Curator: Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator of photographs at the museum
Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936) Coming Home from the Marshes 1886 Platinum print Image: 19.8 × 28.9cm (7 13/16 × 11 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Glorious. adjective: having a striking beauty or splendour.
I have seen quite a few vintage platinum prints over the years, from Paul Strand to Robert Mapplethorpe (even though he didn’t print them himself). And there has always struck me about them a lusciousness, a pleasingly rich “atmosphere” which appeals strongly to the senses, through an almost erotic charge of intensity.
Contrary to the contemporary mania for pure blacks and whites in an image, platinum prints, with their wide gamut, can have an innumerable number of greys in their tonal range which form a holistic whole in the rendition of the subject. For example, Frederick H. Evans’ Kelmscott Manor: In the Attics (2) (1896, below) has a delicacy of description and a glowing aura seemingly emanating from the very depths of the image, which fetishises the photographic object, itself.
As in a drizzle of light rain – and emerging from Pictorialist conventions of sfumato – there is a liquidity to the tonality of platinum prints, as though there is mercury flowing under the surface of the paper. Glorious.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Admired for their velvety matte surface, wide tonal range, and neutral palette, platinum prints helped establish photography as a fine art. Introduced in 1873, the process was championed by prominent photographers until platinum’s use was restricted in World War I and manufacturers were forced to introduce alternatives. The process attracted renewed interest in the mid-twentieth century from a relatively small but dedicated community of practitioners. This exhibition draws from the Museum’s collection to showcase some of the most striking prints made with platinum and the closely related palladium processes.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Eveleen W. H. Myers (British, 1856-1937) Leopold Hamilton Myers as ‘The Compassionate Cherub’ about 1888-1891 Platinum print Image: 24.4 × 29cm (9 5/8 × 11 7/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Sarah Choate Sears (American, 1858-1935) Helen Sears 1895 Platinum print Image: 22.8 × 18.7cm (9 × 7 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Sarah Choate Sears (American, 1858-1935)
Sarah Choate Sears (1858-1935) was an American art collector, art patron, cultural entrepreneur, artist and photographer
About 1890 she began exploring photography, and soon she was participating in local salons. She joined the Boston Camera Club in 1892, and her beautiful portraits and still life attracted the attention of fellow Boston photographer F. Holland Day. Soon her work was gaining international attention.
At the same time she was pursuing her photography interest, she and her husband were hosting some of the most elegant cultural and artistic parties in Boston. They often featured private symphonic performances and included many international composers and performers, including Ignacy Paderewski, Serge Koussevitsky and Dame Nellie Melba.
In 1899 she was given a one-woman show at the Boston Camera Club, and in 1900 she had several prints in Frances Benjamin Johnson’s famous exhibition in Paris. In early 1900 she met American Impressionist Mary Cassatt, and the two continued to be friends for the remainder of their lives. During this same period she was elected as a member of the prestigious photographic associations: the Linked Ring in London and Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession in New York…
In 1907, two of her photographs were published in Camera Work, but by that time she had lost much of her interest in photography.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Kelmscott Manor: In the Attics (2) 1896 Platinum print Image: 19.9 × 14.9cm (7 7/8 × 5 7/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) [Gertrude O’Malley and son Charles] 1900 Platinum print Image: 20.2 × 15.6cm (7 15/16 × 6 1/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) La Cigale (The cicada) Negative 1901; print 1908 Waxed gum bichromate over platinum print Image: 31.4 × 27cm (12 3/8 × 10 5/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Platinum Photographs, featuring more than two dozen striking prints made with platinum and the closely related palladium photographic process.
Drawn from the museum’s collection, the exhibition explores the wide variety of visual characteristics that have come to define the allure and beauty of this medium, which include a velvety matte surface, wide tonal range, and neutral palette. Introduced in 1873 by scientist William Willis Jr. (British, 1841-1923), the use of platinum was quickly embraced by both professional and amateur photographers alike and helped to establish photography as a fine art.
The visual qualities of each print could be individualised by changing the temperature of the developer or adding chemicals such as mercury or uranium. Photographers further enhanced their works by using an array of commercially available papers with rich textures and by employing inventive techniques such as the application of pigments and layered coatings to mimic effects associated with painting and drawing.
Platinum printing became widely associated with Pictorialism, an international movement and aesthetic style popular at the end of the 19th century. Advocates of Pictorialism favoured visible marks of the artist’s hand that might be achieved by manipulating either the negative or the print, or both. These hand-crafted prints differentiated themselves from the crisp images produced by commercial photographers and snapshots made with hand-held cameras recently introduced by Kodak.
Among the works on view is a triptych of a mother and child by Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934), one of the most technically innovative photographers associated with Pictorialism, an atmospheric nude by Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879-1973), and a view of Venice by Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, born United States, 1882-1966). Other images by Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) and Karl Struss (American, 1886-1981) incorporate geometric forms or unusual vantage points to introduce abstraction into their compositions.
The popularity of platinum paper declined in the years leading up to the First World War. The soaring price of the metal forced manufacturers to introduce alternatives, including papers made with palladium and a platinum-and-silver hybrid. As platinum became crucial in the manufacture of explosives, governments prohibited its use for any purpose outside the defence industry. The scarcity of materials and eventual shifting aesthetic preferences led many photographers to abandon the process in favour of gelatin silver prints.
Interest in the process was renewed in the mid-20th century, and a relatively small but dedicated number of photographers continue to use the process today. The fashion photographer Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009) began hand coating papers with platinum in the 1960s and created prints that simultaneously emphasise intense and detailed shadows and subtle luminous highlights. More recent examples include a double portrait by artist Madoka Takagi (American, born Japan, 1956-2015) featuring herself, arms crossed and a shirtless man covered in tattoos, both gazing stoically into the camera’s lens; a suburban night scene by Scott B. Davis (American, born 1971); and an experiment in abstraction by James Welling (American, born 1951).
In Focus: Platinum Photographs is on view January 21-May 31, 2020 at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition is curated by Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator of photographs at the museum.
Press release from The J. Paul Getty Museum
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Gertrude and Charles O’Malley: A Triptych, summer 1903 1903 Platinum print Image: 19.4 × 15.2cm (7 5/8 × 6 in.) Later overmat and mount -irregular: 58.3 × 71.1cm (22 15/16 × 28 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Gertrude and Charles O’Malley: A Triptych, summer 1903 1903 Platinum print Image: 18.7 × 14.9cm (7 3/8 × 5 7/8 in.) Later overmat and mount -irregular: 58.3 × 71.1cm (22 15/16 × 28 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Gertrude and Charles O’Malley: A Triptych, summer 1903 1903 Platinum print Image: 20 × 14.8cm (7 7/8 × 5 13/16 in.) Later overmat and mount -irregular: 58.3 × 71.1cm (22 15/16 × 28 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Gertrude and Charles O’Malley: A Triptych, summer 1903 1903 Platinum print Image: 19.4 × 15.2cm (7 5/8 × 6 in.) Later overmat and mount -irregular: 58.3 × 71.1cm (22 15/16 × 28 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Joseph Turner Keiley (American, 1869-1914) Untitled 1900-1905 Platinum print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Joseph Turner Keiley (American, 1869-1914)
Joseph Turner Keiley (26 July 1869 – 21 January 1914) was an early 20th-century photographer, writer and art critic. He was a close associate of photographer Alfred Stieglitz and was one of the founding members of the Photo-Secession. Over the course of his life Keiley’s photographs were exhibited in more than two dozen international exhibitions, and he achieved international acclaim for both his artistic style and his writing.
He began photographing in the mid-1890s and met fellow New York photographer Gertrude Käsebier, who at that time was engaged in photographing American Indians who were performing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Keiley also photographed some of the same subjects, and in 1898 nine of his prints were exhibited in the Philadelphia Photographic Salon. One of the judges for the Salon was Stieglitz, who also wrote a glowing review of Keiley’s work.
Due to his success in Philadelphia the next year Keiley became the fourth American elected to the Linked Ring, which at that time was the most prominent photographic society in the world promoting pictorialism.
In 1900 he joined the Camera Club of New York and had a one-person exhibition in the Club’s gallery. At that time Stieglitz was serving as the Vice President of the Club and editor of the Club’s journal Camera Notes, and Keiley soon became his closest ally. Stieglitz asked him to become Associate Editor of the journal, and over the next few years Keiley was one of its most prolific writers, contributing articles on aesthetics, exhibition reviews and technical articles. He also had several of his photographs published in the journal.
While working with Stieglitz the two began experimenting with a new printing technique for glycerine-developed platinum prints, and they co-authored an article on the subject that was later published in Camera Notes.
In 1902 Stieglitz included Keiley as one of the founding members of the Photo-Secession, and he had fifteen of his prints (one more than Edward Steichen) included in the inaugural exhibition of the Photo-Secession at the National Arts Club.
When Stieglitz started Camera Work in 1903 he asked Keiley to become Associate Editor, and for the next eleven years he was second only to Stieglitz in the details of publishing the journal. He contributed dozens of essays, reviews and technical articles, and he advised Stieglitz about promising new photographers from Europe.
Keiley had seven gravures published in Camera Work, one in 1903 and six in 1907.
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966) Grand Canal, Venice 1908 Platinum print 40.8 × 21.3cm (16 1/16 × 8 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands 1918 Palladium print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Doris Ulmann (American, 1882-1934) Landscape with Pump and Barn about 1920-1934 Platinum print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Doris Ulmann (May 29, 1882 – August 28, 1934) was an American photographer, best known for her portraits of the people of Appalachia, particularly craftsmen and musicians, made between 1928 and 1934.
Tina Modotti (American born Italy, 1896-1942) Hands Resting on Tool 1927 Palladium print Image: 19.7 × 21.6cm (7 3/4 × 8 1/2 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
James Welling (born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut) is a postmodern artist. He earned both a BFA and an MFA at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where he studied with, among others, Dan Graham. He emerged in the 1970s as a post-conceptual artist for whom photographic norms and the representational field itself were and remain contested and problematised. Welling lives and works in Los Angeles.
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
Exhibition dates: 14th June, 2019 – 31st May, 2020
Curator: Ann Shumard
Unidentified Artist Charlotte Cushman (detail) c. 1850 Half-plate daguerreotype Image: 12 × 9cm (4 3/4 × 3 9/16″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Let us celebrate strong, creative, (com)passionate women.
Marcus
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Seriousness of their intent and purpose writ large upon their faces. Portraits of the self, as if alone, without decorous engagement for the camera.
Elizabeth Gertsakis
In mid-nineteenth-century America, the growing presence of women in public life coincided with the rise of portrait photography. This exhibition of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes from the 1840s and 1850s features portraits of early feminist icons, women’s rights advocates Margaret Fuller and Lucy Stone, abolitionist Lucretia Mott and best-selling author Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Unidentified Artist Charlotte Cushman c. 1850 Half-plate daguerreotype Image: 12 × 9cm (4 3/4 × 3 9/16″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Charlotte Saunders Cushman (July 23, 1816 – February 18, 1876) was an American stage actress. Her voice was noted for its full contralto register, and she was able to play both male and female parts. She lived intermittently in Rome, in an expatriate colony of prominent artists and sculptors, some of whom became part of her tempestuous private life.
Charlotte Cushman was the foremost American-born actress of her day and the first to enjoy critical and popular acclaim at home and abroad. Following her 1836 New York City stage debut as Lady Macbeth, she honed her craft there and in Philadelphia, where she managed the Walnut Street Theatre from 1842 to 1844. With a dramatic range and commanding stage presence that more than compensated for her lack of conventional beauty, Cushman boldly developed a repertoire that included male as well as female roles. Taking London by storm in 1845, she returned to universal acclaim in the United States in 1849.
Unidentified Artist Lucy Stone c. 1855 Half-plate daguerreotype Case Open: 19.9 × 32.9 × 0.8cm (7 13/16 × 12 15/16 × 5/16″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 – October 18, 1893) was a prominent U.S. orator, abolitionist, and suffragist, and a vocal advocate and organiser promoting rights for women. In 1847, Stone became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She spoke out for women’s rights and against slavery at a time when women were discouraged and prevented from public speaking. Stone was known for using her birth name after marriage, the custom being for women to take their husband’s surname.
Lucy Stone was unequivocal in her opposition to slavery and her support for women’s rights. Yet, when some abolitionists argued that her antislavery efforts should take precedence, she replied, “I was a woman before I was an abolitionist.” Stone helped to organise the first national women’s rights conference in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, and lectured widely on the topic of women’s suffrage. When she married Henry Blackwell in 1855, she defied tradition by retaining her maiden name. In 1866, Stone became a founder of the American Equal Rights Association, which sought to secure voting rights for African Americans and women.
Unidentified Artist Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 Sixth-plate daguerreotype Image: 3.9cm x 3.4cm (1 9/16″ x 1 5/16″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American abolitionist and author. She came from the Beecher family, a famous religious family, and is best known for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which depicts the harsh conditions for enslaved African Americans. The book reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and Great Britain, energising anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential for both her writings and her public stances and debates on social issues of the day.
Harriet Beecher Stowe authored numerous articles, essays, and books during her long career, but it was her dramatic, antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin that brought her fame at home and abroad. First serialised in the National Era newspaper, Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in book form in 1852 and sold more than 300,000 copies during its first year in print. Lionised by Northern abolitionists and vilified by Southern slaveholders, Stowe became the subject of intense public interest. When requests for her portrait multiplied, she responded by posing for several daguerreotype likenesses that were soon copied and distributed widely.
Ezra Greenleaf Weld (American, 1801-1874) Frederick Douglass with the Edmonson Sisters at Fugitive Slave Law Convention, Cazenovia, New York 1850 Half-plate copy daguerreotype Case Open: 15.2 x 24.4 x 1.3 cm (6 x 9 5/8 x 1/2″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; on loan from Mr. and Mrs. Set Charles Momjian
Ezra Greenleaf Weld (October 26, 1801 – October 14, 1874), often known simply as “Greenleaf”, was a photographer and an operator of a daguerreotype studio in Cazenovia, New York. He and his family were involved with the abolitionist movement.
Weld opened his first studio in his home in 1845. In 1850, Cazenovia hosted the abolitionist meeting known as the Fugitive Slave Law Convention. This gave Weld the opportunity to photograph the legendary orator Frederick Douglass with the Edmonson sisters, Gerritt Smith and Abby Kelley Foster. This daguerreotype was given to the imprisoned abolitionist William Chaplin who had helped many of the attendees escape to freedom.
Of the six daguerreotypes of Douglass that have survived, only one besides Greenleaf’s image has had its daguerreotypist identified. Greenleaf’s image is unique because it is a group shot at an outdoor meeting rather than a studio portrait. Daguerreotypes were seldom attempted under these circumstances because the long exposure time required made it difficult to get a satisfactory result. Weld’s is the only daguerreotype of Douglass whose date is known with certainty. This daguerreotype is also unique in the paradoxical sense that it is the only one known to have been copied. Two original half-plates exist: One is held by the Madison County Historical Society in Oneida, New York, the other is in a private collection and currently on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
The Fugitive Slave Law Convention was held in Cazenovia, New York, August 21-22, 1850. Organised to oppose passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by the United States Congress, participants included Frederick Douglass, the Edmonson sisters, Gerrit Smith, Samuel Joseph May, and Theodore Dwight Weld, among others. The convention opened at the First Congregational Church of Cazenovia (now Cazenovia College’s theater building), then moved to “the orchard of Grace Wilson’s School, located on Sullivan Street,” to accommodate the estimated 2000 to 3000 participants. It was chaired by Douglass.
Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave. …
Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether white, black, female, Native American, or Chinese immigrants. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto “No Union with Slaveholders”, criticised Douglass’ willingness to engage in dialogue with slave owners, he replied: “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
Mary Edmonson (1832-1853) and Emily Edmonson (1835-1895), “two respectable young women of light complexion”, were African Americans who became celebrities in the United States abolitionist movement after gaining their freedom from slavery. On April 15, 1848, they were among the 77 slaves who tried to escape from Washington, DC on the schooner The Pearl to sail up the Chesapeake Bay to freedom in New Jersey.
Although that effort failed, they were freed from slavery by funds raised by the Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York, whose pastor was Henry Ward Beecher, an abolitionist. After gaining freedom, the Edmonsons were supported to go to school; they also worked. They campaigned with Beecher throughout the North for the end of slavery in the United States.
Gerrit Smith (March 6, 1797 – December 28, 1874), also spelled Gerritt, was a leading American social reformer, abolitionist, politician, and philanthropist. Spouse to Ann Carroll Fitzhugh, Smith was a candidate for President of the United States in 1848, 1856, and 1860, but only served 18 months in the federal government – in Congress as a Free Soil Party Representative, in 1853-1854.
In 1850, as Congress considered passage of a harsh new Fugitive Slave Law, more than 2,000 people heeded the call of abolitionist Gerrit Smith (standing, center) to meet in Cazenovia, New York, and protest the impending legislation. Among the nearly fifty escaped slaves to participate were Emily and Mary Edmonson (in plaid shawls), whose freedom had been purchased by abolitionists in 1848, and Frederick Douglass (seated, center right), who served as the convention’s presiding officer. On the gathering’s second day, the overflowing crowd moved from its initial meeting place in a church to a nearby orchard. There, a local daguerreotypist made this extraordinary record of the convention.
Marcus Aurelius Root (American, 1808-1888) Lucretia Coffin Mott 1851 Half-plate daguerreotype Case Open: 15 x 23.2 x 1cm (5 7/8 x 9 1/8 x 3/8″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Marcus Aurelius Root (1808-1888) was a writing teacher and photographer. He was born in Granville, Ohio and died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
On 20 June 1846, he bought John Jabez Edwin Mayall’s Chestnut Street photography studio that was in the same building as Root’s residence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Root had success as a daguerreotypist working with his brother, Samuel Root. The Root Brothers had a gallery in New York City from 1849 to 1857. Marcus Aurelius Root authored an important book on photography entitled The Camera and the Pencil.
Lucretia Mott (née Coffin; January 3, 1793 – November 11, 1880) was a U.S. Quaker, abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. In 1848 she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first meeting about women’s rights. Mott helped write the Declaration of Sentiments during the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.
Her speaking abilities made her an important abolitionist, feminist, and reformer. When slavery was outlawed in 1865, she advocated giving former slaves who had been bound to slavery laws within the boundaries of the United States, whether male or female, the right to vote. She remained a central figure in the abolition and suffrage movement until her death in 1880.
A devout Quaker whose activism proved unsettling to some members of her faith, Lucretia Mott assumed a highly visible role in the abolitionist movement. After joining William Lloyd Garrison at the launch of the American Anti-Slavery Society, she helped to found Philadelphia’s Female Anti-Slavery Society. Her concern for women’s rights was a natural outgrowth of her abolitionist efforts. In 1848, Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organised the convention at Seneca Falls, New York, that galvanised the women’s suffrage movement.
