Exhibition: ‘Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression’ at the Phoenix Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 8th March – 12th November 2023

Curator: Rebecca A. Senf, chief curator at CCP and curator of Fashioning Self

Roger Minick (American, b. 1944)
Young Woman in Black with Pendant, Estrada Courts, Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, 1978
1978
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
© Roger Minick 1978

Freedom of the self

This is a strange group of photographs with which to investigate the “long-intertwined relationship between fashion as a tool for self-expression and photography’s role in chronicling it,” for while the many historical portrait photographs depict a link between fashion and photography of the self (through the need to fit into a regimented cultural norm), many of the vernacular images are not about fashion, are a kind of non-fashion, where the people who “pose” for the photographs are just wearing whatever they are in at the time… thereby undermining the premise of the exhibition, that the performance of self becomes a visual language through the picturing of fashion.

Indeed, despite the assertion that historical genres such as street photography “inform contemporary evolutions, such as selfies and carefully crafted social-media platforms”, most selfies taken today through the ubiquity of the phone camera are not carefully crafted, are the very antithesis of the old purpose of a portrait: that is, to picture how we choose to dress, adorn, and re/present ourselves at a particular moment in time.

In today’s contemporary age self is more about the style and context of the individual (as pictured in a photograph) rather than about the fashion (the latest style; the manner of doing something) of the individual or the collective.

Today, style is casual, informal, ephemeral, temporary… which leads us to pose the questions, are historical photographs evidence of a self-expression of more substance, compared to the rapid self, the throw away self, the narcissistic self of today? Are selfies today just a shallow expression of self or are they intended to be more, can they be more?

Today, there is less a consciousness of fashionability than there is the ability to enact the self without resort to fashion. As Yves Saint Laurent once said, “Fashion fades, style is eternal.”

While visual representations of identity continue to shape our understandings of self and each other “with intimate details that alert viewers to who we are, as filtered through the photographic medium” this is no longer achieved through the definition of self as “fashionable” (as defined on a hierarchical scale of who is fashionable and who isn’t, who is beautiful and who isn’t) – rather, it is through the equivalence of a nonhierarchical expression of self where everything becomes valuable, every selfie and portrait of equal awareness and importance in a collective and individual consciousness of self.

The very non-fashion of contemporary self expression is a non-performance, an anti-ritual if you like (which destroys the ritual of production of consumable fashion), which negates fashion as defining the self, much as photography of the self does not define who we are but is only a very small facet of a multi-layered identity.

All of which makes the premise of this exhibition (that the performance of self becomes a visual language through the picturing of fashion) and the first part of its title – Fashioning Self – highly problematic.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. Many thankx to my friend and artist Elizabeth Gertsakis for her help in providing thoughts and inspiration for this text.

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

Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993)
Albert and Lynn Morales, Silver City, New Mexico
1978
Chromogenic print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
© Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Berna

Louis Carlos Bernal (1941-1993) was born in Douglas, Arizona, and grew up in Phoenix. After completing his M.F.A. at Arizona State University in 1972, he joined the faculty of Pima Community College in Tucson, where he remained for the duration of his career, developing and heading its photography program. In 1979, Bernal, along with four other photographers – Morrie Camhi, Abigail Heyman, Roger Minick, and Neal Slavin – received funding from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to photograph Chicano culture in the Southwest for an exhibition and a book project entitled ESPEJO: Reflections of the Mexican American. The commission brought him closer to his ethnic roots and fueled a passionate direction for his work that gained him international recognition for championing regional diversity while symbolizing his exploration of identity as a Mexican American.

Following a tradition of Latin American documentary street photography, Bernal photographed in the barrio – a young girl and her grandfather in a corner barber shop, a girl taking her quinceañera, or locals posing in front of colourful wall murals – images that captured the unique character of Chicano life. He wrote, “My images speak of the religious and family ties I have experienced as a Chicano. I have concerned myself with the mysticism of the Southwest and the strength of the spiritual and cultural values of the barrio.”

