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Exhibition: ‘Lorna Simpson’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 28th May – 1st September 2013

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Five Day Forecast (Prévisions à cinq jours)
1988
5 gelatin silver prints in a frame, 15 plates engraved plastic
24 1/2 x 97 in (62.2 x 246.4cm) overall
Lillian and Billy Mauer Collection
© Lorna Simpson

A fascinating practice!

Identity, memory, gender, representation, the body, the subject, felt, text, images, video, gesture, reenactment, concept and performance, all woven together seamlessly like a good wig made of human hair…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Stereo Styles (Styles stéréo)
1988
10 dye-diffusion black-and-white Polaroid prints, 10 engraved plastic plaques
57 3/4 x 125 1/4 x 1 3/8 in (146.7 x 318.1 x 3.5cm) overall
Collection of Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy
© Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Wigs II
1994-2006
Serigraph on 71 felt panels (images and text)
98 x 265 in (248.9 x 673.1cm) overall
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson surprised her audiences in 1994 when she began to print her photographs on felt, inspired by its materiality after seeing an exhibition of the sculpture of Joseph Beuys in Paris “where the piano and walls were covered for a beautiful installation.” Simpson questioned whether the medium might be appropriate in a far different way for her work given the perspective afforded her by the passage of time. With the felt pieces, Simpson turned away from photography’s traditional paper support, magnified the already larger-than-life-size of the images within her large photo-text pieces to extremely large-scale multi-part works, and, most critically, absented the figure, in particular, the black woman in a white shift facing away from the camera for which she had received critical acclaim.

Ever-present, nevertheless, were her thematic concerns. The first felts offered surrogates for the body in a taxonomy of her own photographs of Wigs, with voicings “in and around gender,” and expanded upon the investigation of the role of coiffure in the construction of identity in Simpson’s photo-texts (such as Stereo Styles, Gallery 1). In the mid-1990s, such felts were succeeded by a series of photographs of interior and exterior scenes that were accompanied by long text passages printed on separate small felts. In these works the figure was replaced, as Okwui Enwezor wrote, “by the rumour of the body.”

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Please remind me of who I am (detail)
2009
50 found photo booth portraits, 50 ink drawings on paper, 100 bronze elements
Overall installation dimensions variable
Collection of Isabelle and Charles Berkovic
© Lorna Simpson

For each multi-part photo-booth piece, Simpson sets in bronze frames these small inexpensive shots as well as her drawings of selected details of the photographs. Self-styled and performed, these photographs were used for a variety of purposes by their now anonymous sitters, ranging from sober, formal ID photos to glamorous, often theatrically playful mementos. Encompassing photo booth shots of different sizes from the 1920s to the 1970s (a few in colour), Simpson’s constellations of many images for each work offer a collective portrait of self-portraiture (Gather, 2009) and continue her ongoing explorations of identity and memory, explicitly phrased in the title of one of them: Please remind me of who I am (2009).

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Waterbearer (Porteuse d’eau)
1986
Gelatin silver print, vinyl letters
59 x 80 x 2 1/2 in (149.9 x 203.2 x 5.7cm) overall
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris / Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

Waterbearer shows a woman from the back, pouring water from an elegant silvery metallic pitcher in one hand and from an inexpensive plastic jug in the other, echoing art historical renderings of women at wells or in the domestic settings of Dutch still-life paintings. As if balancing the scales of justice, this figure also symbolically offers disjunctions of means and class. In the accompanying text, Simpson explicitly addresses memory and the agency of speakers: “She saw him disappear by the river, they asked her to tell what happened, only to discount her memory.”

For her first European retrospective, the Jeu de Paume presents thirty years of Lorna Simpson’s work. For this Afro-American artist, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960, the synthesis between image and text is profound and intimate. If one were to consider Lorna Simpson as a writer, the textual element of her works could have an autonomous life as prose poems, very short stories or fragments of scripts. And yet, her texts are inseparable from her images; there is a dynamic between the two that is both fragile and energising, which links them unfailingly. Lorna Simpson became known in the 1980s and 90s for her photographs and films that shook up the conventions of gender, identity, culture and memory.

Throughout her work, the artist tackles the complicated representation of the black body, using different media, while her texts add a significance that always remains open to the spectator’s imagination. In her recent work, Lorna Simpson has integrated archive images, which she reinvents by positioning herself in them as subject. As the artist underlines: “The theme I turn to most often is memory. But beyond this subject, the underlying thread is my relationship to text and ideas about representation.” (Lorna Simpson)

This retrospective reveals the continuity in her conceptual and performative research. In her works linking photography and text, as well as in her video installations, she integrates – while continually shaking them up – the genres of fixed and moving images, using them to ask questions about identity, history, reality and fiction. She introduces complexity through her use of photography and film, in her exploitation of found objects, in the processes she develops to take on the challenges she sets herself and to spectators.

The exhibition gathers her large format photo-texts of the mid 1980s, which brought her to the attention of the critics (Gestures / Reenactments, Waterbearer, Stereo Styles), her work in screenprints on felt panels since the 1990s (Wigs, The Car, The Staircase, Day Time, Day Time (gold), Chandelier), a group of drawings (Gold Headed, 2013), and also her “Photo Booths,” ensembles of found photos and drawings (Gather, Please remind me of who I am…). The exhibition is also an opportunity to discover her video installations: multivalent narratives that question the way in which experience is created and perceived more or less falsely (Cloudscape, 2004, Momentum, 2010), among them, Playing Chess, a new video installation made especially for the occasion.

About the exhibition

Joan Simon

In her critically acclaimed body of work spanning more than thirty years, Lorna Simpson questions identity and memory, gender and history, fact and fiction, playing eye and ear in tandem if not in synchrony to prompt consideration of how meaning is constructed. That she has often described herself as an observer and a listener informs an understanding of both her approach and her subjects. In her earliest black-and-white documentary street photographs (1978-1980), Simpson isolated gestures that bespoke an intimacy between those framed in her viewfinder, recording what was less a decisive moment than one of coming into relation. Some of these photographs seem to capture crossed glances, pauses in an ongoing conversation. Others are glimpses of occasions, transitional events identifiable by a white confirmation or wedding dress, which convey a sense of palpable silence in exchanges between people just out of earshot.

When Simpson began to stage her own photographs in 1985 and to write accompanying texts, she came in closer. She allowed us to see a carefully framed black body, abstracted in gesture and in white clothing, yet also permitted us to read seemingly overheard comments that redirected and recomplicated the view. While her images captured gestures, her narratives imbued these images frozen in a never-changing present with memory, a past. The title of her first photo-text work, made in 1985, and of the exhibition of that year in which it was first exhibited was Gestures / Reenactments, and one can argue that all Simpson’s work is built on the juxtaposition of gestures and reenactments, creating meaning in the resonant gap between the two. It is a gap that invites the viewer / reader to enter, all the while requiring an active reckoning with some inalienable truths: seeing is not necessarily believing, and what we might see is altered not only by our individual experiences and assumptions but also, critically, by what we might hear.

The exhibition

Whether for still or moving picture productions, Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) uses her camera as catalyst to question identity and gender, genres and history, race and class, fact and fiction, memory and meanings. Assumptions of photographic “truth” are challenged and qualified – indeed redirected – by the images she creates that are inseparable from the texts she writes to accompany them, by the soundings she chooses for videos, or by her pairings of vintage photographs with newly made renderings. The Jeu de Paume presents lorna Simpson’s first large-scale exhibition in Europe beginning with her earliest photo-text pieces of the 1980s through her newest video installation, Chess, 2013, which makes its debut in Paris.

Works in the exhibition show the artist drawing on traditional photo techniques such as gelatin silver prints in an intimate synthesis with speakerly texts (Gallery 1). They also show Simpson’s creation of new combines, among them serigraphs on felt with writings and images invoking film noir (Gallery 2), a video installation of three projections based on historic photographs and her own prior still photos (Gallery 3), constellations of recuperated photo-booth photos with her drawings isolating details from them as well as vintage photographs together with those re-staged by the artist (Gallery 4), and a video focusing on performance as well as time itself and its reversal (Gallery 5).

The exhibition’s parcours [route] reveals turning points in Simpson’s oeuvre as well as thematic continuities. The earliest pieces in the show are Simpson’s performative proto-cinematic photo-texts, beginning with the 1985 Gestures/ Reeactments, a title literally evocative of the work’s visual / verbal aspect while also paradigmatically descriptive of what would be her conceptual practice for the next three decades. Simpson herself makes a rare appearance in her work in two related pieces in the show: the 2009 epic still photo work 1957-2009 (Gallery 4), for which the artist re-enacted scenes from vintage photos, and Chess, 2013, (Gallery 3), which features re-enactments of some of the same photos.

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Gallery 1 introduces the artist’s signature, indeed iconic early images of the 1980s – a black figure in white clothing, face turned away from the camera or cropped out of the frame – accompanied by precisely crafted, allusive texts that recomplicate what is seen by what is heard in these voicings. The intention to deny a view of a face, as Simpson says, “was related to the idea that the one thing that people gravitate to in photography is the face and reading the expression and what that says about the person pictured, an emotional state, who they are, what they look like, deciphering and measuring. Who is being pictured, what is actually the subject? Photographing from the back was a way to get viewers’ attention as well as to consciously withdraw what they might expect to see.”

The performative photo-text works in Gallery 1 are Gestures / Reenactments, 1985 (created as part of her thesis project for her MFA at the University of California, San Diego), Waterbearer and Twenty Questions (A Sampler) (the first works that Simpson made when she moved to New York in 1986), as well as Five Day Forecast, 1988, and Stereo Styles, 1988. Beginning with Waterbearer, all of these except Gestures / Reenactments (which features a black male) show a black female in a white shift played by artist Alva Rogers, who was often mistaken for Simpson herself.

Gallery 2 marks important changes the artist made during the ’90s, most notably Simpson’s surprising shift to printing her photographs on felt and absenting the human figure. At first she used surrogates for the body, seen in the many and various wigs she photographed and which she accompanied with texts that continued to address ideas of identity and gender (Wigs, 1994-2006). She used photographs taken during her travels for the next series of felt works, which were interior and exterior scenes (The Car, 1995, The Rock, 1995, The Staircase, 1998) that in both imagery and texts invoked film noir. These works led almost inevitably to the start of Simpson’s film and video work in 1997. (Her earliest photo-texts will be recognised by the viewer as proto-cinematic with their multiple frames and conversational voices.)

This gallery also reveals how Simpson continues to use her felt medium and returns to her own archive of images as well as found objects. Three related works, though no longer using text, nevertheless “comment” on each other: a video of a performance (Momentum, 2010) inspired by an early 1970s performance at Lincoln Center generated felt works based on vintage photographs of this famous New York theatre – Chandelier, 2011, Daytime, 2011, and Daytime (gold), 2011 – as well as the Gold Headed (2013) drawings, based on the dancers costumed head to foot in gold. Drawings are perhaps the least known medium in Simpson’s practice, and while they reveal the fluid gestures of her hand, visitors will recognise in these gold heads turned from the viewer an echo of the position of the figures in Gallery 1.

Gallery 3 is devoted to Simpson’s newest video, Chess, 2013, which is based on historic photos as well as her own earlier photographic piece, 1957-2009 (Gallery 4), in which she restaged found vintage photographs. Chess and 1957-2009 mark the rare instances in which Simpson has herself appeared in her work.