Marcus Aurelius Root (American, 1808-1888) Lucretia Coffin Mott (detail) 1851 Half-plate daguerreotype Case Open: 15 x 23.2 x 1cm (5 7/8 x 9 1/8 x 3/8″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will display photographs of 19th-century activists and professionals in “Women of Progress: Early Camera Portraits,” a presentation of 10 daguerreotypes and two ambrotypes from the museum’s extensive collection of antebellum portraits. This focused exhibition will explore the increasing visibility of American women in society before the Civil War and the corresponding advent of portrait photography. Organised by Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs, “Women of Progress” is part of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, “Because of Her Story,” and is one of seven exhibitions in the Portrait Gallery’s 2019 – 2020 program to highlight women in history. “Women of Progress: Early Camera Portraits” will be displayed on the museum’s first floor June 14 through May 31, 2020.
The Portrait Gallery’s exhibition will reacquaint visitors with the fascinating lives of 13 memorable Americans. “In the 1840s and 1850s, the growing presence of women in public life coincided with the rise of portrait photography,” Shumard said. “As a result, women who were making their mark in endeavours as varied as journalism, literature, abolitionism and the burgeoning women’s rights movement became sought-after subjects for the camera.”
Those featured in the exhibition will include Dorothea Lynde Dix, activist and educator who sought humane treatment for people with mental illness; Margaret Fuller, editor and women’s rights advocate; Lucretia Mott, abolitionist and co-organiser of the Seneca Falls Convention; Lucy Stone, suffragist and a founder of the American Equal Rights Association; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Other pioneers are the actress Laura Keene, the first woman manager of a major theatre in New York City and Mary Ann Brown Patten, the first woman to command a sailing ship around Cape Horn. The exhibition will also highlight the abolitionists Emily and Mary Edmonson, who are pictured in a daguerreotype with Frederick Douglass at the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law Convention in Cazenovia, New York. Funding for the exhibition was made possible by the National Portrait Gallery’s Women’s Initiative Leadership Committee including Capital One and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.
Press release from the National Portrait Gallery [Online] Cited 03/11/2019
Rufus Anson (American, c. 1821-?) Laura Keene c. 1855 Sixteenth-plate daguerreotype Case Open: 5.4 × 9.7cm (2 1/8 × 3 13/16″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Acquired through the generosity of Bill and Sally Wittliff
Rufus Anson (active 1851-1867), American daguerreotypist who operated a studio in New York City.
An accomplished comedic actress, Laura Keene (20 July 1826 – 4 November 1873) rattled New York City’s theatrical establishment in 1855 when she became the first woman manager of a major theatre in that city. After leasing the Metropolitan Theatre, she opened Laura Keene’s Varieties, serving as manager, director, and principal star. Keene faced hostility from New York’s male theatrical managers. Her theatre was vandalised, and she lost her lease. Undeterred, she opened the Laura Keene Theatre in a new building in 1856. Well versed in all aspects of her craft, Keene was a highly successful manager who championed emerging playwrights and attracted the brightest stars to her acting company.
Rufus Anson (American, c. 1821-?) Laura Keene (detail) c. 1855 Sixteenth-plate daguerreotype Case Open: 5.4 × 9.7cm (2 1/8 × 3 13/16″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Acquired through the generosity of Bill and Sally Wittliff
John Plumbe, Jr. (American born Wales, 1809-1857) Margaret Fuller 1846 Sixth-plate daguerreotype National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Short on funds and waiting to receive a commission from the United States Congress to survey the route for a transcontinental railroad, an idea which he is credited with originating, civil engineer John Plumbe, Jr., took up photography in 1840 after seeing the work of an itinerant daguerreotypist in Washington, D.C. A Welshman by birth, Plumbe opened a gallery in Boston the following year. He eventually maintained galleries in thirteen cities, making his name recognisable in numerous cities across the country. Plumbe opened his Washington, D.C., gallery in 1844, the first in the nation’s capital. By the time he established the National Plumbeotype Gallery of engraved and lithographic reproductions of his own images in 1846, Plumbe had been dubbed “the American Daguerre” by the press. In 1847 Plumbe found himself in financial trouble and he sold his business to his employees. Two years later he gave up photography and retired to Dubuque, Iowa, where [suffering from the prolonged effects of malaria and from acute depression] he met an untimely end by cutting his own throat [at his brother’s residence in Dubuque on May 28, 1857].
After working briefly for the Wisconsin territorial legislature in late 1839, Plumbe went east to continue his campaign for a Pacific railroad. He turned to the newly introduced daguerreotype process of photography as a means of support and excelled in that endeavour. Within six years Plumbe had attained a national reputation through photographic competitions and by establishing a chain of 23 galleries. Plumbe’s Dubuque gallery, opened in 1841 and operated by his brother Richard (1810-1896), was the first photographic establishment west of the Mississippi. Plumbe manufactured and imported photographic materials, gave instruction to the first generation of photographers, and published dozens of lithographic prints of noted Americans based on his daguerreotypes. Among his many achievements are the earliest photographs of the U.S. Capitol and White House (exterior and interior), the earliest photograph of a president in office (James K. Polk), and thousands of portraits of the most noted personalities of the era. Plumbe pioneered brand name recognition, obtained patent rights for colour photography, and published a magazine filled with illustrations based on his photographs. By late 1848, however, Plumbe had experienced severe financial reverses due to competition and mismanagement and was forced to sell his galleries to pay his debts.
John Plumbe, Jr. (American born Wales, 1809-1857) Margaret Fuller (detail) 1846 Sixth-plate daguerreotype National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
The only known daguerreotype of Margaret Fuller.
Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli (May 23, 1810 – July 19, 1850), commonly known as Margaret Fuller, was an American journalist, editor, critic, and women’s rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. …
Fuller was an advocate of women’s rights and, in particular, women’s education and the right to employment. She also encouraged many other reforms in society, including prison reform and the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Many other advocates for women’s rights and feminism, including Susan B. Anthony, cite Fuller as a source of inspiration. Many of her contemporaries, however, were not supportive, including her former friend Harriet Martineau. She said that Fuller was a talker rather than an activist. Shortly after Fuller’s death, her importance faded; the editors who prepared her letters to be published, believing her fame would be short-lived, censored or altered much of her work before publication.
Unidentified Artist Olive Oatman Nd Ambrotype National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
In the spring of 1851, a band of Apache men in present-day Arizona captured thirteen-year-old Olive Oatman and her younger sister. They killed or seriously injured the rest of the family during the attack. At the time, the Oatman family-originally from Illinois-was headed west to California to start their lives anew. Shortly thereafter the Apache sold the two sisters to a Mohave family. While living with this family, Oatman was tattooed on the chin, a custom common among members of the tribe. In 1856, after enduring five years in captivity and the death of her sister, Oatman had her freedom negotiated, and she was given over to authorities at Fort Yuma. Accounts of her release were published widely, and her biography became a best-seller. Though Oatman stated that her Mojave family treated her well, stories such as hers reinforced commonly held assumptions that Native Americans were violent savages.
Olive Ann Oatman (September 7, 1837 – March 21, 1903) was a woman born in Illinois. While traveling from Illinois to California with a company of Mormon Brewsterites, her family was killed in 1851, in present-day Arizona by a Native American tribe. The town of Oatman, Arizona is named after the Oatman family and the massacre which occurred therein. Though she identified her family’s attackers as Apache, they were most likely Tolkepayas (Western Yavapai). This small group of Native Americans clubbed Olive’s family to death. They captured Olive and her younger sister, Mary Ann, and enslaved them for one year. The girls were traded to the Mohave people. Olive spent four years with the Mohave. During her time with the Mohave tribe her sister, Mary Ann, died from starvation. Olive returned to white society five years after the Oatman Massacre, wearing a blue tattoo on her chin as a reminder of her time with the Mohave people.
Following her repatriation into American society, Olive’s story began to be retold with dramatic license in the press, as well as in her own “memoir” and speeches. Novels, plays, movies, and poetry have been inspired by Olive’s story, which resonated in the media of the time and long afterward. She had become an oddity in 1860s America, partly owing to the prominent blue tattooing of Oatman’s face by the Mohave, making her the first known tattooed American woman on record. Much of what actually occurred during her time with the Native Americans remains unknown.
Unidentified Artist Olive Oatman (detail) Nd Ambrotype National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
In the United States, the rise of studio portrait photography during the 1840s and ’50s coincided with a period of heightened visibility for women, who were emerging as prominent players in arenas including activism, literature, journalism and theatre. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, sold 300,000 copies across the nation in the first year following its publication, while in 1855, comedic stage actress Laura Keene became the first female manager of a major New York City theatre. These women, as well as others making their mark in antebellum America, increasingly found themselves in front of the camera, posing for portraits to be shared with the public or exchanged among loved ones as tokens of affection.
“Women of Progress” catalogues the stories of 13 such mid-19th century figures through the lens of ten daguerreotypes and two ambrotypes. Some of these individuals remain household names today – Beecher Stowe, Lucretia Mott and Dorothea Dix, for example. Others, including Mary Ann Brown Patten, the first woman to sail a clipper ship around Cape Horn; Charlotte Cushman, a popular actress who played both male and female parts; and Mary Ann Meade, a daguerreotypist in her own right – are lesser known. Regardless, the women are united by both their progressive bent and the fact that their camera likenesses survive as a direct result of the burgeoning popularity of photography.
An 1846 photograph of journalist Margaret Fuller falls into the first of these categories: In a letter to her brother, the writer explains that photographer John Plumbe Jr. asked her to pose for a portrait. The resulting image, a sixth-plate daguerreotype, depicts its sitter reading a hefty tome, seemingly so engrossed in the text that she remains unaware of the camera’s presence. The image was later displayed in Plumbe’s studio to attract future clientele.
The circumstances surrounding the production of an 1851 half-plate daguerreotype of abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucretia Mott are far hazier. Taken by photographer Marcus Aurelius Root, the portrait served as the basis for a widely circulated lithographic print by Boston-based artist Leopold Grozelier. Unlike daguerreotypes, lithographic prints could be produced in multiple copies. Lithographs also conveyed a greater variety of tones than earlier printing methods, allowing for more accurate copies of original works such as daguerreotypes and paintings.
Shumard says it’s possible Root’s photograph was taken with the direct intention of serving as the basis for Grozelier’s print. Whereas a daguerreotype sitting typically produced just one plate, lithographs could be easily mass-produced for public purchase. …
To make copies of daguerreotypes, photographers placed original plates on specialised copy stands and then reshot the image – a process known as redaguerreotyping. Although these copies often lacked the level of contrast and subtle gradation seen in the original daguerreotypes, they were more accurate than lithographs and could be circulated on a smaller scale. “Women in Progress” features two copies – an 1852 picture of Beecher Stowe and a half-plate depicting sisters Mary and Emily Catherine Edmonson in a group photograph taken at an 1850 gathering of abolitionists protesting the impending passage of the new federal Fugitive Slave Law. The Edmonsons earned their freedom from slavery with the help of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin author’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher.
Shumard notes that the group portrait had previously been exhibited in relation to two of its better-known sitters, abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith. Now, however, the scene’s female subjects are the ones commanding visitors’ attention. “In this instance,” she says, “it’s really nice to be able to highlight the Edmonson sisters.” The Beecher Stowe copy, Shumard says, stems from one of several studio sittings that yielded multiple plates ready for reproduction and distribution to an eager public.
The majority of daguerreotypes produced in mid-19th century America were designed for private rather than public consumption. “They are very intimate objects, [made] to be held in your hand and looked at,” says Shumard, or perhaps gifted to a loved one as a personal memento.
The medium’s capacity for conveying familiarity is apparent in an 1855 half-plate of abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone, who took the then-unheard of step of keeping her maiden name upon marrying husband Henry Blackwell. In the portrait, Stone’s features and clothing – including hand-coloured peach-tinted flesh and a pink pigmented skirt – are accentuated in an attempt to make the keepsake image look more lifelike.
Other notable images not to be missed include an 1850 quarter-plate daguerreotype of poet Sarah T. Bolton, who urged readers to “Battle for the right. / And break the chains that bind / the mighty to the few,” and a sixth-plate ambrotype of Olive Oatman, a young woman who was abducted by Native Americans and spent five years in captivity, first as a slave of the tribe that murdered most of her family and later as an adopted member of the Mohave people.
Oatman’s 1856 return attracted national attention. She was the subject of an exaggerated 1857 account, Life Among the Indians: Captivity of the Oatman Girls, and traveled the country on a publicity lecture circuit. Her likeness, meanwhile, was cemented in the public’s imagination by blue markings tattooed across the length of her chin. This facial tattoo, applied with cactus ink, is just discernible in the exhibition ambrotype, which is among the National Portrait Gallery’s most recent acquisitions.
Referencing the Oatman and Brown Patten ambrotypes, Shumard concludes, “I’m so excited that we have these ambrotypes of [women] who are not household names but… who experienced such trying circumstances and managed to survive.”
Unidentified Artist Dorothea Lynde Dix c. 1849 Half-plate daguerreotype Case Open: 15.4 x 24.4 x 1.3cm (6 1/16 x 9 5/8 x 1/2″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
In 1841, teacher, humanitarian, and reformer Dorothea Dix launched a vigorous campaign to secure humane treatment for those afflicted with mental illness. At a time when such individuals were more often imprisoned and abused than cared for and treated, Dix became a tireless advocate for their welfare. Personally investigating the “cages, cellars, stalls, [and] pens” where sufferers were confined, she reported her findings in speeches and articles, as well as in the petitions she submitted to lawmakers. Thanks to her efforts, facilities for the mentally ill were greatly expanded and improved.
Unidentified Artist Dorothea Lynde Dix (detail) c. 1849 Half-plate daguerreotype Case Open: 15.4 x 24.4 x 1.3cm (6 1/16 x 9 5/8 x 1/2″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Meade Brothers Studio Mary Ann Meade c. 1850 Sixth-plate daguerreotype Case Open: 9.6 × 15.9 × 1.6cm (3 3/4 × 6 1/4 × 5/8″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Dudley Emerson Lyons
A daguerreotypist in her own right, Mary Ann Meade began her career in the successful photography business founded around 1840 by her brothers, Charles and Henry Meade. After Charles’s death in 1858, Mary Ann gained greater visibility in the gallery’s operations. At a time when few women worked behind the camera, she was listed as a photographer in Trow’s New York City Directory (1861-62). In 1861, an article about the Meade Brothers gallery noted, “Mr. [Henry] Meade and his sister attend personally to visitors.” By June 1863, Mary Ann had become the gallery’s director and was billed as “Successor to MEADE BROTHERS.”
The brothers opened their daguerreian gallery in Albany, N.Y., in 1842, and their business later expanded to other cities. They each traveled to Europe and in 1848, Charles Meade became the first American to photograph Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre – the originator of the daguerreotype process. In 1850, the Meade brothers established their flagship American Daguerreotype Gallery on Broadway in New York City, where they photographed such famous subjects as statesman Daniel Webster and entertainer Lola Montez.
Meade Brothers Studio Mary Ann Meade (detail) c. 1850 Sixth-plate daguerreotype Case Open: 9.6 × 15.9 × 1.6cm (3 3/4 × 6 1/4 × 5/8″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Dudley Emerson Lyons
Unidentified Artist Mary Ann Brown Patten c. 1857 Ninth-plate ambrotype Case Open: 7.4 x 12.4 x 0.9cm (2 15/16 x 4 7/8 x 3/8″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Gift of Dorthy Knouse Koepke
Mary Ann Brown Patten (April 6, 1837 – March 18, 1861) was the first female commander of an American merchant vessel. She was the wife of Joshua Patten, captain of the merchant clipper ship Neptune’s Car. The ship was bound around Cape Horn from New York towards San Francisco when Joshua Patten collapsed from fatigue in 1856. His wife took command for 56 days, faced down a mutiny, and successfully managed to navigate the clipper ship into San Francisco. At the time she was 19 years old and pregnant with her first child.
In 1856, Mary Ann Brown Patten became the first woman to sail a clipper ship around Cape Horn, through the notoriously treacherous waters at the tip of South America. Schooled in navigation by her sea captain husband, she took helm of his ship after he fell seriously ill and the first mate proved untrustworthy. Only nineteen years old and pregnant at the time, Patten captained the San Francisco-bound Neptune’s Car for fifty-one days, during the most hazardous portion of its 15,000-mile voyage. Upon bringing the vessel safely to its destination, she was hailed for her skill as well as her courage.
Curator: Sarah Hermanson Meister, with River Bullock, Beaumont & Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, assisted by Madeline Weisburg, Modern Women’s Fund Twelve-Month Intern, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Six Tenant Farmers without Farms, Hardeman County, Texas 1937, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 12 15/16 × 16 5/8″ (32.9 × 42.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
This image appeared in Land of the Free and later in Lange and Paul Taylor’s documentary photobook An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1941), where Lange cropped out the sixth, smaller man, perhaps to simplify the idea of strength and virility conveyed there.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) A Half-Hour Later, Hardeman County, Texas 1937, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 12 1/8 × 15 3/16″ (30.8 × 38.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
“All photographs – not only those that are so-called ‘documentary,’ … can be fortified by words.”
“And the assignment was… see what was really there. What does it look like, what does it feel like, what actually is the human condition.”
Dorothea Lange
“Lange took so many memorable photographs that it is challenging to shortlist them. One of the greatest is at the entrance to the MoMA show: “Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona” (1940). The farmworker’s hands are close to the lens of the camera. One hand is holding a wooden beam; it could be the implement of his impending crucifixion. The other hand, with its open palm and splayed fingers, covers his mouth. Unforgettably powerful, the photograph resembles self-portraits by Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele, who shared Lange’s interest in extremities – hands and feet, and also, wretched misery.”
Arthur Lubow
Closer and closer
While MoMA has closed temporarily due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, I believe it is important to document and write about those exhibitions that would have been running during this distressing time, as a form of social inclusion, social connection if you like, in the virtual world. I know that I am feeling particularly isolated at the moment, fighting off depression, with a lack of my usual routine and coffee with friends.
Great art always inspires, engages me, makes me feel and care about the world around me. In these photographs by that most excellent of photographers Dorothea Lange, of another desperate time, The Great Depression, we can feel her sincerity and intensity, that resolute gift of seeing the world clearly, despite the abject misery that surrounds her. Fast forward future, and we see the lines of the newly unemployed, desperate, penniless, snaking around the block of the social security buildings here in Australia, this very day.
Lange’s photographs don’t need words. Words are never enough.
The faces weary, furrowed, parched under baking sun, rutted like the land, Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas (1938). Dark eyes pierce the marrow, astringent lines, heavy eyebrows, mirror, set above, tight, tight mouth, Young Sharecropper, Macon County, Georgia (July 1937). I feel what, his pain? his sadness? his despair? Hands, arms, feet, form an important part of Lange’s visual armoury, arm/ory, amour. The hand to chin of Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (March 1936); the bony arms of Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle (June 1938); hand obscuring face, steely gaze, Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley Town, California (1938); weathered, beaten hands, beaten, Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona (November 1940). These extremities are expressions not just of her subjects, but of herself. A virtual self-portrait.
