Their strange appearance may have reflected Kahlo’s own discomfort with her physical body. Having contracted polio at an early age, she had one leg that was thinner than the other. She used colourful, large skirts to cover the disfigurement.
Kahlo doted on her pet monkeys. In her self-portraits, they are often shown sitting close to her, physically enfolding or grasping her in some way. They appear to be protective, friendly and gentle.
In many cultures, monkeys are used to symbolise lascivious, or primal behaviour. They are a mirror image of man, reminding him of his animal nature and close proximity to the natural world. Through monkeys, man sees his own connection to the animal kingdom with its uncontrollable, primal urges. In renaissance art, fettered monkeys were often used to symbolise men who are entrapped or bound by their desires.
In Kahlo’s paintings, monkeys do not appear in this way. They are more gentle, child-like and tender. Partially due to their wild natures, monkeys are often associated with fertility or lust in Mexican mythology. Kahlo’s trust and connection with her pets may have been in part due to her own feelings of inadequacy and frustration around her inability to carry to children. One of the reasons feminists celebrate Kahlo’s work is her unabashed claim to her own sexuality. She was not afraid to acknowledge her own sexual feelings or desires.
In Kahlo’s painting, the monkeys appear loyal. It feels as though Kahlo is connected with the creatures in some way. There is a bond there. Never the less, the monkeys also often appear by Kahlo’s shoulder or back, reflecting the image of a ‘monkey on your back’, a phrase commonly used to describe a problem or burden of some kind. With their association with animal nature, disfigured or primal humanity and lascivious primal urges, Kahlo may have felt at once supported by and burdened by her connection to her animal ancestors.
Extract from Kitty Jackson. “Symbolism in Art: Frida Kahlo – Self Portrait with Monkey,” on the ArtDependence Magazine website, September 4, 2017 [Online] Cited 20/01/2019. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida in Front of the Cactus Organ Fence, San Angel 1938 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida with Blue Satin Blouse, New York 1939 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Frida on Rooftop, New York 1946 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Cristina and Frida, New York 1946 Colour print, assembly (Carbro) process
Albright-Knox Art Gallery 1285 Elmwood Avenue Buffalo, New York 14222-1096
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm Closed Mondays, Tuesdays, and Independence, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Days
“Levitt’s superb lush colour photographs taken after 1970 engage the viewer not in memory but in the moment, not in nostalgia but in joy.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
“For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world … Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy …”
Charles Baudelaire. The Painter of Modern Life 1863
“At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”
James Agee
Speaking of pioneers of colour photography the wonderful American photographer Helen Levitt died recently at the end of March.
Here is a selection of her colour work from the 1970s – 1980s. With two Guggenheim Foundation grants in 1959 and 1960 she switched from black and white to colour dye-transfer prints photographing the theatre of the street, the serendipity of the decisive moment previsualised and captured through awareness and an intimate knowledge of her subject matter. Unfortunately in a burglary in 1970 most of her colour transparencies and prints were stolen from that initial period.
What remains, as Sally Mann would say, are the eloquent bones of the matter: superb lush colour photographs taken after 1970 that engage the viewer not in memory but in the moment, not in nostalgia but in joy.
In colour she found “beauty in correspondences.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
… Her pictures were mostly of Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. She shot them in black and white, as silver gelatin prints, in the 1930s and 1940s and in colour dye-transfer prints in the 1960s and 1970s. In between, she got into movie-making for a while. Her theme was the same, the streets of New York. Apart from a trip in 1941 to Mexico City, she never found a better subject in her life.
The grittier parts were her particular joy. Her world was run-down streets, rubble-filled building sites, warehouses and litter-strewn front steps. This was urban photography with a vengeance: small scraps of sky, no trees. When she was going with Walker Evans in 1938, borrowing his camera as well (“of course”) as sleeping with him, he used to be afraid of going as far uptown as she did. Some of her young male subjects, lounging around in their zoot suits and fedoras, had an unmistakable air of menace. But mostly she brought back images of gossiping women and her favourite, scrambling children. A right-angle viewfinder allowed her to take the picture without them knowing, even, as Evans showed her, when riding right beside them in the subway.