Gallery 4 presents reenactments that use quotidian photographic genres to explore constructions of identity and that offer a collective portrait of photographic portraiture over time. All of the works in this gallery are based on found photographs Simpson purchased on eBay and each depicts anonymous subjects performing for the camera. 1957-2009 is based on photographs in a vintage album; Gather and Please remind me of who I am are constellations of bronze-framed found photo-booth images (from the 1920s to the 1970s) accompanied by Simpson’s similarly framed drawings of details from the photographs.

Gallery 5 offers Simpson’s video installation Cloudscape, 2004, which focuses on performance itself and the soundings of a body, that of artist Terry Adkins whistling a hymn. Embodying memory (and the distortions of it) as she did in her earliest photo-works but playing also with the particularities of video, Simpson loops the video to play forward and backward. In this process a new melody is created even as the stationary figure appears same but different.

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Chess (Échecs)
2013
HD video installation with three projections, black & white, sound
10:25 minutes (loop)
Score and performance by Jason Moran
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

“Gestures” and “reenactments” could both be described as the underlying methods of Simpson’s practice for the decades to follow. Whether working with photographs she herself staged, found photographs, or archival film footage, her images captured gestures (as in her earliest documentary photographs of 1978-1980) while her series of multiple images, accompanied by texts, proposed simultaneous (if not synchronous) reenactments. This method also applied to works in which she replicated found images, whether turning images from her films into drawings, or using herself to re-play roles depicted by anonymous figures she had discovered in vintage photographs, either for staged still photographs (as in 1957-2009, 2009), or for moving pictures (as in the video Chess, 2013).

Chess, 2013, Simpson’s video installation made expressly for this exhibition, draws on images from 1957-2009, her still photograph ensemble of 2009 (on view in Gallery 4). For both, in a departure from her earlier videos and prior staged photographs, Simpson herself performs. In 1957-2009, by reenacting scenes from found vintage prints with which they are shown, Simpson is “mirroring both the male and the female character, in dress, pose, expression, and setting. When I would mention the idea of working with mirrors [for the Chess video] people would often mention the famous portraits of Picasso and Picabia taken at a photo studio in New York by an anonymous photographer who placed the subject at a table in front of two mirrored panels at seventy-degree angles. The result is a five-way portrait that includes views that are not symmetrical and that offer slightly different angles: a surrealist trope of trick photography.”

Though the artist first rejected the idea of working with the mirror device used in these historic portraits, which she had seen many times, she decided to take it on fully and reconstruct it in her studio for this new video project after art historian and sociologist Sarah Thornton sent her “a beautiful image of an unknown man of African descent in a white straw hat, which had been in an exhibition at MoMA [catalogue page 61]. It was a five-way portrait probably taken by the same photographer who had taken the portraits of Picasso and Picabia. I could no longer resist or dismiss this idea. I felt that it was demanding my attention.”

Shot in Simpson’s studio over the weekend of December 8, 2012, Chess is comprised of three video projections. For two of them Simpson again plays both female and male chess-players, and with the help of makeup and hair assistants, she now allows her characters to age. The third projection shows pianist Jason Moran performing his improvised score for this project, which was inspired by discussions between artist and composer about “mirroring in music,” especially “in the work of musician Cecil Taylor, who employs mirroring in his compositions.”

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
The Car
1995
Serigraph on 12 felt panels with felt text panel
102 x 104 in (259.1 x 264.2cm)
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
The Car (detail)
1995
Serigraph on 12 felt panels with felt text panel
102 x 104 in (259.1 x 264.2cm)
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson
1957-2009 (detail)
2009
299 gelatin silver prints, framed
5 x 5 in. (12.7 x 12.7cm) each (image size)
Rennie Collection, Vancouver
© Lorna Simpson

While collecting photo booth images on eBay, Simpson found the first of the vintage photographs – a woman in a tight sweater-dress leaning on a car – that would generate 1957–2009 (2009). The artist subsequently bought the entire album and in 2009 restaged these photographs of an anonymous black woman and sometimes a man performing for their camera between June and August 1957 in Los Angeles, which they may have done in the hope of gaining movie work in Hollywood or as an independent project of self-invention. For 1957-2009, Simpson reenacted both female and male roles, and the 299 images are comprised of both the 1957 originals and Simpson’s 2009 remakes. Simpson again reenacted a selection of these vignettes for her video installation Chess, 2013.

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Cloudscape (Paysage nuageux)
2004
Video projection, black & white, sound
3:00 minutes (loop)
Centre national des arts plastiques, purchase in 2005
Photo courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson/Centre national des arts plastiques

Lorna Simpson’s video installation Cloudscape (2004) isolates one man, Simpson’s friend, the artist and musician Terry Adkins, in a dark room, spotlighted as he whistles a hymn and is enveloped in fog. Focusing on the ephemerality of performance, the artist employs a technique afforded by her medium to play with time as well. Simpson runs the video forward and then also backward in a continuous loop, creating new visual and oral / aural permutations of gesture and reenactment. In the reversal of the time sequence, the image remains somewhat familiar while the tune turns into something else, a different melody.

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Momentum
2010
HD video, color, sound
6:56 minutes
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

As Simpson explored new mediums, such as film and video starting in 1997 or found photographs in the late 1990s, she continued to work in parallel with her felt serigraphs. In this gallery are three related sets of works that, unlike her earlier photo-text pieces, are all based on a personal memory: performing as a youngster, age 12, in gold costume, wig, and body paint in a ballet recital at New York’s Lincoln Center. Simpson re-staged such a performance for her video Momentum (2010).

Jeu de Paume
1, Place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
métro Concorde
Phone: 01 47 03 12 50

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday: 12am – 8pm
Saturday and Sunday: 11am – 7pm
Closed Monday

Jeu de Paume website

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Exhibition: ‘Lewis Hine – Photography for a Change’ at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich

Exhibition dates: 8th June – 25th August 2013

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Midnight at the Brooklyn Bridge
1906
Gelatin silver print
12 x 17cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

“While human truth may be ephemeral qualities like justice are not; the struggle is to define justice and to live it. And for artists to display it.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Here is one artist who certainly used photography for social good. Hine “represents the beginning of a long tradition of politically engaged, social documentary photography, so called “concerned photography”… He firmly believed that every person, every individual, was worthy of respect, and he believed photography to be the best tool for clearly and visibly expressing this view.” Bravo to him.

Unfortunately, like so many of these visionary and revolutionary artists, Hine died in 1940, completely impoverished. As a society, why is it that we don’t value these brave human beings until years after they have passed? Is it because of petty jealousies, the rush of life, people in positions of power too long or a lack of understanding of the visionary nature of their work? Or is it just that time passes them by. I would like to pose this question.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Fotomuseum Winterthur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Spinner in New England mill
1913
Gelatin silver print
12.6 x 10.1cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Italian family looking for lost baggage, Ellis Island
1905
Gelatin silver print
33.4 x 27.2cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Candy worker, New York
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
17.2 x 11.8cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

To what extent can images effectively combat injustice and social inequity? The American photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940) offered an early answer to this question through his work. Trained as a teacher and sociologist, he ardently wished that Americans would become conscious of the injustice of American labor laws. He also firmly believed that every person, every individual, was worthy of respect, and he believed photography to be the best tool for clearly and visibly expressing this view.

His work represents the beginning of a long tradition of politically engaged, social documentary photography, so called “concerned photography.” His photographs of immigrants from Ellis Island, child labor in American factories, and the construction of the Empire State Building high above Manhattan have become major icons of the 20th century. Simultaneously, the photographs also point to the fact, that the documented problems have not lost their currency, even one hundred years later. Today, even in Europe, we are experiencing intensive migrations, which will continue to increase in the future. Here we are not confronted with child labor, because we have transferred the kinds of industrial production that used child labor to distant countries. Accidents in non-European factories indicate the risky conditions under which our consumer goods are still produced today. Hine’s photographic eye and his black and white images form a trajectory that leads directly to the present.

Lewis Hine grew up in a family that owned a simple restaurant in the small town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He lost his father at age 18 due to an accident. He provided for himself and his family first as a factory worker in a furniture production company and then as a doorman, salesman, and bookkeeper. After training as a teacher and studying sociology at the University of Chicago, Hine moved to New York, where he first came in contact with photography while teaching at the Ethical Culture School. Using the camera in his lessons, he made portraits of immigrants on Ellis Island in conjunction with a research project. From then on Hine viewed his camera as a weapon for revealing social injustice and effecting change through the power of images. With this motivation he traveled some 75,000 km through the United States for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) and photographed children at work in the fields, mines, factories, mills, and on the streets. His photographs played no small part in raising awareness for child labor and instigating initial reforms. They also represented some of the earliest and most significant contributions to the social documentary genre of photography. During the construction of the Empire State Building Hine was commissioned with documenting the phases of construction over the course of six months in 1930/1931. In over one thousand photographs he recorded the perspective of the construction workers and their hard work on the ultimately 381 m high building. Despite his early success and the use of his images by many governmental agencies, Hine died in 1940, completely impoverished, after an operation.

Fotomuseum Winterthur presents this comprehensive retrospective including 170 images and extensive documentation material in cooperation with the Fundación MAPFRE (Madrid), the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Paris) and the Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam). All works come from the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, USA.

Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Paris gamin
c. 1918
Gelatin silver print
24.4 x 19.4cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Jewess at Ellis Island
1905
Gelatin silver print
24.1 x 19.1cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Mechanic at steam pump in electric power house
1920
Gelatin silver print
16.9 x 11.7cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
[Man on girders, Empire State Building]
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
12 x 9.2cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
[Steelworker touching the tip of the Chrysler Building]
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
16.9 x 11.9cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Icarus atop Empire State Building
1931
Gelatin silver print
9.3 x 10cm
© Collection of George Eastman House, Rochester

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45 CH-8400
Winterthur (Zürich)

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11am – 6pm
Wednesday 11am – 8pm
Closed on Mondays

Fotomuseum Winterthur website

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Exhibition: ‘Photographic Wonders: American Daguerreotypes from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’ at the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati

Exhibition dates: 17th May – 25th August 2013

Unknown Maker (American)
Three Lively Women
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, quarter plate
3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

I love the word “occupationals” to describe portraits of individuals with the hallmarks of their trade.

Marcus

Many thankx to the Taft Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Thomas Easterly (American, 1809-1882)
Man with Elephant
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, quarter plate
3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Thomas Martin Easterly

A sometime calligrapher and writing teacher, Vermont-born Thomas Martin Easterly (b. 1809 Guilford, Vermont, d. 1882) learned the daguerreotype process in New York between 1841 and 1844, possibly from Charles and Richard Meade. In 1844 Easterly sailed from New York City to New Orleans, where he made photographs before returning to Vermont the following year. He did not remain for long: by October, he had entered into a daguerreotype studio partnership in Iowa. He and his partner operated as traveling photographers working throughout Iowa and Missouri for several years. Some scholars have credited Easterly with making the first photographs of Plains Indians.