“One of the greatest is at the entrance to the MoMA show: “Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona” (1940). The farmworker’s hands are close to the lens of the camera. One hand is holding a wooden beam; it could be the implement of his impending crucifixion. The other hand, with its open palm and splayed fingers, covers his mouth. Unforgettably powerful, the photograph resembles self-portraits by Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele, who shared Lange’s interest in extremities – hands and feet, and also, wretched misery.” (Press release)
Lange “is a key link in a chain of photographic history. From Evans, she learned how to frame precise images of clapboard churches. But unlike Evans, who usually preferred to keep a distance and capture a building’s architectural integrity, Lange always wanted, as she said when describing how she made “Migrant Mother,” to move “closer and closer”.” Moving closer, her photographs possess an un/bridled intimacy with troubled creatures. Moving closer, seeing clearly. Closer and closer, till death, parts.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures MoMA exhibition
Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures introduction text
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco 1933 Gelatin silver print 10 3/4 x 8 7/8″ (27.3 x 22.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Albert M. Bender
About this photograph, one of the first made outside her studio, Lange recalled, “I was just gathering my forces and that took a little bit because I wasn’t accustomed to jostling about in groups of tormented, depressed and angry men, with a camera.”
“We use the camera as a tool of research. Upon a tripod of photographs, captions, and text we rest themes evolved out of long observations in the field.”
Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, 1939
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley Town, California 1938, printed c. 1958 Gelatin silver print 9 7/16 × 8″ (24 × 20.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Grayson, San Joaquin Valley, California 1938, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 10 3/8 x 16 15/16″ (26.3 x 43cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Regarding this picture, Dorothea Lange’s field notes report: “Grayson was a migratory agricultural labourers’ shack town. It was during the season of the pea harvest. Late afternoon about 6 o’clock. Boys were playing baseball in the road that passes this building, which was used as a church. Otherwise, this corpse, lying at the church, was alone, unattended, and unexplained.” The full negative she made there represents not just this doorway but the entire whitewashed gabled façade. The concrete steps in front of the entrance and foundation blocks are visible. Apparently the form in the doorway was what drew Lange to the scene, however; it has been suggested that she later realised this central feature was important enough to carry the composition and proceeded to concentrate on the portion of the negative with the shallow portal holding the body. She published an even more severely cut-down version in the 1940 US Camera Annual. Bearing the title Doorstep Document, it eliminates the three plain boards that frame the doorway, making the depth of the threshold less evident and the wrapped figure and worn double doors more prominent and funereal.
It is not known why Lange identified the form as a corpse rather than a homeless person. Today we are more inclined to think the latter, since such scenes are common. The relaxed, uncovered pose of the feet indicates a voluntary reclining position. Lange was also some distance away when she made the exposure. One of the playing children may have suggested the corpse idea to test its shock value, and perhaps Lange adopted it for future propaganda purposes. Grayson was just a small town southwest of Modesto, and this church was probably one of the few places of refuge it offered.
It would seem peculiar for the feet of a dead person to be exposed. Here they represent the life, the personality, of this anonymous citizen. Always sensitive to the appearance and performance of others’ feet, due to her own deformity, Lange made hundreds of photographs on the theme. This one is among the most melancholy.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Ex-Slave with Long Memory, Alabama c. 1937, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 15 3/16 × 11 15/16″ (38.5 × 30.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Archibald Macleish (American, 1892-1982) Land of the Free 1938 Letterpress open: 9 7/16 x 13 1/8″ (24 x 33.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York
Open at Lange’s Ditched, Stalled and Stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California February 1936
FOR THE ENTIRE second half of Dorothea Lange’s life, a quotation from the English philosopher Francis Bacon floated in her peripheral vision: “The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.” She pinned a printout of these words up on her darkroom door in 1933. It remained there until she died, at 70, in 1965 – three months before her first retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and three decades after she took the most iconic photograph in the medium’s history.
Alice Gregory. “How Dorothea Lange Defined the Role of the Modern Photojournalist,” on the The New York Times Style Magazine website Feb. 10, 2020 [Online] Cited 25/02/2020
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California March 1936 Gelatin silver print 11 1/8 x 8 9/16″ (28.3 x 21.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
The captions used to describe Migrant Mother are as varied as the publications in which they appeared: “A destitute mother, the type aided by the WPA.” “A worker in the ‘peach bowl.'” “Draggin’-around people.” “In a camp of migratory pea-pickers, San Luis Obispo County, California.” Even in ostensibly factual settings such as newspapers, government reports, or a museum cataloguing sheet, no fixed phrase or set of words was associated with the image until 1952, when it was published as Migrant Mother.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Sunlit Oak c. 1957, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 30 7/8 × 41 1/8″ (78.4 × 104.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Kern County, California 1938 Gelatin silver print 12 7/16 x 12 1/2″ (31.6 x 31.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Western Addition, San Francisco, California 1951, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 7 3/16 × 6″ (23.8 × 17.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Crossroads Store, North Carolina July 1939, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 9 11/16 × 13 9/16″ (24.6 × 34.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas 1938 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 x 12 13/16″ (23.6 x 32.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Lange and Taylor’s captions in An American Exodus consider the human impact of environmental crises. The one for this image reads, “Tractors replace not only mules but people. They cultivate to the very door of the houses of those whom they replace.”
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) The Road West, New Mexico 1938, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 9 5/8 × 13 1/16″ (24.5 × 33.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
The image was memorialised later by Robert Frank
A seminal work in documentary studies, with powerful photographs of the Depression era made by the wife and husband team of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor. They were hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the 300,000 strong, Depression era exodus from rural America, and the struggles these migrant workers overcame in search of basic necessities. The documentary photographer and social scientist’s goal was to “use the camera as a tool of research. Upon a tripod of photographs, captions, and text we rest themes evolved out of long observations in the field. We adhere to the standards of documentary photography as we have conceived them. Quotations which accompany photographs report what the persons photographed said, not what we think might be their unspoken thoughts.” p. 6.
Text from the Abe Books website [Online] Cited 24/02/2020
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle June 1938, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 29 3/4 × 24″ (75.6 × 61cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
“IF YOU DIE, YOU’RE DEAD – THAT’S ALL”
When it was published in An American Exodus, this portrait was captioned “If you die, you’re dead – that’s all.” This line was taken from Lange’s field notes, which quote the woman at greater length: “‘We made good money a pullin’ bolls, when we could pull. But we’ve had no work since March. … You can’t get no relief here until you’ve lived here a year. This county’s a hard country. They won’t help bury you here. If you die, you’re dead, that’s all.'”
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Young Sharecropper, Macon County, Georgia July 1937, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 11 3/4 × 11 3/4″ (29.8 × 29.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Jobless on the Edge of a Peafield, Imperial Valley, California February 1937, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 16 15/16 × 15 3/4″ (43 × 40.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor An American Exodus. A Record of Human Erosion New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939 First edition. Hardcover Letterpress open: 10 1/4 x 15 3/8″ (26 x 39.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York
Empathy and Artistry: Rediscovering Dorothea Lange
John Szarkowski was about 13 when he saw an image by Dorothea Lange that “enormously impressed” him. After he had become the powerful director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, he would recall that he took it to be a “picture of the hard-faced old woman, looking out of the handsome oval window of the expensive automobile with her hand to her face as if the smell of the street was offending her, and I thought, ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ That a photographer can pin that specimen to the board as some kind of exotic moth and show her there in her true colours.”
A quarter of a century after his initial encounter with the photo, working in 1965 with Lange on his first one-artist retrospective at MoMA, he read her full caption for “Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley Town, California,” and realised that the fancy car belonged to an undertaker and that the expression he took for haughtiness was grief.
The wry confession of his mistake, which Szarkowski made in 1982 to an interviewer, is not mentioned in “Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures,” which opened Sunday at MoMA. But it illustrates the curatorial theme: Lange’s pictures require verbal commentary to be read legibly.
Curiously, though, the strength of Lange’s photographs at MoMA undercuts the exhibition’s concept. With or without the support of words, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), created some of the greatest images of the unsung struggles and overlooked realities of American life. Her most iconic photograph, which came to be called “Migrant Mother,” portrays a grave-faced woman in ragged clothing in Nipomo, Calif., in 1936, with two small children burying their faces against her shoulders, and a baby nestled in her lap. It is one of the most famous pictures of all time.
Yet Lange was not simply a Depression photographer. As this revelatory, heartening exhibition shows, she was an artist who made remarkable pictures throughout a career that spanned more than four decades. The photos she took in 1942 of interned Japanese-Americans (which the government suppressed until 1964) display state-administered cruelty with stone-cold clarity: One dignified man in a three-piece suit and overcoat is wearing a tag, like a steer, while disembodied white hands on either side examine and prod him. Her prescient photographs of environmental degradation portray the human cost of building a dam that flooded the Berryessa Valley near Napa. Her empathetic portraits of African-American field hands shine a light on a system of peonage that predated and outlasted the 1930s.
Nevertheless, her fame rests largely on the indelible images she made, starting in 1935, as an employee of the Resettlement Administration and its successor, the Farm Security Administration, both under the leadership of Roy Stryker. Lange endured a fractious relationship with Stryker, who seemed deeply discomfited by a strong-minded woman. He fired her in 1940, saying she was “uncooperative.” To his credit, however, he always acknowledged that “Migrant Mother” was the key image of the Depression.
Seeking a deeper understanding of the economic crisis, Lange and her collaborators in the field interviewed her subjects, and she incorporated their words into her captions. She was the first photographer to do that systematically. The show’s curator, Sarah Hermanson Meister, who drew from the museum’s collection of more than 500 Lange prints, includes many of the captions in the wall labels, in an installation that is patterned after Szarkowski’s 1966 Lange show. (The artist died of esophageal cancer before it opened.)
…
Lange took so many memorable photographs that it is challenging to shortlist them. One of the greatest is at the entrance to the MoMA show: “Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona” (1940). The farmworker’s hands are close to the lens of the camera. One hand is holding a wooden beam; it could be the implement of his impending crucifixion. The other hand, with its open palm and splayed fingers, covers his mouth. Unforgettably powerful, the photograph resembles self-portraits by Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele, who shared Lange’s interest in extremities – hands and feet, and also, wretched misery. …
Many wonderful Lange photographs are not overtly political. “Bad Trouble Over the Weekend” (1964) is a close-up of a woman’s hands folded over her face; one hand bears a wedding band and holds an unlit cigarette. (The subject was her daughter-in-law.) And Lange photographed multi-trunked oaks with the same acuity as fingered hands.
The fame of “Migrant Mother” has cropped Lange’s reputation unfairly. She is a key link in a chain of photographic history. From Evans, she learned how to frame precise images of clapboard churches. But unlike Evans, who usually preferred to keep a distance and capture a building’s architectural integrity, Lange always wanted, as she said when describing how she made “Migrant Mother,” to move “closer and closer.” Her 1938 photograph, “Death in the Doorway,” of a church entrance in the San Joaquin Valley reveals a blanketed corpse that someone, probably unable to afford a burial, has deposited. Evans would never have gone there.
In turn, Lange was revered by the documentary photographers who followed her. The greatest of them, Robert Frank, paid her direct homage in “The Americans,” shooting from the same vantage point the New Mexico highway that Lange had memorialised in “An American Exodus.”
But photography was heading off in a different direction. A year after his Lange exhibition, Mr. Szarkowski mounted “New Documents,” which introduced a younger generation of American photographers: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Speaking to me in 2003, he explained that these photographers were “rejecting Dorothea’s attitude” that “documentary photography was supposed to do some good” and instead using the camera “to explore their own experience and their own life and not to persuade somebody else what to do or what to work for.” That notion was hardly foreign to Lange. In a picture of a lame person, “Walking Wounded, Oakland” (1954), she found, as did the New Documents artists, a real-life subject that mirrored her own life.
One happy consequence of our dismal political moment is a rediscovery of Lange. In 2018, a major exhibition from her archive was staged at the Barbican Center in London and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Perhaps now younger photographers will be inspired to pick up her banner. The need is all too apparent. Where is the photographer of clear eyed empathy and consummate artistry to depict the disquiet, hopelessness and desperate fortitude that riddle the American body politic of today? Who will bring us our “Migrant Mother”?
Arthur Lubow. “Empathy and Artistry: Rediscovering Dorothea Lange,” on The New York Times website Feb. 13, 2020 [Online] Cited 24/03/2020.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona November 1940 Gelatin silver print 19 15/16 × 23 13/16″ (50.7 × 60.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Edwin Rosskam (American, 1903-1985) Richard Wright (American, 1908-1960) 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States 1941 Offset lithography open: 10 1/4 x 14 1/2″ (26 x 36.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art Library
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Richmond, California 1942 Gelatin silver print 9 3/4 x 7 11/16″ (24.7 x 19.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Richmond, California 1942, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 10 7/16 × 13 3/16″ (26.5 × 33.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
During World War II, at the height of antiJapanese sentiment, Lange documented an explicitly racist billboard advertising the Southern Pacific railroad company. Rather than portraying the billboard in isolation, she disrupted the frame with a handmade sign that seems to undermine the commodification of such political sentiments.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) One Nation Indivisible, San Francisco 1942 Gelatin silver print 13 1/8 × 9 13/16″ (33.4 × 25cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Just About to Step into the Bus for the Assembly Center, San Francisco April 6, 1942, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 10 3/8 × 9 13/16″ (26.3 × 25cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
The Museum of Modern Art presents Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, the first major solo exhibition at the Museum of the photographer’s incisive work in over 50 years. On view from February 9 through May 9, 2020, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures includes approximately 100 photographs drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition also uses archival materials such as correspondence, historical publications, and oral histories, as well as contemporary voices, to examine the ways in which words inflect our understanding of Lange’s pictures. These new perspectives and responses from artists, scholars, critics, and writers, including Julie Ault, Wendy Red Star, and Rebecca Solnit, provide fresh insight into Lange’s practice. Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures is organised by Sarah Meister, Curator, with River Bullock, Beaumont & Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, assisted by Madeline Weisburg, Modern Women’s Fund Twelve-Month Intern, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.
Toward the end of her life, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) remarked, “All photographs – not only those that are so-called ‘documentary,’ and every photograph really is documentary and belongs in some place, has a place in history – can be fortified by words.” Organised loosely chronologically and spanning her career, the exhibition groups iconic works together with lesser known photographs and traces their varied relationships to words: from early criticism on Lange’s photographs to her photo-essays published in LIFE magazine, and from the landmark photobook An American Exodus to her examination of the US criminal justice system. The exhibition also includes groundbreaking photographs of the 1930s – including Migrant Mother (1936) – that inspired pivotal public awareness of the lives of sharecroppers, displaced families, and migrant workers during the Great Depression. Through her photography and her words, Lange urged photographers to reconnect with the world – a call reflective of her own ethos and working method, which coupled an attention to aesthetics with a central concern for humanity.
“It seems both timely and urgent that we renew our attention to Lange’s extraordinary achievements,” said Sarah Meister. “Her concern for less fortunate and often overlooked individuals, and her success in using photography (and words) to address these inequities, encourages each of us to reflect on our own civic responsibilities. It reminds me of the unique role that art – and in particular photography – can play in imagining a more just society.”
The exhibition begins in 1933, when Lange, then a portrait photographer, first brought her camera outside into the streets of San Francisco. Lange’s increasing interest in the everyday experience of people she encountered eventually led her to work for government agencies, supporting their objective to raise public awareness and to provide aid to struggling farmers and those devastated by the Great Depression. During this time, Lange photographed her subjects and kept notes that formed the backbone of government reports; these and other archival materials will be represented alongside corresponding photographs throughout the exhibition. Lange’s commitment to social justice and her faith in the power of photography remained constant throughout her life, even when her politics did not align with those who were paying for her work. A central focus of the exhibition is An American Exodus, a 1939 collaboration between Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, her husband and an agricultural economist. As an object and as an idea, An American Exodus highlights the voices of her subjects by pairing first-person quotations alongside their pictures. Later, Lange’s photographs continued to be useful in addressing marginalised histories and ongoing social concerns. Throughout her career as a photographer for the US Government and various popular magazines, Lange’s pictures were frequently syndicated and circulated outside of their original context. Lange’s photographs of the 1930s helped illustrate Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), and her 1950s photographs of a public defender were used to illustrate Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials (1969), a law handbook published after Black Panther Huey P. Newton’s first trial during a time of great racial strife.
This collection-based exhibition would not be possible had it not been for Lange’s deep creative ties to the Museum during her lifetime. MoMA’s collection of Lange photographs was built over many decades and remains one of the definitive collections of her work. Her relationship to MoMA’s Department of Photography dates to her inclusion in its inaugural exhibition, in 1940 which was curated by the department’s director, Edward Steichen. Lange is a rare artist in that both Steichen and his successor, John Szarkowski, held her in equally high esteem. More than a generation after her first retrospective, organised by Szarkowski at MoMA in 1966, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures uses both historical and contemporary words to encourage a more nuanced understanding of words and pictures in circulation.
Press release from MoMA website
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Richmond, California 1942 Gelatin silver print 7 3/8 x 6 5/8″ (18.8 x 16.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Café near Pinole, California 1956, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 11 15/16 × 16 7/8″ (30.3 × 42.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) “Guilty, Your Honor,” Alameda County Courthouse, California 1955-1957, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 17 1/16 × 14 15/16″ (43.3 × 37.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) The Defendant, Alameda County Courthouse, California 1957 Gelatin silver print 12 3/8 x 10 1/8″ (31.4 x 25.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) The Witness, Alameda County Courthouse, California 1955-1957, printed c. 1958 Gelatin silver print 10 5/16 × 8 1/2″ (26.2 × 21.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Walking Wounded, Oakland 1954, printed c. 1958 Gelatin silver print 7 1/2 × 9 1/2″ (19 × 24.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist
Lange’s choice of title for this image was almost certainly influenced by her own experience with disability. As a child she had contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp. Toward the end of her life she reflected, “No one who hasn’t lived the life of a semi-cripple knows how much that means. I think it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. All those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it and I am aware of the force and the power of it.”
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Man Stepping from Cable Car, San Francisco 1956 Gelatin silver print 9 3/4 x 6 7/16″ (24.8 x 16.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Woman in Purdah, Upper Egypt 1963, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 12 7/16 × 15 15/16″ (31.6 × 40.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Bad Trouble Over the Weekend 1964, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print 7 3/16 × 5 3/4″ (18.2 × 14.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
Lange grappled extensively with the titles of the photographs included in her 1966 MoMA retrospective. In a letter to the curator, John Szarkowski, she wrote, “I propose also to caption each print separately, beyond time and place, sometimes with two or three words, sometimes with a quotation, sometimes with a brief commentary. This textual material I shall be working on for some time, on and of.” Rather than identify the subject of this photo as her daughter-in-law, Lange’s title extends the image’s affective reach.
