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Exhibition: ‘Stanley Greene – Black Passport’ at Foam, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 16th December 2011 – 5th February 2012

Many thankx to FOAM for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs: Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

Stanley Greene (American, 1949-2017)
Madman, Afghanistan
2008
Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

Foam presents Black Passport, a project by and about the American conflict photographer Stanley Greene (New York, 1949-2017). Black Passport shows photos of conflicts and disasters combined with photos of Greene’s private life. The result is a revealing portrait of a photographer who is addicted to the adrenaline rush of being on the move, but at the same time realises the sacrifices he makes in his personal life. Stanley Greene has photographed in regions such as Chechnya, Iraq, Rwanda and Sudan and is one of the founders of the international photo agency NOOR.

Every day, newspapers and magazines are filled with photos of war, oppression and violence. The photographer that enables us to watch what is happening in the rest of the world from the safety of our own homes, however, usually remains invisible. This is not the case in Black Passport, the biography of war photographer Stanley Greene, which appeared in book form in 2009 and will be exhibited in Foam starting on 16 December. Photos of conflict and disaster regions such as Rwanda, Sudan, Chechnya and Iraq are alternated with photos from the private life of Stanley Greene: photos of Paris and many women. Slide shows will also be presented, interspersed with texts from the book. Greene’s voice resounds through the exhibition space – he is disconcertingly frank: ‘I think you can only keep positive for eight years. If you stay at it longer than that, you turn. And not into a beautiful butterfly.’

Just as Stanley Greene, visitors to the exhibition are poised between the safety of Western life and the horrors of foreign wars. And it is precisely this juxtaposition that causes these photos to stir us more than the stream of bad-news images that inundate us daily. In addition, Black Passport is a fascinating story about what it is like to be a war photographer. Why does someone choose to be continually confronted with death and misery? Is it an escape from everyday reality and a craving for adventure?

Short Biography

Stanley Greene has photographed in the former Soviet Union, Central America, Asia and the Middle East. His work has appeared in publications including Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Stern and Paris Match. He has won various World Press Awards and in 2004 the W. Eugene Smith Award. Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003 was published in 2004 and his book Black Passport in 2009. Greene is one of the founders of the Amsterdam-based international photo agency NOOR.

Press release from the Foam website

Stanley Greene (American, 1949-2017)
Iraq, 2004, Road side explosion, Northern Iraq
2004
Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

“I think you can only do this for eight years. For eight years you can still keep the positive. If you stay at it longer than eight years, you turn. And not into a beautiful butterfly. You really turn. I see it in myself, I see it in all my friends and colleagues. I mean they are all victims of post trauma. We’re not the beautiful butterflies anymore. We become moths. We’re like moths flying to the flame.You know, sometimes your wings get singed or you just burn up. Get killed. Or you burn up inside.The drugs and the alcohol and the party and all of this is to push it away, push it away.”

“I’m an observer, I’m not an objective observer though, but I’m an observer. I feel it’s very important for journalists to go to these hell holes and photograph or write or do radio or whatever because I still believe that the public wants to know.”

Stanley Greene

Stanley Greene (February 14, 1949 – May 19, 2017) was an American photojournalist.

Greene was born to middle class parents in Brooklyn. Both his parents were actors. His father, who was born in Harlem, was a union organiser, one of the first African Americans elected as an officer in the Screen Actors Guild,and belonged to the Harlem Renaissance movement. Greene’s father was blacklisted as a Communist in the 1950s and forced to take uncredited parts in movies. Greene’s parents gave him his first camera when he was eleven years old.

Greene began his art career as a painter, but started taking photos as a means of cataloging material for his paintings. In 1971, when Greene was a member of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the Black Panther Party, his friend photographer W. Eugene Smith offered him space in his studio and encouraged him to study photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Greene held various jobs as a photographer, including taking pictures of rock bands and working at Newsday. In 1986, he shot fashion photographs in Paris. He called himself a “dilettante, sitting in cafes, taking pictures of girls and doing heroin”. After a friend died of AIDS, Greene kicked his drug habit and began to seriously pursue a photography career.

He began photojournalism in 1989, when his image (“Kisses to All, Berlin Wall”) of a tutu-clad girl with a champagne bottle became a symbol of the fall of the Berlin Wall. While working for the Paris-based photo agency Agence Vu in October 1993, Greene was trapped and almost killed in the White House in Moscow during a stand-off between President Boris Yeltsin and the parliament. He covered the war-torn countries Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iraq, Somalia, Croatia, Kashmir, and Lebanon. He took pictures of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the US Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

After 1994, Greene was best known for his documentation of the conflict in Chechnya, between rebels and the Russian Armed Forces, which was compiled in his 2004 book, Open Wound. These photos drew attention to the “suffering that has marked the latest surge in Chechnya’s centuries-long struggle for independence from Russia”.

In 2008, Greene revealed that he had hepatitis C, which he believed he had contracted from a contaminated razor while working in Chad in 2007. After controlling the disease with medication, he traveled to Afghanistan and photographed a story about “the crisis of drug abuse and infectious disease”.

Stanley Greene co-founded NOOR Agency with Kadir van Lohuizen in 2007. They launched their agency with their colleagues on the 7th of September 2007 at Visa Pour L’Image. Greene died in Paris, at the age of 68. He had been undergoing treatment for liver cancer.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Black Passport is the biography of war photographer Stanley Greene, compiled out of hours of interviews by Teun van der Heijden. It shows Stanley’s war images alternated with private images.

Teun van der Heijden: “Black Passport started as any other photo book project. At the beginning Stanley did let me know that he was up for ‘something completely different’. While working on the project we had a lot of conversations in which I discovered that there were a lot of similarities between Stanley and me. What is it then that one person becomes a designer, living happily with the same woman for 25 years, being a father of two daughters and the other person becomes a war photographer. This question was the beginning of a series of interviews. Out of the interviews came Black Passport. Black Passport is nominated several times. Some people believe it is the most important photo book of 2010.

Text from the YouTube website

Stanley Greene (American, 1949-2017)
Fireflies, Paris, France
2006
Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

Stanley Greene (American, 1949-2017)
Black & White Ball, Paris, France
2006
Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

Stanley Greene (American, 1949-2017)
On the MKAD, on the way to the airport, Moscow, Russia
2003
Gelatin silver print
Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

Stanley Greene (American, 1949-2017)
Kaboul, Afghanistan
2008
Gelatin silver print
Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

Stanley Greene (American, 1949-2017)
Scene 3. ’89. East Berlin
From Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

Stanley Greene (American, 1949-2017)
Scene 7. ’93. Moscow. Inside the White House
From Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

All photographs: Black Passport © Stanley Greene / NOOR

Foam
Keizersgracht 609
1017 DS Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: + 31 20 5516500

Opening hours:
Mon – Wed 10.00 – 18.00 hrs
Thu – Fri 10.00 – 21.00 hrs
Sat – Sun 10.00 – 18.00 hrs

Foam website

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Exhibition: ‘Diane Arbus’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 18th October, 2011 – 5th February, 2012

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962
1962
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

A fabulous posting, with memorable thoughts and photographs!

These archetypal images have become deeply embedded in the collective conscience where conscience is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations. The snap, snap, snap of the shutter evinces the flaws of human nature, reveals the presence of a quality or feeling to which we can all relate. As Arbus states, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. That is why these photographs always capture our attention – because we become, we inhabit, we are the subject.

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.

“There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth. Individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life… I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”

Diane Arbus. Paper on Plato, senior English seminar, Fieldston School, November 28, 1939

“I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning. I want to gather them, like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.

There are the Ceremonies of Celebration (the Pageants, the Festivals, the Feasts, the Conventions) and the Ceremonies of Competition (Contests, Games, Sports), the Ceremonies of Buying and Selling, of Gambling, of the Law and the Show; the Ceremonies of Fame in which the Winners Win and the Lucky are Chosen or Family Ceremonies or Gatherings (the Schools, the Clubs, the Meetings). Then they are Ceremonial Places (The Beauty Parlor, The Funeral Parlor or, simply The Parlor) and Ceremonial Costumes (what waitresses wear, or Wrestlers), Ceremonies of the Rich, like the Dog Show, and of the Middle Class, like the Bridge Game. Or, for example: the Dancing Lesson, the Graduation, the Testimonial Dinner, the Séance, the Gymnasium and the Picnic, and perhaps the Waiting Room, the Factory, the Masquerade, the Rehearsal, the Initiation, the Hotel Lobby and the Birthday Party. The etcetera.

I will write whatever is necessary for the further description and elucidation of these Rites and I will go wherever I can to find them.

These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”

Diane Arbus. “American Rites, Manners and Customs,” Plan for a Photographic Project, Guggenheim proposal

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) 'Lady Bartender at Home with a Souvenir Dog, New Orleans, La.' 1964 from the exhibition 'Diane Arbus' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, Oct 2011 - Feb 2012

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Lady Bartender at Home with a Souvenir Dog, New Orleans, La.
1964
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, NYC., 1966
1966
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Two Ladies at the Automat, New York City
1966
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus. 'Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967' 1967

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967
1967
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Albino sword swallower at a carnival, Md
1970
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

On Photographs

“They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.”