After the dissolution of the partnership, Easterly moved to Saint Louis and took over a studio in 1848. He had a successful career for ten years, but his loyalty to the daguerreotype process after the introduction of the ambrotype, tintype, and paper photograph processes caused his business to falter. By 1860 Easterly had begun to sell farm implements in addition to continuing his daguerreotype practice.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Attributed to Ezekiel Hawkins (American, 1808-1862)
The Jacob Strader at Wharf, Cincinnati
c. 1853
Daguerreotype, half plate
4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

This daguerreotype of the side-wheel packet Jacob Strader was taken at the Cincinnati boatyard where she was built in 1853. Owned by the U.S. Mail Line Co., this steamboat was named to honour Jacob Strader, the company’s first president. The Jacob Strader ran regularly between Cincinnati and Louisville, however during the Civil War, because her large cabin contained 310 berths, she was frequently used to transport sick and wounded soldiers. This boat was dismantled in 1866.

As steamboats replaced flatboats and keelboats as the major mode of river transportation, travel along the Ohio River became faster and easier. By the middle of the nineteenth century, more than 3,000 steamboats arrived each year at the port of Cincinnati. The city’s prominent location along the river contributed to its rapid growth, and by 1850 Cincinnati became the sixth largest city in the country. The development of railroads slowly led to the decline of steamboats. They continued to operate on the Ohio River, but their numbers dwindled.

Text from the Ohio Memory Collection website

Unknown Maker (American)
A Showing of Daguerreotypes
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, quarter plate
3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown Maker (American)
Comic Dentist
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, sixth plate
3 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

American Daguerreotypes from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, on display May 17 – Aug. 25, features 82 astonishing images of life in 19th-century America. The exhibition includes rare images of such well-known Americans as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Tom Thumb.

By the middle of the 19th century, Cincinnati was the Queen City of the West. A transportation hub, the city was home to industry, art, and even a professional baseball team. Though there are numerous written accounts of life in the big city at this time, we are also fortunate to have images of this era because of the earliest “photographic” works, known as daguerreotypes. In 1839 the American public first encountered this exciting new invention. By 1843, daguerreotypists had set up shop in every major city in the United States. Visitors to the Taft will have the opportunity to view these remarkable works. This exhibition features about 90 daguerreotypes of exceptional quality and variety, with the high degree of resolution typical of these rare, one-of-a-kind photographs. Works by both famed and anonymous makers provide a window into mid-19th-century America: its occupations, trades, urban and rural scenery, and racial and ethnic diversity.

In 1839 the American public encountered the exciting new invention of photography in its earliest form, the daguerreotype. Together, these two Taft exhibitions present an in-depth look at the art of early photography, as well as candid, touching, and sometimes humorous image of life in mid-19th century America and Cincinnati. A daguerreotype is a unique image crafted on a silvered copper plate, a surface that acts like a mirror. While sometimes hard to view, this exhibition presents the works under perfect lighting conditions. The earliest daguerreotypes required exposures of up to thirty minutes. Within a few years, however, portraits could be made in about ten to twenty seconds.

Among the exceptional daguerreotypes in Photographic Wonders are post-mortem images (portraits taken after death) that tell sorrowful stories, while The Comic Dentist and other humorous subjects still amuse today’s audiences. Portraits of individuals with the hallmarks of their trade (called occupationals), including a blacksmith with his tools, a woman ironing, and a clown in costume, show Americans’ pride in their work. Outdoor scenes reveal quaint towns and growing cities, while landscapes feature popular tourist destinations. The wide range of subjects offers something for every interest. The exhibited works in Photographic Wonders are part of an acclaimed collection that Hallmark Cards, Inc., donated in 2005 to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

The choice examples selected for the Taft date from about 1840 to about 1860, while Nicholas Longworth and his family lived in the historic house that is now the Taft Museum of Art. Local Exposures, a captivating “snapshot” of life in Cincinnati in the 1800s, will delight Cincinnati history enthusiasts. A rarely exhibited Cincinnati streetscape reveals what the city looked like in 1848, while business cards and advertisements for daguerreotype studios show the prominence of the industry in Cincinnati.

“These were the first photographs. Prior to this the only way you could preserve your image was through a painting or sketch. Imagine seeing yourself in a photograph for the first time – it would seem like magic, and that’s exactly the first reaction people had,” says installing curator, Tamera Muente. Taft Museum of Art Director/CEO, Deborah Emont Scott, says, “It’s an amazing experience to view these precious, one-of-a-kind photographs. The images are small and the viewing experience is an intimate one – you step back in time and share a rare mid-19th-century moment with the sitter.”

Press release from the Taft Museum of Art website

William C. North (American, 1814-1890)
The Fisherman
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, half plate
5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown Maker (American)
Clown
c. 1850-1855
Daguerreotype, sixth plate
2 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown Maker (American)
Tightrope Walker
c. 1855
Daguerreotype, half plate
5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown Maker (American)
Tom Thumb and his Mother
c. 1850-1855
Daguerreotype, quarter plate
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

General Tom Thumb was the stage name of Charles Sherwood Stratton (January 4, 1838 – July 15, 1883), a little person who achieved great fame under circus pioneer P.T. Barnum.

Unknown Maker (American)
Woman Ironing
c. 1850-1855
Daguerreotype, sixth plate
3 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Unknown Maker (American)
Profile Portrait of Frederick Douglass
c. 1858
Daguerreotype, sixth plate
3 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
© Nelson Gallery Foundation

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an African American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave.

Douglass wrote several autobiographies, eloquently describing his experiences in slavery in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which became influential in its support for abolition. He wrote two more autobiographies, with his last, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in 1881 and covering events through and after the Civil War. After the Civil War, Douglass remained active in the United States’ struggle to reach its potential as a “land of the free”. Douglass actively supported women’s suffrage. Without his approval, he became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate of Victoria Woodhull on the impracticable and small Equal Rights Party ticket. Douglass held multiple public offices.

Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant, famously quoted as saying, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”(Text from Wikipedia)

“I have often been asked, how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. And my readers may share the same curiosity. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the ‘quick round of blood,’ I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York, I said: ‘I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.’ Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.”

Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. 1882, p. 170.

Taft Museum of Art
316 Pike Street at the east end of Fourth Street
across from Lytle Park, in downtown Cincinnati

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 4pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

Taft Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘A World of Bonds: Frederick Sommer’s Photography and Friendships’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exhibition dates: 16th June – 4th August 2013

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Moon Culmination
1951
gelatin silver print
24.2 x 19.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in.)
Gift of Frederick Sommer

Frederick Sommer is not as well known as others in the famous quintet (the others being Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Minor White and Paul Strand). He is the (slightly) forgotten master. But for those that know his work, Frederick Sommer is the photographer’s photographer.

There is a visual and intellectual alchemy transmitted through his work. It is as if he was a magician, producing images out of thin air: paper cuts, smoke on glass, collage, found objects, rites, passages, cleavages, heroes, occultism (Paracelsus was a Renaissance physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist). From the few photographs I have seen in the flesh his prints, like his thinking, have a volume to them that few other photographers can match. Here I must cede to the knowledge of my friend and photographer Ian Lobb who visited Sommer at his home in Prescott, Arizona.

“You will notice with FS prints that the only date given is the date of the negative. This is not unusual of course, but one of FS strengths is being interested in returning to a negative and print it with enthusiasm after looking at other versions for a very long time.

Another strength is a really simple strong way of working – according to Les Walkling, FS had a block of wood the same size as an 8 x 10 contact print. By placing the print on this base as he spotted, the print was always raised above his work environment and the chance of an accident was reduced. So simple – so elegant. I see this state of mind repeated – eg when he was out photographing with Siskind and he found a pile of X-rays and said that this was his work for the day.

Caponigro and Sommer are the ones that make their technical skill communicate in very unique ways. By chronology, Sommer is the first one who found that something beyond the f/64 Group vocabulary could be said. Whereas Edward Weston and Paul Strand are working at about 3/10 for their prints, Sommer is working at 9/10. He doesn’t always get there in every print but when he succeeds the results are beyond what any other classical photographer ever achieved in the physical presence of the photograph.

Venus, Jupiter and Mars was the first extended viewing of Sommer that arrived here (in Australia). It would have been at the Printed Image (bookshop) in 1981.”

Ian Lobb

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.

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Venus, Jupiter and Mars
1949
Gelatin silver print
23.8 x 19.1cm (9 3/8 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Valise d’Adam
1949
Gelatin silver print
23.9 x 18.9cm (9 7/16 x 7 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Against a backdrop of rusting metal, Frederick Sommer arranged a grouping of found objects. A clipboard clamp represents a head and shoulders while dirty, cracking doll’s arms and legs provide more literal context, defining the object as a human body. Within that fragmented body, Sommer places a complete doll with its head pointed downward, as if ready to be born. The photograph’s French title, Valise d’Adam, or as Sommer translated it, Adam’s Traveling Case, is a sly reference to the idea that man travels through woman into the world, and perhaps, woman even carries man through life.

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Manzanillo, Mexico
1955
Gelatin silver print
35.6 x 27.8cm (14 x 10 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, René Huyghe Collection
Image courtesy of the Aaron Siskind Foundation

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Untitled
1947
Gelatin silver print
24.2 x 19.1cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
The Anatomy of a Chicken
1939
Gelatin silver print mounted on paperboard
24.1 x 19cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Paracelsus
1957
Gelatin silver print
34.3 x 25.6cm (13 1/2 x 10 1/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Paracelsus (1493/1494 – 24 September 1541), born Theophrastus von Hohenheim (full name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), was a Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance.

He was a pioneer in several aspects of the “medical revolution” of the Renaissance, emphasising the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the “father of toxicology”. Paracelsus also had a substantial impact as a prophet or diviner, his “Prognostications” being studied by Rosicrucians in the 1600s. Paracelsianism is the early modern medical movement inspired by the study of his works.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Cut Paper
1980
gelatin silver print
24.2 x 18.7cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

The National Gallery of Art explores the continuities in Frederick Sommer’s varied body of work and demonstrates the influence of his friendships with fellow artists in the exhibition A World of Bonds: Frederick Sommer’s Photography and Friendships, on view in the East Building from June 16 to August 4, 2013. Drawn from the Gallery’s significant holdings, which include a major 1995 gift from the artist himself, the exhibition showcases 27 works by Sommer, Edward Weston, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Aaron Siskind, and Charles Sheeler, including three pieces on loan from other museums and private collections.

“The Gallery is privileged to display this influential body of work, which illuminates Frederick Sommer’s interactions with his fellow artists,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “In addition to photographs drawn from our permanent collection, we are grateful to the lenders who have assisted us in revealing the continuities in Sommer’s broad range of work, as well as The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation for its generous support.”

About the exhibition

The exhibition showcases the beauty and diversity of Sommer’s striking images and places them in the context of his formative friendships with such prominent contemporaries as Edward Weston, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler, and Aaron Siskind.

As an artist, Frederick Sommer notoriously defies classification. Over the span of more than 60 years, he created paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as collages, musical scores, poetry, and theoretical texts. Today, Sommer is best known for his photography, the medium in which he produced his most inventive visual experiments and which best suited the breadth of his visual interests. These ranged from disorienting desert landscapes to surrealistic arrangements of found objects, and to abstractions that brought together drawing and photography.

“All rare things should be lent away / and I have borrowed very freely,” Sommer wrote of his art. He also asserted that “the world is not a world of cleavages, it is a world of bonds.” This exhibition examines both claims, offering a glimpse into the ways in which Sommer shared ideas with his contemporaries while simultaneously creating a body of work uniquely his own.

About the artist

Just as he defied the bounds of medium and genre, Sommer, who lived in the small town of Prescott, Arizona, also never fully belonged to any artistic group or movement. His work reflects both wide-ranging personal interests and a broad scope of artistic affinities with artists as divergent as the surrealists and the members of the f/64 group of West Coast photographers.