Here and there
Her birthplace was in Brooklyn, where her father was in the wholesale knitwear business. She aspired to something more artistic, but found she couldn’t draw. For a time she trained in ballet, which taught her to appreciate the musculature of posing bodies and the spontaneous grace of her child subjects. After dropping out of high school she went to work in the darkroom of Florian Mitchell’s commercial portrait-photography studio on $6 a week. There she was hooked.
A good image, she thought, was just lucky. But her New Yorker’s instinct seemed to tell her exactly where to wait for one. A broken-down car would soon attract people to lie under it, peer under the hood or try to push it. A cane chair, put out on the sidewalk, would draw an elderly man with cigar and newspaper, or a plump young woman in a housecoat wilting in the heat. With luck dogs would come out too, rough-haired mutts or poodles with fresh-shampooed coats. The open back of a truck would reveal delivery men moping on piles of sacks, or dozing among pink and blue bales of cloth. Any abandoned thing – a tea-chest, a mirror frame, the pillared entry of an empty building – would soon sport knots of children diving in, climbing up, fighting and contorting their small bodies in every kind of way.
Her pictures did not have names. “New York”, and the year, was the label on most of them. They did not need explaining; they were “just what you see”. Many had a backdrop of posters, graffiti or billboards, which gave a commentary of sorts. “Special Spaghetti 25 cents.” “Post No Bills.” “Nuts roasted daily.” “Buttons and Notions, One Flight Up.” “Bill Jones Mother is a Hore.” Her earliest project with her first, secondhand camera was to photograph children’s chalk drawings on the pavements. She never tried to speculate on them. What mattered was the patterns they made.
In the 1960s, when she got two Guggenheim grants, she began to shoot the streets in colour. The tricky developing ultimately frustrated her, and the streets, too, had changed. The children had retreated indoors to watch television. But where she had found grace and texture in black and white, colour now provided beauty in correspondences. The multi-coloured balls in bubble-gum machines could be picked up in a girl’s dress, or the red of a stiletto shoe matched with the frame of a shop window. Her broken-down cars were now lurid beasts against the stucco walls. And out of her peeling, greenish doorways could come women in furs, or pink hair-curlers, or orange-striped socks.
She did not rate her own work highly. Though her original prints eventually sold for tens of thousands of dollars, she let them pile up in her apartment in boxes labelled “Nothing good” or “Here and there”. Her hopes when she started were for photographs that would make a socialist statement of some sort, but she abandoned that on Cartier-Bresson’s advice. A “nice picture”, as she reluctantly admitted some of hers were, was a work of art that had value in itself, as well as a celebration of the random, teeming work of art that is the city of New York.
Anonymous. “Helen Levitt,” on The Economist website April 8th 2009 [Online] Cited 16/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt by John Szarkowski, Powerhouse Books, 2005 is available from the Amazon website. The photograph above is used on the cover of the book.
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Women by Car, Laguna Beach, California c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“Art is life seen through man’s inner craving for perfection and beauty – his escape from the sordid realities of life into a world of his imagining. Art accounts for at least a third of our civilization, and it is one of the artist’s principal duties to do more than merely record life or nature. To the artist is given the privilege of pointing the way and inspiring towards a better life.”
Paul Outerbridge
If Outerbridge only photographed intermittently after 1943, then what photographs they are.
Perhaps some of the most important colour photographs of their generation were made after he moved to California influencing the next generation of colour photographers (as noted below in the press release).
What else can one say – his aesthetic sensibility is so far ahead of his time, so prescient of future colour spaces in photography. I know how “no regular income” feels as an artist, but he still had the courage and vision to make the work.