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours: 10.30am – 5.30pm Open seven days a week
Curators: Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs at the Getty Museum in collaboration with Getty curators Mazie Harris, Virginia Heckert, Karen Hellman, Arpad Kovacs, Amanda Maddox, and Paul Martineau.
Imagine having these photographs in your collection!
My particular favourite is Hiromu Kira’s The Thinker (about 1930). For me it sums up our singular 1 thoughtful 2 imaginative 3 ephemeral 4 ether/real 5 existence.
“Aether is the fifth element in the series of classical elements thought to make up our experience of the universe… Although the Aether goes by as many names as there are cultures that have referenced it, the general meaning always transcends and includes the same four “material” elements [earth, air, water, fire]. It is sometimes more generally translated simply as “Spirit” when referring to an incorporeal living force behind all things. In Japanese, it is considered to be the void through which all other elements come into existence.” (Adam Amorastreya. “The End of the Aether,” on the Resonance website Feb 16, 2015 [Online] Cited 23/02/2020)
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) [Guadalupe Mill] 1860 Salted paper print Image (dome-topped): 33.8 × 41.6cm (13 5/16 × 16 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Hiromu Kira (1898-1991) was one of the most successful and well-known Japanese American photographers in prewar Los Angeles. He was born in Waipahu, O’ahu, Hawai’i on April 5, 1898, but was sent to Kumamoto, Japan, for his early education. When he was eighteen years old, he returned to the United States and settled in Seattle, Washington, where he first became interested in photography. In 1923, he submitted prints to the Seattle Photography Salon which accepted two of the photographs. In 1923, his work was accepted in the Pittsburg Salon and the Annual Competition of American Photography. He found work at the camera department of a local Seattle pharmacy and began meeting other Issei, Nisei and Kibei photographers such as Kyo Koike and joined the Seattle Camera Club.
In 1926, Kira moved to Los Angeles with his wife and two young children. Although he was never a member of the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California, a group that was active in Los Angeles at that time, he developed strong friendships with club members associated with the pictorialist movement of the 1920s and ’30s such as K. Asaishi and T. K. Shindo. In 1928, Kira was named an associate of the Royal Photography Society, and the following year he was made a full fellow and began exhibiting both nationally and internationally. In 1929 alone, Kira exhibited ninety-six works in twenty-five different shows. In the late twenties, he worked at T. Iwata’s art store. In 1931, his photograph The Thinker, made while showing a customer how to use his newly purchased camera properly, appeared on the March 1931 issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
On December 5, two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kira was selected to be included in the 25th Annual International Salon of the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles. Within a few months, he was forced to store his camera, photography books and prints in the basement of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles for the duration of World War II. He and his family were incarcerated at Santa Anita Assembly Center and the Gila River, Arizona concentration camp from 1942-1944, leaving the latter in April 1944.
Following his release, he lived briefly in Chicago before returning to Los Angeles in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. In Los Angeles, he worked as a photo retoucher and printer for the Disney, RKO and Columbia Picture studios but never exhibited again as he had before the war.
Text from the Hiromu Kira page on the Densho Encyclopedia website [Online] Cited 23/02/2020
Markéta Luskačová (born 1944) is a Czech photographer known for her series of photographs taken in Slovakia, Britain and elsewhere. Considered one of the best Czech social photographers to date, since the 1990s she has photographed children in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and also Poland…
In the 1970s and 1980s, the communist censorship attempted to conceal her international reputation. Her works were banned in Czechoslovakia, and the catalogues for the exhibition Pilgrims in the Victoria and Albert Museum were lost on their way to Czechoslovakia.
Luskačová started photographing London’s markets in 1974. In the markets of Portobello Road, Brixton and Spitalfields, she “[found] a vivid Dickensian staging”.
In 2016 she self-published a collection of photographs of street musicians, mostly taken in the markets of east London, under the title To Remember – London Street Musicians 1975-1990, and with an introduction by John Berger.
During the 1960s Nagano observed the period of intense economic growth in Japan, depicting the lives of Tokyo’s sarariman with some humour. The photographs of this period were only published in book form much later, as Dorīmu eiji and 1960 (1978 and 1990 respectively).
Nagano exhibited recent examples of his street photography in 1986, winning the Ina Nobuo Award. He published several books of his works since then, and won a number of awards. Nagano had a major retrospective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2000.
Nagano died two months short of his 94th birthday, on January 30, 2019.
A three-panel silkscreen print on glass, Succulent Screen depicts a detail view of one of the signature miter-cut windows of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Freeman House. The house was built in the Hollywood Hills in 1923, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 as a California Historical Landmark and as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #247 in 1981; it was bequeathed to the USC School of Architecture in 1986.
The Getty Museum holds one of the largest collections of photographs in the United States, with more than 148,000 prints. However, only a small percentage of these have ever been exhibited at the Museum. To celebrate the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Department of Photographs, the Getty Museum is exhibiting 200 of these never-before-seen photographs and pull back the curtain on the work of the many professionals who care for this important collection in Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs, on view December 17, 2019 – March 8, 2020.
“Rather than showcasing again the best-known highlights of the collection, the time is right to dig deeper into our extraordinary holdings and present a selection of never-before-seen treasures. I have no doubt that visitors will be intrigued and delighted by the diversity and quality of the collection, whose riches will support exhibition and research well into the decades ahead,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The exhibition includes photographs by dozens of artists from the birth of the medium in the mid-19th century to the present day. The selection also encompasses a variety of photographic processes, including the delicate cyanotypes of Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871), Polaroids by Carrie Mae Weems (American, born 1953) and Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) and an architectural photographic silkscreen on glass by Veronika Kellndorfer (German, born 1962).
Visual associations among photographs from different places and times illuminate the breadth of the Getty’s holdings and underscore a sense of continuity and change within the history of the medium. The curators have also personalised some of the labels in the central galleries to give voice to their individual insights and perspectives.
Growth of the collection
In 1984, as the J. Paul Getty Trust was in the early stages of conceiving what would eventually become the Getty Center, the Getty Museum created its Department of Photographs. It did so with the acquisition of several world-famous private collections, including those of Sam Wagstaff, André Jammes, Arnold Crane, and Volker Kahmen and Georg Heusch. These dramatic acquisitions immediately established the Museum as a leading center for photography.
While the founding collections are particularly strong in 19th and early 20th century European and American work, the department now embraces contemporary photography and, increasingly, work produced around the world. The collection continues to evolve, has been shaped by several generations of curators and benefits from the generosity of patrons and collectors.
Behind the scenes
In addition to the photographs on view, the exhibition spotlights members of Getty staff who care for, handle, and monitor these works of art.
“What the general public may not realise is that before a single photograph is hung on a wall, the object and its related data is managed by teams of professional conservators, registrars, curators, mount-makers, and many others,” says Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs at the Getty Museum. “In addition to exposing works of art in the collection that are not well known, we wanted to shed light on the largely hidden activity that goes into caring for such a collection.”
Collecting Contemporary Photography
The department’s collecting of contemporary photography has been given strong encouragement by the Getty Museum Photographs Council, and a section of the exhibition will be dedicated to objects purchased with the Council’s funding. Established in 2005, this group supports the department’s curatorial program, especially with the acquisition of works made after 1945 by artists not yet represented or underrepresented in the collection. Since its founding, the Council has contributed over $3 million toward the purchase of nearly five hundred photographs by artists from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, South Africa, and Taiwan, as well as Europe and the United States.
Looking ahead
The exhibition also looks towards the future of the collection, and includes a gallery of very newly-acquired works by Laura Aguilar (American, 1959-2018), Osamu Shiihara (Japanese, 1905-1974), as well as highlights of the Dennis Reed collection of photographs by Japanese American photographers. The selection represents the department’s strengthening of diversity in front of and behind the camera, the collection of works relevant to Southern California communities, and the acquisition of photographs that expand the understanding of the history of the medium.
“With this exhibition we celebrate the past 35 years of collecting, and look forward to the collection’s continued expansion, encompassing important work by artists all over the world and across three centuries,” adds Potts.
Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs is on view December 17, 2019 – March 8, 2020 at the Getty Center. The exhibition is organised by Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs at the Getty Museum in collaboration with Getty curators Mazie Harris, Virginia Heckert, Karen Hellman, Arpad Kovacs, Amanda Maddox, and Paul Martineau.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum [Online] Cited 09/20/2020
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) [Spring] 1873 Albumen silver print 35.4 × 25.7cm (13 15/16 × 10 1/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Reverend William Ellis (British, 1794-1872) and Samuel Smith [Portrait of a Black Couple] about 1873 Albumen silver print 24.1 × 18.6cm (9 1/2 × 7 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Prince Roland Napoleon Bonaparte (French, 1858-1924) Jacobus Huch, 26 ans about 1888 Albumen silver print 15.9 × 10.9cm (6 1/4 × 4 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Underwood & Underwood (American, founded 1881, dissolved 1940s) Les Chiens du Front, eux-mems, portent des masques contre les gaz May 27, 1917 Rotogravure 22 × 20.4cm (8 11/16 × 8 1/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Munkácsi was a newspaper writer and photographer in Hungary, specialising in sports. At the time, sports action photography could only be done in bright light outdoors. Munkácsi’s innovation was to make sport photographs as meticulously composed action photographs, which required both artistic and technical skill.
Munkácsi’s break was to happen upon a fatal brawl, which he photographed. Those photos affected the outcome of the trial of the accused killer, and gave Munkácsi considerable notoriety. That notoriety helped him get a job in Berlin in 1928, for Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, where his first published photo was a motorcycle splashing its way through a puddle. He also worked for the fashion magazine Die Dame.
More than just sports and fashion, he photographed Berliners, rich and poor, in all their activities. He traveled to Turkey, Sicily, Egypt, London, New York, and Liberia, for photo spreads in Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung.
The speed of the modern age and the excitement of new photographic viewpoints enthralled him, especially flying. There are aerial photographs; there are air-to-air photographs of a flying school for women; there are photographs from a Zeppelin, including the ones on his trip to Brazil, where he crossed over a boat whose passengers wave to the airship above.
On 21 March 1933, he photographed the fateful Day of Potsdam, when the aged President Paul von Hindenburg handed Germany over to Adolf Hitler. On assignment for Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, he photographed Hitler’s inner circle, although he was a Jewish foreigner.
Munkácsi left for New York City… Munkácsi died in poverty and controversy. Several universities and museums declined to accept his archives, and they were scattered around the world.
Erwin Blumenfeld (American born Germany, 1897-1969)
Blumenfeld was born in Berlin on 26 January 1897. As a young man he worked in the clothes trade and wrote poetry. In 1918 he went to Amsterdam, where he came into contact with Paul Citroen and Georg Grosz. In 1933 he made a photomontage showing Hitler as a skull with a swastika on its forehead; this image was later used in Allied propaganda material in 1943.
He married Lena Citroen, with whom he had three children, in 1921. In 1922 he started a leather goods shop, which failed in 1935. He moved to Paris, where in 1936 he set up as a photographer and did free-lance work for French Vogue. After the outbreak of the Second World War he was placed in an internment camp; in 1941 he was able to emigrate to the United States. There he soon became a successful and well-paid fashion photographer, and worked as a free-lancer for Harper’s Bazaar, Life and American Vogue. Blumenfeld died in Rome on 4 July 1969.
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) City Shell 1938 Gelatin silver print 49.2 × 39.4cm (19 3/8 × 15 1/2 in.) Reproduced courtesy of the Barbara and Willard Morgan Photographs and Papers, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Henry Holmes Smith (1909-1986) was an American photographer and one of the most influential fine art photography teachers of the mid 20th century. He was inspired by the work that had been done at the German Bauhaus and in 1937 was invited to teach photography at the New Bauhaus being founded by Moholy-Nagy in Chicago. After World War II, he spent many years teaching at Indiana University. His students included Jerry Uelsmann, Jack Welpott, Robert W. Fichter, Betty Hahn and Jaromir Stephany.
Smith was often involved in the cutting edge of photographic techniques: in 1931 he started experimenting with high-speed flash photography of action subjects, and started doing colour work in 1936 when few people considered it a serious artistic medium. His later images were nearly all abstract, often made directly (without a camera, i.e. like photograms), for instance images created by refracting light through splashes of water and corn syrup on a glass plate. However, although acclaimed as a photographic teacher, Holmes’ own photographs and other images did not achieve any real recognition from his peers.
Otto Steinert (German, 1915-1978) Schlammweiher 2 Negative 1953, print about 1960s Gelatin silver print 39.6 x 29.1cm (15 9/16 x 11 7/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Courtesy Galerie Johannes Faber
The photo essay as haunting and elegiac poem: “a richly-hued, cinematic portrayal of a largely hidden world: that of violence, police work and incarceration, seen with empathy and candour.”
Parks is one of my favourite photographers. He continues to astound me with his experimentation and percipience, his sensitive insight, into his subjects becoming: “a more nuanced view that reflected the social and economic factors tied to criminal behaviour and a rare window into the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it.” All captured by his probing camera – using natural light, flash, low depth of field, blur, high angles, low angles, perspective, transience, informality and chiaroscuro.
Two photographs in the posting suffice to speak of the photographers art: pointing figure, veins, clenched first and revelation, the blue fairy of light, in the beautiful Narcotics Addict, Chicago, Illinois; and body carriage interior, overweight man, braced, shadow, fag hanging out of mouth, pulling – all dreams laid bare. The photographer crouching at the same level. Shooting Victim in Cook County Morgue, Chicago, Illinois.
Wonderful to see the layout of the Life Magazine photo essay as well. Notice how Raiding Detectives, Chicago, Illinois is cropped claustrophobically tight, giving little sense of the passage of the tenement. Similarly, the hand and cigarette in Untitled, Chicago, Illinois (cover for the new book about the series), is bound by the cropping and shadows. Other images from the shoots Drug Search, Chicago, Illinois and Untitled, San Quentin, California are also used, expanding the context of the scene.
His photographs “give shape to the ground against which poverty, addiction, and race become criminalised,” allowing “Life’s readers to see the complexity of these chronically oversimplified situations.” They also enable us to enter a liminal space, where we feel both the mundane horror and specular beauty of life in medias res.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
MoMA Acquires 56 Photographs from Gordon Parks’s Groundbreaking 1957 Series “The Atmosphere of Crime”
The Museum of Modern Art has acquired 56 prints from American artist Gordon Parks’s series of colour photographs made in 1957 for a Life magazine photo essay titled “The Atmosphere of Crime.” The Museum and The Gordon Parks Foundation collaborated closely on the selection of 55 modern colour prints that MoMA purchased from the Foundation, and the Foundation has also given the Museum a rare vintage gelatin silver print (a companion to a print Parks himself gave the Museum in 1993). A generous selection of these prints will go on view in May 2020 as part of the first seasonal rotation of the Museum’s newly expanded and re-envisioned collection galleries. The collection installation Gordon Parks and “The Atmosphere of Crime” will be located on the fourth floor, with Parks’s work as an anchor for exploring representations of criminality in photography, with a particular focus on work made in the United States.
One of the preeminent photographers of the mid-20th century, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) left behind a body of work that documents American life and culture from the early 1940s to the 2000s. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks worked as a youth in St. Paul, Minnesota, before discovering photography in 1937. He would come to view it as his “weapon of choice” for attacking issues including race relations, poverty, urban life, and injustice. After working for the US government’s Farm Security Administration in the early 1940s, Parks found success as a fashion photographer and a regular contributor to Ebony, Fortune, Glamour, and Vogue before he was hired as the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine in 1948.
In 1957, Life assigned Parks to photograph for the first in a series of articles addressing the perceived rise of crime in the US. With reporter Henry Suydam, Parks traversed the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, producing a range of evocative colour images, 12 of which were featured in the debut article, “The Atmosphere of Crime,” on September 9, 1957. Parks’s empathetic, probing views of crime scenes, police precincts, hospitals, morgues, and prisons do not name or identify “the criminal,” but instead give shape to the ground against which poverty, addiction, and race become criminalised. Shot using available light, Parks’s atmospheric photographs capture mysterious nocturnal activity unfolding on street corners and silhouetted figures with raised hands in the murky haze of a tenement hallway.
A robust selection from this acquisition will anchor a display within a fourth-floor collection gallery, titled Gordon Parks and “The Atmosphere of Crime.” Using Parks’s work as a point of departure, the installation will draw from a range of other works in the Museum’s collection, offering varied representations of crime and criminality. Since the 1940s, the Museum has collected and exhibited photographs of crime as represented in newspapers and tabloids, exemplified by the dramatic, flash-lit work of Weegee, complemented by 19th-century precedents such as mug shots, whose purported objectivity was expected to facilitate the identification of criminals, as well as acquisitions across media that point to subsequent investigations and more contemporary concerns.
While Parks’s work was first displayed at MoMA in 1948, and was included in the landmark exhibition The Family of Man in 1955, it wasn’t until 1993 that five of his photographs were approved for the Museum’s collection (including a large-scale gelatin silver print from the 1957 series on crime mentioned above). The Museum has since supported the acquisition of additional vintage prints in 2011 and 2014 (including Harlem Newsboy, currently on view on the Museum’s fifth floor).
“As an artist of the highest order and a passionate advocate for civil rights, Parks made iconic photographs that continue to speak poignantly to the complexity of cultural politics and racial bias in the United States,” said Sarah Meister, curator in MoMA’s Department of Photography. “This acquisition substantially improves the Museum’s holdings of Gordon Parks’s achievement, reflecting our commitment to the artist and fostering the possibility of situating his work within a broad range of contemporary concerns. His enduring impact on the history of photography and representation cannot be overstated.”
“MoMA’s acquisition reinforces the significance of Gordon Parks as an artist whose practice continues to inspire future generations,” said Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., executive director of The Gordon Parks Foundation. “Parks knew that his camera could be a powerful weapon, more potent than violence, and that pictures and words could further social change. The Atmosphere of Crime series remains as timeless and relevant today as when the photographs were made more than 50 years ago.”
Sarah Meister has also collaborated on The Gordon Parks Foundation’s forthcoming publication Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, to be published by Steidl in spring 2020. The book’s expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks’s original reportage was selected and sequenced by Meister, and her illustrated text situates this critically important photo essay within both Parks’s career and historic representations of crime and criminality. Other contributors include Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy (Spiegel & Grau, 2014), and Nicole Fleetwood, Professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers University and author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020). The book also features a foreword by MoMA’s director Glenn D. Lowry and The Gordon Parks Foundation’s executive director, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr.