Sommer’s circle of close artist-friends and mentors helps explain his idiosyncratic sensibilities. This circle included the photographer Edward Weston, whose precise attention to the details of the natural world inspired Sommer’s turn to photography. Equally important to Sommer, however, was his friendship with Max Ernst, the surrealist whose automatic painting techniques and uncanny imagery encouraged Sommer to reconfigure familiar objects into strange new creations. Aaron Siskind was yet another close friend and peer with whom Sommer shared a fascination with the abstract textures of everyday materials. Other artists represented in the exhibition who influenced Sommer’s approach to photographing assemblages and his exploration of photographic abstraction include Man Ray and Charles Sheeler.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Coyotes
1945
Gelatin silver print mounted on paperboard
19 x 24.2cm (7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011)
Man tracks #9R
from the Mantracks series 1978-83
Gelatin silver photograph
42.9 x 35.2cm

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Ondine
1950
Gelatin silver print mounted on paperboard
19.2 x 24.3cm (7 9/16 x 9 9/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

The nymph Ondine was an immortal water spirit who became human after falling in love for a man, marrying him, and having a baby. In one of the versions of the tale, when she caught her husband sleeping with another woman, she cursed him to remain awake in order to control his own breathing.

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Taylor, Arizona
1945
Gelatin silver print
19.2 x 24.2cm (7 9/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Max Ernst
1946
Gelatin silver print
19.05 x 24.13cm (7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.)
Collection of Susan and Peter MacGill
Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Untitled
1947
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Coyotes
1941
Gelatin silver print
19.1 x 24.1cm (7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Les Walkling (Australia, b. 1953)
Flypaper
1980
Gelatin silver photograph
19.1 x 24.3cm
Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982
© Les Walkling

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Lacryma
1992
Collage of photomechanical reproductions of lithographic, relief and intaglio prints on
heavyweight wove paper
36 x 42.4cm (14 3/16 x 16 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Lacryma, alternative form of lacrima – a tear (drop of liquid from crying)

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Drawing
1948
Tempera on black wove paper
30.4 x 46.9cm (11 15/16 x 18 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
The Queen of Sheba
1992
Collage of photomechanical reproductions of relief and intaglio prints on heavyweight wove
paper
21.8 x 31.8cm (8 9/16 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Frederick Sommer

Fiona Hall (Australian, b. 1953)
Envy, Seven Deadly Sins
1985
Polaroid photograph
61 × 50.8cm
© Fiona Hall

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 10.00am – 5.00pm

National Gallery of Art website

Frederick Sommer website

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Exhibition: ‘Herb Ritts: Beauty and Celebrity’ at Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City

Exhibition dates: 9th May – 28th July 2013

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Fred with Tires – Bodyshop Series, Hollywood
1984
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 in. (60.9 x 50.8cm)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

I admit that I went through a stage of disliking Herb Ritts photographs – no longer!

In contemplation, his formal aestheticism confirms a serene beauty – spare, refined, erotic.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Fred with Tires became the archetypal photograph of the male body in the 1980s and made the world-wide reputation of its commercial photographer, Herb Ritts. Gay men flocked to buy it, myself included. I was drawn by the powerful, perfectly sculpted body, the butchness of his job, the dirty trousers, the boots and the body placed within a social context. At the time I realised that the image of this man was a constructed fantasy, ie. not the ‘real’ thing, and this feeling of having been deceived has grown ever since. His hair is teased up and beautifully styled, the grease is applied to his body just so, his body twisted to just the right degree to accentuate the muscles of the stomach and around the pelvis. You can just imagine the stylist standing off camera ready to readjust the hair if necessary, the assistants with their reflectors playing more light onto the body. This/he is the seduction of a marketable homoeroticsm, the selling of an image as sex, almost camp in its overt appeal to gay archetypal stereotypes.

Herb Ritts, whether in his commercial work or in his personal images such as those of the gay bodybuilders Bob Paris and Rod Jackson, has helped increase the acceptance of the openly homoerotic photograph in a wider sphere but this has been possible only with an increased acceptance of homosexual visibility within the general population.  Openly gay bodies such as that of Australian rugby league star Ian Roberts or American diver Greg Luganis can become heroes and role models to young gay men coming out of the closet for the first time, visible evidence that gay men are everywhere in every walk of life. This is fantastic because young gay men do need gay role models to look up to but the bodies they possess only conform to the one type, that of the muscular mesomorph and this reinforces the ideal of a traditional masculinity. Yes, the guy in the shower next to you might be a poofter, might be queer for heavens sake, but my God what a body he’s got!”

Marcus Bunyan. “Historical Pressings,” from Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (Phd thesis) 2001

Many thankx to Oklahoma City Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Djimon with Octopus, Hollywood
1989
Gelatin silver print
44.5 x 38.7cm (17 1/2 x 15 1/4 in.)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Tony with shadow, Los Angeles
1988
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Point Dume
1987
Gelatin silver print
31.9 x 25.4cm (12 9/16 x 10 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Versace Dress, Back View, El Mirage
1990
Gelatin silver print
137.2 x 109.2cm (54 x 43 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

The American photographer Herb Ritts produced a body of work in the 1980s and 1990s that seems to embody the outdoor lifestyle and glamour of the southern California beautiful set. This photograph, taken at El Mirage Dry Lake in California, appeared on the cover of Italian designer Gianni Versace’s September 1990 catalogue and incorporates a formalism and contemporary sensuality characteristic of Ritts’s aesthetic. Ritts’s photograph appeals through its boldly contrasting lights and darks.

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Versace Veiled Dress, El Mirage
1990
55.8 x 44.6cm (21 15/16 x 17 9/16 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Now and Zen 1, El Mirage
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts: Beauty and Celebrity will be on view at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art from May 9 through July 28, 2013. Organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with the support of the Herb Ritts Foundation and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, this exhibition will feature over eighty large-scale black-and-white photographs by acclaimed photographer, Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002). Ranging in scale from intimate portraits to ten foot murals, the exhibition will highlight the diversity of the artist’s work. Known for his innovative approach to fashion, intimate portraiture of celebrities, and the classical treatment of the nude, Ritts emerged in the 1980s to become one of the most successful celebrity and fashion photographers of the late twentieth century and an important part of the history of American photography.

Herb Ritts grew up in Los Angeles and maintained his studio in Hollywood. A self-taught photographer, Ritts first began taking photographs in the late 1970s after studying economics at Bard College. The intimate publicity images that he made of Richard Gere were among his first serious portraits and helped to launch his career. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ritts built his reputation as a leading celebrity portraitist and fashion photographer, contributing regularly to publications such as GQ, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. From 1988, he also made music videos and commercials for which he won numerous awards.

The photographs included in the exhibition represent some of Herb Ritts’s most iconic works which incorporate the natural light of the California sun while emphasising shapes, unusual juxtapositions, and the beauty of the human form. Ritts celebrates nature and the human body in evoking the tactile appeal of surface textures of grains of sand, veiled fabric, drying mud, and cascading water seen in Waterfall 4 (1988), Backflip (1987), and Woman in Sea (1988). Fashion photographs on view include such as Versace Veiled Dress, El Mirage (1990), Stephanie, Cindy, Christy, Tatjana, Naomi, Hollywood (1989), and Djimon with Octopus (1989). Examples of celebrity portraiture include Richard Gere, Jack Nicholson, Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Depp, Bruce Springsteen, Drew Barrymore, David Bowie, Matthew McConaughey, and Mick Jagger. Also included in the exhibition are poetic and eternal images in Ritts’s Africa series, taken in 1993 when he traveled to East Africa, and examples from the rare Corps et Ames (1999) series of photographs, portraying dancers in motion.

This exhibition – drawn from the photography collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Herb Ritts Foundation – present Herb Ritts’ style and the range of his career.

Press release from the Oklahoma City Museum of Art website

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Male Nude with Bubble, Los Angeles
1987
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Wrapped Torso, Los Angeles
1989
Platinum print
46.4 x 38.4cm (18 1/4 x 15 1/8 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Backflip, Paradise Cove
1987
Gelatin silver print
90 x 70 in. (228.6 x 177.8cm)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Corp et Âmes – 14, Los Angeles
1999
Gelatin silver print
14 x 11 in. (35.5 x 27.9cm)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Chrissy Turlington, Versace 3, Milan
1991
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Madonna (True Blue Profile), Hollywood
1986
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 in. (60.9 x 50.8cm)
Gift of Herb Ritts Foundation. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Matthew McConaughey, Palmdale
1996
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 in. (60.9 x 50.8cm)
Gift of Herb Ritts Foundation. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Loriki with Spear, Africa
1993
Gelatin silver print
45 x 41 in. (114.3 x 104.1cm)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Tony Ward
1986
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Waterfall IV, Hollywood
1988
Platinum print
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.64cm)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Woman in Sea, Hawaii
1988
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 in. (60.9 x 50.8cm)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Bill T. Jones VI, Los Angeles
1995
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Man with Chain, Los Angeles
1985
Gelatin silver print
47.8 x 38.4 cm (18 13/16 x 15 1/8 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch Drive
Oklahoma City, OK 73102

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10am – 5pm
Sunday: noon – 5pm
Closed: Mondays and Major Holidays

Oklahoma City Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 26th February – 28th July 2013

PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS AN ART PHOTOGRAPH OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1971
Dye-transfer print
31.1 x 47.7cm (12 1/4 x 18 3/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher, Jennifer and Philip Maritz, and Charlotte A. and William E. Ford Gifts; The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

Eggleston photographs the obvious with such candour and vigour that simple things become something more: almost interior statements of his mind evidenced in the physicality of the photograph. He may be at war with the obvious, but these are complex thoughts told in simple, eloquent ways. They are only obvious if you know how to look for them.

The peaches thrown on the roof, the rusted speculum of ‘Wonder Bread’, the turned up shoes; the use of foreshortening, the low positioning of the camera (looking up or across at ground level), the formalism of colour, the light.

Eggleston understands the essence of each scene he photographs perfectly. The child’s eye-level view of the tricycle emphasising its gigantism will always be a favourite, as will the abstract expressionist colour field of Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi) (1980, below). As with any virtuoso artist, Eggleston controls the tonality and mood of compositions beautifully: a case in point is Untitled (Memphis) (c. 1972, below) which will always remind me of a piece of Mozart piano music. It took me a while when I was growing up to like Mozart (as a concert pianist I loved the romantics such as Chopin and Debussy), but when you finally understand all the nuances contained in his music, when you finally grow to love him, you are just so full of admiration for his achievement.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Mississippi)
c. 1970
Dye-transfer print
25.1 x 38.3cm (9 7/8 x 15 1/16 in)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background)
1971 (printed 1999)
Dye-transfer print
36.8 x 55.5cm (14 1/2 x 21 7/8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled, from the portfolio 14 Pictures
1974
Dye-transfer print
33.1 x 48.5cm (13 1/16 x 19 1/8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher, Jennifer and Philip Maritz, and Charlotte A. and William E. Ford Gifts; The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Louisiana)
1980 (printed 1999)
Dye-transfer print
30.2 x 45.3cm (11 7/8 x 17 13/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, and Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1974
Dye-transfer print
33.1 x 48.5cm (13 1/16 x 19 1/8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi)
1980
Dye-transfer print
29.6 x 45.5cm (11 5/8 x 17 15/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

The American photographer William Eggleston (born 1939) emerged in the early 1960s as a pioneer of modern colour photography. Now, 50 years later, he is arguably its greatest exemplar. At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston at The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the work of this idiosyncratic artist, whose influences are drawn from disparate if surprisingly complementary sources – from Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson in photography to Bach and late Baroque music. Many of Eggleston’s most recognised photographs are lush studies of the social and physical landscape found in the Mississippi delta region that is his home. From this base, the artist explores the awesome and, at times, the raw visual poetics of the American vernacular.