Diane Arbus in response to request for a brief statement about photographs, March 15, 1971

Diane Arbus (New York, 1923-1971) revolutionised the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves.

Arbus found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land, photographing people she discovered during the 1950s and 1960s. She was committed to photography as a medium that tangles with the facts. Her contemporary anthropology – portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities – stands as an allegory of the human experience, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theatre and reality.

In this first major retrospective in France, Jeu de Paume presents a selection of two hundred photographs that affords an opportunity to explore the origins, scope, and aspirations of a wholly original force in photography. It includes all of the artist’s iconic photographs as well as many that have never been publicly exhibited. Even the earliest examples of her work demonstrate Arbus’s distinctive sensibility through the expression on a face, someone’s posture, the character of the light, and the personal implications of objects in a room or landscape. These elements, animated by the singular relationship between the photographer and her subject, conspire to implicate the viewer with the force of a personal encounter.

Biography

Diane Arbus was born in New York City on March 14, 1923, and attended the Ethical Culture and Fieldston Schools. At the age of eighteen she married Allan Arbus. Although she first started taking pictures in the early 1940s and studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch in 1954, it was not until 1955-1957, while enrolled in courses taught by Lisette Model, that she began to seriously pursue the work for which she has come to be known.

Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960 under the title The Vertical Journey. From that point on she continued to work intermittently as a free-lance photographer for Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Show, The London Sunday Times, and a number of other magazines, doing portraits on assignment as well as photographic essays, for several of which she wrote accompanying articles.

During the 1950s, like most of her contemporaries, she had been using a 35mm camera, but in 1962 she began working with a 6×6 Rolleiflex. She once said, in accounting for the shift, that she had grown impatient with the grain and wanted to be able to decipher in her pictures the actual texture of things. The 6×6 format contributed to the refinement of a deceptively simple, formal, classical style that has since been recognised as one of the distinctive features of her work.

She received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 for projects on “American Rites, Manners and Customs” and spent several summers during that period traveling across the United States, photographing contests, festivals, public and private gatherings, people in the costumes of their professions or avocations, the hotel lobbies, dressing rooms and living rooms she had described as part of “the considerable ceremonies of our present.” “These are our symptoms and our monuments,” she wrote in her original application. “I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”

The photographs she produced in those years attracted a great deal of attention when a selected group of them were exhibited, along with the work of two other photographers, in the 1967 “New Documents” show at the Museum of Modern Art. Nonetheless, although several institutions subsequently purchased examples of her work for their permanent collections, her photographs appeared in only two other major exhibitions during her lifetime, both of them group shows.

In the late 1960s she taught photography courses at Parsons School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union and in 1971 gave a master class at Westbeth, the artists cooperative in New York City where she then lived. During the same period she initiated the concept and did the basic research for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1973 exhibition on news photography, “From the Picture Press.”

She made a portfolio of ten photographs in 1970, printed, signed and annotated by her, which was to be the first of a series of limited editions of her work. She committed suicide on July 26, 1971 at the age of forty-eight. The following year the ten photographs in her portfolio became the first work of an American photographer to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

In the course of a career that may be said to have lasted little more than fifteen years, she produced a body of work whose style and content have secured her a place as one of the most significant and influential photographers of our time. The major retrospective mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in 1972 was attended by more than a quarter of a million people in New York before it began its tour of the United States and Canada. The Aperture monograph Diane Arbus, published in conjunction with the show has sold over 300,000 copies. Beginning in 2003, Diane Arbus Revelations, an international retrospective organised by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art travelled to museums throughout the United States and Europe between 2003 and 2006. Major exhibitions devoted exclusively to her work have toured much of the world including, Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Press release from the Jeu de Paume website

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J.
1963
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Puerto Rican Woman with a Beauty Mark
1965
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus. 'Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C. 1967' 1967

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C. 1967
1967
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
A child crying, N.J.
1967
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970
1970
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Untitled (6) 1970-71
1970-1971
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

On Freaks

“There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll go through a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

“If you’ve ever talked to somebody with two heads you know they know something you don’t.”

The Gap between Attention and Affect

“You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinise reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.”

Other Thoughts

“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.”

“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognise.”

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. I do have a feeling for the print but I don’t have a holy feeling for it. I really think what it is, is what it’s about. I mean it has to be of something. And what it’s of it always more remarkable than what it is.”

“I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Teenage couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C. 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966
1966
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Lady at a Masked Ball with Two Roses on Her Dress, NYC
1967
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, NYC
1970
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Tattooed Man at a Carnival, Md.
1970
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Diane Arbus

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: ‘Vivian Maier: Photographs from the Maloof Collection’ at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Exhibition dates: 15th December 2011 – 26th January 2012

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled (portrait of a woman)
Date unknown
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Another photographer who is getting more recognition. Out of the work I have seen the portraits are the strongest. Some of them feel like precursors to the confronting portraits of women made by Diane Arbus while others offer a more reflective, contemplative examination of human presence.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Alicia Colen for her help and to the Howard Greenberg Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled
c. 1950’s
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled
1954
Gelatin silver print, printed later
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Florida
1957
Gelatin silver print, later print
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
New York, New York City
Nd
Gelatin silver print, later print
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled
Nd
Gelatin silver print, later print
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Howard Greenberg Gallery is proud to present the recently discovered work of street photographer, Vivian Maier (1926-2009), from the Maloof Collection.

A nanny by trade, Vivian Maier’s street and travel photography was discovered by John Maloof in 2007 at a local auction house in Chicago. Always with a Rolleiflex around her neck, she managed to amass more than 2,000 rolls of films, 3,000 prints and more than 100,000 negative which were shared with virtually no one in her lifetime. Her black and white photographs-mostly from the 50s and 60s-are indelible images of the architecture and street life of Chicago and New York. She rarely took more than one frame of each image and concentrated on children, women, the elderly, and indigent. The breadth of Maier’s work also reveals a series of striking self-portraits as well as prints from her travels to Egypt, Bangkok, Italy, and the American Southwest, among dozens of other international cities.

“My fascination with her story has only grown, as has my involvement with her photographs. It is such an unusual story with no resolution. At first her images are extremely well seen, quality photographs of life on the street, in New York City and Chicago. But as one looks at the body of her work, she reveals her deeper interests. Then one tries to imagine who she was, what motivated her, her personality. It is not everyday that one becomes so involved and even obsessed with a particular photographer,” comments Howard Greenberg.

What little is known about Maier’s life is the result of John Maloof’s extensive research. He discovered her obituary on line in 2009 which was just the beginning of his investigative work. An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Maier split her time between Europe and the US, returning to NY in 1951. In 1956, she ultimately settled in Chicago where she worked as nanny for more than forty years. For a brief period in the 1970s she worked as a nanny to journalist, Phil Donahue’s children. Towards the end of her life, Maier was supported by the children she had cared for in the early 50s. Unbeknownst to them, one of Maier’s storage lockers (containing her massive group of negatives) was auctioned off due to delinquent payments.

After purchasing the first collection of Maier photographs in 2007, Maloof acquired more from another buyer at the same auction. He has since established the Maloof Collection to promote the work of Vivian Maier and to safeguard the archive for future generations. The archive consists of approximately 100,000 to 150,000 negatives; over 3,000 prints; hundreds of rolls of film; home movies; audio tape interviews, and other items representing roughly 90% of Maier’s work. Through Maloof’s efforts, Vivian Maier’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and have received significant critical attention. In November, Powerhouse Books will publish Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, edited by Maloof with a foreword by Geoff Dyer. John Maloof is also co-producing a documentary about Vivian Maier.

Press release from the Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled
c. 1950’s
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Uptown West, New York, NY, January 26, 1955
1955
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
New York, New York City
1954
Gelatin silver print, printed later
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled
1956
Gelatin silver print, printed later
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled, Chicago, May 16, 1957
1957
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Florida
1960
Gelatin silver print, printed later
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled
Nd
Gelatin silver print, printed later
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
New York City
1955
Gelatin silver print, printed later
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
New York City, Self-Portrait, September 10th, 1955
1955
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Howard Greenberg Gallery
The Fuller Building
41 East 57 Street
Suite 1406
New York, NY 10022
Phone: 212.334.0010

Gallery hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10.00am – 5.00pm

Howard Greenberg Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘The Three Graces’ at The Art Institute of Chicago

Exhibition dates: 29th October 2011 – 22nd January 2012

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

Artist unknown (American)
[Three women]
c. 1930s
Gelatin silver print
8.9 x 14.7cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Artist unknown (American)
The Three Graces
c. 1930s
Gelatin silver print
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Artist unknown (American)
Look Pleasant
c. 1910s
Gelatin silver print
8.9 x 8.6cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Artist unknown (American)
[Three women]
c. 1910s
Gelatin silver print
11.6 x 6.8cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Artist unknown (American)
Untitled
1910/1940
Image: 7.7 × 5.2cm (3 1/16 × 2 1/16 in.)
Paper: 8.6 × 6.1 cm (3 7/16 × 2 7/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

After George Eastman introduced the handheld Kodak #1 camera in 1888, amateurs made millions of snapshots depicting friends and family, travels, and festive occasions such as weddings. Even while solidifying such thoroughly conventional behaviours, amateur photography developed a new pictorial language that privileged immediacy, spontaneity, and accident. Career photographers and art historians – but also antiques vendors and flea-market shoppers – have long recognised the value of the “snapshot aesthetic.” The rise of social media and smartphones in recent years has effectively ended the era of the snapshot as both a printed photograph and an image for a private audience.