I am in awe of the man: the visual complexity but eloquent simplicity of his photographs is simply amazing, simply… his own.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Downtown Central Library for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Recently discovered colour images of California and Mexico taken during the 1940s and 1950s by the late visionary photographer Paul Outerbridge, who was considered “a master of colour photography,” will be exhibited at the Central Library’s First Floor Galleries, 630 W. Fifth St., downtown, from March 28 through June 28 2009.
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Balboa Beach, California c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“[Outerbridge] was a designer and illustrator in New York before turning to photography in the 1920s. In 1925, having established himself as an innovative advertising photographer and graphic designer, he moved to Paris and worked for the French edition of Vogue magazine. There he met Edward Steichen, with whom he developed a friendly rivalry. Around 1930, having returned to New York, Outerbridge began to experiment with colour photography, in particular the carbro-colour process. He focused primarily on female nudes – striking, full-colour images that were ahead of their time. The growing popularity of the dye transfer process lead to cheaper color photographs and Outerbridge, who stuck fast to the carbro process as superior in its richness and permanence, saw his commercial work dry up, leaving him without a regular source of income. In 1943 Outerbridge moved to California, where he photographed only intermittently.”
Text from the Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 14/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Reclining Nude c. 1937 Pigment dyed digital print
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Motel Bar, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1948 Dye transfer print 16″ x 20″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Hotel Lobby, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
As one of America’s earliest masters of colour photography, Paul Outerbridge established his reputation by making virtuoso carbro-colour prints of nudes and still-lives in the 1930s. As pictures, they are as brilliant and innovative today as when they earned their place as classics in the history of photography.
Outerbridge left New York in the 1940s, choosing to settle in California, and eventually taking up residency in the Mediterranean-style ocean side town of Laguna Beach. Little is known of Outerbridge’s last body of work in the 8 years preceding his death in 1958. But Outerbridge’s recently printed transparencies from the 1950s affirms that he fully understood the possibilities inherent in colour photography despite it being the early days of its use in photographic art. Outerbridge went on to make a body of work that presaged the style and imagery of colour photographers working a full quarter of a century later.
Employing a 35mm camera rather than the large-format equipment of the studio, Outerbridge captured vivid pictures while on the fly. His images were composed using the same precision of form and colour that characterised his 1930s studio work, but, in this series, Outerbridge applied his earlier techniques to the energetic world of the street. This was a new landscape for Outerbridge, who, seeing in the new spectrum of colour, depicted the people and places from his adopted Southern California, and, with great relish and sensitivity, from the Mexican towns just south of the border. In the tradition of such photographers as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Anton Bruehl, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, all of whom made significant photographic forays into Mexico, Outerbridge ventured south from Laguna. In his 1949 black Cadillac, Outerbridge frequented the seaport towns along the Baja peninsula. One of his favourite stops was Mazatlan, on Mexico’s western coast, where he took particular pleasure in surveying the urban architecture, absorbing – and documenting – the city streets teeming with people, the brightly coloured topography.
Among the scenes Outerbridge etched onto film: carnival carriages with passengers dressed and bound for a grand party; a group of fashionable men relaxing in an outdoor hotel lobby drinking Cokes and beer while a small orchestra plays on in the afternoon sun; and a lone girl in a lime-green dress and white sweater walking past a gas station whose painted-red details add vibrant flourishes to the scene. Outerbridge was keenly aware that the beauty of everyday objects was also tied to the larger meanings anchored in the social landscape, but he cared less for this fact than for the expression of pure colour and form as seen through and by the lens.
These extraordinary pictures recall the 1970s photographs of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who strove to codify these same formal and subjective aesthetics into a bold definition of the new colour vocabulary. Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs from California and Mexico will bring a heretofore undiscovered and unrecognised sequence of photographs that bridges the formal gap between the past and the present. Outerbridge’s visionary handling of colour confirmed that he had instinctively known the potential of the colour medium, and, luckily for us, he created an astounding body of photographs to prove it.