The exhibition celebrates the fall 2012 acquisition of 36 dye transfer prints by Eggleston that dramatically expanded the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of this major American artist’s work. It added the entire suite of Eggleston’s remarkable first portfolio of colour photographs, 14 Pictures (1974), 15 superb prints from his landmark book, William Eggleston’s Guide (1976), and seven other key photographs that span his career.

Eggleston wrote that he was “at war with the obvious,” a statement well-represented in works such as Untitled [Peaches!] (1970) – a roadside snapshot of rocks and half-eaten fruit thrown atop a sunlit corrugated tin roof capped with a sign announcing “PEACHES!” The exhibition features a number of the artist’s signature images, including Untitled [Greenwood, Mississippi] (1980), a study that takes full advantage of the chromatic intensity of the dye-transfer colour process that, until Eggleston appropriated it in the 1960s, had been used primarily by commercial photographers for advertising product photography; and Untitled [Memphis] (1970), an iconic study of a child’s tricycle seen from below. It was the cover image of the artist’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, which accompanied his landmark show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976.

As much as Eggleston was influenced by various sources, he, too, has proved influential. His inventive photographs of commonplace subjects now endure as touchstones for generations of artists, musicians, and filmmakers from Nan Goldin to David Byrne, the Coen brothers, and David Lynch.

Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis)
1970
Dye-transfer print
30.7 x 43.8cm (12 1/16 x 17 1/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Louis V. Bell Fund; Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher, Jennifer and Philip Maritz, and Charlotte A. and William E. Ford Gifts, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1983
Dye-transfer print
37 x 56cm (14 9/16 x 22 1/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
c. 1972 (printed 1986)
Dye-transfer print
28.8 x 43.4cm (11 5/16 x 17 1/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1984
Dye-transfer print
55.9 x 37.1cm (22 x 14 5/8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi)
1970 (printed 1999)
Dye-transfer print
55 x 37.1cm (21 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis)
c. 1972
Dye-transfer print
46 x 31cm (18 1/8 x 12 3/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Louis V. Bell Fund; Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher, Jennifer and Philip Maritz, and Charlotte A. and William E. Ford Gifts, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Near Jackson, Mississippi)
c. 1970 (printed 2002)
Dye-transfer print
60.3 x 48.9cm (23 3/4 x 19 1/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Louis V. Bell Fund; Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher, Jennifer and Philip Maritz, and Charlotte A. and William E. Ford Gifts, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis)
1971 (printed 1999)
Dye-transfer print
55.4 x 36.8cm (21 13/16 x 14 1/2 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012.283)
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, and Elizabeth S. and Robert J. Fisher Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
Phone: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm
Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm
Closed Wednesday

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Experience Civil War Photography: From the Home Front to the Battlefront’ at the Smithsonian Castle, Washington, DC

Exhibition dates: 1st August 2012 – 31st July 2013

Anonymous photographer
Ambrotype of a washerwoman for the Union Army in Richmond
c. 1865
Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian

Many thankx to the Smithsonian Castle for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“It is very strange that I, a boy brought up in the woods, seeing as it were but little of the world, should be drifted into the very apex of this great event.”

Abraham Lincoln, on the Civil War, July 1864

A box of gun cotton (cotton treated with nitric acid) carrying the brand name “Anthony’s Snowy Cotton,” a photo processing supply that a Civil War-era photographer might use in the field to create collodion photographs.
Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian

A sampling of photographic chemical bottles used for wet collodion photography during the Civil War
Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian

This Civil-war era photo album of American political and military figures was owned by Karl Schenk, president of Switzerland
1865
Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian

Anonymous photographer
A book of illustrated personal portraits from the Civil War era
c. 1861-1865
Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian

A photo exhibit to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Experience Civil War Photography: From the Home Front to the Battlefront, opens in the Smithsonian Castle August 1st 2012 and it continues for a year. Advancements in photography brought the conflict close to home for many Americans and the exhibit features a stereoview and a carte-de-visite album of Civil War generals.

During the Civil War the Castle served as a home for the Smithsonian Secretary’s family and a place of learning and collecting. The exhibit displays excerpts from the diary from the daughter of the Secretary Joseph Henry. Mary Henry recorded the comings and goings of soldiers to the Castle use of its towers to observe advancing soldiers and the state of Washington after Lincoln’s assassination.

Also featured are Smithsonian employee Solomon Brown (1829-1906) and the lecture hall that hosted a series of abolitionist speakers; it was destroyed by fire in 1865. Stereoviews, a form of 3-D photography that blossomed during that era, daguerreotypes, tintypes and ambrotypes – all emerging types of photography – are highlighted in the exhibit to explore the ways photography was used to depict the war, prompt discussion and retain memories.

The exhibit features a range of Civil War-era photographic materials from Smithsonian collections, including cameras, stereoviewers, albums and portraits, alongside photographs of soldiers and battlefields. Highlights include an ambrotype portrait of an African American washerwoman, carte-de-visite (a type of small photo) album of Civil War generals, an 11-by-4-inch-view camera and equipment and an examination of the emergence of battlefield photography and photojournalism.

Experience Civil War Photography: From the Home Front to the Battlefront is a joint exhibition produced by the Smithsonian and the Civil War Trust and is sponsored by the History channel. For more information visit the Civil War website.

Press release from the Smithsonian Castle website

Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882)
[Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Dead Confederate sharpshooter in “The devil’s den”]
July 1863

Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882)
[Antietam, Md. President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers]
3rd October 1862

Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882)
[Antietam, Md. President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers] (detail)
3rd October 1862

Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaign was one of the first to use photography as a political tool
1860
Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882)
[Fort Pulaski, Ga. The “Beauregard” gun]
April 1862
1 negative (2 plates) : glass, stereograph, wet collodion
Two plates form left (LC-B811-0197A) and right (LC-B811-0197B) halves of a stereograph pair
Photograph of the Federal Navy, and seaborne expeditions against the Atlantic Coast of the Confederacy – specifically of Fort Pulaski, Ga., April 1862

Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882)
[Richmond, Va. Grave of Gen. J. E. B. Stuart in Hollywood Cemetery, with temporary marker]
Richmond, April-June 1865

James F. Gibson (American, 1828-1905)
[James River, Va. Deck and turret of U.S.S. Monitor seen from the bow (ie. stern)]
9th July, 1862
1 negative (2 plates): glass, stereograph, wet collodion

A magnified view of a photo looking through a single lens viewfinder of a Civil War-era stereoviewer (featuring an image in the same series as the one above)
Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian

Alexander Gardner (American born United Kingdom, 1821-1882)
[Washington Navy Yard, D.C. Lewis Payne, the conspirator who attacked Secretary Seward, standing in overcoat and hat]
April 1865
Glass, wet plate colloidon

Matthew Brady & Co.,
Petroleum Nasby (David Ross Locke)
1865
Albumen photograph

An 1865 carte-de-visite portrait – a highly collectible albumen photograph on a small card – featuring American humorist Petroleum Nasby, pseudonym of David Ross Locke. Photo: Brian Ireley, Smithsonian

Smithsonian Castle
1000 Jefferson Dr SW
Washington, DC 20004, United States

Opening hours:
8.30am – 5.30pm daily

Smithsonian Castle website

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Review: ‘Johsel Namkung: A Retrospective’ published by Cosgrove Editions, 2013

June 2013

Published by Cosgrove Editions, Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective is a collection of one hundred exquisite images selected from a remarkable career in photography spanning six decades.

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Big Meadow, Washington Pass, Washington September, 2000
2000

“I like to give my viewers questions, not answers. Let them find beauty in the most mundane things, like roadside wildflowers and tumbled weeds.”

Johsel Namkung

“When we can find the abstract in nature we find the deepest art.”

Mark Tobey

“Photographs give us information; it seems that they give us information that is very packaged and they give us the information that we are already prepared to recognise obviously. It’s as if the words don’t have the weight they should have, so that one of the statements being made by any photograph is: “This really exists.” The photograph is a kind of job for the imagination to do something that we should have been able to do if we were not so disturbed by so many different kinds of information that are not really absorbed. Photographs have this authority of being testimony, but almost as if you have some direct contact with the thing, or as if the photograph is a piece of the thing; even though it’s an image, it really is the thing.”

Susan Sontag. Excerpt from a speech, Wellesley College photographic symposium, April 21, 1975

This is a superlative book by Cosgrove Editions that celebrates the sixty-year life in photography of the now 94-year-old Johsel Namkung. Rather than a retrospective I see this book as testimony to Johsel Namkung’s vision as an artist and the photographs, as Susan Sontag observes above, as testaments that allow the viewer to have some direct contact with the things that Johsel photographed, to see and feel with him the places that he visited and the things that he saw.

Some of the photographs in this book take your breath away. Taken with a large format camera Johsel’s compositions are heavily influenced by music and are almost fugue-like in their structure. They vibrate and sing like few other landscape photographs that I have ever seen. There is the absence of a horizon, so that his photographs seem to agree with the picture-plane rather than with the world at large.1 Rather, Johsel lets his images flow and in that flow he creates patterning that distinctly creates layers of landscape. The juxtaposing of lines on the landscape is reinforced in the sequencing of the book, where binary opposites are paired on facing pages: feminine / masculine, yang / ying, macro / micro. For example Rainy Pass, Washington July, 1989 is printed opposite Picture Lake, Mount Baker, Washington July 1979 (feminine / masculine); Steptoe Butte, Washington January, 1989 is printed opposite Oak Creek, Washington March, 1991 (yang / ying); and the vast Denali National Park, Alaska September, 1987 is printed opposite the almost Japanese-like delicacy of Arrigetch, Alaska September, 1980 (macro / micro). Although there are links to Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Toby and photographers Ansel Adams, Minor White and Eliot Porter this work is wholly Johsel’s in its compositional structure – the position that the photographer puts himself in, both physically and mentally, to obtain these most beautiful of images.

Johsel has a love of small triangular shapes within the pictorial frame. They act like small punctum or pizzicato in musical terms and these given details are intended as such by the photographer. The little punctum in Johsel’s individual works become an accumulation of small punctum that resonate throughout the whole testimony of his work – through the placement of rocks and twigs, the use of triangles and layers whose presence Johsel so loves within the photograph. In this sense (that the photograph is written by the photographer), these are photographs of the mind as much as they are of the landscape. Working in the manner of Minor White (photographing in meditation, creating a pathway from the self to the object, from the object through the camera and back to the self, forming a circle), harmonising all elements (visual, physical, elemental, spiritual), Johsel exposes himself as much as the landscape he is photographing. This is his spirit in relation to the land, to the cosmos, even. Like Monet’s paintings of water lilies these photographs are a “small dreaming” of his spirit with a section of the land not necessarily, as in Aboriginal art, a dreaming and connection to the whole land.