Bernal also centered on the family and the home, believing these two elements combined to form the most significant structure within the Mexican-American community. As he wandered streets from Texas to Los Angeles, and met people who were soon drawn to charismatic personality, he was often invited into their homes. He asked permission to photograph them surrounded by their treasured possessions, their family portraits and mementos, and their shrines decorated with saints, candles, and flowers. His subjects appear at ease and confident in front of his camera, a product of Bernal’s deep respect for them. Bernal’s interest in what people chose to surround themselves with led him to photograph the interiors of homes without people. These sensitive portraits of both prized and everyday items in living rooms, bedrooms and gardens were perhaps his most significant innovation.

Bernal’s interest in strong compositional design and technical expertise are evident in both his skilfully printed black-and-white images and his colour work that luminously captures the bright pinks, blues, and greens of interior painted adobe walls, window curtains, and religious icons. He felt a particular urgency to document the streets, people, homes, and artefacts in historic neighbourhoods, as many were undergoing rapid changes or being bulldozed to make way for urban renewal. In recording the Mexican- American experience of Southwest towns and barrios, Bernal created a visual document that preserves the specific iconography and reveals many aspects of this distinct culture.

The Louis Carlos Bernal Collection contains 98 fine prints, both black-and-white and colour, and research materials that include project records, correspondence, clippings, writings and publications.

Anonymous. “Louis Carlos Bernal,” on the Centre for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Kozo Miyoshi (Japanese, b. 1947)
Tucson, Arizona
1992
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the artist, DEP’T CO.,LTD., Tokyo, Nippon Polaroid, Tsudani Oil Co. Ltd.
© Kozo Miyosh

Kozo Miyoshi was born in Chiba, Japan in 1947. He graduated from the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art in 1971. He began his photographic career in the 1970s and started shooting an 8 × 10-inch large format camera in 1981. In 2009 he upgraded to an ultra large format 16 × 20-inch camera which he continues to use on his travels. Miyoshi’s photographs have received international acclaim for their unique and sincere approach to his fleeting subjects.

Dennis Feldman (American, b. 1946)
Man with Reflective Glasses
1969-1972
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the artist
© Dennis Feldman

Dennis Feldman (American, b. 1946)
White Girl 1970
1970
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the artist
© Dennis Feldman

From the seedy streets of Los Angeles to empty living rooms and apartments across the United States, the photographs of Dennis Feldman (b. 1946) explore the ways popular entertainment seeps into American consciousness. Pictures from his most acclaimed series, Hollywood Boulevard, 1969-1972, invite subjects from social parade of Los Angeles’s famed sidewalk to animate their self-styled identities. His American Images series, published in 1977, pursues other disclosures, revealing tensions that have come to define the underside of the American dream. In some pictures, people relish the escape and freedom symbolised by cars and movieland, while others seem to search for more elusive horizons. Like Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Frederick Sommer – pioneering photographers whom he considers mentors – Feldman carefully crafts compositions that do not judge their subjects. Instead, they pry apart the world of appearances to reflect on fantasy and desire as they intertwine with paths of everyday life.

Anonymous. “Dennis Feldman: Photographs,” on the BAMPFA website 2019 [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled [Liberace with his mother]
New York, 1954
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Garry Winogrand Archive
Gift of the artist
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression examines the role of photography in shaping, sharing, and shifting identity.

About the exhibition

Whether for a selfie or formal portrait, we all craft our appearance and identity for a public audience. We consider cultural and social norms, the emotions we wish to express or hide away, where we’re going and with whom, and the purpose of the photograph when choosing how we dress, adorn, and present ourselves. The resulting images serve as a window into a particular moment of our life, with intimate details that alert viewers to who we are, as filtered through the photographic medium.

Organised by Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression features 54 works of street, documentary, and self-portrait photography from 1912 to 2015 that explore this long-intertwined relationship between fashion as a tool for self-expression and photography’s role in chronicling it. Iconic views by Dennis Feldman, Laura Volkerding, Linda Rich, John Simmons, David Hume Kennerly, Teenie Harris, and more illuminate the dialogue that occurs between photographer and subject – the give-and-take between self-performance and art making.

Alongside these works drawn from CCP’s outstanding collection, Fashioning Self also features a rotating display of social media images reflecting community members and individuals from across the United States. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the Museum and CCP will invite visitors, Arizona residents, and our collective social media followings to take their own selfies and portraits in the galleries or in their environments and share them via the hashtag #FashioningSelf for display in Norton Gallery. By placing these contemporary, real-time images in conversation with works by renowned photographers of the Americas, the exhibition interrogates what it means to be an artist or maker in a world where cameras are commonplace and everyone curates a feed.