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

Artist unknown (American)
Untitled (Summer, Aug, 1920)
1920
Gelatin silver print
13.9 × 8.3cm (5 1/2 × 3 5/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Artist unknown (American)
Untitled
c. 1920-1929
Gelatin silver print
13.7 × 8.5cm (5 7/16 × 3 3/8 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

This exhibition explores the early years of vernacular photography through graceful snapshots of female trios. Displaying more than 500 “found” images the exhibition features photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are taken and kept with the aim of preserving moments in life for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot becomes an image “type” – transferred into the hands of a collector and folded into a broader cultural history?

This subject is explored in the Art Institute of Chicago’s The Three Graces – on view October 29, 2011, through January 22, 2012, in the museum’s Photography Galleries 3 and 4. The exhibition, featuring a private collection of more than 500 anonymous images depicting female trios, spans nearly a century of female role-playing for the camera. These mostly American “found” photographs, spanning from the 1890s to the 1970s, collectively reveal a great deal about the evolving ritual of women’s self-presentation, a theme already idealised in Classical culture with depictions of “The Three Graces.”

New York collector Peter J. Cohen, who has spent decades scouring flea markets, shops, and galleries in search of rare amateur photographs, amassed this image collection and gave it its title. Cohen was struck by the frequency of images featuring female trios, and had the wit to identify in them a playful echo of the Greek muses Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who are said to personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. Cohen owns some 20,000 anonymous snapshots spanning from the late 19th century until the 1970s. He has organised his mountainous holdings according to many classifications, among them “Double Exposures,” “Up on The Roof,” and “Dangerous Women.”

For Art Institute exhibition coordinator Michal Raz-Russo, who also authored the accompanying book, the “three graces” theme serves as a frame through which to chart shifts and continuities in women’s self-understanding across nearly a century. The 1888 introduction of the Kodak #1 camera and the 1900 debut of the Kodak Brownie made photography immensely popular, with much of the marketing was directed at women. Modern life and leisure in the 1920s coincided with the arrival of smaller cameras, faster film speeds, and automatic exposures; women of the expanding middle class became practiced at self-portraiture while vacationing or camping on their own. Later, in the mid-20th century, a clear convergence can be seen between women’s self-portraits and ideals of womanhood promulgated in films and glossy magazines. Throughout this history, men are clearly at work too, convincing women to participate in erotic poses according to another set of visual models. While the varieties of picturing and self-picturing are complex, The Three Graces demonstrates that women worked to define themselves as social beings through photography.

Visitors to the exhibition can find information on individual snapshots – gleaned from inscriptions and the clues provided by clothing and setting – at a special computer kiosk located in the gallery.

Press release from The Art Institute of Chicago website

Artist unknown (American)
[Three Women]
c. 1920s
Gelatin silver print
13.5 x 8.3cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Unknown Maker (American)
Untitled (Stamped Clyde Banks Photo Services, Crystal Sheer, Aug 5 1932)
1930-1939
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 11.7 × 7.1cm (4 5/8 × 2 13/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Unknown Maker (American)
Untitled (Stony Creek Dude Ranch, July 1939, stamped Certified, Master Photo Finishers of America, Fountain Photo Service, May 15 1940)
Made 1939
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 11.6 × 7cm (4 5/8 × 2 13/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Unknown Maker (American)
Untitled (Stamped Master Photo Finishers of America, Service and Quality, Kay Tone 10 Point Process, Certified Reg. U.S. Pat Off., Caton Photo Co., Detroit, Michigan, Sep 11 1939)
Printed 1939
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 10.7 × 7.9cm (4 1/4 × 3 1/8 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Artist unknown (American)
[Three Women]
c. 1940s
Gelatin silver print
11.7 x 7cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Artist unknown (American)
[Three Women and a photographer]
c. 1940s
Gelatin silver print
12.2 x 7.6cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Unknown Maker (American)
Untitled (Gym Teachers Linda “Sissy” House, Sarah Beth Jordan, Seanne Livingston, 9th Grade)
Printed 1961
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 9 × 9 cm (3 9/16 × 3 9/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Unknown Maker (American)
Untitled
1960-1969
Internal dye diffusion transfer print
Paper: 10.8 × 8.9cm (4 5/16 × 3 9/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century)
Untitled [Three women]
1967
Chromogenic print
Image: 11.7 × 9.2cm (4 5/8 × 3 5/8 in.)
Paper: 12.7 × 10.2cm (5 × 4 1/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Unknown Maker (American)
Untitled
Printed 1968
Chromogenic print
Paper: 9 × 8.6cm (3 9/16 × 3 7/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

Artist unknown (American)
[Three Women]
c. 1930s
Gelatin silver print
14.5 x 8.7cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen

The Three Graces: Snapshots of Twentieth-Century Women book cover
Hardcover – November 29, 2011

Featuring an amazing treasure trove of unpublished images, this intriguing and entertaining book looks at how women explored their identity through popular photography in the 20th century

Snapshots preserve more than individual likeness and memory. Photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are collected with the aim of constructing and preserving a personal identity for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot is subsequently discarded or displaced and becomes merely an “anonymous” image? This and many other questions are discussed in this fascinating selection of anonymous images depicting three women. Presumably all taken by nonprofessionals, these snapshots were acquired over time by a private collector interested in their eclectic yet familiar details, who named the grouping after the iconic Greco-Roman motif.

In traditional western iconography, the Three Graces personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. In the 150 snapshots assembled here, the remarkable consistency of confidence and poise projected by the trios of women – in varied settings, in various states of dress/undress, and over a period of more than fifty years – reveals the formal and behavioral conventions that evolved as photography’s popularity skyrocketed among amateurs. To this end, the iconography of The Three Graces provides a framework for understanding the generational differences and cultural influences that shaped women’s self-presentation in front of the camera in the first half of the 20th century.

Text from the Amazon website

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111 South Michigan Avenue
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Phone: (312) 443-3600

Opening hours:
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Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

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Exhibition: ‘After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 22nd March, 2011 – 2nd January, 2012

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

Hans Haacke (German, b. 1936)
Thank You, Paine Webber
1979
Gelatin silver print and chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010
© Hans Haacke

Since the early 1970s Haacke has taken on the intertwined political and corporate forces that use cultural patronage as a smokescreen to advance interests that are often antithetical to the vitality of free speech and expression in democracies. Haacke made this work just as the strategy of appropriation – lifting an image out of its original context and re-presenting it in critical fashion – began to make waves in the New York art world of the late 1970s. Like all effective appropriation, it exposes a prior instance of borrowing – in this case, how the investment firm Paine Webber used a documentary photograph to give its annual report the veneer of social concern. The artist then pointedly contrasted it with an image from the same annual report of a beaming trio of executives in a painting-lined gallery. As a counterpoint to the protestor’s signboard, Haacke dropped in text from a different Paine Webber ad campaign to show on whose backs the “risk management” is taking place – a biting indictment, the relevance of which has only increased since the recent economic downturn.

Wall text

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
The Storyteller
1986
Silver dye bleach transparency in light box
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Charlene and David Howe, Henry Nias Foundation Inc., Jennifer and Robert Yaffa, Harriet Ames Charitable Trust, and Gary and Sarah Wolkowitz Gifts, 2006
Image courtesy of the artist
© Jeff Wall

Wall’s staged tableaux straddle the worlds of the museum and the street. His subjects are scenes of urban and suburban disarray that he witnessed firsthand – the kinds of things anyone might see while wandering around a city and its outskirts. Working like a movie director, he restages the scene using nonprofessionals as actors and presents his photographs as colour transparencies in light boxes such as those of large-scale public advertisements found at airports and bus stops. The scale and ambition of his pictures – scenes of everyday life shot through with larger intimations of political struggle – equally evoke the Salon paintings of nineteenth century French painters such as Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, which were themselves brazen combinations of canonical and contemporary subjects.