As Minor White observes of the “recognition” of such dreaming when working with the view camera,

“First, there is a store of images, experience, ego problems, ideals, fears, which the man brings to his seeing at the start. Second, during the activity of seeing they are matched against the images in the visual world, like matching colours. This is done with some conscious effort and a great deal of unconscious participation. At the moment of matching or “recognition” there is a feeling of important at least, and sometimes a merciless impact. This in turn is secured by exposure – like a sudden gust of wind drops a ripe apple. So we can say “recognition” is the trigger of exposure. In view camera work the lapse between recognition and exposure may be relatively long. There is time for analysis and criticism of image and idea, and exposure sums up the entire experience.”2

Like the sudden gust of wind drops the ripe apple.

Oh the joy Johsel must have found when he recognised such invocations, by being aware of his surroundings and his relationship to the earth. I know from my own experience that when you find such a place and recognise it for what it is, it is then an entirely different matter to capture it on film for the camera imparts its own perspective. It is almost as if Johsel and the camera are one, and that the camera itself has disappeared into the landscape (I like the way that you can nearly see his camera but it is actually hidden in the photograph at the bottom of the posting). I get the feeling that Johsel is quite consciously working within an adopted aesthetic – sort of like a tea ceremony – and just making things purposefully and having faith that it is some sort “of way” of doing things. At no point is there any sense of difficulty here – it has all been removed. Yet there was so much physical effort: climbing, walking, waiting, patience, no trace of it. What a heroic act this is!

Johsel approaches a metaphysics of the Real, creating authentic visualisations of the world – an idealised, abstracted Real tending towards a (mental) s(t)imulation. In other words, he photographs the world not to reveal a specific place but a particular state of mind. Is the link to indexicality broken? No, but there is no ultimate truth or origin here, for his is an art of transformation (theatricality) through structure (modernism) which is the essence of aesthetic arts.

“This strategy rejects the search for an origin or ultimate Truth and instead interprets reality as composed, contingent and intersubjective; reality is, therefore, theatrical… Theatricality is made of this endless play and of these continuous displacements of the position of desire, in other words, of the position of the subject in process with an imaginary constructive space.”3

In Johsel’s photographs desire is displaced, ego is removed and his photographs become images of the mind as much as they are of the landscape. This is Johsel at play recognising, becoming these imaginary, constructive spaces. He is in the zone, he becomes the zone, even. Finally we can say: his photographs and his life are transformational; his imagination is the representation of possibility; his work is testimony to that representation.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Adapted from Robert Nelson commenting on the painting of Monet. “Impressionist’s ode to beauty trips into light fantastic,” The Age newspaper, Wednesday May 22nd 2013, p. 42

2/ White, Minor. “Exploratory Camera,” 1949 in Bunnell, Peter C. (ed.,). Aperture Magazine Anthology – The Minor White Years 1952-1976. Aperture, 2013, p. 64

3/ Féral, Josette. “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified,” in Modern Drama 25 (March) 1982, p. 177

Many thankx to Johsel Namkung, Dick Busher and Cosgrove Editions for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Dick Busher allowed me to pick the photographs that I wanted to illustrate this posting and for that I am most grateful. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The book has recently taken top honours in two different award competitions among independent publishers for photography books: The Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benny Awards, and the Independent Publishers IPPY Awards.

PS. I think that photographer is very aware of: “Let the subject generate its own composition” (MW) – coming from Weston’s “Composition is the strongest way of seeing.”

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Cougar Lake, Oregon June 1991
1991

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Rainy Pass, Washington July, 1989
1989

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Picture Lake, Mount Baker, Washington July 1979
1979

In his photography Johsel brings attention and importance to elements of nature that most people pass by on their way to the grand vistas. One of my favourite locations in Washington is the Palouse as seen from Steptoe Butte; Johsel’s interpretations of the undulating wheat fields just greening with new growth are sensuous and impressionistic. One feels the slope of the earth, the texture of the tilled fields rather than seeing it. The sophisticated simplicity of his vision is highlighted in a simple composition of a dark pond surface, afloat with delicate grasses; the fine lines flowing this way and that give a sense of constant movement, yet it is a still photograph. In a twig reaching out of the snow, the subtle reflection on a pond in late afternoon light, delicate frozen ripples of ice clinging to river rock, the geometric chaos of tree branches covered in snow, the rich patina of weather-beaten stone, Johsel celebrates the minute in a grand way; it becomes the symbol for the greater whole. Textures, rhythm of line and movement become the foremost elements in his work. Some of Johsel’s images are quiet and abstract, singing a single note, while others are full-out symphonies in a celebration of the rhythms. In particular I find his Korean landscapes extraordinary. In winter the alpine hillsides bare their architecture; ridge after ridge, speckled with leafless birch and pyramidal conifers, they overlap in a crescendo of natural beauty.

Art Wolfe, Introduction to Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Steptoe Butte, Washington January, 1989
1989

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Oak Creek, Washington March, 1991
1991

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Steptoe Butte, Washington October, 1977
1977

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Steptoe Butte, Washington October, 1983
1983

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Denali National Park, Alaska September, 1987
1987

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Arrigetch, Alaska September, 1980
1980

Photography as a medium is still relatively young. Introduced publicly in 1839, its definition has remained complicated in discourse and practice, oscillating between practical application – whether scientific illustration, family record, or aid to commerce – and aesthetic or expressive concerns. Debates that arose shortly after its invention, contesting whether photography could be an artistic medium, remained heated a century later and beyond, resolving only after Photoshop and other types of photographic manipulation became commonplace. Questions about the role of the photographer, the relative merits of colour versus black-and-white, truth to the original shot versus darkroom manipulation, investigations about canon, hierarchy, and genre have continued to multiply, as have the social organisations – art schools, technical assistance and supplies, professional and amateur societies, regular shows and publications – that foster photographic work. Becoming a photographer in the middle of the twentieth century, Johsel Namkung emerged at the intersection of all these social and conceptual shifts. Taking advantage of this opening, he made several unconventional choices: deciding to work in colour although it was black and white that signified art photography until the 1970s or later; working abstractly, but hewing to the dictates of straight photography: available light, no darkroom manipulation, print the full negative.

From the acquisition of his first camera, Namkung developed high standards for his photographic practice, recalling to interviewer Alan Lau, “I always had a confidence in myself… I had a sort of a vision toward my photographic future. I knew I was going to be something.”1 Trained first as a musician, from the beginning Namkung defined photography in abstract terms, approaching his motifs in terms of rhythms, tonal relationships, pattern, and texture. Individual works reveal specific affinities. The calligraphic grasses in Lizzard Lake, Stampede Pass, WA, August 1976 suggests Harry Callahan’s images of reeds, which are associated with Abstract Expressionist photography. The lichen-covered stone in Blue Mountain, Olympic National Park, WA, September 1976 resembles Jackson Pollock or the famed White Paintings of Namkung’s friend Mark Tobey. The screen of regular tree trunks in Sherman Pass, WA, August 1993, recalls the hatched lines representing driving rain in modern Japanese printmaking. Like limpid watercolor strokes, the rolling hills of the Palouse – distinct in each version of Steptoe Butte, of 1976, 1977, and 1983 – allude to Morris Louis’s colour field paintings.

Namkung’s preface here recounts how successive unusual jobs supplied him with professional training as a photographer. Seattle in the postwar boom years also provided a rich and supportive context for his art. Skilled artists from the ranks of first- and second-generation immigrants, from Japan, China, Korea, and the Philippines, gathered in the International District but worked and showed farther afield. Art photography had a popular following and many innovative practitioners; Pictorialism – promoted by annual exhibitions like those organised by the Seattle Camera Club – encouraged aesthetic and technical exploration with cameras. The so-called Northwest Mystics represented only one of several artistic communities exploring abstraction, some emphasising its expressive potential, others seeking formal invention. Creativity was equally celebrated beyond fine art. Rarefied technical challenges were tackled and mastered at The Boeing Company as well as the scientific laboratories of the University of Washington. The richness of this cultural ecology fostered the unique development of Namkung’s career. In return, his thoughtful production has nourished local and international audiences for over four decades.

Elizabeth Brown, Former Chief Curator, Henry Art Gallery, Introduction to Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective

1/ Alan Chong Lau interview of Johsel Namkung conducted in Seattle, Washington, on October 5, 1989, for the Archives of American Art Northwest Asian American Project.

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Shi Shi Beach Buoy, Olympic National Park, Washington August, 1981
1981

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Bissell, Washington December, 1981
1981

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Alaska Lichens, Date Unknown
Nd

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Blue Mountain, Olympic National Park, Washington September, 1976
1976

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Weston Beach, Point Lobos, California May, 1988
1988

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Frenchman Coulee, Washington May, 2002
2002

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Kalaloch Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington October, 1984
1984

Joshel Namkung on Hurricane Ridge, photographed by his friend Ken Levine

Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective website

Cosgrove Editions is an independent publisher of books on photography. We also provide production and printing assistance for artists who self publish their work. Many of our projects have won some of the highest international awards for printing quality.

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Exhibition: ‘Tim Hetherington / Doug Rickard’ at Stills Gallery, Sydney

Exhibition dates: 22nd May to 22nd June 2013

In association with Yossi Milo Gallery and Head On Photo Festival

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Alcantara, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

“Our generation is not attached to this myth of photography as objective reporting because we know it’s not. And so he and I had been kind of playing with the idea of, so where is that line? What does that mean? Are we, by definition, objective? Is there something else that can be reported about war that can be more about the experience? That touches on what it’s like to be there, on the individual conflict of what it means to be there? That’s what that particular work is about.”

Chris Anderson

The intimacy of war

Both of these series depict human bodies under surveillance. In one (Tim Hetherington) the subject is un/aware. Having given the photographer prior consent to be photographed while they were sleeping the American servicemen remain blissfully unaware of the result of the camera “snapping” them. Just as they seem to be on the very verge of snapping in the video Sleeping Soldiers_single screen (2009, below). The psychological scars of war don’t differentiate between awake and asleep, aware and unaware:

“The photographer wanted to reveal the soldiers how they must seem to their mothers: innocent, vulnerable. Still it is a portrait of the scars of war because, as Hetherington said, their sleep was often helped along by drugs… That a soldier allowed Hetherington to capture him while asleep illustrates the photographer’s dedication and connection to the platoon.” (Philip Brookman, Corcoran chief curator on the Washington Post website [Online] Cited 12/06/2013)

Hetherington spent 15 months in Afghanistan between 2007-2008 following the members of a 15-strong platoon of US paratroopers at one of the most remote and dangerous outposts in the war zone. He went on to make the award winning film Restrepo (2010) with the footage that he shot during his year-long engagement with the spaces of war. In repose, the US soldiers seem angelic, contemplative, or vulnerable: in the photographs posted here I see Adonis (Alcantara), foetal (Kelso), corpse (Lizama) and death mask (Richardson). As Michael Fried comments on the 1930s Walker Evans subway photographs were he took pictures of commuters with a hidden camera, “the notion that persons who are unaware of being photographed who at the limit are unaware of being beheld manifest the inner truth of their meaning on their faces.” This way of capturing an inner truth is rare in the history of art. While there are plenty of individual paintings that depict sleeping men in art I could find no body of work that depicts men sleeping in photography.