When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade, the first African American to hold this position. Parks embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in colour. The resulting eight-page photo-essay “The Atmosphere of Crime” was noteworthy not only for its bold aesthetic sophistication, but also for how it challenged stereotypes about criminality then pervasive in the mainstream media. They provided a richly-hued, cinematic portrayal of a largely hidden world: that of violence, police work and incarceration, seen with empathy and candour.
Parks rejected clichés of delinquency, drug use and corruption, opting for a more nuanced view that reflected the social and economic factors tied to criminal behaviour and a rare window into the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it. Transcending the romanticism of the gangster film, the suspense of the crime caper and the racially biased depictions of criminality then prevalent in American popular culture, Parks coaxed his camera to do what it does best: record reality so vividly and compellingly that it would allow Life‘s readers to see the complexity of these chronically oversimplified situations. The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 includes an expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks’ original reportage.
Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation and The Museum of Modern Art. Text by Nicole Fleetwood and Bryan Stevenson.
Text from the Steidl website [Online] Cited 16/02/2020
The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 (cover) Text by Nicole Fleetwood and Bryan Stevenson Series edited by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. Edited by Sarah Hermanson Meister 168 pages, 70 images Hardback / Half-linen 25 x 29cm English ISBN 978-3-95829-696-1 Published Spring 2020
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours: 10.30am – 5.30pm Open seven days a week
Duane Michals is one of the greatest photographic storytellers of the twentieth century. His parables – seemingly simple stories used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson – resonate, vibrate, with energy, and insight into, the human condition. They are as profound as the air we breathe but cannot see – expressing the invisible, presencing the spiritual. I feel, I know these stories, intimately. Those things-for-which-there-are-no-words.
“Presencing. In 1885, Van Gogh, wrote a letter to his brother Theo: ‘Rembrandt goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language. It is with justice that they call Rembrandt – [a] magician.’ (Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh [letter 534], on or about 10 October 1885, in Leo Jansen, Luijten and Nienke Bakker (eds.,). Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute, Amsterdam, 2009 [Online] Cited 11/10/2019)
The things-for-which-there-are-no-words remain hidden when approached with conceptual thought. They need to be experienced to be known. The currency of this experience, as we have seen, is deeply personal, but in allowing it we can touch on truth, perhaps even the truth.”1
There are things here not seen in this photograph. The spirit leaves the body. William Blake and Duane Michals. Enchanted melancholy. The mysterious / music. In swift embrace. In love. In memory. In death. The fluidity of the line of the artist. Things are queer. The world implodes and ravages itself. Paradise is reborn. The letter, and love, from my father that I, also, never did receive. The nature of reality. Truth?
“I’m completely overwhelmed by the nature of our reality,” he is quoted as saying in the exhibition catalog about human evolution. “We’ve been working on this version of man for a thousand years. He lives longer, he’s healthier, but he’s still an unproven product. Still the same greedy little bastard.”
“For Michals, photography is not documentary in nature but theatrical and fictive: the camera is one of many tools humanity uses to construct a comprehensible version of reality. In his imaginative, visually rich photographs, the artist exploits the medium’s storytelling capacity,” says the press release. Isobel Crombie suggests the ‘medium’ of photography has ‘The ability to speak to us across time and to connect to the mind and the heart.’2
When I was young. What was time?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Kim Devereux. “Me and My Muse,” in the NGV Magazine Issue 19 Nov – Dec 2019, p. 55
2/ Isobel Crombie. “One Suggestive Moment,” in the NGV Magazine Issue 19 Nov – Dec 2019, p. 33
Many thankx to The Morgan Library & Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I write with this photograph not to tell you what you can see, rather to express what is invisible.”
Duane Michals 1966 in Johnson, B. (ed.,) 2004, ‘Photography speaks: 150 photographers on their art’, Aperture, New York p. 150
“I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.”
Duane Michals
Duane Michals uses visual narrative, symbolism and metaphysical imagery to interpret the human condition. His photographic sequences have a film-like appearance and represent intangible elements of dreams, imagination, death, time, myth and spirit. A freelance commercial photographer, Michals began experimenting with sequence works in the 1960s, later adding text to illuminate emotion and philosophical ideas and following in the tradition of painters such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico whom he greatly admired. His staged, fictive tableaux vivants are intimate scenes that explore the atmosphere of the invisible and metaphysical…
Robert Wiles Evelyn Francis McHale May 1, 1947 1947 Gelatin silver print Overall: 9 1/2 × 8 in. (24.1 × 20.3cm) Purchased on the Goldsmith Fund for Americana The Morgan Library & Museum
“At the bottom of Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier her falling body punched into the top of a car.”
LIFE Magazine caption
“On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. “He is much better off without me. … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody,” she wrote. Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale’s death Wiles got this picture of death’s violence and its composure.”
LIFE Magazine description
On 30 April she visited her fiancée in Easton presumably to celebrate his 24th birthday and boarded a train back to NYC at 7 a.m., 1 May 1947. Barry [Rhodes] stated to reporters that “When I kissed her goodbye she was happy and as normal as any girl about to be married.”
Of course we’ll never know what went through Evelyn’s mind on 66 mi train ride home. But after she arrived in New York she went to the Governor Clinton Hotel where she wrote a suicide note and shortly before 10:30 a.m. bought a ticket to the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building.
Around 10:40 am Patrolman John Morrissey, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the building. Moments later he heard a crash and saw a crowd converge on 34th street. Evelyn had jumped, cleared the setbacks, and landed on the roof of a United Nations Assembly Cadillac limousine parked on 34th street, some 200 ft west of Fifth Ave.
Across the street, Robert C. Wiles, a student photographer, also noticed the commotion and rushed to the scene where he took several photos, including this one, some four minutes after her death. Later, on the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray found her tan (or maybe gray, reports differ) cloth coat neatly folded over the observation deck wall, a brown make-up kit filled with family pictures and a black pocketbook with the note which read:
“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiance asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.”
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) The Spirit Leaves the Body 1968 Gift of Richard and Ronay Menschel The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) I Build a Pyramid 1978 6 (5 x 7 inch) silver gelatin prints with hand-applied text The Morgan Library & Museum
ILLUSION
Francesco Salviati (Italian, 1510-1563) Emblematic Design with Two-Headed Horse and Moth c. 1550-1563 Pen and brown ink, brown wash, on paper; framing lines at upper left and right edges in pen and brown ink Overall: 7 1/2 × 7 3/8 in. (19.1 × 18.7cm) Gift of János Scholz The Morgan Library & Museum
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Satan Smiting Job with Boils c. 1805-1810 Pen and black and grey ink, grey wash, and watercolour, over faint indications in pencil, on paper Overall: 9 3/16 x 11 inches (233 x 280 mm) Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909 The Morgan Library & Museum
Jehan Georges Vibert (French, 1840-1902) A Cardinal in Profile 1880 Watercolour on paper Overall: 4 7/8 × 3 3/8 in. (12.4 × 8.6cm) Gift of John M. Thayer The Morgan Library & Museum
Henry Pearson (American, 1914-2006) 128th Psalm (Study for “Five Psalms”) 1968 Chinese ink on heavy paper Overall: 23 1/2 × 18 in. (59.7 × 45.7cm) Gift of Regina and Lawrence Dubin, M.D The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) The Illuminated Man 1968 Gelatin silver print, unique print Image: 15 5/8 x 22 7/8 inches The Morgan Library & Museum
When Michals arrived in New York from Pittsburgh in the early 1950s, the city provided not only freedom from the strict conventions of his Catholic upbringing, but an opening to worlds of ideas and experiences that extended in all directions. By the early 1960s, he was living with his life partner, the architect Frederick Gorree (who passed away in 2017) and experimenting with the photographic image beyond the single frame, often including handwritten texts.
“Duane cut photography’s umbilical cord,” Smith said about the photographer’s contributions to the medium. “He saw there’s no reason to limit the camera to what you find in the world; it should be part of the history of expressing ideas.” Michals’s 1970 one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art confirmed his significance in establishing a new genre.
In the 1960s, he became interested in Buddhism and meditation, further expanding his artistic concerns. At the Morgan, Michals walked over to a large, eye-popping ink drawing by Henry Pearson, an abstract artist loosely associated with the Op Art movement. Pearson’s “128th Psalm (Study for ‘Five Psalms’)” from 1968, is a light-bulb-shaped form with lines emanating from the center like electrified nerve endings and pulsating out beyond the frame.
“This drawing is pure energy,” he said. That same year, Michals – who had not known Pearson’s work – made “The Illuminated Man,” a photograph of a male figure facing the camera, his head emanating light, suggesting enlightenment. “The Illuminated Man” and “128th Psalm” share the theme of spiritual radiance.
Michals cited a 1937 painting by René Magritte not in the Morgan Collection called “The Pleasure Principle.” It is a portrait of the poet Edward James, a patron of Surrealist art, his head a glowing light bulb. “I only discovered the painting later,” he said, after he had made his own photographic homage, in 1965, in which Magritte appears ghostlike in double exposure, against a canvas on an easel, behind an empty chair. “I was very proud to have had a similar idea to one of my deities,” he said.
“The nature of consciousness is always the central question,” he asserted. In The Human Condition, his panel of six photographs from 1969 begins with a man standing on the 14th Street subway platform; the train arrives and he is bathed in a halo of light; the light becomes a swirl and in the last frame he is swept into a white disc the size of a galaxy passing through the night sky. From the immediate to the universal in six frames.
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) The Bewitched Bee 1986 Gelatin silver print Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
IMAGE AND WORD
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) There Are Things Here Not Seen in This Photograph 1977 10 15/16 x 13 7/8 inches The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) I Remember Pittsburgh 8 1982 Gelatin silver print The Morgan Library & Museum
Ciro Ferri (Italian, 1634-1689) Fame Painting a Portrait Held by Religion 17th century Brush and brown and white gouache, pen and and brown ink, over black chalk, on brown toned paper Overall: 11 x 7 9/16 inches (279 x 192 mm) Purchased as the gift of the Fellows The Morgan Library & Museum
Design for a frontispiece engraved by Gérard Audran for a volume of portraits of cardinals published by Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi
Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009) Giorgio de Chirico, Rome Rome, 1944 (negative), 1946-1947 (print) Gelatin silver print on paper; mounted to cardstock Image And Sheet: 7 1/16 × 7 3/8 in. Gift of Irving Penn, 2006 The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) Andy Warhol 1958 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4cm) Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) René Magritte at His Easel 1965 77/8 × 97/8 inches (20 × 25.1cm) Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel The Morgan Library & Museum
Florian, Marquis de (1755-1794) Red leather portfolio [realia] – Portefeuille de Monsieur de Voltaire and Donné à Monsieur de Florian “Voltaire’s briefcase” 18th century Leather, gold clasp Stamped on front: “Portefeuille de Monsieur / de Voltaire”; on back: “Donné a Monsieur / de Florian” Overall: 16 15/16 × 12 5/8 in. (43 × 32cm) Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1911 Pierpont Morgan Library Dept. of Literary and Historical Manuscripts The Morgan Library & Museum
Voltaire gave this briefcase to the marquis de Florian, the husband of his niece Elisabeth Mignot. Her sister, Marie-Louise Mignot, Mme Denis, was Voltaire’s companion for the last twenty-nine years of his life. With extensive decorative gold tooling. Exhibited numerous times at the Morgan Library as “Voltaire’s briefcase.”
“The things we chose from the collection were so close to what my instincts are,” he said to Joel Smith, the curator of photography at the Morgan, who organised the show with Michals.
The photographer was referring to the kinship between things he chose and the irreverent nature of his own work. “I’m completely overwhelmed by the nature of our reality,” he is quoted as saying in the exhibition catalog about human evolution. “We’ve been working on this version of man for a thousand years. He lives longer, he’s healthier, but he’s still an unproven product. Still the same greedy little bastard.”
To illustrate the point, he reached for Voltaire’s briefcase among the holdings in the Morgan’s collection. It dates from the 1700s and is decorated with gold-leaf filigree on its red leather casing.
Smith recalled that Michals was so “wowed at the thought of Voltaire’s ideas living inside it and amused by the showbiz of its provenance” that he went home and painted a portrait of Candide on an old tintype, adding Voltaire’s bitterly ironic refrain in white block letters: “This Is the Best of All Possible Worlds.” The briefcase and Candide, 2019 are both in the show.
Yet, Michals doesn’t share Voltaire’s bleak view of existence. His own work is often characterised by an iconoclastic wit, imbued with serious metaphysical inquiry – a “curiosity about the nature of reality, in a much more profound sense than just a bunch of atoms.”
Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917) Lucifer c. 1900 Pencil and watercolour, on paper Overall: 9 3/8 × 12 7/16 in. (23.8 × 31.6cm) Gift of Alexandre P. Rosenberg The Morgan Library & Museum
Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890-1918) Embrace 1914 Graphite on wove paper Overall: 19 1/8 × 12 3/4 in. (48.6 × 32.4cm) Bequest of Fred Ebb The Morgan Library & Museum
[Looks at Egon Schiele’s drawing Embrace (p. 22)] There’s so much emotion in this; it’s so immediate. There’s a few things happening: physical entanglement, then you see the look on his face, registering some kind of emotional response. I love the idea: Schiele had no thought that in a hundred years we’d be standing here or how we’d be talking about it. Art is not really about the future.
Duane Michals in Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan exhibition catalogue 2019, p. 21
In this depiction of the artist in the arms of an unidentified companion, the jagged, seemingly erratic contours suggest a psychological agitation characteristic of Schiele’s self-portraits. A feeling of tension derives from the position of the artist’s head-turned away from the woman embracing him – as well as from the placement of the couple to the left of the sheet, with the figure of the woman cropped. The resulting asymmetry conveys the artist’s emotional unbalance and emphasises his egocentric character while demonstrating the amazing technical agility he brought to bear to express a wide range of emotions.
Text from The Morgan Library & Museum website
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) A Letter from My Father 1960 (image), 1975 (text) 15 3/4 × 19 7/8 inches (40 × 50.5cm) Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
The Morgan Library & Museum proudly presents an exhibition combining a six-decade retrospective of Duane Michals with an artist’s-choice selection of works from all corners of the permanent collection. Michals is known for his picture sequences, inscribed photographs, and, more recently, films that pose emotional, conceptual, and cosmic questions beyond the scope of the lone camera image. Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan (October 25, 2019 to February 2, 2020) takes viewers on a tour of the artist’s mind, putting work from his expansive career in conversation with Old Master and modern drawings, books, manuscripts, and historical objects.
The first retrospective on Michals to be mounted by a New York City institution, the exhibition is organised around animating themes in the artist’s work: Theatre, Reflection, Love and Desire, Playtime, Image and Word, Nature, Immortality, Time, Death, and Illusion. It showcases his storytelling instincts, both in stand-alone staged photographs and in sequences. The exhibition also includes screenings of short films, Michals’s preferred medium in recent years.
For Michals, photography is not documentary in nature but theatrical and fictive: the camera is one of many tools humanity uses to construct a comprehensible version of reality. In his imaginative, visually rich photographs, the artist exploits the medium’s storytelling capacity. For example, the six images in I Build a Pyramid (1978) find the artist in Egypt, stacking stones in a modest pile that, from the camera’s perspective, appears to rival the scale of the ancient pharaohs’ monuments. Michals reveals that the scenario echoes his childhood habit of building cities from stones in his backyard in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. In the exhibition, Michals’s staged scenes are juxtaposed with those of his creative heroes, who include William Blake, Edward Lear, and Saul Steinberg. In his dual role as artist and curator he matches wits with writers, stage designers, toy makers, and his fellow portraitists of the past and the present.
Since 2015 Michals has focused his creative efforts on filmmaking, a natural outgrowth of his directorial habits as a photographer. On a screen in the exhibition, three short films are featured amid a cycle of over 200 photographs from the series Empty New York (1964-1965), the project through which the artist first recognised his theatrical vision of reality. Michals will host two special programs of film screenings in the Morgan’s Gilder Lehrman Hall, introducing films that have never been screened publicly before.
Illusions of the Photographer revives the format of the 2015 exhibition Hidden Likeness: Emmet Gowin at the Morgan, which The New York Times said “all but redefined the genre” of the collection dive curated by a contemporary artist. The present project is a personal one for Michals, who explains, “The Morgan literally is my favourite museum in New York. I always learn something at the Morgan. I’m so thrilled about this show, because it’s probably going to be the very last time to see me there, with all my resources and touchstones. I’m … archaic, in a way. I’m eighty-seven! I’m of my generation. My references are not at all to what people are talking about today. I’m comfortable there, that’s where I belong – and that’s what I contribute.”
Joel Smith, the Morgan’s Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head, says “Duane Michals’s art is contemplative, confessional, and comedic. It transcends the conventional bounds, and audience, of photography. Through narration and sequencing he reorients the camera towards timeless human dilemmas; he derives poetic effects from technical errors such as double exposure and motion blur. His originality and intimacy as an artist come through in the discoveries he brings to light from the Morgan’s collection.”
Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan is accompanied by an 88-page softcover catalogue featuring a wide-ranging interview with the artist and illustrations of seventy works, including his selections from the Morgan’s collection and the previously unpublished 1969 title sequence.
About Duane Michals
Duane Michals (b. February 18, 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania) is an American photographer who often combines images with text in a format that recalls cinematic storytelling. Michals received his BA from the University of Denver in 1953. He began photographing for magazines in 1960 and became a prolific portraitist of artists such as Andy Warhol, René Magritte, and Marcel Duchamp. His first solo exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970. Michals lives and works in New York City.
Press release from The Morgan Library & Museum [Online] Cited 14/11/2019
NATURE
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902) God Creating the World c. 1900-1902 Gouache on board 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches (201 x 135 mm) Morgan Family Collection
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902) God Creates Eve while Adam is Asleep c. 1900-1902 Gouache on board 12 x 9 1/8 inches (305 x 233 mm) Morgan Family Collection
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902) Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden c. 1900-1902 Gouache on board 11 x 8 inches (279 x 203 mm) Morgan Family Collection
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902) Adam and Eve Perceive their Nakedness c. 1900-1902 Gouache on board 12 1/8 x 8 3/4 inches (308 x 221 mm) Morgan Family Collection
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) Paradise Regained 1968 6 silver gelatin prints with hand-applied text
… He picked up a panel of gouache drawings from around 1900 by French illustrator James Jacques Joseph Tissot titled “God Creating the World,” a biblical morality tale in a series of lighthearted scenes depicting the creation of Adam; then Eve; the two of them frolicking; Eve eating the apple; and their banishment from paradise. The Tissot sequence is among nearly 60 works in his final selection for the current exhibition Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan, through Feb. 2. His pick of drawings, paintings and artefacts resides in dialogue with 38 of Michals’s photographic works – his narrative sequences as well as stand-alone prints, projected images from a series titled “Empty New York,” and several of his recent short films.
He pointed out a link between the Tissot drawings and his own “Paradise Regained,” from 1968: a suite of six images that begins with a well-dressed young couple sitting and facing the camera in an empty apartment. With each frame they get progressively undressed, and more and more plants fill up the space behind them. In the final image, they are naked amid a lush, domestic Eden.