The Storyteller is set in a barren, leftover slice of land next to a highway overpass in Vancouver, where the artist lives. Various groupings of modern urban castaways – perhaps descendants of the Native Americans who occupied the land before the arrival of Europeans – are dispersed around the hillside, a mini-catalogue of art-historical reference. Like the upside-down, half-submerged figure of Icarus in the background of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the woman speaking and gesticulating to the two men listening at the lower left becomes the key to unifying the fractured and alienating environment from which Wall’s picture is constructed.

Wall text

Laurie Simmons (American, b. 1949)
Walking Gun
1991
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1998
© Laurie Simmons

The early 1990s marked the last moment when a wide swath of women artists responded to the sexism they saw as pervasive in the culture – from the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Clarence Thomas. A pioneer of set-up photography, Simmons dramatically expanded the scale of her constructed tableaux for a series of spotlighted puppet-like objects perched atop doll legs: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. This armed and dangerous example refers to the old-movie cliché where a man carrying a gun is shown in shadow profile. Here, Simmons offers instead the death-dealing seductress – also familiar from film noir – in monumental miniature, a doll capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice.

Wall text

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, b. 1953)
Todd M. Brooks, 22 Years Old, from Denver, Colorado, $40
1991
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
© Philip-Lorca diCorcia

In the middle of the 1990’s, diCorcia gained international recognition for his large color photographs of street scenes and passersby. For an earlier series, he traveled to Los Angeles on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and worked on a part of Santa Monica Boulevard frequented by male prostitutes and drug addicts. For each picture he made there, he carefully composed his setting, then asked young men to pose for him, giving them a small fee (from twenty to fifty dollars) that was negotiated each time.

At that time, NEA support of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe was highly controversial, and diCorcia had to sign a document stating that he would not produce any “obscene” work while on his fellowship. He set up the whole negotiating procedure as a symbolic way of sharing his grant with people whose behavior would surely have been condemned by the censors. The titles always mention the name, the age and the origin of the model, as well as the amount paid. The staged situation interacts with the raw reality of the exchange of money, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, yet preserving an authentic emotional charge.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, b. 1953)
Eddie Anderson, 21 Years Old, from Houston, Texas, $20
1991
Chromogenic print
Image: 39.2 x 57.8 cm (15 7/16 x 22 3/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
© Philip-Lorca diCorcia

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection from March 22, 2011, through January 2, 2012, in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features 25 photographs dating from 1979 to the present by 15 contemporary artists.

The exhibition’s title, After the Gold Rush, is taken from a classic 1970 song by Neil Young, whose verses contrast a romanticised past with a present of squandered plenty and an uncertain future. Inspired by the recent political and economic upheavals in America and abroad, this selection juxtaposes new photographs that take the long view of the world’s current condition with prescient works from the 1980s and 1990s that remain startlingly relevant today.

This is the first occasion for the Museum to present recently acquired works by: Gretchen Bender, James Casebere, Moyra Davey, Katy Grannan, Hans Haacke, An-My Lê, Curtis Mann, Trevor Paglen, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Also featured are photographs by: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Robert Gober, Adrian Piper, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Williams.

After the Gold Rush begins with Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber (1979) – the first work by this legendary provocateur of Conceptual art to enter the Metropolitan’s collection. Haacke’s biting photo-diptych is so pertinent to the recent economic downturn that it seems as if it could have been made yesterday. In this work, the artist appropriated images from the investment firm’s annual report to convey his viewpoint that big business provides a veneer of social concern to mask the brutal effects of the “risk management” they offer their clients.

Other works in After the Gold Rush use varying degrees of artifice and photographic realism to reflect on marginalised and repressed voices. Measuring over 14 feet long and presented as a backlit transparency in a light box, The Storyteller (1986) is Jeff Wall’s signature image and is typical of his method. Working from memory, the artist uses nonprofessional actors and real locations to meticulously restage a scene of urban blight that he witnessed in his native Vancouver. Wall plays this photographic verisimilitude against compositions and figural poses indebted to French painters such as Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Georges Seurat. A comparison of Wall’s Storyteller with Courbet’s Young Ladies of the Village (1852), on view in the Museum’s galleries for Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture, reveals parallels: in both, a keenly observed moment of telling social interaction taking place on a sloping landscape. Each artist has combined a daringly modern subject with references to earlier art.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is another key figure in the development of staged photography. In the early 1990s, the artist created a series of works in response to the political attacks on gays and federal funding of the arts in the U.S. DiCorcia hired male hustlers to pose for their portraits out on the streets – and paid them with grant money he received from the National Endowment for the Arts. At the same moment, a wide swath of women artists addressed issues of sexism and racism: examples of this politically pointed art are represented by Laurie Simmons’ Walking Gun (1991) – a spotlighted puppet of doll legs and a revolver that seems capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice – and Adrian Piper’s 1992 work Decide Who You Are #24 (A Moving Target), which includes a childhood image of Anita Hill as part of a blistering meditation in word and image on racial politics. Such works are missives from a time not so long ago when artists regularly commented on present-day politics and culture through their art. (Because of light sensitivity, this work by Adrian Piper will be on view through Sunday, September 26.)

Although the recently made photographs in After the Gold Rush seem at first glance to be less overtly political than their predecessors, they nevertheless address vital issues about contemporary society. James Casebere’s epic vision of America, Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, (2009), is based on a tabletop model that the artist spent 18 months building. The photograph shows a suburban subdivision of the kind recently ravaged by the foreclosure crisis, and its sunny sense of “Morning in America” comments ironically on the country’s future prospects. An-My Lê’s similarly sweeping five-part photographic piece Suez Canal Transit, USS Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt (2009) will also be featured. Lê is interested in the way in which U.S. armed forces come into contact with the rest of the world. This major new work – which seems at first to be a straightforward panorama of military might overseas – subtly undercuts the viewer’s expectations to question the current position of the U.S. on the global stage.

Trevor Paglen is a young artist whose works plot the “black world” of covert military operations, from telephoto images of predator drones taken from miles away, to software that follows planes used for the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists. Paglen’s 2008 photograph KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186) shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by artists including Carleton Watkins. To make these and other photographs, Paglen collaborated with amateur astronomers who were originally trained by the U.S. government to look out for Soviet satellites during the Cold War, but turned their attention to American surveillance in recent years.

The final piece in After the Gold Rush is a suite of five recently acquired photographs from 2007-2009 by the celebrated photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The grouping shifts focus from macro to micro: from expansive aerial views of Shanghai and Dubai to close ups that suggest the smallest increments of sustenance and regeneration. Taken together, they evoke the interconnectedness of all things and a grounding of the political in the personal as a way for an engaged yet expressive art.

Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Moyra Davey (American born Canada, b. 1958)
Copperhead Grid (detail)
1990
Chromogenic prints
Image: 8 3/4 in. × 6 in. (22.3 × 15.3cm) each
Sheet: 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3cm) each
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011
© Moyra Davey

It was in 1990 – at the height of a worldwide economic recession that also marked the end of the 1980s art bubble – that Davey began photographing the scratched, worn-away surfaces of pennies, the most devalued and lowest form of currency. Her accumulation of one hundred micro-photographic specimens is constructed around the readymade patterns of decay that countless anonymous owners have unconsciously wrought upon their surfaces; their base materiality is incisively contrasted with the most elevated of national symbols. As with all of Davey’s work, there is a melancholic sense of loss that connects subject and form: like pennies, photographs are objects of exchange imprinted by contact with the world around them.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Adrian Piper (American, b. 1948)
Decide Who You Are #24: A Moving Target
1992
Photo-mechanical processes on three panels
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Peter Norton Family Foundation, 1994
© Adrian Piper

Piper is an artist and a philosophy professor who works in a variety of media, including performance, video, sound pieces, photography, drawing, and writing. She often explores issues of autobiography, racism, and stereotyping. For her 1992 series Decide Who You Are, the artist used a triptych format in which a different appropriated photograph is flanked by an image of the “three wise monkeys” maxim advocating “See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil” at left, and at right a photograph of a young girl who, though not identified, is Anita Hill – who had recently been thrust into the spotlight for accusing then-nominee for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. The verse in the left panel changes in each individual work in the series, while that on the right is unchanging – what the artist once described as “a comprehensive, textbook compendium of commonly invoked litanies of denial and intimidation, from the bland to the vaguely menacing” and “a must for novices and aspiring leaders in business, politics, and culture.”

Wall text

Christopher Williams (American, b. 1956)
3 White (DG’s Mr. Postman) Fourth Race, Phoenix Greyhound Park, Phoenix, Arizona, August 22, 1994
1994
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Charina Foundation Inc. and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gifts, 2003
© Christopher Williams

Robert Gober (American, b. 1954)
Page 12 / Untitled (Detail from 1978-2000)
1978-2000
Gelatin silver print
40.6 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Charina Foundation Inc. Gift, 2002
© Robert Gober

Robert Gober works primarily in sculpture, installations, and photography. He is perhaps best known for his delicate, ghostly hand crafted versions of domestic fixtures, such as drains, beds, doors, and sinks. Through these uncanny replicas, Gober invests mass produced objects with personal meaning – the private, unruly desires and memories of the individual. This image appeared in the book (his first in the genre) that Gober created to accompany his installation representing the United States at the 2000 Venice Biennale. In it, the artist interweaves his own journey to New York in 1978 as a young gay man with the toxic fallout of homophobic recrimination that accompanied the murder of the Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard twenty years later.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.