Text from the Curatorial Assistance website [Online] Cited 19/01/2019. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Gas Station, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1950 Dye transfer print 16″ x 20″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Self-portrait on Lounge, Oceanside Resort, California c.1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“Outerbridge, who died in 1958, built his reputation in the early 1920s in New York and Paris making elegant black and white photo abstractions primarily of nudes and still lifes that rivalled those of his peers, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston. In the 1930s, Outerbridge mastered the exquisite tri-carbro-colour print process and went on to make some of the most important colour photographs in art and advertising of that time.
Moving to California in 1943 and taking up residence in Laguna Beach, Outerbridge made his last important body of work throughout California and Mexico. Between 1948 and until his death in 1958 he codified a new language in colour photographs that anticipated the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and others known for their “New Color” work in the 1970s.
“The curious position of prosperous American tourists amid the daily poverty experienced by some Mexicans is one of the recurring themes in the work, but with Outerbridge there is no political polemic,” says co-curator Phillip Prodger. “Outerbridge was thinking of his photographs as jig-saw puzzles made up of many different highly coloured pieces, each placed with meticulous care.”
Among Outerbridge’s subjects are carnival carriages with passengers dressed and headed for a grand party; a group of fashionable men relaxing in an outdoor hotel lobby drinking Coke and beer while a small orchestra plays; a girl in a lime-green dress and white sweater walking past a gas station whose painted-red details add a vibrant flourish to the scene.”
Text from the Downtown Central Library press release [Online] Cited 14/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Model with Satin Dress, Laguna Beach, California c. 1950 Tricolor carbon print 20″ x 16″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Party, Laguna Beach c. 1950 Tricolor carbon print 20″ x 16″
Los Angeles Central Library 630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, CA 90071 Phone: (213) 228-7000
Curator: Karen Sinsheimer, curator of photographs at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Jeff Gusky (American) Corridor in Kazimierz (Former Jewish District) Cracow, Poland 1996
As promised photographs by Jeff Gusky from the exhibition Of Life and Loss: The Polish Photographs of Roman Vishniac and Jeffrey Gusky.
Many thanks to Jeff for making them available to me.
I have tried to form a small narrative from some of the photographs that Jeff sent me, like a piece of music.
The flow through passageways and doorways forming rivers of light and dark ends in the ascending stairs that hold the possibility of deliverance and redemption. This holistic image is reminiscent of photographs by Eugène Atget.
The most beautiful video and music (see below) is entirely appropriate for this post: Gorecki Symphony No. 3 “Sorrowful Songs” – Lento e Largo.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Jeff Gusky (American) Former Jewish Home in Use as a Public Toilet Dzialoszyce, Poland 1996
Jeff Gusky (American) Desecrated Synagogue and Jewish School Dzialoszyce, Poland 1999
Jeff Gusky (American) Lublin Corridor #1 Lublin, Poland 1999
Jeff Gusky (American) Birkenau Silhouette Auschwitz, Poland 1996
Jeff Gusky (American) Where They Lived #4 Cracow, Poland 2001
Gorecki Symphony No. 3 “Sorrowful Songs” – Lento e Largo
Detroit Institute of Arts 5200 Woodward Avenue Detroit, Michigan 48202 Phone: 313.833.7900
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Detail of Stencilled Lettering on Yellow Railroad Car: "DO NOT HUMP"]' September 16, 1974](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/evans-do-not-hump-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Detail of Stencilled Lettering on Yellow Railroad Car: \"DO NOT HUMP\"]' September 16, 1974")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Fireplace in Floyd Burrroughs's Bedroom with Bedpost in Foreground, Hale County, Alabama]' 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/walker-evans-fireplace-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Fireplace in Floyd Burrroughs's Bedroom with Bedpost in Foreground, Hale County, Alabama]' 1936")
![Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York [Children with Soap Bubbles, New York City]' c. 1940](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/helen-levitt-children-with-soap-bubbles-new-york-city-web.jpg "Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York [Children with Soap Bubbles, New York City]' c. 1940")
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