“I had been looking at a lot of Rousseau paintings when I made the sequence,” Michals said, referring to the jungle scenes of the French Post-Impressionist. While he loves the Tissot panel, he admitted, “I’m a raging atheist,” distancing himself from its religious message. “I was a pretend Catholic and then I stopped pretending.” The spiritual dimension of “Paradise Regained” is balanced by the artist’s tongue-in-cheek view of urban life, where men and women only return to a natural state indoors, where everything is unnatural.
Jacob Hoefnagel (Flemish, 1573 – c. 1632) Orpheus Charming the Animals 1613 Watercolour and gouache, heightened with white gouache, over traces of black chalk, on vellum mounted to panel; bordered in gold Overall: 6 9/16 × 8 5/16 in. (16.7 × 21.1cm) Purchased on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund 1978 Morgan Family Collection
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) Warren Beatty 1967 Gelatin silver print 8 × 9 15/16 inches (20.3 × 25.2cm) Purchased on the Photography Acquisition Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
PLAYTIME
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) Things Are Queer 1973 Nine gelatin silver prints Images: 5 × 7 inches (12.7 × 17.8cm) each Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
REFLECTION
Wallace Studio, Manchester, New Hampshire Untitled (Mirror) c. 1880s Cabinet card with rounded corners Mount: 6 7/16 × 4 3/16 in. (16.4 × 10.6cm) Print: 5 11/16 × 4 in. (14.4 × 10.2cm) Gift of Adam Fuss The Morgan Library & Museum
Carlo Galli Bibiena (1728 – c. 1778) Interior of a Gallery 1750s Pen and black ink and grey and brown wash Sheet is framed by an overmount of paper that leaves around 8 5/8 x 11 7/8 inches visible Overall: 9 1/4 × 12 13/16 in. (23.5 × 32.5cm) Thaw Collection The Morgan Library & Museum
John F. Collins (American, 1888-1990) Multiple Self-Portrait 1935 Gelatin silver print Image: 13 3/4 × 10 9/16 in. (34.9 × 26.8cm) Purchase on the Photography Collectors Committee Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) A Story About a Story 1989 15 7/8 x 19 3/4 inches (40.3 × 50.2cm) Purchased on the Photography Collectors Committee Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
In Michals work, the immediate and the infinite spar. In the show is a single image by a little-known photographer named John F. Collins. The 1935 self-portrait shows Collins looking at us while holding a large photograph of himself; in that photograph he is looking down at the same photograph of himself. In each subsequent picture within a picture, he is looking out, and then into the photograph he is holding, into a spiralling infinity.
It is a striking parallel to Michals’ “A Story Within a Story” of 1989, in which a man leans against a mirror in the corner of the frame and faces a mirror in which his reflection echoes repeatedly as it recedes behind him. “This is a story about a man telling a story about a man. …” starts his text.
N. Institoris (d. 1845) Interior of a Prison c. 1825-1845 Pen and black ink, with grey wash, over pencil, on paper; verso contains slight sketch of a building, in graphite. 13 x 17 1/2 inches (330 x 445 mm) Gift of Mrs. Donald M. Oenslager, 1982 The Morgan Library & Museum
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont (French, 1720-1791) Perspective View of the Mechanical Works and Construction of a Theater. Verso: Sketch of an elevation of a colonnade 18th century Pen and black ink, with grey wash, over graphite, on paper; verso: graphite 12 1/4 x 14 9/16 inches (310 x 369 mm) Purchased as the gift of Mrs. Donald M. Oenslager in memory of her husband The Morgan Library & Museum
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Cour de Rouen 1898 Albumen print Overall: 8 × 6 3/4 in. (20.3 × 17.1cm) Purchased on the Photography Collectors Committee Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001) Penn Station Lovers 1946-1947, printed c. 1981 Gelatin silver print 14 x 11 in. (sheet) Purchased as the gift of Elaine Goldman The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) Empty New York, Subway Interior c. 1964 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4cm) Collection of Nancy and Burt Staniar The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) Empty New York, Dry cleaners upper East side c. 1964 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4cm) Collection of Nancy and Burt Staniar The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) From the series Empty New York c. 1964 Gelatin silver prints 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4cm) Collection of Nancy and Burt Staniar The Morgan Library & Museum
TIME
Herbert Matter (American born Switzerland, 1907-1984) Alexander Calder hanging mobile in motion 1936 Gelatin silver print with additions by hand 5 9/16 × 6 3/16 in. (14.13 × 15.72cm) Purchased as the gift of Richard and Ronnie Grosbard The Morgan Library & Museum
Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. The designer’s innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design.
Biography
Born in Engelberg, Switzerland, Matter studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva [fr] and at the Académie Moderne in Paris under the tutalge of Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. He worked with Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, Le Corbusier and Deberny & Peignot. In 1932, he returned to Zurich, where he designed posters for the Swiss National Tourist Office and Swiss resorts. The travel posters won instant international acclaim for his pioneering use of photomontage combined with typeface.
He went to the United States in 1936 and was hired by legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. Work for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and other magazines followed. In the 1940s, photographers, including Irving Penn, at Vogue’s studios at 480 Lexington Avenue often used them for shooting the advertising work commissioned by outside clients. The practice was at first tolerated, but by 1950 it was banned on the grounds that it “has interfered with our own interests and has been a severe handicap to our editorial operations”. In response Matter and three other Condé Nast photographers Serge Balkin, Constantin Joffé and Geoffrey Baker left to establish Studio Enterprises Inc. in the former House & Garden studio on 37th Street (Penn stayed on but also left in 1952).
From 1946 to 1966 Matter was design consultant with Knoll Associates. He worked closely with Charles and Ray Eames. From 1952 to 1976 he was professor of photography at Yale University and from 1958 to 1968 he served as design consultant to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He was elected to the New York Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame in 1977, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 1980 and the AIGA medal in 1983.
As a photographer, Matter won acclaim for his purely visual approach. A master technician, he used every method available to achieve his vision of light, form and texture. Manipulation of the negative, retouching, cropping, enlarging and light drawing are some of the techniques he used to achieve the fresh form he sought in his still lifes, landscapes, nudes and portraits. As a filmmaker, he directed two films on his friend Alexander Calder: “Sculptures and Constructions” in 1944 and “Works of Calder” (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
Close friends of Matter and his wife Mercedes were the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, fellow Swiss photographer Robert Frank and Alberto Giacometti. Matter’s wife Mercedes was the daughter of the American modernist painter Arthur Beecher Carles, and was herself the chief founder of the New York Studio School.
“The absence of pomposity was characteristic of this guy”, said another designer, Paul Rand, about Matter. His creative life was devoted to narrowing the gap between so-called fine and applied arts. Matter died on May 8, 1984, in Southampton, New York.
Saul Steinberg (American born Romania, 1914-1999) Untitled (Cat and wheel of time) 1965 Ink (black, blue, red, green, brown) and pencil on laid Strathmore 19 × 25 in. (48.26 × 63.5cm) Gift of the Saul Steinberg Foundation The Morgan Library & Museum
Saul Steinberg defined drawing as “a way of reasoning on paper,” and he remained committed to the act of drawing. Throughout his long career, he used drawing to think about the semantics of art, reconfiguring stylistic signs into a new language suited to the fabricated temper of modern life. Sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always with virtuoso mastery, Saul Steinberg peeled back the carefully wrought masks of 20th-century civilisation.
Text from The Morgan Library & Museum website
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) When He Was Young 1979 8 x 9 15/16 inches (20.3 × 25.2cm) Purchased on the Photography Collectors Committee Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) What is Time? 1994 Gelatin silver print 16 × 19 7/8 inches (40.6 × 50.5cm) Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
Included in his selection from the Morgan is an amusing drawing by Saul Steinberg, “Cat and the Wheel of Time,” 1965, in which the months of the year, the days of the week, and the hours of the day are written in circles inside a large wheel following a small cat down a hill. “Time has always been central to so much of my thinking,” Michals said. Smith handed him his text and image piece, What Is Time? from 1994, in which an eternally handsome young man holds an old-fashioned round clock to his ear. The text beneath it begins, “Time is the duration of everything, and life is an event, a fluttering of wings … the moment is the interval between now and then and, then, again.”
Exhibition dates: 13th September – 30th November, 2019 Visited September 2019 posted January 2020
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Utopian dreaming / dystopian dreams
Synchronicity… when I visited this exhibition on the 16th September 2019, the grand man had only died the previous week on the 9th September 2019.
This was a fabulous exhibition of mainly VINTAGE prints (see labels) at C/O Berlin, with the added bonus of seeing many Robert Frank photographs I had never seen before.
Thoughts
1/ The vintage prints were much larger than I had thought they would be
2/ The English photographs were very impressive. A similar tonal range to Josef Sudek’s prints in these works i.e. no hard blacks or whites zones 2.5-8
3/ The Americans – to actually see a large vintage print of the Trolley Car was incredible. The Black American man’s face was only his mouth, nose and eyes, the rest was completely dark
4/ The vintage prints seemed more whimsical than the later prints: not so much contrast. Sometimes edges bleed off, grain was large, depth of field low, skylines askew. Frank loved his silhouettes and chiaroscuro
It was a great pleasure to see these iconic photographs together in one place. Several times I had to catch my breath as one famous image followed another. But then there were images I had never seen before. Mostly vintage prints as well… as close to Frank’s original vision as you can get. More poetic, more spontaneous, than the later prints. The United States photographs form a road trip of impressions, a reflective and elegiac poem to the American dream.
It’s not often that you can say that an artist changed how we see and interpret the world but that is the case. Through his seminal work The Americans, Frank’s importance to the history of photography and visual culture cannot be denied. Americans didn’t like the mirror that was held up to their society by an outsider, a European Jew. Frank certainly wasn’t afraid to picture the underbelly of America – a phlegmatic portrait of a disaffected and divided country that still has great relevance today.
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing photographs titled Landsgemeinde / Cantonal Assembly Hundwil, Schweiz (1949). Later silver gelatin prints. No individual titles. Donation of the artist. Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Landsgemeinde / Cantonal Assembly Hundwil, Schweiz (installation views) 1949 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Peru (installation view) 1948 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur Permanent loan of the Volkart Stiftung Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank. Unseen wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Geneva (installation view) 1945 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Geneva (installation view) 1945 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Geneva (installation view) 1944-1945 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) New York c. 1949 Vintage silver gelatin print Donation of the artist
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Times Square, New York (installation view) 1949 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank. Unseen wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Portfolio. 40 Photos (installation views) 1941-1946 First Edition Steidl, Göttingen, 2000 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Mississippi, St Louis (installation view) 1948 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris (installation view) 1949 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris (installation view) 1949 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Mary and Pablo, New York (installation views) 1951 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (b. 1924 in Zurich, d. 2019 in Nova Scotia, Canada) traveled thousands of kilometres between America’s East and West coasts, taking almost 30,000 photographs. Just 83 black-and-white pictures from this mixture of diary, social portrait, and photographic road movie have influenced generations of photographers after him. Frank’s book The Americans was first published in Paris before it was released in the United States in 1959 with an introduction by the Beat novelist Jack Kerouac. Oblique angles, cropped figures, and blurred movement became the hallmarks of a new photographic style that would change the course of postwar photography. In 1985, Franks photographs have been displayed in Germany for the first time – in the Amerika Haus in Berlin. Now, C/O Berlin presents contact sheets, first editions, and vintage material from the photographer’s early work at the same place. His time in Switzerland, travels through Europe and South America, and unpublished pictures from the United States in the 1950s will be shown together with famous classic photos from The Americans.
Robert Frank. Unseen reveals the narrative power of a visual language that Frank developed long before it earned him international recognition.
The exhibition was organised in cooperation with the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924. A trained photographer, he traveled to New York for the first time in 1947, where he found a position at the Harper’s Bazaar photo studio. He worked between Europe and the US for several years and in 1950, Edward Steichen invited him to participate in the 51 American Photographers exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York. Frank freelanced for Life, McCall’s, Look, Vogue and other magazines. In 1955, he was the first European to receive a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship that funded a comprehensive photo series for which he traveled across America. The result was the seminal photobook The Americans (1959). Following the volume’s unexpected success, the photographer turned to film. His later work juxtaposed Polaroids and autobiographical text fragments. This year Frank published his most recent book, Good Days Quiet, at the age of 95. Frank’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, most recently at Les Rencontres d’Arles (2018); Albertina, Vienna (2018); Art Institute of Chicago (2017); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2014); and at Tate Modern, London (2004). His films were shown at C/O Berlin in 2009. Robert Frank lived in New York and in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he died on September 9, 2019.
Text from the C/O Berlin [Online] Cited 28/12/2019
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at bottom, photographs of London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London (installation view) 1951 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris (installation view) 1949 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at right a photograph of London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London (installation view) 1951 Vintage gelatin silver print Arnold Kübler Archive Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London 1951 Vintage gelatin silver print Arnold Kübler Archive
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London (installation views) 1951 Gelatin silver photographs, later prints Permanent loan of the Friends of the Fotostiftung Schweiz Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London 1951 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Permanent loan of the Friends of the Fotostiftung Schweiz
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris 1952 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist
America
Robert Frank. Unseen wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left, Nevada (1956); at second left, Los Angeles (1956); and at right, On the road to Carolina (1955) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Nevada (installation view) 1956 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Los Angeles (installation view) 1956 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) On the road to Carolina (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Route US 91, leaving Blackfoot, Idaho (installation views) 1956 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Route US 91, leaving Blackfoot, Idaho 1956 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left, Florida(1956); at third left, New York City (early 1950s); and at right, Ranch Market, Hollywood (1955-1956) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) New York City (installation view) early 1950s Vintage gelatin silver photograph Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Florida (installation view) 1956 Gelatin silver print Swiss Foundation for Photography Collection, Winterthur Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) New York City (installation view) early 1950s Vintage gelatin silver photograph Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left, Bar – Gallup, New Mexico (1955) and at right, Rodeo – New York City (1954) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Rodeo – New York City (installation views) 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Rodeo – New York City 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at right, Charity Ball, New York 1954 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Charity Ball, New York (installation views) 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Charity Ball, New York 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left in the bottom photograph, Bar – New York (1955) followed by, Yom Kippur – East River, New York City (1954) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Los Angeles (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver photograph Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Los Angeles 1955 Vintage gelatin silver photograph Donation of the artist
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Wanamaker Fire, 10th Street East, New York (installation view) 1956 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Bar – New York (installation view) 1955 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Bar – New York 1955 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Yom Kippur – East River, New York City (installation view) 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) USA (installation view) 1950s Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Contact Sheet 62 / Factory, Detroit (installation views) 1955 From The Americans. 81 Contact Sheets. Yugensha, Tokyo/Motomura Kazuhiko, 2009 Private Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Contact Sheet 31 / U.S. 91, Leaving Blackfoot, Idaho (installation views) 1956 From The Americans. 81 Contact Sheets. Yugensha, Tokyo/Motomura Kazuhiko, 2009 Private Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Contact Sheet 18 / Trolley, New Orleans (installation views) 1955 From The Americans. 81 Contact Sheets. Yugensha, Tokyo/Motomura Kazuhiko, 2009 Private Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Bryant Park, New York (installation view) around 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) 42nd Street, New York (installation view) early 1950s Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) 41st Street and 7th Avenue (installation view) 1953 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Les Américans book cover and pages (installation views) 1958 Delpire. Paris
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Gli Americani book cover (installation view) 1959
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) The Americans book cover and pages (installation views) 1959 Grove Press, New York
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Trolley – New Orleans (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Trolley – New Orleans (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Trolley – New Orleans 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left, Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey (1955) and at right, City Fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey (1955) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) City Fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey (installation views) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) City Fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
C/O Berlin Foundation, Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22–24, 10623 Berlin Phone: +49 30 2844416 62
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Speed of Life at Jeu de Paume, Paris
“I photograph those who push themselves to any extreme, and people who cling to the freedom to be themselves.”
Peter Hujar
Free your mind
A huge posting to finish what has been a bumper year on Art Blart: two book chapters published, a photographic research trip to Europe in which I saw some incredible exhibitions and took over 7000 photographs for my art work, lots of postings and writing and, sadly, the loss of two friends – my mother in Australia, the bohemian photographer and poet Joyce Evans and vision impaired photographer Andrew Follows.
I couldn’t think of a better posting to finish the year than with a photographer who put it all on the line: Peter Hujar. Not for him the world of Apollonian perfection, wishing for fortune and fame, relying on some big time backer to promote him. Hujar stuck to his craft, carving images, performances if you like, from dystopian contexts and Dionysian revellers. “Hujar was the instigator of the performances captured in his portraits, as much as a director as a photographer.”
Paraphrasing Mark Durant, we might say that Hujar was a poet of the urban nocturne, a photographer of subjective desire known for his gritty, erotic, sentimental yet (im)personal images. Philip Gefter observes that, “A hallmark of Hujar’s portraiture is the invisibility of technique – a kind of visual innocence – as if the camera were not present and the subject had been happened upon.” Richard Woodward says that Hujar, “observed his companions in this outlaw life with what might be called warm objectivity.” Photographer Duane Michals says that, “Hujar was a pioneer, years ahead of Mapplethorpe in his sexual candor, as well as an artist whose photographs are less swank and less affected.”
Ah! what a time it was to be an artist and to be gay in New York, with the likes of Hujar, Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Wojnarowicz, Haring, Arthur Tress, and Duane Michals, to name but a few. A time of sexual liberation, followed by a period of disease and death. Hujar pictures this “scene” – the flowering of gay life and then the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. He pictures the constellations as they swirl around him. He allows the viewer to enter his world without judgement, just showing it how it was – a world of avant-garde dance, music, art, and drag performance; “glowing skyscrapers, assorted rubble, discarded rugs, boys in drag, and girls passed out in his doorway.” This is it he is saying, this is how I live, this is who surrounds me, suck it up and breathe it in. He allows the viewer to enter his world of ideas and possible metaphors. No judgement is offered nor accepted.
As my appreciation of his photographs grows, I reflect on the skill that it takes to make these photographs look effortless. Hujar, “a student of Lisette Model, admirer of August Sander, and friend of Diane Arbus, made his photographs distinctly his own: a perfect and unmistakable mirror of his own body and milieu.” A mirror of strength and determination / of friendship / of love – his pictures gather, together, a feeling for – the freedom of people, and places, to be themselves. Do places have feelings? yes they do! (I remember visiting the Coliseum in Rome and having to leave after 20 minutes the energy of the place was so bad; and then visiting the Loretta Sanctuary in Prague and feeling, such calm and peace in that place, that I have rarely felt before).