Alyssa Rosenberg. “Gay Americans, Censorship, And ‘After The Gold Rush’ At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art,” on the Think Progress website November 28, 2011 [Online] Cited 11/12/2024

Robert Gober (American, b. 1954)
Untitled (Detail from “1978-2000”)
2000
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2002
© Robert Gober

James Casebere (American, b. 1953)
Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1
2009
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2011
© James Casebere

Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974)
KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satelltte; USA 186)
2008
Chromogenic print
Image: 95.3 x 76.2cm (37 1/2 x 30 in.)
Frame: 96.5 × 77.5cm (38 × 30 1/2 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011
© Trevor Paglen

Trained as a geographer, Paglen is an artist who plots the topography of a new global and celestial space – the “black world” of covert military operations. Examples of his subjects include the supposed sites used for the extraordinary rendition of prisoners, which he shoots with specially designed cameras from up to forty miles away, and the network of private planes used to transport them under the radar. This image shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by the photographer Carleton Watkins when the West was still being explored. In order to track such spacecraft, Paglen uses a database created by amateur astronomers who were trained by the U.S. government to search the skies for Soviet sputniks but continued their hobby after the end of the Cold War by tracking our own satellites. In this work, the artist brings into one composition two historically disparate moments in geographic and celestial colonisation.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Oriental Pearl
2009
Inkjet print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010
Image courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
© Wolfgang Tillmans

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

Opening hours:
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Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm
Closed Wednesday

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Exhibition: ‘Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs’ at the The Denver Art Museum (DAM)

Exhibition dates: 25th September 2011 – 1st January 2012

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

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Burning oil sludge, north of Denver, Colorado
1973-1974
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
North of Keota, Colorado
1973 printed 1989
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Mobile home park, north edge of Denver, Colorado
1973-1974
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is the first U.S. venue for Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs. The exhibition features more than 200 black-and-white photos spanning Adams’s 45-year career, showcasing the artistic legacy of the American photographer and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Adams lived and worked in Colorado for nearly 30 years. Many of his most acclaimed images were taken in the Rocky Mountain region and will strike a familiar chord with visitors. The exhibition, organised by the Yale University Art Gallery, will be on view September 25, 2011 – January 1, 2012 in the museum’s Gallagher Family Gallery.

“We’re excited to host the work of one of the foremost photographers of our time,” said Eric Paddock, the DAM’s curator of photography. “Robert Adams’s striking yet quiet photos provoke thought about current economic, political and environmental issues Westerners confront every day. We think visitors will see something very familiar in his work.”

Since becoming a photographer in the mid-1960s, Adams has been widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential chroniclers of the American West. Adams’s photographs and writing insist that the realities of everyday landscapes are as beautiful as idealised scenes from nature. They ask questions about the ways people change and interact with nature, and what it means to live simply and quietly in today’s world. This commitment earned Adams prominence in photography’s “New Topographics” movement of the late 20th century and lends authority to his ongoing work. His photographs of Colorado suburban growth and clear cut forests in the Pacific Northwest, for example, express shock at mainstream social and economic values.

“The Denver Art Museum is pleased to be the first U.S. venue for The Place We Live, showcasing our continued commitment to our photography program,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “Colorado has a rich photography history and we’re excited to have visitors engage with these artworks that provide a narrative to the American experience and take a fresh look at their surroundings.”

Featuring more than 200 gelatin silver prints, The Place We Live weaves together four decades of Adam’s work into a cohesive, epic narrative of American experience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Each of the photographer’s major projects is represented, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by prior settlers of his native Colorado to his most recent images of forests and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest.

Biography

Born in Orange, N.J., in 1937, Robert Adams moved with his family from Madison, Wis., to Denver, Colo., at the age of 15. He earned a doctorate degree from the University of Southern California and, intent on pursuing an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Disturbed by the rapid transformation of the Colorado Springs and Denver areas, Adams began photographing a landscape transformed by tract housing, highways, strip malls and gas stations. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy,” Adams wrote. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.” Since 1997, he has lived and worked in Oregon.”

Press release from The Denver Art Museum

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Lakewood, Colorado
1968-1971
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
In a New Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado
1969
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado
1969
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado
1969
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Denver, Colorado
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Longmont, Colorado
1973-1974, printed 2007
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Eden, Colorado
1968
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Colorado Springs, Colorado
1968
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Edge of San Timoteo Canyon, looking toward Los Angeles, Redlands, California
1978
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado
1978
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Longmont, Colorado
1979, printed 1985
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Santa Ana Wash, Redlands, California
1983, printed 1991
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Sitka spruce, Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon
1999-2000
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

The Denver Art Museum
Civic Center Cultural Complex
located on 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock in downtown Denver

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The Denver Art Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘In Focus: The Sky’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 26th July – 4th December 2011

Col. Henry Stuart Wortley (British, 1832-1890)
The Day is Done, and the Darkness Falls from the Wings of Night.,
about 1862
Albumen silver print
29.5 x 35.2cm (11 5/8 x 13 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Many thankx to Melissa Abraham for her help and to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

With its immensity, immateriality, and variability, the sky has been an enduring subject in art history, fascinating and challenging generations of artists. As soon as the medium of photography was introduced in 1839, photographers attempted to represent the sky and its natural phenomena.

Atmospheric light and its constant mutability have always been hard to capture, but by the 1850s the greater light sensitivity of collodion negatives (compared to the daguerreotype and calotype processes) allowed the spectacles of the sky to be more easily transposed to photography.

With further technical improvements such as the development of instantaneous processes in the 1880s and the advent of Kodachrome colour film around 1935, photographers have continued to explore this theme in diverse and imaginative ways.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Cloudy Sky – Mediterranean Sea
1857
Albumen silver print
12 1/4 x 16 7/16 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Clouds

The collodion process (in which a syrupy, light-sensitive mixture was applied to glass-plate negatives) was advantageous for its short exposure time and sharpness, but its sensitivity to blue light could also pose a challenge. By the time the camera captured detail in the foreground, the sky was often overexposed and thus printed as blank space.

To create his sweeping seascape, Cloudy Sky – Mediterranean Sea, Gustave Le Gray combined two slightly overlapping negatives: one for the sky and one for the sea.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
[Solar Eclipse]
January 1, 1889
Albumen silver print
16.5 × 21.6cm (6 1/2 × 8 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Standing atop Mount Santa Lucia in northern California at approximately 3.50 p.m. on January 1, 1889, Carleton Watkins was able to make only one exposure during the instant of complete eclipse. Accompanied by professors from the newly created University of California and the United States Naval Observatory, Watkins waited slightly more than an hour for the moon to begin its movement and assume its temporary position directly in front of the sun. The radiating sun, its brilliance hidden by the black moon, lies suspended over a sea of clouds whose rippling waves dominate the sky. Only the inclusion of the treetops in the foreground serves to ground the image in a familiar reality.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: The Sky, a thematically-installed exhibition of permanent collection photographs, on view at the Getty Center from July 26 – December 4, 2011.

“The sky has fascinated and challenged photographers since the invention of the medium,” said Anne Lyden, associate curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition. “This exhibition showcases a wide range of approaches to capturing the many moods and effects of the sky – things we usually take for granted.”

The selection of 22 artworks provides visitors with an opportunity to explore the Getty Museum’s world-renowned photographs collection through the pictorial subject of the sky, with the works loosely organised under four different themes: urban skies, clouds, dark skies, and colourful skies.

The exhibition features photographs by artists such as: Ansel Adams, John Divola, André Kertész, Joel Meyerowitz, Alfred Stieglitz, and Carleton Watkins, among others. The Getty’s collection includes exemplary objects that demonstrate both technological and aesthetic innovations in photography. Among the different processes highlighted are daguerreotypes, albumen silver prints, palladium prints, platinum prints, and more contemporary inkjet prints.

One of the most well-known works in the exhibition is Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, (negative made November 1, 1941; printed December 16, 1948). Traveling by car through New Mexico, Adams was inspired by light from the setting sun illuminating crosses in the graveyard at the side of the road. By carefully considering the composition, visualising the printed image before creating the photograph, understanding the required exposure needed in response to the available light, and exerting a certain degree of control in the printing process so that detail and shadows were retained, Adams succeeded in capturing the fleeting moment when the sun was setting and the bright moon appeared in the darkening sky.