Although the exhibition is of the still photographs, what I find most chilling however is how Hetherington melds the sleeping bodies with action footage in the video. The overlaying of the sound of helicopters onto images of the sleeping soldiers, the blending of bodies and machines, the reverberation of voices with the rat tat tat of heavy weapons fire is particularly disturbing. The look in the soldier’s eyes as he freaks out when one of his compatriots is shot at 3.24 – 3.38 of the video is frightening. The grief, the fear, palpable – and then to end the video with the corpse-like body of Lizama… THIS is the horror of war. Kill or be killed, boredom, nightmares, as if fighting and sleeping in a dream. Hetherington lays it all on the line for the viewer.

“For me, it’s kind of the closest thing I’ve seen, in any form, that actually shows what it must feel like to be in combat. You’re right there with the soldiers, and they’re not heroic; they’re really just struggling to come to terms with what is going on around them. That’s really what this is. So instead of showing them just being honourable, he’s showing this stuff, the scenes of them being in combat, as a kind of dream.” (Philip Brookman, Corcoran chief curator)

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Stills Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Donoho, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Kelso, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

“The book and film are about the intimacy of war,” explains Hetherington. “And that’s what I see when I see the photographs of these guys sleeping. We are used to seeing soldiers as cardboard cut-outs. We dehumanise them, but war is a very intimate act. All of those soldiers would die for each other. We’re not talking about friendship. We’re talking about brotherhood.”

“You can get bored of taking pictures of fighting,” he says. “I got more interested in the relationship between the soldiers. That’s where the shots of them sleeping came from. If you go to these places you can sometimes get all your media oxygen sucked up by the fighting; we were lucky to have time to explore other things.”

“In America, soldiers are used by the right wing as a symbol of patriotic duty, but the truth is they are all individuals,” he concludes. “And the Left want a moral condemnation of the war. What I say is that if we have a full understanding of what the soldiers can and can’t do out there, it is a good starting point for peace-building. The heart of the war machine is in fact taking a group of young men and putting them on the side of a mountain. We need to understand that experience. Certainly if we have any hope of properly reintegrating them into society.”

Rob Sharp. “Combat fatigue: Tim Hetherington’s intimate portraits of US soldiers at rest reveal the other side of Afghanistan,” on The Independent website, 11th September 2010 [Online] Cited 19/09/2022

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Kelso, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Kim, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Lizama, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Nevalla, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011)
Richardson, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP

Sleeping Soldiers_single screen (2009) from Tim Hetherington.

In association with Head On Photo Festival, Stills Gallery is delighted to host compelling works by two internationally acclaimed artists, Tim Hetherington and Doug Rickard, brought to Australian audiences from Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

Without the guns and artillery of war, or the armor of bravado and aggression, Tim Hetherington’s images of sleeping American soldiers are disarmingly peaceful and childlike in their vulnerability. Hetherington observed this active-duty battalion while they were stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley during 2007-08, capturing beneath the camouflage the most intimate of moments, which are seemingly at odds with common reportage images of adrenaline-fuelled and stony-faced soldiers. Through his photographs, writing and films, Tim Hetherington gave us new ways to look at and think about human suffering. Tim was tragically killed on April 20, 2011, while photographing and filming the conflict in Libya.

Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture depicts American street scenes, located using the internet platform Google Street View. Over a four-year period, Rickard virtually explored the roads of America looking for forgotten, economically devastated, and largely abandoned places. After locating and composing scenes of urban and rural decay, Rickard re-photographed the images on his computer screen, freeing the image from its technological origins and re-presenting them on a new documentary plane. Rickard’s work evokes a connection to the tradition of American street photography. He both follows and advances that tradition, with a documentary strategy that acknowledges an increasingly technological world. Collectively, these images present a photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised and economically powerless, those living an inversion of the American Dream.

Both artists are highly regarded for their contributions to contemporary photographic and film practices. Before his untimely death Hetherington received numerous accolades for his documentation of conflict zones, including the 2007 World Press Photo of the Year, the Rory Peck Award for Features (2008), an Alfred I. duPont Award (2009), and an Academy Award nomination for Restrepo (2011). His work has posthumously become part of the Magnum Photo Archive. Doug Rickard is founder of American Suburb X and These Americans, and his work has been widely exhibited including in New Photography 2011 at MOMA, New York, Le Bal, Paris, and the 42nd edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles. A monograph of A New American Picture was first published in 2010 and was rereleased in 2012.This is the first opportunity for Australian audiences to see many of these works, and it is also a new collaboration with the prestigious Yossi Milo Gallery, established in 2000, and focused on the representation of artists specialising in photo-based art, video and works on paper.

Text from the Stills Gallery website

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#32.700542, Dallas, TX (2009)
2011
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#34.546147, Helena-West Helena, AR (2008)
2010
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#40.700776, Jersey City, NJ (2007)
2011
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#40.805716, Bronx, NY (2007)
2011
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#82.948842, Detroit, MI (2009)
2010
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
101.6 x 162.56cm
Edition of 5 + 3AP

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
#114.196622, Lennox, CA (2007)
2012
from A New American Picture
Archival pigment prints
66.04 x 105.41cm
Editions of 5 + 3AP

Stills Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

Stills Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951’ at The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida

Exhibition dates: 14th March – 16th June 2013

Alexander Alland (Ukranian-American, 1902-1989, born Sevastopol, Ukraine)
Untitled (Brooklyn Bridge)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: William and Jane Schloss Family Foundation Fund

Conscience of the brave

Bradley Manning.
A slight, bespectacled, intelligent gay man.
A man who has the courage of his convictions.
He revealed truth at the heart of the world’s largest “democracy.”

There is something insidious about the American nation. Not its citizens, not its place, but its government. This government has perpetrated evil in the name of its people. Think of Iraq and Afghanistan, invasions in the name of freedom, the support of puppet governments, the assassinations, the military advisors on the ground, the profits made.

The torture. The deaths.

Bradley Manning revealed all of this because he has a mighty moral compass. He knows right from wrong. He was not afraid to expose the hypocrisy that for many years has beaten, unfettered, in the breast of a nation. The home of the brave and the free is sadly under attack from within. In the name of its people.

And why is this text relevant to this posting?

So often in the history of America, dissension is shut down because of some imagined menace, from within or without. Here another group of people (photographers documenting American social conditions) were persecuted for standing up for social causes, for the freedom to expose injustice where it lives. The paranoia of patriotism.

As Harold Pinter has so pithily observed,

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Except the hypnotist is a deranged psychopath, a divided split personality arraigning god, greed and guns. Out of one, many sins.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to The Norton Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“When the persecution of an individual who has exposed an evil is pursued so ruthlessly and yet the evil itself is studiedly ignored, all of us know that there is something very wrong with the way that our society is conducting itself. And if we do not protest in the strongest terms about what is being done in our name, then we become complicit.”

Alan Moore

“The US has shown remarkable energy in its pursuit of alleged whistleblowers. Has it investigated the deaths of those innocent civilians with the same vigour? With any vigour whatsoever? And which would you consider a crime? To conceal the deaths of innocent civilians, or to reveal them? I know what my answer would be.”

Les Barker

“To suggest that lives were put in danger by the release of the WikiLeaks documents is the most cynical of statements. Lives were put in danger the night we invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq, an act that had nothing to do with what the Bradley Mannings of this country signed up for: to defend our people from attack. It was a war based on a complete lie and lives were not only put in danger, hundreds of thousands of them were exterminated. For those who organised this massacre to point a finger at Bradley Manning is the ultimate example of Orwellian hypocrisy.”

Michael Moore

“Private Manning is the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to ‘a moral choice.’ His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.”

John Pilger

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Coming to America
c. 1951
Gelatin silver print The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Photography Acquisitions Committee Fund

Louis Stettner

Louis Stettner (November 7, 1922 – October 13, 2016) was an American photographer of the 20th century whose work included streetscapes, portraits and architectural images of New York and Paris. His work has been highly regarded because of its humanity and capturing the life and reality of the people and streets. Starting in 1947, Stettner photographed the changes in the people, culture, and architecture of both cities. He continued to photograph New York and Paris up until his death. …

Back from the war Stettner joined the Photo League in New York. Stettner visited Paris in 1946 and in 1947 moved there. From 1947 to 1949 he studied at the “Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques” in Paris and received a Bachelor of Arts in Photography & Cinema. He went back and forth between New York and Paris for almost two decades and finally settled permanently in Saint-Ouen, near Paris, in 1990. Stettner still frequently returned to New York.

Stettner’s professional work in Paris began with capturing life in the post-war recovery. He captured the everyday lives of his subjects. In the tradition of the Photo League, he wanted to investigate the bonds that connect people to one another. In 1947 he was asked by the same Photo League to organise an exhibition of French photographers in New York. He gathered the works of some of the greatest photographers of the era, including Doisneau, Brassaï, Boubat, Izis, and Ronis. The show was a big success and was largely reviewed in the annual issue of U.S. Camera. Stettner had begun a series of regular meetings with Brassaï who was a great mentor and had significant influence on his work. In 1949, Stettner had his first exhibition at the “Salon des Indépendants” at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

In 1951 his work was included in the famous Subjektive Fotografie exhibition in Germany. During the 1950s he free-lanced for Time, Life, Fortune, and Du (Germany). While in Paris he reconnected with Paul Strand, who had also left New York because of the political intolerance of the McCarthy era – Strand had been a founder of the Photo League that would be blacklisted and then banned during those years.

In the 1970s Stettner spent more time in New York City, where he taught at Brooklyn College, Queens College, and Cooper Union.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Erika Stone (German, b. 1924)
Lower Eastside Facade
1947
Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection
Museum purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth M. Ross, the Derby Fund,
John S. and Catherine Chapin Kobacker, and the Friends of the Photo League

Stone’s adroit cropping of this image emphasises the coy upward gaze of the woman in the advertisement, away from the laundry line (emblem of poverty), and suggests the social mobility of the postwar era.

Erika Stone’s documentary photographs reflect her long, active career as a photo journalist and magazine photographer. In the 40’s, Stone was a member of the legendary Photo League, an organisation of photo documentarians which she feels most influenced her approach to her personal photographic work. It was during the years as a League member that she developed her interest in documenting people and at the age of seventeen, produced her Bowery series.

Although she considers herself mostly self-taught, she studied at the New School of Social Research with Bereniece Abbott and George Tice.

Stone was a stringer for both Time and Der Spiegel magazines and worked as a general photojournalist until 1960. After the birth of her two sons, she made photographing children and family her specialty. Her photographs have been and are widely published in magazines and textbooks around the world.

Anonymous. “Erika Stone,” on the American Photography Archives Group website Nd [Online] Cited 13/07/2024

Marvin E. Newman (American, 1927-2023)
Halloween, South Side
1951
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Photography Acquisitions Committee Fund

Marvin Newman

Born in New York; Newman attended Brooklyn College, where he studied sculpture with Burgoyne Diller and photography with Walter Rosenblum. Following Rosenblum’s suggestion, he joined the Photo League in 1948, taking classes with John Ebstel. The Photo League, founded in 1936, blazed a trail for serious photographers for 15 years, providing a forum for ideas, cheap darkroom space, and the vision of using the art of picture taking to change the world. Newman then attended the Institute of Design, Chicago (1949-52), where, after studying with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, he received one of the first MS degrees in photography (1952).