Hujar’s photographs are memorable. Nan Goldin and Vince Aletti said that his work, “like that of so few photographers, can’t be forgotten and becomes even deeper and more compelling over time.” His work is so compelling it’s like you can’t take tear your eyes away from the photographs. They demand repeat viewing. They seem possessed of an awareness of their own making. That is Hujar’s music, his signature.
Like any great artist, his images reveal themselves over time, expounding his love of life and his intimate and free engagement with the world. Hujar was, is, and always will be… a watcher, a dreamer, a cosmic spirit.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Many thankx to David for the iPhone installation images. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The life and art of Peter Hujar (1934-1987) were rooted in downtown New York. Private by nature, combative in manner, well-read, and widely connected, Hujar inhabited a world of avant-garde dance, music, art, and drag performance. His mature career paralleled the public unfolding of gay life between the Stonewall uprising in 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
In his loft studio in the East Village, Hujar focused on those who followed their creative instincts and shunned mainstream success. He made, in his words, “uncomplicated, direct photographs of complicated and difficult subjects,” immortalising moments, individuals, and subcultures passing at the speed of life.
What was Hujar’s truth, his photographic truth? Hujar understood and utilized photography’s tension between document and theatricality. In the act of photographing there is a performance, not only on the part of the subject, but for the photographer as well. For Hujar, to photograph was a balancing act between fierce observation and manifesting his devotion. As Jennifer Quick observes in her essay for the catalogue, This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, “While Arbus and Mapplethorpe are known for their detached postures, Hujar’s silent, tacit presence pervades his work. Like Avedon, Hujar was the instigator of the performances captured in his portraits, as much as a director as a photographer.” That Hujar is considered in the same company of Avedon, Arbus, and Mapplethorpe, reminds us that the retrospective Speed of Life is long overdue.
Hujar’s restlessness led him to wander beyond the confines of the studio. Like Brassai, Hujar was a poet of the urban nocturne, prowling the streets with his camera as the day unraveled. Brassai’s Paris is gritty, erotic, sentimental, yet impersonal. Hujar’s photographs of New York’s streets at night embrace emptiness and furtive gestures, glowing skyscrapers, assorted rubble, discarded rugs, boys in drag, and girls passed out in his doorway. His nighttime images of the Hudson river are disquieting, suggesting powerful currents not fully understood by the dappled surfaces. The thrill and danger of an anonymous sexual encounter is manifested in the 1981 image, Man Leaning Against Tree. It is the moment for Hujar to surveille and assess, when the object of desire is seen but has not yet turned his head to return the gaze. There is a little bit of softness in the image, due, perhaps, to the dim light or the camera moving while the shutter remained open. This image is as much a document of Hujar’s habits of looking as it is about the man leaning against the tree. Despite claims of photography’s objectivity or passive observation, the photographer, consciously or not, visually manifests subjective desire, and Hujar was masterful in this regard. …
While all photographs are tethered to mortality, there is something exemplary in Hujar’s cool acceptance of our temporality. He was fully engaged with his moment yet unsentimental in his attachment. Whether he was photographing a lover or an abandoned dog as elegant as it is scruffy, we can sense that Hujar’s interest was intellectual and physical in equal measure. He may not have been comfortable with the world as it was, but he embraced and even loved what was in front of his camera. “My work comes out of my life, the people I photograph are not freaks or curiosities to me,” he said. “I like people who dare.”
Hujar put his art to political use in 1969. In late June, a police raid inspired fierce resistance from the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, in the West Village. Hujar’s boyfriend at the time, Jim Fouratt, arrived on the scene to organise for the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the first political group to cite homosexuality in its name. Hujar agreed to make a photograph for a GLF poster. Early one Sunday morning that fall, members of the group assembled and ran back and forth past the photographer on Nineteenth Street, west of Broadway. The poster, bearing the slogan COME OUT!!, appeared in late spring 1970 in advance of the gay liberation march that marked the first anniversary of Stonewall.
In September 1973, transgender Warhol Superstar Candy Darling (born James Lawrence Slattery) was hospitalised for lymphoma. She asked Hujar to make a portrait of her “as a farewell to my fans.” Out of several dozen exposures, Hujar chose to print this languorous pose. As rendered in the print, Candy’s banal, fluorescent-lit hospital room looks as elegant as the studio props in a Hollywood starlet’s portrait. Hujar later wrote that his style cues came from Candy, who was “playing every death scene from every movie.” The image, first seen in print in the New York Post after Candy’s death six months later, became the most widely reproduced of Hujar’s works during his lifetime.
Jeu de Paume presents a selection of 150 photographs of this singular artist from October 15th, 2019 to January 19th, 2020. The exhibition follows Hujar’s work from the beginnings mid 1950 until the 1980s, shaping a portrait of the underground New York City.
The life and art of Peter Hujar (1934-1987) were rooted in downtown New York. Private by nature, combative in manner, well-read, and widely connected, Hujar inhabited a world of avant-garde dance, music, art, and drag performance. His mature career paralleled the public unfolding of gay life between the Stonewall uprising* in 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
After graduating from high school in 1953, Hujar worked as an assistant to commercial photographers until 1968. Five years of contributing features to mass-market magazines convinced him that a fashion career “wasn’t right for me” and in 1973 he opted for an autonomous, near-penniless life as an artist. In his loft studio above a theater in the East Village, Hujar focused on those who obeyed their creative instincts and shunned mainstream success.
At age forty-two, he published his only monograph, Portraits in Life and Death, and opened his first solo gallery show. The searching intimacy he achieved as a portraitist carried over into unsentimental photographs of animals and plants, landscapes, buildings, and the unique features of nude bodies.
Hujar’s brief affair in 1981 with the young artist David Wojnarowicz evolved into a mentoring bond that changed both their lives. On their excursions to blighted areas around New York, Hujar crafted the portrait of a city in free fall, complementing Wojnarowicz’s dark vision of Reagan-era America.
Peter Hujar died of AIDS-related pneumonia in November 1987.
Press release from Jeu de Paume
Early years
In 1953, Peter Hujar finished high school in Manhattan, where he had studied photography. He then worked for some fifteen years as an assistant to commercial photographers. Punctuating those years were two long periods in Italy, buoyed by scholarships – a first one that was obtained by a boyfriend (1958-1959) and then his own (1962-1963). From 1968 to 1972, he tried to make it as a freelancer in the mass-market world of fashion, music, and advertising photography. The hustle “wasn’t right for me,” and he turned his back on the commercial mainstream. From this time on he lived on almost nothing, squeaking by on small jobs, taking paying jobs only when necessary and focusing on the subjects he found compelling. In 1973, he moved to the crumbling East Village, into a loft that would become the setting for his mature studio work, most notably the vast majority of his portraits.
Portraits
Portraiture was central to Hujar’s practice. The subjects of his art, Hujar wrote, were “those who push themselves to any extreme” and those who “cling to the freedom to be themselves.” “In a sense, I am still a fashion photographer. These people are chic but in a dark kind of way. Most of them are unknown or maybe known to just a few, but they have all been creative adventurers and possess a certain spirit.”
Most of his portraits were posed, but Hujar often expected his models to perform in front of the camera, which made many of the shoots truly collaborative ventures. Disguises and props were often incorporated, and his subjects were sometimes veiled, simultaneously revealing and masking themselves.
The reclining portrait is a photographic genre Hujar made his own. The pose features extensively in his 1976 monograph Portraits in Life and Death, and he continued to rely on it as a means of capturing something unique in his sitter: to face a camera lens from a reclining position is an unfamiliar and provoking experience.
New York
“The happiest times with Peter, when he wasn’t photographing, were walking around Manhattan, looking at the crowns of buildings, and the fantasies about ‘living there,'” remembers Gary Schneider, one of his close friends.
Born in New Jersey, Hujar spent all his life in New York, and more specifically in Manhattan, whose buildings, streets, and piers he started photographing more extensively in the second half of the 1970s. Divided between Downtown’s derelict areas and Midtown’s skyscrapers, Hujar’s New York is often a nocturnal city: a place of abandoned structures, night-time cruising, and early-dawn vistas. A few journeys outside New York, during the summer months, to the beaches of Fire Island in the Hamptons, and, in the early 1980s, to the countryside around Germantown, forty miles north of New York, along the Hudson River, offer other glimpses of Peter Hujar’s personal geography, testifying to the variety of subjects that he found worth photographing.
Bodies
Portraiture of bodies was another focal point of Hujar’s last decade of work. In 1978, some of his works were included in The Male Nude: A photographic Survey at the Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery in New York.
Bodies, he suggested, could be read as freely as faces for character, emotion, or life story.
He photographed bodies in the extremes of youth and old age, bodies displaying unique features, and bodies in transient states, notably pregnancy and arousal.
Whether photographing faces or bodies, Hujar was attentive to the characteristics conferred by time and experience, such as Manny Vasquez’s spinal tap scar and the imprint left by socks on Randy Gilberti’s ankles. “I want people to feel the picture and smell it,” he said of his nudes, which he contrasted to the idealised bodies in Robert Mapplethorpe’s work.
Gracie Mansion Gallery, 1986
When exhibiting his work, Hujar employed two distinct methods. He displayed prints either in isolation (notably in his loft, where just one photograph at a time was on view) or in large groupings, two images high, as on this wall. For the last exhibition during his lifetime, in January 1986 in New York, Hujar covered the walls of the Gracie Mansion Gallery with a frieze of seventy photographs in no apparent order. He fine-tuned the layout for days until no one type of image (portrait, nude, animal, still life, landscape, cityscape) appeared twice consecutively. Each of his subjects thus preserved its own identity and singularity rather than serving as a variation on an imposed theme.
The arrangement highlighted his inventive range, created echoes among seemingly unrelated images, and drew attention to preoccupations that had recurred throughout his career. The display in this room centres on images taken in the 1980s and is freely inspired by that 1986 exhibition.
Andy Warhol
In 1964 Peter Hujar was a regular visitor to The Factory, Andy Warhol’s studio at 231 East 47th Street in New York. He posed four times for Screen Tests, brief portraits filmed by Warhol and screened in slow motion. Together with his friend Paul Thek, Hujar was chosen as one of the “Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys”, whose film portraits were regularly shown at the Factory and at parties and events elsewhere. Among the other personalities figuring in the Screen Tests in 1964-1965 were the actor-directors Dennis Hopper and Jack Smith, together with writer-critic Susan Sontag and poet John Ashbery – both of whom would later pose for Hujar.
A hallmark of Hujar’s portraiture is the invisibility of technique – a kind of visual innocence – as if the camera were not present and the subject had been happened upon, discovered there, as Ludlam appears to be, in medias res.
“Hermetic appeal and an identification with psychic damage came together in Hujar’s last important relationship, with the meteoric younger artist David Wojnarowicz, who was a ravaged hustler when they met at a bar in late 1980 and who died from AIDS in 1992. They were lovers briefly, then buddies and soul mates. Wojnarowicz said that Hujar “was like the parent I never had, like the brother I never had.” In return, he inspired fresh energies in Hujar’s life and late work. In a breathtakingly intimate portrait of Wojnarowicz with a cigarette and tired eyes, from 1981, the young man’s gaze meets that of the camera, with slightly wary – but willing and plainly reciprocated – devotion: love, in a way. Their story could make for a good novel or movie – as it well may, in sketched outline in your mind, while you navigate this aesthetically fierce, historically informative, strangely tender show.”
Hujar observed his companions in this outlaw life with what might be called warm objectivity. Whatever the portrait subject – doll maker and transgender pioneer Greer Lankton, model Bruce St. Croix sitting naked on a chair and handling his huge erection, Warhol superstar Candy Darling on her death bed, or a pair of cows in a muddy field – he photographed them directly with his 2 1/4, often at close range, without props or gauzy lighting.
He began as a street photographer, on the prowl for unrehearsed gestures, as can be seen in a 1958 picture in Italy of a well-dressed young man touching his thick coif of dark hair and standing next to a pudgy boy in a cap who has his hands in his pockets.
Hujar’s indelible portraits of famous avant-garde artists and drag queens, and his curiously gothic landscapes and animal pictures, are so fastidiously exquisite, so fussily exact, so representative of a period past (“Speed of Life” is a very odd title) that they immediately summon the ratty hauteur, the necessary obsessions, and the cold-eyed dignity that helped most gay men survive, and not survive, in the early gay lib and AIDS years. …
… His portraits often combine the freakish curiosity of Arbus and the monumental candidness of his mentor Richard Avedon into something resembling momento mori portraits suitable for displaying atop a casket. They are unmistakably contemporary but they feel historic, as if burned to silver plates. (Not for nothing did Hujar make his own display prints.) That doesn’t mean there’s no life in those portraits; far from it, these are the essences of his subjects so well-distilled that there’s really no need to go on. We see nostalgia washing over the present.
Exhibition dates: 5th November – 13th December, 2019
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Wave, Lave, Lace, Pescadero Beach, California 1978 Archival pigment print 16 x 20 inches
I like these photographs, I like them a lot.
Unlike most conceptual art where you have to read a heavy tome of text to understand, actually, the work is about very little and means even less – here, there is humour, wit, intelligence and insight into the condition of our existence on this earth.
Using the optics of the large format camera to enhance perspective, Pfahl projects (his) music into the cosmos. The mark making is lightly made on the landscape, as in Triangle, Bermuda or Australian Pines, Fort DeSoto, Florida. Imagine having the impulse, the creativity, to make that gesture, to wrap silver foil around the trees in the latter image at just that height. A brilliant intervention into the “natural” (i.e. constructed) scene. Often used in his photographs is the Sowilō or the s-rune, the runic symbol ϟ meaning “sun”.
In 1981, Peter C. Bunnell observes in his Introduction to James Alinder’s book Altered Landscapes: The Photographs of John Pfahl, “Our momentary, fragmented and captured vision of disorder and emotion has been replaced by a cool rendering of purposefulness as if to accord another dimension of positivism to the moving force of contemporary human awareness. Pfahl’s work is an attack on the problems of space and, ultimately, existence from a rational point of view.”
Forty years later, these photographs seem not so much rational, or picturesque, as spiritual. The human construction touches the earth lightly, almost reverentially. As Pfahl notes, utmost care is taken not to alter the actual subject in a way he would consider harmful to his positivist respect for nature. In this delicate footprint, these photographs are very prescient of the dangers of our own Anthropocene – of climate change, of raging bushfires, drought, flood and bio-exinction. We are literally destroying this planet and its creatures. Bunnell states, “Pfahl’s imagery is a sure manifestation of the belief that society can produce an art suitable to its nature and, in this case, a specific kind of photographic presence that expresses current societal values.”
Unfortunately, it’s all too late. The lesson has not been learned.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs and the text (reproduced with permission) in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Moonrise over Pie Pan, Capitol Reef National Park 1977 Archival pigment print 16 x 20 inches
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Haystack Cone, Freeport, Maine 1976 Vintage dye transfer print 7 3/4 x 10 inches
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Pink Rock Rectangle, Lewiston, New York 1975 Vintage dye transfer print 7 3/4 x 10 inches
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Triangle, Bermuda 1975 Archival pigment print 16 x 20 inches
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Australian Pines, Fort DeSoto, Florida 1977 Vintage dye transfer print 7 3/4 x 10 inches
Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming solo exhibition, John Pfahl Altered Landscapes. The exhibition will open November 5th and continue thru December 13th, 2019. A reception is scheduled for November 23rd, from 5-8 pm. The exhibition will present a selection of vintage dye transfer colour photographs that the artist printed in the late 1970s, as well as larger archival pigment prints of the series most celebrated images.
In his series Altered Landscapes, Pfahl physically changes the environment, fabricating the view to question our perception of the landscape through added elements that reference mark-making devices associated with photographs, maps, plans, and diagrams. These gestures sometimes repeat strong formal components; fill in information suggested by the scene, or act upon information external to the photograph itself. The picturesque scenes are at once interrupted and completed by the artist’s involvement in creating the photograph.
John Pfahl was born in 1939 in New York, New York and raised in New Jersey. He studied art at Syracuse University, receiving a B.F.A. in 1961 and a M.A. from the School of Communications of the same university in 1968. His position in photography has been one of both a celebrated artist and an important educator. Pfahl taught photography for over decade at the Rochester Institute of Technology, educating many now important contemporary photographers and has served as a longtime adjunct professor in the Visual Studies department of the University of Buffalo. In 2009, he was the Honored Educator of the Year by the Society for Photographic Education. Other honours include two National Endowment for the Arts, Photographer’s Fellowships.
His work is in numerous prominent collections, including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman House, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Modern Art, Center for Creative Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, among others.
Monographs on Pfahls’s work include Altered Landscapes: The Photographs of John Pfahl (Friends of Photography 1982), Picture Windows (New York Graphic Society 1987), A Distanced Land (UNM/Albright-Knox Gallery 1990), Permutations on the Picturesque (Lightwork 1997) and Waterfall (Nazraeli Press 2000), and Extreme Horticulture (Verlag 2003).
Press release from the Joseph Bellows Gallery [Online] Cited 09/11/2019
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Slanting Forest, Lewiston, New York 1975 Vintage dye transfer print 7 3/4 x 10 inches
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Live Oak Lightning, Lompoc, California 1978 Vintage dye transfer print 7 3/4 x 10 inches
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Tracks, Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah 1977 Archival pigment print 16 x 20 inches
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Monument Valley with Red String, Monument Valley, Utah 1977 Archival pigment print 16 x 20 inches
Permanet exhibition Visited September 2019 posted November 2019
First gallery
Installation view of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
I didn’t have time on my European photographic research tour to post about this exhibition at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest.
Let me say right off bat, that I’m not a great fan of Capa’s work and the larger, 1990s non-vintage prints presented in this exhibition were unimpressive.
I admire Capa’s courage in order to get the shot (“If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”), but his photographs leave me cold. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but his objectivity, his reportage, is just that. Looking back 80 years later, we must remember how raw, how radical and confronting these photographs would have been when viewed in Life magazine and Picture Post at the time: authentic representations of war and death straight from the front. But in terms of the image, what you see is what you get. The framing is not particularly good, the angles are pretty conventional and front on, the occurrences direct and focused. The immediacy of the image, that is their strength.
For me they don’t leave a lasting impression, never have done. Yes, the D-Day landings because he was there; The death of a Loyalist militiaman because it is so famous; the shaving of the women collaborators heads because they are so vile … but you wonder, does his greatness come from the fact that, time and time again, he got the job done and produced the goods (as in a saleable image). That and the reality that he was a great self promoter: labelled the ‘Greatest War Photographer in the World’ by Picture Post in 1938. But was he a good image maker?
They are what they are. That’s really all you can say.
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
“La Guerre Civile en Espagne,’ in Vu Magazine No. 445 September 23, 1936
Caption: “Le jarret vif, la poitrine au vent, fusil au poing, il dévalaient la pente couverte d’un chaume raide… Soudain l’essor est brisé, une balle a siffle – une balle fratricide – et leur sang est bu par la terre natale … “
“His step quick, his chest to the wind, his rifle in his hand, he hurtled down the steep slope. Suddenly the boom was broken, a bullet whistled – a fratricidal bullet – and their blood is drunk by the homeland … “
The caption as published in LIFE magazine: “Robert Capa’s camera catches a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head in front of Cordoba.”