The summer sky of Cape Cod features in Meyerowitz’s photograph Fence, Truro, negative 1976; printed 1992. Having recently acquired a large view camera, Meyerowitz spent two summers recording the structures and light of the coastal area that ultimately resulted in the 1978 book, Cape Light. Noting the shifting shadows as they played across the picket fence, his use of colour aptly describes the very subject of light itself.

Included in the exhibition is a selection from John Divola’s Zuma Beach series. In the fall of 1977, after discovering an abandoned lifeguard headquarters at Zuma Beach, California, Divola began visiting the site mornings and evenings to photograph. Bringing paints, using flash, and depending on the Pacific Ocean and the ever-changing sky for a dramatic backdrop, he created spontaneous scenes in this seaside theatre.

Also on view is a small group of three photographs by Alfred Stieglitz. From 1922 to 1934, Stieglitz photographed clouds and created a series of abstract configurations which reflected the fluctuation of his subjective state. By simply titling each piece Equivalent, he invited an open reading of the images and their content.

In Focus: The Sky is the ninth installation of the ongoing In Focus series of exhibitions, thematic presentations of photographs from the Getty’s permanent collection.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Songs of the Sky
1924
Gelatin silver print
11.7 x 9.2cm (4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© J. Paul Getty Trust

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Cloud, Mexico
1926
Palladium print
14.9 × 24cm (5 7/8 × 9 7/16 in.)
© 1981 Arizona Board of Regents, Center for Creative Photography

The first image with artistic intention that Edward Weston made in Mexico was of a cloud. Stopped in the port of Mazatlan on his way to Mexico City in 1923, Weston, for the first time in his career, was moved to photograph the sky, a theme that would occupy him intermittently throughout his entire sojourn in Mexico. Working with his Graflex, which allowed for greater flexibility than his tripod-mounted eight-by-ten-inch camera, he shot clouds spontaneously and maintained a personal collection of prints that he referred to as his “cloud series.” He noted in his daybook, “Next to the recording of a fugitive expression, or revealing the pathology of some human being, is there anything more elusive to capture than cloud forms! And the Mexican clouds are so swift and ephemeral, one can hardly allow the thought, ‘Is this worth doing?’ or, ‘ls this placed well?’ – for an instant of delay and what was, is not!”

The economy of form achieved in this 1926 image through the isolation of a single strip of stratus clouds oriented diagonally within the frame was not new to Weston’s aesthetic; his 1924 picture of Tina Modotti (1896-1942) nude on the roof of their home (see 86.XM.710.8) employs a remarkably similar composition. If Mexico provided Weston the inspiration to explore and expand the range of his oeuvre, adding clouds, still lifes, and landscapes to his repertoire of portraits and nudes, it simultaneously served as the place where his visual approach to the world was honed. His time in Mexico came to an end the same year he made this picture, but many of the principles he developed there would last him throughout his career.

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Equivalent
1926
Gelatin silver print
11.6 × 9.1cm (4 9/16 × 3 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Equivalent
1926
Gelatin silver print
11.7 × 9.2cm (4 5/8 × 3 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Sangre de Cristo, New Mexico
1930
Platinum print
9.2 × 11.9cm (3 5/8 × 4 11/16 in.)
© Aperture Foundation

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[The West Side, Looking North from the Upper 30s / Nightview]
1932
Gelatin silver print
33.8 × 26.8cm (13 5/16 × 10 9/16 in.)
© Estate of Berenice Abbott

“If [photography] is to be utterly honest and direct, it should be related to the pulse of the times – the pulse of today.” ~ Berenice Abbott

Nowhere is Berenice Abbott’s statement better demonstrated than in this photograph of the pulsating vibrancy of New York City, alive at night with thousands of glittering lights. The flashes of illumination perforate the frame, reflecting the dynamism of the world’s fastest-changing city. Abbott set about documenting New York when she returned there in 1929 after nine years spent in Europe. Abbott made this photograph from a high vantage point in the Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue looking north.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985)
The Lost Cloud, New York
Negative 1937; print 1970s
Gelatin silver print
24.8 x 16.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of André Kertész

Urban Skies

Soon after arriving in New York in October 1936, André Kertész spent time searching the city streets for fresh material, just as he had done in Paris for a decade. One afternoon he observed a solitary white cloud in a vast blue sky, dwarfed by the monolithic presence of the Rockefeller Center. Kertész later recounted that he was “very touched when he saw the cloud, as it “didn’t know which way to go” (Bela Ugrin, Dialogues with Kertész, ” 1978-1985, the Getty Research Institute) – a sentiment he strongly identified with as a new immigrant.

From the lyrical to the abstract, photography has often been an apt medium with which to capture the fleeting nature of skies.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

The impenetrable façade of Rockefeller Center in New York dominates the frame of this photograph, filling the lower and right sides of the image with its cold, hard, modern lines. The other third of the composition belongs to the sky, in which a lone puff of white cloud hangs isolated like a cotton ball, holding sway against the force of the skyscraper. The brilliant white form is “lost” in this scene that is otherwise devoid of natural, spirited shapes. The cloud possesses an innate impermanence; it will be gone with the next gust of wind, blown along on its path to some other expanse of sky. Andre Kertész’s juxtaposition of the whimsical cloud and unforgiving architecture seems to emphasise his own sense of isolation; the photograph was made soon after he had emigrated from Europe.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico
Negative November 1, 1941; print December 16, 1948
Gelatin silver print
34.9 × 44cm (13 3/4 × 17 5/16 in.)
© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Arguably Ansel Adams’s most famous image, this photograph is titled Moonrise rather than Sunset, even though the moon technically does not rise in the sky. As a scholar noted: The factuality and, moreover, the meaning of the setting sun were rejected by him in favour of the expressive symbolism of the rising moon; of the shining luminescence ablaze with greatness in its primal mystery, dramatically isolated in the infinity of darkness.

Instead of making an unmanipulated print from the negative, Adams selectively printed the sky black and the foreground dark in order to achieve a particular illumination and spiritual transcendence. The photographer’s skill and vision transformed the tiny town of Hernandez, dotted with glowing white cemetery and church crosses, into a spectral landscape.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Smog, Los Angeles
1949
Gelatin silver print
25.2 × 34cm (9 15/16 × 13 3/8 in.)
© Estate of William A. Garnett

An ardent conservationist, Garnett became concerned about land use and air pollution in the early 1940s. He made this photograph in an attempt to raise public awareness. Over the years Garnett came to believe that he was more likely to inspire positive change by pointing out nature’s enduring beauty than by showing the ugliness caused by poor choices.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Full Moon, Southwestern Utah
1953
Gelatin silver print
15.6 x 15.3cm (6 1/8 x 6 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the John Dixon Collection
© Oakland Museum of California, the City of Oakland

Dorothea Lange suffered health problems in the late 1940s, but she wanted to travel again and be part of the current documentary effort. Since the federal government was no longer funding such projects, this meant working for the thriving picture magazines. Lange proposed to Life that she and Ansel Adams do a project in Utah. They would travel with her son Daniel, who would write text for the article, and her husband, who had a continuing interest in the survival of utopian communities. Their purpose was to record the landscape, built environment and inhabitants of three towns in southwestern Utah settled in the mid-nineteenth century by Mormons. The grandchildren of some of these pioneers were Lange’s subjects during her visit to Gunlock, Toquerville, and St. George in 1953.

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Fence, Truro
negative 1976; print 1992
Chromogenic print
59.7 x 47.3cm (23 1/2 x 18 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Nancy and Bruce Berman
© Joel Meyerowitz, courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, NY

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Untitled
From the Zuma Beach series
1977
Chromogenic print
24.8 x 30.4cm (9 3/4 x 11 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Michael and Jane Wilson
© John Divola

Skies in Color

In the fall of 1977, after discovering an abandoned lifeguard headquarters at Zuma Beach, California, John Divola began visiting the site to photograph. Painting the walls, incorporating props, using flash, and depending on the Pacific Ocean and the sky for a dramatic backdrop, he created a series of makeshift scenes.

Discussing his work in 1980, Divola said, “These photographs are the product of my involvement with an evolving situation. The house evolving in a primarily linear way toward its ultimate disintegration, the ocean and light evolving and changing in a cyclical and regenerative manner.”

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Untitled
1977
From the Zuma Series
Chromogenic print
24.6 × 30.5cm (9 11/16 × 12 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Michael and Jane Wilson
© John Divola

Robert Weingarten (American, b. 1941)
6:30 A.M. 10/06/03, #98, Malibu, CA
2003
Inkjet print
76.4 × 76.4cm (30 1/16 × 30 1/16 in.)
© Robert Weingarten
Gift of Alvin and Heidi Toffler

The horizon at dawn, looking southeast over Santa Monica Bay, from the artist’s home in Malibu.