During this time, Newman won national contests, including one sponsored by American Photography (1950) and another by Time, Inc. (1951). His work appeared in the Always a Young Stranger exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in a one-man show at Roy De Carava’s A Photographer’s Gallery (1956). Well-known as a photojournalist, Newman has been a major contributor to Sports Illustrated since its inception (1953), as well as to Life, Look, Newsweek, and Smithsonian magazines. In addition, he has been the national president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, authored or coauthored eight books on photography, and received the Art Director’s Gold Medal for Editorial Photography.

Ida Wyman (American, 1926-2019)
Spaghetti 25 Cents, New York
1945
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Photography Acquisitions Committee Fund

This Italian restaurant was near the offices of Acme Newspictures, where Wyman became the company’s first female photo printer in 1943. After the war she lost her job at the agency. The “Ladies Invited” sign on the window is a reminder of a time when unescorted women were not always welcome in public dining establishments.

Ida Wyman

When I began working in the 1940s, few women were doing magazine photography in a field that was almost exclusively male. As I progressed from box camera to Speed Graphic (my first professional camera), and then to a Rolleiflex, I stopped thinking about the mechanics of film speed, f-stops, shutter speed, and began focusing on subject matter that interested me. What interested me so much were ordinary people and their everyday activities. Early on, I had documented children’s games and unusual architectural details in my Bronx neighbourhood. I decided to expand, to go elsewhere, taking the subway to Harlem, Chinatown, and lower Manhattan, exploring those neighbourhoods and looking for photos.

I became a member of the Photo League in 1946. I considered myself a documentary photographer and the League’s philosophy of honest photography appealed to me. I also began to understand the power of photos to help improve the social order by showing the conditions under which many people lived and worked. Even after leaving the League the following year, I continued to emphasise visual and social realities in my straightforward photographs.

Beginning with my earliest photos seeing New York City with my feet, and in whatever part of the country I was in, I continued my own walkabout, learning the area, engaging my subject, listening, and respecting their dignity. This continued to be my approach when taking photos. My photographs depicted daily life in America’s modern metropolitan centres, including Chicago and Los Angeles as well as New York.

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
The Wishing Tree
1937, printed later
from Harlem Document, 1936-40
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Lillian Gordon Bequest

Harlem’s legendary Wishing Tree, bringer of good fortune, was once a tall elm that stood outside a theatre at 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue. When it was cut down in 1934 Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the celebrated tap dancer, moved the stump to a nearby block and planted a new Tree of Hope beside it to assume wish granting duties. A piece of the original trunk is preserved in the Apollo Theatre on 125th Street, where performers still touch it for luck before going onstage.

Sonia Handelman Meyer (American, 1920-2022)
Hebrew Immigration Aid Society
c. 1946
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin in memory of Max Alperin

The efforts of the New York based Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS) to rescue European Jews during the war were severely hampered by US immigration laws. After the war it aided in the resettlement of some 150,000 displaced persons, including, presumably, these three, whom Handelman Meyer has chosen to photograph in close-up. She conveys both their common suffering and their individuality, emphasising differences in body language and dress.

Sonia Handelman Meyer

I first heard of the Photo League from Lou Stoumen in Puerto Rico in 1942. I was working for the U.S. Army Signal Corps and Lou was preparing to join Yank Magazine. When I returned to New York City, I walked up the rickety stairs to League Headquarters and took a beginners class with Johnny Ebstel. I bought a used Rolleicord for a precious $100, and dared to go out on the city streets to photograph the life around me. Soon the guys began to come back from the war and the heady life of Photo League workshops, exhibits, lectures, photo hunts, and committee assignments intensified. I took eye-heart-soul opening workshops with Sid Grossman, worked as the paid (!) secretary for a year or so, and worked on the Lewis Hine Committee under Marynn Ausubel.

I photographed in Spanish Harlem, Greenwich Village, midtown Manhattan, at the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, at an anti-lynching rally in Madison Square Park, at a Jehovah’s Witness convention in Yankee Stadium, and on Coney Island. Mostly, I photographed children and reflections of my city – rough-edged, tender, and very beautiful in its diversity. Some of this work was shown in the major 1949 exhibition, This is the Photo League.

The heartbreaking end of the League coincided with a huge change in my personal life. I got married and my husband began to go to college and we were out of NY for a while. And then the biggest change: our own family arrived and the joys of our son, and later our daughter, absorbed my time. Prints and negatives were stashed away in boxes and I lost track of all the old friends at the League. After so many years of being in the shadows, you can imagine my pleasure, at 90+ years of age, to have my photographs out of their boxes and onto walls where they can be seen, thought about, and enjoyed – and perhaps again take their place in the history of the Photo League.

Arthur Leipzig (American, 1918-2014)
Chalk Games, Prospect Place, Brooklyn
1950
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Rictavia Schiff Bequest

Arnold Eagle (Hungarian-American, 1909-1992)
Chatham Square Platform, New York City
c. 1939
Silver gelatin print

Joe Schwartz (American, 1913-2013)
Slums Must Go! May Day Parade, New York
c. 1936
Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection
Museum Purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth M. Ross, the Derby Fund, John S. and Catherine Chapin Kobacker, and the Friends of the Photo League

Morris Huberland (Polish-American, 1909-2003 born Warsaw, Poland)
Union Square, New York
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund

The Norton Museum of Art’s newest special exhibition, The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951, is a formidable survey of the League’s history, and its artistic, cultural, social, and political significance. Opening March 14 and on view through June 16, 2013, this striking exhibition includes nearly 150 vintage photographs from Photo League collections at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, and The Jewish Museum in New York City.

The exhibition is organised by Mason Klein, Curator of Fine Arts at The Jewish Museum and Catherine Evans, the William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography of the Columbus Museum of Art. It premiered in at The Jewish Museum in 2011 to rave reviews. The New York Times called The Radical Camera a “stirring show,” and the New York Photo Review hailed it as “nothing short of splendid.” The New Yorker named the exhibition one of the top 10 photography exhibitions of 2011. The Norton is the final venue on the exhibition’s tour.

The exhibition explores the fascinating blend of aesthetics and social activism at the heart of the Photo League. League members were known for capturing sharply revealing, compelling moments from everyday life. The League focused on New York City and its vibrant streets – a shoeshine boy, a brass band on a bustling corner, a crowded beach at Coney Island. Many of the images are beautiful, yet harbour strong social commentary on issues of class, race, and opportunity. The organisation’s members included some of the most noted photographers of the mid-20th century – W. Eugene Smith, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Lisette Model, Berenice Abbott and Aaron Siskind, to name a few.

In 1936, a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organisation in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centred on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph, and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. (The Photo League also helped validate photography as a fine art, presenting student work and guest exhibitions by established photographers.) The Radical Camera presents the development of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Offering classes, mounting exhibitions, and fostering community, members of the Photo League focused on social reform and the power of the photograph to motivate change. At the height of their influence, their membership included the most important photographers of their day including Berenice Abbot, Aaron Siskind, Barbara Morgan, Sid Grossman, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), and Lisette Model. Featuring more than 175 works by these artists as well as many more Photo League members, The Radical Camera traces the organisation’s interests, attitudes toward photography, and impact during its 15-year lifespan.

The innovative contributions of the Photo League during its 15-year existence (1936-1951) were significant. As it grew, the League mirrored monumental shifts in the world starting with the Depression, through World War II, and ending with the Red Scare. Born of the worker’s movement, the Photo League was an organisation of young, idealistic, first-generation American photographers, most of them Jewish, who believed in documentary photography as an expressive medium and powerful tool for exposing social problems. It was also a school with teachers such as Sid Grossman, who encouraged students to take their cameras to the streets and discover the meaning of their work as well as their relationship to it. The League had a darkroom for printing, published an acclaimed newsletter called Photo Notes, offered exhibition space, and was a place to socialise.

The Photo League helped validate photography as a fine art, presenting student work and guest exhibitions by established photographers such as Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Edward Weston, among others. These affecting black and white photographs show life as it was lived mostly on the streets, sidewalks and subways of New York. Joy and playfulness as well as poverty and hardship are in evidence. In addition to their urban focus, “Leaguers” photographed rural America, and during World War II, took their cameras to Latin America and Europe. The exhibition also addresses the active participation of women who found rare access and recognition at the League. The Radical Camera presents the League within a critical, historical context. Developments in photojournalism were catalysing a new information era in which photo essays were appearing for the first time in magazines such as Life and Look. As time went on, its social documentary roots evolved toward a more experimental approach, laying the foundation for the next generation of street photographers.

In 1947, the League came under the pall of McCarthyism and was blacklisted for its alleged involvement with the Communist Party. Ironically, the Photo League had just begun a national campaign to broaden its base as a “Center for American Photography.” Despite the support of Ansel Adams, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Paul Strand, and many other national figures, this vision of a national photography centre could not overcome the Red Scare. As paranoia and fear spread, the Photo League was forced to disband in 1951. The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 has been organised by The Jewish Museum, New York, and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Major support was provided by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Limited Brands Foundation.”

Press release from The Norton Museum of Art website

Sy Kattelson (American, 1923-2018)
Untitled (Subway Car)
1949
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift

Jerome Liebling (American, 1924-2011)
Butterfly Boy, New York
1949
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund
© Estate of Jerome Liebling

Lee Sievan (American, 1907-1990)
Salvation Army Lassie in Front of a Woolworth Store
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund

This is a classic photograph. Look at the triangle that forms the central part of the image, from the girl at left looking with disdain at the matriarch singing then down to the look on the organ players face. Notice the girl at right covering her ears so she cannot hear the racket. Imagine the legs of the organ player going up and down, pumping air into the organ; and finally observe the shadow of a man’s face captured by reflection in the shop window as he walks past the scene. Magic.

Rosalie Gwathmey (American, 1908-2001)
Shout Freedom, Charlotte, North Carolina
c. 1948
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Gay Block and Malka Drucker Fund of the Houston Jewish Community Foundation

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
Max Is Rushing in the Bagels to a Restaurant on Second Avenue for the Morning Trade
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Joan B. and Richard L. Barovick Family Foundation and Bunny and Jim Weinberg Gifts

Bernard Cole (English, 1911-1992, born London, England)
Shoemaker’s Lunch
1944
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York,
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift

Rebecca Lepkoff (American, 1916-2014)
Broken Window on South Street, New York
1948
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Esther Leah Ritz Bequest

Arthur Leipzig (American, 1918-2014)
Ideal Laundry
1946
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Esther Leah Ritz Bequest

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled (Tenements, New York)
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift

Leftist political activism was a strong element in Kanaga’s work, beginning with her photographs of a labor strike in San Francisco in 1934. She provided photographs for progressive publications such as New Masses, Labor Defender, and Sunday Worker. Underlying this formal study of tenement laundry lines (a common motif in League imagery) is Kanaga’s empathy for the living conditions of the working class.

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Boy Jumping into Hudson River
1948
Gelatin silver print The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund

Sol Prom (Solomon Fabricant) (American, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Dancing School)
1938
from Harlem Document, 1936-40
Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund

Mary Bruce opened a dancing school in Harlem in 1937. For fifty years she taught ballet and tap, giving free lessons to those who could not afford them. Her illustrious pupils included Katherine Dunham, Nat King Cole, Ruby Dee, and Marlon Brando.

The Norton Museum of Art
1451 S. Olive Avenue
West Palm Beach, FL 33401
Phone: (561) 832-5196

Opening hours:
Thursday – Tuesday 10am – 5pm
Closed Wednesdays

Norton Museum of Art website

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