Text from the Phoenix Art Museum website

Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Muscle Beach, Los Angeles
1949
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Purchase
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Kuniyoshi Portrait
c. 1941
Gelatin silver
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Max Yavno Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (国吉康雄, Kuniyoshi Yasuo, September 1, 1889 – May 14, 1953) was an eminent 20th-century Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker.

Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Untitled [Opening Night at the San Francisco Opera]
1947
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Max Yavno Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Social documentary photographer Max Yavno (1911-1985) identified the odd charm that constitutes the identity of a place and people. Born in New York, Yavno was a social worker from 1932-1936; this background clearly informed his photographic career. His humanistic sensibility is revealed in his work, which includes street photographs made in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Yavno is best known for his depictions of these great American cities and the cultural and social detail of their inhabitants, many of which distinctively reflect their era.

In 1936, Yavno began photographing New York street life for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theater Project. As his interest in photography burgeoned, Yavno joined the Photo League and served as its President in the late 1930s. Through this organisation he met Aaron Siskind who became his roommate and lifelong friend. During World War II, Yavno served in the United States Army Air Force as a film and photography instructor. Following the war, he relocated to San Francisco and continued teaching. There, Yavno began a freelance career with clients including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. During this time Yavno achieved success both as a fine art and a commercial photographer.

Yavno was included in “Seventeen American Photographers,” a 1947 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This placed him alongside established photographers Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, and Edward Weston. Following this pivotal exhibition, Yavno published The San Francisco Book in 1948 and The Los Angeles Book in 1950, both of which chronicled the urban landscape and its population. By 1952, Edward Steichen had purchased Yavno’s prints for The Museum of Modern Art, New York. With recommendations by Edward Weston and Steichen, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953. From 1954-75, Yavno owned and operated a thriving commercial photography studio in Los Angeles.

In 1975, the sixty four year old photographer closed his studio to allow for more personal pursuits. Yavno continued to photograph California, but also worked in Mexico, Morocco, Israel, and Egypt, securing funds for the later trips from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Photography of Max Yavno was published by University of California press in 1981, to accompany a retrospective at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Yavno continued to make and exhibit photographic works until his death in 1985.

The Max Yavno Archive contains papers, records of commercial assignments, correspondence, information regarding the Photo League, memorabilia, photographic materials and over 800 fine photographs.

Anonymous. “Max Yavno,” on the Centre for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Air Force Pilot
1975-1980
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Max Yavno Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, b. 1928)
Pennsylvania Dutch & Adidas, Santa Cruz, U.S.A.
1975
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Al Cohen
© Elliott Erwitt

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Jitterbugging in a night club. Memphis, Tennessee, 1939
1939-11
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of John H. Wolcott
© Courtesy of Linda Wolcott Moore for the Estate of Marion Post Wolcott

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Spectators at the Paddock Fence, Warrenton, West Virginia
1941
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Robin Moore
© Courtesy of Linda Wolcott Moore for the Estate of Marion Post Wolcott

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Board of Directors of the Two Rivers Non-stock Cooperative at a Demonstration of Farmall “M” Tractor, Waterloo, Nebraska
1941
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Robin Lee Moore
© Courtesy of Linda Wolcott Moore for the Estate of Marion Post Wolcott

Marion Post Wolcott was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and educated at the New School for Social Research, New York University, and at the University of Vienna. Upon graduation in 1932, she returned to New York to pursue a career in photography and attended workshops with Ralph Steiner. By 1936, she was a freelance photographer for Life, Fortune, and other magazines. She became a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in 1937 and remained there until Paul Strand recommended her to Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration, where she worked from 1938 to 1942. Wolcott suspended her photographic career thereafter in order to raise her family, but continued to photograph periodically as she traveled and taught, in Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and New Mexico. In 1968 she returned to freelance photography in California and concentrated on colour work, which she had been producing in the early 1940s. Wolcott’s photographs have been included in group and solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, ICP, and elsewhere. Among other honours she has received are the Dorothea Lange Award, and the 1991 Society of Photographic Education’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The several books on her life and career include Paul Henrickson’s Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life of Marion Post Wolcott (1992).