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday, Sunday 10am – 5.30pm
Saturday 10am – 8pm
Monday Closed

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘W. Eugene Smith – Photographs A retrospective’ at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 27th August – 27th November 2011

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Dance of the Flaming Coke
1955
Gelatin silver print
20.6 x 33cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

This man is legend. He created some of the most memorable and moving photographs in the history of the medium. Once seen, for example his seminal photograph Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath (1972, below), they are never forgotten. Look at the photographs, really look deeply at them. The compositions are flawless, peerless. Smith’s use of chiaroscuro makes his images sing and flow, like a Bach fugue. In spite of everything, “in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.”

Through that courage he left us a body of work that will live forever as masterpieces of the art of photography. Applause.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Martin-Gropius-Bau for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Albert Schweitzer, Aspen, Colorado
1949
Gelatin silver print
24.7 x 33.2cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Guardia Civil, Spain
1950
Gelatin silver print
25.1 x 32.1cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
The Wake
1950
Gelatin silver print
22.2 x 33.1cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Steel Mill Worker, Pittsburgh
1955
Gelatin silver print
15.1 x 21.5cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Untitled
1955
Gelatin silver print
22.2 x 34cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath Minamata, Japan
1972
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

One of the most well-known photojournalists in the 20th century, Eugene Smith, with his wife at that time Aileen, took this photograph of Tomoko Uemura bathed by her mother, Ryoko. Tomoko was severally disabled, as a result of mercury poisoning, through her mother who ate fish caught in the nearby bay, contaminated by industrial wastewater from a chemical factory. The Smiths lived in a small fishng village in Southern Japan for four years, and documented the human victims and the natural environments destroyed by industrial pollution.

This photograph was carefully posed and lit by the photographers to create a composition similar to that of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture in which Mary holds the dead body of her son Jesus. The Smiths created the photograph as a tool to raise the public’s awareness of mercury poisoning and to help the victims’ fight against the polluting corporation and ultimately the Japanese government.

Text from the Minneapolis Institute of Art Collection website

W. Eugene Smith, who was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, and died in 1978 in Tucson, Arizona, first made a name for himself as a politically and socially committed photojournalist in the USA in the 1940s. Many of his photographic reports appeared in Life, the leading picture magazine that had been launched in New York in 1936. Smith saw in photography more than just an illustration to a text and had often asked editors for a greater say in the composition of a photo-essay. His painstakingly researched and emotionally moving features set new standards of photojournalism in the 1940s and 1950s.

Smith had begun to take photographs as a fifteen-year-old, having been inspired by his mother, a keen amateur photographer. In 1936, following the suicide of his father as a result of the Great Crash, Smith initially enrolled at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. But he dreamed of becoming a photographer and moved to New York, where he attended the New York Institute of Photography. He embarked on his professional career in 1937 as a photo reporter for Newsweek.

A year later he began to work as a freelance for the Black Star Agency, and his pictures appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Collier’s, Time and Life. With Life he was to have a close association that went on for years.

When the USA found itself at war at the end of 1941 Smith initially took propaganda shots for the magazine Parade to support the American troops. Then, as a correspondent for Flying magazine, he took part in reconnaissance flights, taking photos from the air. In 1944 he was back on the staff of Life – this time as a war correspondent – documenting the battle of Saipan and the American landings on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In the course of the fighting the style of his photos changed. Instead of being gung ho they tended to focus on the terrible sufferings of the civilian population and were shot in a way that involved the viewer emotionally. On 22 May 1945 Smith himself was seriously injured, forcing him to submit to a series of operations that went on until 1947.

His new lease of life was symbolised by the first photograph he took after his wound. A Walk to Paradise Garden depicts his two youngest children walking towards a sun-bathed clearing. “While I followed my children into the undergrowth and the group of taller trees – how they were delighted at every little discovery! – and observed them, I suddenly realized that at this moment, in spite of everything, in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.” (1954)

After his recovery he went back to work for Life again. Documentary features showing the dedicated work of ordinary people were particularly popular with readers. In The Country Doctor (1948) he accompanied a young country doctor from the Denver area on his rounds for several weeks. His report Nurse Midwife (1951) on the black midwife Maud Callen was produced against a background of racial discrimination and the brazen activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. In developing the prints Smith adjusted the lighting so as to enhance the emotional atmosphere – during a birth, for example – and so arouse sympathy for the selfless efforts of the midwife. His social commitment, however, did not always meet with approval, as in the case of the unpublished report (1950) on the re-election campaign of Clement Attlee, the candidate of the British Labour Party.

Life intended the report to strengthen indirectly the position of the Conservatives by presenting the results of Attlee’s nationalisation policies in a critical light. Smith’s coverage, however, aroused sympathy for Attlee’s programme and the candidate himself. Smith had more success with his Spanish Village feature (1951). He wanted to convey an impression of living conditions under a fascist regime. After obtaining the necessary shooting permission, he spent two months studying the Spanish countryside before finally selecting a remote village in the Estremadura as his subject. Not a few of the photographs, with their chiaroscuro and clearly structured composition, are reminiscent of classical paintings and convey by means of this stylistic device a sense of the hardships but also the beauty of life there.

Smith’s feature on the work of Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné was to be his last for Life whose refusal to give him a say in the selection and layout of pictures had become unacceptable, and he left the periodical after the appearance of his photo essay Albert Schweitzer – Man of Mercy in November 1955.

A career alternative offered itself in the shape of membership of Magnum, the photographers’ agency founded in 1947. Stefan Lorant commissioned Smith to do an extensive feature on the city of Pittsburgh and its iron foundries, which occupied him for the next few years and nearly exhausted his financial and personal resources. Instead of the 100 prints agreed with Lorant, there arose 13,000 shots out of which he wanted to compose an essay which would be entirely in line with his convictions. In 1958 88 photographs were published in Popular Photography’s Annual Guide, although the essay never appeared in its entirety.

In 1957 Smith, who was known for his excessive devotion to his work, had left his family and moved to 821 Sixth Avenue in New York. The house was visited and used for rehearsals by many well-known jazz musicians, and Smith, who was a passionate music lover, photographed and documented this creative milieu over the next few years, while also keeping an audio record on 1,740 tapes, which were only discovered among his posthumous effects in 1998. At the same time he photographed street scenes from his window while also working on the construction of a psychiatric clinic in Haiti.

In 1961 a commission from the Cosmos PR Agency to photograph the company Hitachi Ltd. took Smith to Japan for a year. This was followed in 1963 by a book which contrasted modern Japan with its deeply rooted traditions. A decade later he again turned to the forced modernisation of Japan and its grave consequences with a shocking series about the Minamata epidemic which had been triggered by the environmental pollution caused by the chemical concern Chisso, which had discharged mercurial waste into the sea near the town of Minamata. The Committee for the Defence of the Victims hired Smith to document the human and ecological dimensions of the catastrophe, and the photographer, who threw himself heart and soul into the project, moved with his second wife, Aileen Mioko Smith, to Minamata. In the course of his researches he was beaten up by company security guards and severely injured. The pictures he took, which appeared in Life and his book Minamata: A Warning to the World largely contributed to publicising the scandal.

By the early 1970s Smith’s photographic work was attracting the attention of museums. His photo A Walk to Paradise Garden had already been selected by Edward Steichen as a symbolic climax to the exhibition The Family of Man (1955), but it was not until 1971 that the first retrospective Let Truth Be the Prejudice was held in the Jewish Museum in New York. In 1977 Smith, by this time seriously ill, moved to Tucson, Arizona, to take up a teaching post at the university there in what was to be the last year of his life.

Text from the Martin-Gropius-Bau website

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
A Walk to Paradise Garden
1946
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Dr. Ernest Ceriani Following the Loss of a Mother and Child During Childbirth
1948
Gelatin silver print
28 x 20.2cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Untitled
1954
Gelatin silver print
33.5 x 23.6cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
The Spinner
1950
Gelatin silver print
32.4 x 23cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Maude – Delivery
1951
32.7 x 25cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Untitled
1954
Gelatin silver print
34.6 x 25.2cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin
Niederkirchnerstraße 7
Corner Stresemannstr. 110
10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 254 86-0

Opening hours:
Wednesday to Monday 10 – 19 hrs
Tuesday closed

Martin-Gropius-Bau website

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Exhibition: ‘Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks’ at the Phoenix Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 20th August – 6th November 2011

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

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Children with Doll (Ella Watson’s Grandchildren)
1942
Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Ingrid Bergman at Stromboli
1949
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Black Muslim Rally
New York, 1963
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Alberto Giacometti, Paris
1951
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks spent the majority of his professional career at the crossroads of the glamorous and the ghetto – two extremes the noted photographer knew well. Perhaps best recognised for his works chronicling the African-American experience, Parks was also an accomplished fashion photographer. Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks provides a revealing look at the diversity and breadth of Parks’s most potent imagery. Featuring 73 works specifically selected by Parks for the photographic collection of the Los Angeles-based Capital Group, Bare Witness divulges heart wrenching images, iconic moments, celebrities and slices of everyday life.