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) September 5, 1936. The death of a Loyalist militaman 1936 Gelatin silver print
“The Spanish War Kills Its First Woman Photographer,” in LIFE magazine (Gerda Taro, July 1937) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gerda Taro (1910-1937)
Gerta Pohorylle (1 August 1910 – 26 July 1937), known professionally as Gerda Taro, was a German Jewish war photographer active during the Spanish Civil War. She is regarded as the first woman photojournalist to have died while covering the frontline in a war.
Taro was the companion and professional partner of photographer Robert Capa. The name “Robert Capa” was originally an alias that Taro and Capa (born Endre Friedmann) shared, an invention meant to mitigate the increasing political intolerance in Europe and to attract the lucrative American market. A significant amount of what is credited as Robert Capa’s early work was actually made by Taro.
Coverage of the Spanish Civil War
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Taro travelled to Barcelona, Spain, to cover the events with Capa and David “Chim” Seymour. Taro acquired the nickname of La pequeña rubia (“The little blonde”). They covered the war together in northeastern Aragon and in the southern Córdoba province. Always together under the common and using the bogus signature of Robert Capa, they succeeded in publishing through important publications (the Swiss Zürcher Illustrierte, the French Vu). Their early war photographs are distinguishable since Taro used a Rollei camera which rendered squared photographs while Capa produced rectangular pictures using a Contax camera[citation needed] or a Leica camera. However, for some time in 1937 they each produced similar 35 mm pictures under the label of Capa&Taro.
Subsequently, Taro attained some independence. She refused Capa’s marriage proposal. Also, she became publicly related to the circle of anti-fascist European and intellectuals (such as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell) who crusaded particularly for the Spanish Republic. fr:Ce Soir, a communist newspaper of France, signed her for publishing Taro’s works only. Then, she began to commercialise her production under the Photo Taro label. Regards, Life, Illustrated London News and Volks-Illustrierte (the exile edition of Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung) were amongst the publications that used her work.
Reporting the Valencia bombing alone, Taro obtained the photographs which are her most celebrated. Also, in July 1937, Taro’s photographs were in demand by the international press when, alone, she was covering the Brunete region near Madrid for Ce Soir. Although the Nationalist propaganda claimed that the region was under its control, the Republican forces had in fact forced that faction out. Taro’s photographs were the only testimony of the actual situation.
“So nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world” (epitaph in French and Catalan on her tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris)
“The Spanish War Kills Its First Woman Photographer,” in LIFE Magazine (Gerda Taro, July 1937) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa
(Endre Ernő Friedmann) 22 October 1913, Budapest, Hungary – 25 May 1954, Thái Bình, Vietnam
He never avoided challenges – he brought his restless, adventurous spirit and toughness from Hungary. He hardly had anything else in his luggage when he left his native country in 1931. He made photo-history with his war reportage on the Spanish Civil War, WWII, China, and Vietnam. His stories and, in particular, his slogan – “if your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” – made him a legendary person. But he made a mistake in Thái Bình. He went too close.
His brother wrote about him: “He lived a lot and suffered a lot during his short life. He was born poor and died poor. He bequeathed us the chronicle of his unique career along with the visual proof of his conviction: not only can mankind endure a lot but it is able to win every now and then.”
His parents – Júlia Berkovits and Dezső Friedmann – were tailors, who ran a prosperous show-room in Budapest. Their first child was László, followed by Endre and five years later by Kornél. After a Lutheran elementary school, Robert Capa went to study at Madách Secondary School. Inspierd by Lajos Kassák, he became interested in journalism in 1929, one year before his matriculation. After 1930, he was a photographer.
He was a good friend of Suzanne Szász, i.e. Székely Zsuzsa, already in Budapest. He lived at the same house as Éva Besnyő, who was his first childhood love.
He was shortly imprisoned because of his leftist connections and his participation in a leftist demonstration on 1 September 1930. In prison, he learnt the methods of the infamous investigator Péter Hain, who beat him so hard that he lost consciousness. He was released through his parents’ connections and he almost immediately left the country.
According to one of the legends, he only had a stick of salami in his luggage when he left. His train ticket to Vienna was paid by the Jewish Community of Pest, from there he went on to Prague through Brno and somehow he eventually arrived in Berlin. He left in July 1931 and it took him two or three weeks to get to the German capital. He studied journalism at the German Political College (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik). Since his parents were becoming poor and were not able to support him, he went to work as a photo lab assistant at the photo agency Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst). In the beginning, almost everybody spoke Hungarian at Dephot. No wonder since it was founded by Simon Guttmann and its financial manager was László Fekete, known as Ladislaus Glück at that time.
There were László Czigány (Taci) and György Markos among his fellow-workers and friends. He received his first camera at this time, a Voigtländer 6×9 from György Kepes. Later he got a Leica from Guttmann to carry out smaller assignments.
In 1932, he was sent by Guttmann to make the report which made him famous: he took the photo of Leon Trotsky at the Socialist Congress in Copenhagen. He was the only one to succeed in taking a photo of Trotsky, since photography was strictly forbidden at the meeting. The photo was published by Weltspiegel on a full page.
He was assisted in adapting himself to the foreign city and culture by his friends from Budapest, György Kepes and Éva Besnyő. They often invited him for dinner at their home, actively contributing to his subsistence besides his spiritual development. (At this time he stealthily ate the everyday roast-meat chop of his landlady’s dachshund.) He had to leave Berlin in 1933, which became more and more dangerous for left-wing Jewish intellectual immigrants. He went to Vienna and from there to Budapest by boat. He went to court schoolgirls at Lajos Pécsi’s studio in Dorottya Street almost everyday with his friends from the Munka-kör (Work Circle), among them Lajos Kassák. He worked for photographer Ferenc Veres in Budapest, taking photos of Budapest for touristic leaflets and publications. But he did not do it just howsoever! He did it by the metre. The photographer bought the exposed and developed Leica-films by 26 frames, i.e. by the metre from Endre Friedmann. We do not know what happened to these pictures or those he made in 1933 at the World Scout Jamboree in Gödöllő. Some of them were certainly taken to Paris, where a photographer friend of his tried to sell them to French photo agencies – without any success.
He moved to Paris in September 1933, still not as Capa, but neither as Bandi Friedmann any more; he tried to sell his photos under his new name André Friedman – with little success. He was starving more often than eating well. The young Hungarian with many names yet being actually an unknown photographer was helped by André Kertész with work, connections, his friendship and – knowing Capa – certainly with some money, too. (Later – already in America – he designed Capa’s book titled Death in the Making (Így készül a halál) from Gerda Taro’s and Capa’s photos taken in Spain.) He came into contact with Gisèle Freund, Hans Namuth and Chim at this time. Soon after he made friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson.
His first photo report was published in 1934 in Vu Magazine. He changed his name to Capa around this time almost together with his girlfriend Gerda Pohorylle, whose name became Gerda Taro. Foreign literature wrongly put together the name of Robert Capa from those of Robert Taylor and Frank Capra, but, to our knowledge, he was called Cápa (shark) because of his big mouth and pushy behaviour already at secondary school in Budapest. All he did abroad was to make it sound English by dropping the accent. The change of his name was also motivated by financial interests, since Gerda was able to sell the photos of a successful American photographer at a price three times higher than those of André. His appearance was also significantly transformed together with the change of his name. He had his long hair cut and he began to wear well-ironed suits, believing that it would be the seal of his success. However, it was difficult for him to work up the change of his name and the radical transformation of his appearance mentally.
He went to record the Spanish Civil War in 1936/37 together with Gerda Taro (whom he taught photography), assigned by Regards, a leftist French weekly magazine. And why should he not have received accreditation when his commissioner, Regards had a Hungarian editor, Pál Aranyossy writing under the name of Falus? Dezső Hoffmann was also working here at this time. Gerda died during an air-raid, but Spain became the springboard to world-wide fame for Capa since his photo titled “The Falling Soldier” irrevocably became a classic.
He worked in London, Paris and returned to Spain to take photos at the fall of Barcelona. He was everywhere where the sky was resounding. Besides the weekly magazine Regards, his photos were also published in LIFE. A countless number of his photos were published by Stefan Lorant in his journals, in Weekly Illustrated and in Picture Post. Lorant coined the slogan “The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa,” which accompanied him all through his life.
He spent six months in China with film director Joris Ivens and cameraman John Fernhout during the Japanese occupation. He learnt English from the Dutch in the middle of China and he taught them songs of Hungarian highwaymen in exchange. By the way, Fernhout was Éva Besnyő’s first husband, whom she met earlier in the Spanish Civil War.
Capa returned to Paris, then went back to Spain again to take the series of photos published on 11 pages in Picture Post, two pages in LIFE and five pages in Regards.
After his father died in Budapest, he had nothing else binding him to Europe, so he moved to the United States in 1939 following his mother and his younger brother. Not only his photography, but also the typical Hungarian “lecho” (lecsó) dish cooked by Júlia Friedmann became a legend in the larger group of their friends. He preserved his Hungarian bonds: in his writing “Why have I left home?” he wrote about the conspiracy with his secondary schoolmates under the pillars of the Chain Bridge in Budapest. At the time, he mostly made reportage for LIFE, for example about the presidential elections in Mexico, where he met Kati Deutsch again, a former pupil of Hungarian photographer Lajos Pécsi.
He authored a book in 1941 together with writer Diana Forbes-Robertson about the air battle of London, entitled The Battle of Waterloo Road. After Hungary’s declaration of war, for being a citizen of an enemy state, he was not allowed to leave a ten-mile range of New York and he was also forbidden to take photos. However, in a rather short time, as perhaps the only alien enemy, he achieved to be accredited by the U. S. Army. He only had these personal documents at that time: U. S. residence permit, a Hungarian passport and letters of assignment from various journals. It did not pose an unsolvable problem to him, since he already succeeded in crossing international borders with an expired passport and a nicely decorated Hungarian restaurant menu – and with his big talk – already ten years earlier.
He took photos in England, North Africa, Sicily and in other parts of Italy. He landed with the first American troops on D-Day. He covered the last German offensive in Belgium and took photos about the fall of Leipzig. In the last day of the war he was asked by the Paris correspondent of the American Army’s radio to read an appeal in Hungarian on the air to persuade the population of besieged Budapest to turn against the Germans. Capa accepted to do it; however, by this time his Hungarian had become so rusty that he had to give it up in disgrace. After this incident, his friends were teasing him unmercifully about being a fake Hungarian. At this time Hemingway’s saying became a classic: “Capa speaks seven languages, but all of them poorly.”
At the end of the war, he was about to have a business-card printed with the title “Robert Capa, war photographer, unemployed.” Being aware of the course of world history since that time and Capa’s life story, he could hardly have distributed a lot of these cards. He received U. S. citizenship after the war, officially under the name of Robert Capa.
He went to the Soviet Union in 1947 with John Steinbeck, who wrote about him: “Capa was able to see and use what he had discovered. He was able to show the whole population’s hatred on a child’s face… Capa’s work is the proof of his great heart and his exuberant compassion… I frequently travelled and worked with Capa. He may have had much closer friends but nobody liked him as much as I did. He liked to seem to be easy and carefree in his work. But he was not. His photos are not accidental.”
In the same year, he founded Magnum in New York with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, Maria Eisner, William Vandivert and his wife. Organising the agency, getting clients and making money took much of his time. He wrote to Maria Eisner around 1950: “I enjoy so much to be able to take photos again that I think I will get into to the habit.” After his death, Magnum was taken on and managed by his younger brother, Kornél Friedmann – or as he is better known: Cornell Capa.
In 1947, Robert Capa went to Turkey with a 16 mm film camera. A little bit later he covered the birth of the State of Israel. In Tel Aviv he met a lot of Hungarian acquaintances and then, guided by Paul Goldmann, a photographer of Hungarian origins, he took pictures of the heroic defence at the Kibbutz Negba in the Negev Desert. He also recorded the immigrant Hungarian battalion fighting for the liberation of Jerusalem.
In 1948, he spent six weeks in Hungary, taking photos of the war-torn country with the more and more evident signs of communist influence. At this time reconstruction works were implemented under the first three-year plan. He was accompanied by György Markos, his friend in Berlin and then in Paris. He took photos at the Ganz Shipyard, he recorded the first rice harvest in Békés County and the city of Budapest reviving from the ruins. “The day before I left, I went to get my exit visa. The sergeant who handled foreigners studied my passport very thoroughly. After stamping my exit visa, he asked me which school I went to. I told him the name of my secondary school in Budapest and he promptly listed my teachers and found out the year of my matriculation. He attended the same school, which he finished two years later than me. He gave back my passport and said: “If you had been born two years later with your talent, you either would not be alive today or you would be a secretary of a minister. This way, however, you are only a troubled Western liberal. This is historical materialism.”” This story, entitled “Conversation in Budapest” was published a year later in Holiday Magazine.
Until 1952, he mostly reported about his travels on assignment by Holiday Magazine, often writing the articles as well. Although he never grew rich, he was always full of ideas hiding opportunities to make a lot of money. Once he said: “I will never make millions. You make millions if you have one good idea. When you have twenty a day, you have to share them.” He was proud of his shrewdness that he attributed to being Hungarian. He reversed the well-known slogan from Hollywood, quoted earlier. In his version he said: “It is not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.”
In 1954, he was sent to Indochina by LIFE to cover the French colonies. On 25 May, he stepped on a land-mine and died. He was honoured with a posthumous Croix de Guerre by General René Cogny.
Capa’s memory has not faded – neither in Hungary, nor abroad. This is, not the least, due to his younger brother who, after the deaths of Capa, Bischof and Chim, felt that he did not have a more important task in his life than ensuring eternal life for these geniuses of photography. His zeal is attested by several exhibitions and books. His work was not without success: almost thirty years after Capa’s death, one of the best Hungarian writers, Ferenc Karinthy wrote about the photographer in his book The End of the World (Vége a világnak). Also András Simor wrote a poem as an homage to the photographer and to the soldier he made immortal. Film director Miklós Jancsó wrote an essay for the fortieth anniversary of Thái Bình. And above all: there is no photographic history or textbook without mentioning both of their names with Robert Capa on the top.
Károly Kincses (2005) “Robert Capa,” on the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center website [Online] Cited 03/11/2019
Please note: according to Capa’s birth entry his fathers name was Dávid Friedman (one n) and he was named Endre Ernő Friedman (one n). According to my friend György Németh whom this information came from, he later used his name with two N. As György says, it’s a bit of a mess as he used all kind of spelling throughout his life. Thank you György!
Robert Capa’s birth entry
Second gallery
Installation view of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Fountain rubble in city square, Stalingrad, USSR (installation view) August 1-31, 1947 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Student civil-defense volunteers assisting the wounded, Guangzhou, China (installation view) July-September 1938 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Funeral procession for victim killed on the day of the presidential elections, Mexico City, Mexico (installation view) July 9, 1940 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Man and cat outside an air-raid shelter, London, UK June-July 1941 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Medical transport craft for men wounded in the first wave of American troops landing on D-Day, off Omaha Beach, near Colelville-sur-Mer, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France (installation view) June 6, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) German soldiers captured by American forces burying some of the men killed during the D-Day landings, near Colelville-sur-Mer, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France June 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) American soldiers guard a group of captured Germans, southwest of Saint-Lð, Normandy, France July 26-30, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Cow in the middle of a street lined with ruined buildings, Normandy, France (installation view) June-July 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Soldiers leading a French woman who had collaborated with the Germans to the Préfecture de Police to have her head shaved, Chartres, France (installation view) August 18, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) German soldiers captured by American forces during the Battle of the Bulge, south of Bastogne, Belgium (installation view) December 23-26, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest 8 Nagymező Street, 1065 Budapest, Hungary Phone: +36 1 413 1310
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![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Austria, 1899-1968) '[Calypso]' about 1944; before 1946 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Dec 2019 - March 2020](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_04305501_2000x2000.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Austria, 1899-1968) '[Calypso]' about 1944; before 1946 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Dec 2019 - March 2020")
![Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) '[Guadalupe Mill]' 1860 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Dec 2019 - March 2020](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_06196501_2000x2000.jpg "Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) '[Guadalupe Mill]' 1860 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Dec 2019 - March 2020")
![Marinus Jacob Kjeldgaard (Danish, 1884-1964, active Paris, France late 1930s - late 1940s) '[Collage: Balance of Powers]' about 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_05085801_2000x2000.jpg "Marinus Jacob Kjeldgaard (Danish, 1884-1964, active Paris, France late 1930s - late 1940s) '[Collage: Balance of Powers]' about 1939")
![Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) '[Egg in Spotlight]' 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_32105401_2000x2000.jpg "Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) '[Egg in Spotlight]' 1943")
![Shigeichi Nagano (Japanese, 1925-2019, active Tokyo, Japan) '[Tokyo, Aobadai (Nishi Saigoyama Park), Meguro Ward]' 1988](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_30687901_2000x2000.jpg "Shigeichi Nagano (Japanese, 1925-2019, active Tokyo, Japan) '[Tokyo, Aobadai (Nishi Saigoyama Park), Meguro Ward]' 1988")
![Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) '[Spring]' 1873](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_06520801_2000x2000.jpg "Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) '[Spring]' 1873")
![Reverend William Ellis (British, 1794-1872) and Samuel Smith. '[Portrait of a Black Couple]' about 1873](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_133436t1v1_2000x2000.jpg "Reverend William Ellis (British, 1794-1872) and Samuel Smith. '[Portrait of a Black Couple]' about 1873")
![László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) '[The Law of the Series]' 1925](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_05309301_2000x2000.jpg "László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) '[The Law of the Series]' 1925")
![Paul Wolff (German, 1887-1951) and Dr Wolff & Tritschler OHG (German, founded 1927, dissolved 1963) '[Dog at the beach]' 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_041552t1v1_2000x2000-1.jpg "Paul Wolff (German, 1887-1951) and Dr Wolff & Tritschler OHG (German, founded 1927, dissolved 1963) '[Dog at the beach]' 1936")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903 - 1975) '[Two Giraffes, Circus Winter Quarters, Sarasota]' 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_05269601_2000x2000.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903 - 1975) '[Two Giraffes, Circus Winter Quarters, Sarasota]' 1941")
![Myoung Ho Lee (South Korean, b. 1975) '[Tree #2]' 2006](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_31977201_2000x2000.jpg "Myoung Ho Lee (South Korean, b. 1975) '[Tree #2]' 2006")
![Florian, Marquis de (1755-1794) 'Red leather portfolio [realia]' 18th century](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/voltaire-briefcase.jpg "Florian, Marquis de (1755-1794) 'Red leather portfolio [realia]' 18th century")
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