Wolcott’s documentary photographs for the FSA are notable for their variation in subject matter. Because she joined the organisation late in its existence, Stryker often gave her assignments intended to complete projects already begun by others. Wolcott’s photographs show wealthy and middle-class subjects in addition to the poor people and migrant workers who appeared in most FSA photographs. Her body of work provides a view into another side of the 1930s in America, among that small percentage of people who could afford to escape the damaging effects of the Depression.

Lisa Hostetler

Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 232 “Marion Post Wolcott,” on the International Center of Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Francis J. Bruguière (American, 1879-1945)
Self-portrait with Friend
c. 1912
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of James Enyeart

This spring, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) presents Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression, a new major photography exhibition organised by PhxArt and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Tucson. It will be on view from March 8 through November 12 in the Doris and John Norton Gallery for the Center for Creative Photography at Phoenix Art Museum.

Spanning the 1910s through the present, Fashioning Self explores the long-intertwined relationship between self-expression, fashion, and the photographic medium, with more than 50 works by Dennis Feldman, Laura Volkerding, Louis Carlos Bernal, Tseng Kwong Chi, David Hume Kennerly, Helen Levitt, Teenie Harris and others drawn from the CCP collection. These fine-art photographs are displayed alongside a social-media feed of community photos and selfies to spark reflection on the dynamic between photographer and subject, particularly as new technologies, self-styling, and the photographic medium continue to shape visual culture and personal and collective identities around the globe.

“Since the mid-1800s, photographers have captured our world and the captivating cast of characters who inhabit it, documenting all the varied and nuanced presentations of style and expression,” said the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum, Jeremy Mikolajczak. “Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression sparks fascinating conversations around historical photography genres, including street photography, and how they inform contemporary evolutions, such as selfies and carefully crafted social-media platforms, while also exploring the give-and-take between self-performance and art making.”

Fashioning Self showcases 54 works of street, documentary and self-portrait photography that present slices of everyday public life in the United States from 1912 through 2015. Featured works include those by Garry Winogrand, Marion Post Wolcott, Kozo Miyoshi, Laura Volkerding, Tseng Kwong Chi, Joan Liftin and Rosalind Solomon.

The exhibition’s fine-art images are complemented by a rotating display of social-media photos reflecting community members and individuals from across the United States. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the museum and CCP will invite visitors, Arizona residents and the institutions’ collective social-media followings to snap their own selfies and portraits in the galleries or other environments and share them via the hashtag #FashioningSelf for display in Norton Gallery. By placing these contemporary, real-time images in conversation with works by renowned photographers of the Americas, the exhibition interrogates what it means to be an artist or maker when cameras are commonplace and everyone curates a feed.

“I am excited for visitors to contribute their own photos to Fashioning Self and engage with works from CCP’s collection in a fun and unique way,” said Rebecca A. Senf, chief curator at CCP and curator of Fashioning Self. “By participating in the gallery’s regularly updated social-media feed, they will be included in a century-long history of photographers who have fashioned, captured and distributed visual representations of identity, while considering how technology, digital platforms, and the ubiquity of the camera continue to shape our understandings of self and each other.”

Press release from the Phoenix Art Museum

Laura Volkerding (American, 1939-1996)
Mrs. Mary Hatchett, Chicago
1979
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Laura Volkerding Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Educator and photographer Laura Volkerding (1939-1996) began her artistic career making prints and drawings, and discovered her passion for photography in 1972, at age thirty-three. Volkerding studied fine arts at the University of Louisville and the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology where she received a Master’s degree in graphic design. She taught at University of Chicago from 1970 to 1980, and then served as a senior lecturer in photography at Stanford University until her death in 1996.

Citing photographs by Walker Evans and Art Sinsabaugh, as well as Chicago’s modernist architecture as visual influences, Volkerding’s early photographic work depicts quirky vernacular architecture, campgrounds and suggestive landscapes. In the late 1970s, Laura Volkerding, Nicholas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Frank Gohlke, and Lewis Baltz were among twenty-four photographers chosen to participate in an intensive project entitled Court House that documented historic court house architecture across America. Published in 1979, the monograph Court House: A Photographic Document exhibits a diverse and inclusive examination of America’s architectural heritage. In 1980, Volkerding moved to California and embarked on a project documenting the development of the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay waterfronts creating panoramic images by joining continuous frames of 5 x 7 inch negatives into a more expansive view.