Born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks, who died in 2006 at age 93, was an African American photographer who began working professionally in the 1930’s. Parks tackled the harsh truth and dignity of the black urban and rural poor in the United States. He photographed aspects of the Civil Rights movements and individuals associated with the Black Panthers and Black Muslims. For nearly 25 years, from 1948 to 1972, he served as staff photographer for Life magazine. He also established himself as a foremost fashion photographer, providing spreads for respected magazines such as Vogue.

Bare Witness features many of Parks’s most memorable images such as “American Gothic.” Taken during Parks’s brief time with the Farm Security Agency, the photograph depicts a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. Also included in the exhibition is a series of photos from Parks’s most famous Life magazine essay about Flavio da Silva, a malnourished and asthmatic boy living in a Rio de Janerio slum. Portraits of Muhammad Ali, Duke Ellington, Alexander Calder, Ingrid Bergman, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X among others will also be on view.

“Whether photographing celebrities or common folk, children or the elderly, Harlem gang leaders or fellow artists, Parks brought his straightforward, sympathetic ear and mind to bear witness to late 20th century civilisation,” commented Hilarie Faberman, the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Cantor Arts Center and organiser of the exhibition. “His photographs balance the dichotomies of black and white, rich and poor, revealing his strengths and struggles as an artist and a man.”

In addition to his documentary and fashion photography, Parks was a filmmaker, author, musician and publisher. He was the first black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film, “The Learning Tree” in 1969, which was based on his early life experiences. He subsequently directed the popular action films “Shaft” and “Shaft’s Big Score.” He was a founder and editorial director of Essence magazine and wrote several autobiographies, novels and poems. In 1988, he received the National Medal of Arts award and throughout his lifetime was the recipient of 40 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities in the United States and England.

“Parks was a renaissance man whose career embodied the American ideal of equality and whose art was deeply personal. This exhibition is an exciting opportunity for Museum visitors to experience the poignant images he made over five decades,” commented Rebecca Senf, Norton Curator of Photography, Phoenix Art Museum.

The exhibition includes an illustrated catalogue with an essay by photography scholar Maren Stange who writes frequently on modern American culture. This exhibition has already enjoyed a five-venue tour, where the photographs were received with great excitement. The exhibition has been revived for a final showing at the Phoenix Art Museum. Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks was organised by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are made possible by generous support from The Capital Group Foundation, the Cantor Arts Center’s Hohbach Family Fund, and Cantor Arts Center’s Members.

Press release from the Phoenix Museum of Art website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
American Gothic
1942
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Red Jackson, Harlem
1948
Gelatin silver print
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mrs. Jefferson, Fort Scott
1949
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
A Gambling Woman, Caribe Hilton Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico
December 1949
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mário da Silva, Crying after Being Bitten by Dog, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
1961
Gelatin silver print
14 x 11 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Malcolm X at Rally, Chicago, Illinois
1963
From the series Chicago Muslim Story (1963)
Gelatin silver print
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks relocated from Minnesota to Chicago’s South Side in 1940, immersing himself in the local art community while operating a portrait studio out of the South Side Community Art Center. In 1941 he was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship for a portfolio of photographs he created on the South Side; the award gave him the means to move east to Washington, DC. By 1948 Life magazine hired him as its first African American staff photographer.

In 1963 Parks returned to Chicago on assignment for Life to report on the Nation of Islam, newly headquartered in the city. Parks gained unprecedented access to this radical civil rights movement through his friendship with Malcolm X, who arranged a meeting with Elijah Muhammad, the group’s leader, so that Parks could obtain permission to proceed with the story. Parks spent weeks with the Black Muslim community, documenting a range of its activities – from self-defense training to religious services led by Malcolm X.

Parks’s photo-essay ran in the May 31, 1963, issue of Life, along with an essay by Parks that reflects on his dual status as insider and outsider. The text begins with his return to Chicago after nearly a decade and his memories of “the hopelessness that seeped into the black souls of that jungle.” Parks goes on to describe his current position: “I was a Black Man in White Man’s clothing, sent by the very ‘devils’ [Elijah Muhammad] criticized so much… . I wondered whether or not my achievements in the white world had cost me a certain objectivity.” He concludes, “I sympathize with much of what they say, but I also disagree with much of what they say… . Nevertheless, I acknowledge that the circumstance of common struggle has willed us brothers.”

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Muhammad Ali
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Muhammad Ali
1970
Cibachrome
20 x 16 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Phoenix Art Museum
McDowell Road & Central Avenue
1625 N. Central Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85004

Opening hours:
Monday Closed
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday 10am – 9pm
Thursday – Sunday 10am – 5pm

Phoenix Art Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Joel Meyerowitz – Aftermath’ at the Miami Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 19th August – 6th November 2011

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Searchers in Rubble
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there …

Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Sadness. And light. Hope. Amidst the inferno. Study the masterpiece Finding More Fireman (below) in the enlarged version and you cannot fail to be moved. It is all there: monumental, intimate, hellish, redemptive – a modern, “disastrous” form of the Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Flower Offering
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Pit Looking North
2002
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Smoke and Spray
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Jeffrey Hugh Newman

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Moving the Monument
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Jeffrey Hugh Newman

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Finding More Fireman
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Searchers
2002
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Welders in South Tower
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

In commemoration of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Miami Art Museum presents Focus Gallery: Joel Meyerowitz – Aftermath, an exhibition of photographs taken by the only photographer granted right of entry into Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. For nine months during the day and night, Meyerowitz photographed “the pile,” as the World Trade Center came to be known, and the over 800 people a day that were working in it. The exhibition consists of 24, recently-donated photographs, presented in the Focus Gallery section of the Museum’s Permanent Collection installation. Admission to Miami Art Museum will be free to all emergency personnel, including police and firefighters, and their guests throughout the exhibition’s run, August 19 – November 6, 2011. A special preview for emergency personnel will be held on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 4-7pm. Author and photography critic Vicki Goldberg will give a lecture entitled “What Remains” on Thursday, September 8, 2011, beginning at 6:30pm.

After September 11, 2001, the Ground Zero site in New York City was classified as a crime scene and only those directly involved in the recovery efforts were allowed inside. The press was prohibited from the site. Influenced by Walker Evans’s and Dorothea Lange’s work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, Meyerowitz, long recognised as one of the pioneers of colour photography, was convinced that if a photographic record of the unprecedented recovery efforts was not made, “there would be no history.” With the help of sympathetic officials, he managed to become the only photographer granted right of entry into Ground Zero.

“I was making photographs for everyone who didn’t have access to the site,” says Meyerowitz, “I wanted to communicate what it felt like to be in there as well as what it looked like: to show the pile’s incredible intricacy and visceral power. I could provide a window for everyone else who wanted to be there, too, to help, or to grieve, or simply to try to understand what had happened to our city.”

Armed with a large-format wooden camera, Meyerowitz spent nine months photographing the site. In the first few weeks, he was chased off the site repeatedly, but over time, with the help of officials on and off site, the use of forged workers’ passes, and by assuming the “uniform” of hard hat, goggles, respirator, gloves, boots and duct taped pants, Meyerowitz became “woven into the fabric of the site.”

About the experience, Meyerowitz has written, “The nine months I worked at Ground Zero were among the most rewarding of my life. I came in as an outsider, a witness bent on keeping the record, but over time I began to feel a part of the very project I’d been intent on recording… the intense camaraderie I experienced at Ground Zero inspired me, changing both my sense of myself and my sense of responsibility to the world around me. September 11th was a tragedy of almost unfathomable proportions. But living for nine months in the midst of those individuals who faced that tragedy head-on, day after day, and did what they could to set things right, was an immense privilege.”

The photographs in MAM’s collection are from a unique set of contact prints (photographs printed on a 1:1 scale from the negatives) issued by the artist in 2006. As a group, they span the entire nine month period that Meyerowitz was on site, presenting a poignant, condensed view of the clean up effort, including portraits of the workers involved. The set is introduced by a single image of the World Trade Center towers taken by the artist in the 1980s from his apartment window.

The entire set of more than 8,000 photographs taken by Meyerowitz form an archive at the Museum of the City of New York. The Aftermath series was the focus of a 2006 book, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archives published by Phaidon (reissued this year in a special 10th anniversary edition) and an exhibition organised by the US Department of State that traveled worldwide from 2002 to 2005.

Press release from the Miami Art Museum website

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Explosion Squad Detective
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Steps Down to Plaza
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Jeffrey Hugh Newman

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Fireman at Last Column
2002
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Building #5 and Woolworth
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Simon and Bonnie Levin

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Welder and Rubble
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Miami Art Museum
101 W Flagler St., Miami, FL 33130

Opening hours:
Monday 11am – 6pm
Tuesday – Wednesday Closed
Thursday 11am – 9pm
Friday – Sunday 11am – 6pm

Miami Art Museum website

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