Volkerding experimented with multiple photographic formats before settling, in 1984, on the rich clarity of prints produced with a Deardorff 8 x 10 inch view camera. This same year, Volkerding discovered the subject that would drive her work for over a decade: Les Compagnons du Devoir, a French sculpture apprentice community founded in medieval times. Their history of sculptural practice and reverence for craftsmanship resonated for Volkerding. She was attracted to the figurative and architectural forms that populated their work space. Volkerding photographed classrooms and apprentice projects, foundries and workshops, and cathedral restoration projects. The images suggest the presence of the craftsmen, but are devoid of the actual artisans, thus alluding to the longer craft tradition rather than the contemporary individuals. In addition to making many photographs of Les Compagnons in France, Volkerding photographed other sculpture workshops in Quebec, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Italy, and the United States. This body of work was exhibited at Stanford in 1986; in 1988 she was awarded her second Guggenheim fellowship. The Center for Creative Photography published a related monograph, Solomon’s Temple: the European Building-Crafts Legacy, shortly before Volkerding’s death.

The Laura Volkerding Endowment and the naming of the Laura Volkerding Reading Room at the Center for Creative Photography serve to perpetuate her important role in photography. The Laura Volkerding Archive contains photographic work prints, negatives, personal papers, and a substantial collection of multi-colour intaglio prints and one-colour lithographs, as well as 968 fine prints.

Anonymous. “Laura Volkerding,” on the Centre for Creative Photography Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Laura Volkerding (American, 1939-1996)
Easter, Chicago
1979
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Laura Volkerding Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

“Our choices about clothing, makeup, hairstyles and accessories are a component of the way we communicate who we are, what we value, and what is important to us,” says Rebecca A. Senf, Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography …

“These prints are not just evidence of the photographer’s process; they are also evidence of the self presentation process of the people who appear in the pictures,” says Senf. “When you have your portrait made, there’s a process that goes behind thinking about what you’ll wear, how you’ll do your hair and what kind of sense of yourself are you trying to convey through the picture.”

Featuring works by Helen Levitt, Tseng Wong Chi, Charles “Teenie” Harris and Dennis Feldman, among others, Fashioning Self considers both the formal and informal ways in which people employ visual signifiers to transit their identities to the world. Whether donning ball gowns and fur wraps, cowboy hats and boots, bandana and chest tattoos, or unironic trucker hats, each subject conveys an intuitive sense of ease and authenticity that comes from being true to who they are.

Senf brings this integrity to the curation of the show, offering a broad array of images sparkling with individual expressions of character and poise that can resonate with the widest possible audience. “One of the most exciting things about photography is that it’s functioning as a visual language and people are using it to communicate ideas,” she says.

Miss Rosen. “Symbiotic relationship between art and identity,” on the Huck website Monday 14 August 2023 [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
Helene Mayer, Two Time Olympic Fencing Champion
1935
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
John Gutmann Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

John Gutmann received his bachelor’s degree from the State Academy of Arts and Crafts in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) and studied with master painter Otto Mueller, one of the founding members of the New Realist movement in Germany. Gutmann moved to Berlin in 1927 where he earned his master’s degree at the State Institute for Higher Education. The arts were flourishing in Berlin, and the city’s vibrant social scene provided inspiration for subject matter and aesthetic. Gutmann’s paintings were done in the vein of well-known German painter Otto Dix, who represented Berlin nightlife as both dizzily exciting and darkly isolating. In 1933, due to the rise of the Nazi regime, Gutmann was no longer able to exhibit his paintings or teach and began to experiment with photography as a means of supporting himself. He bought a Rolleiflex camera, shot three rolls of film, and immediately secured a contract with a German agency, Presse-Foto, to photograph in America and send pictures back for German publications. That same year he arrived in San Francisco and started to document America from the detached eye of an anthropologist. By 1936 he had secured a teaching position at San Francisco State College, where a decade later he founded its creative photography program, one of the first in the country. By the end of the thirties, Gutmann switched agencies to Pix, Inc., a New York-based agency, which promoted his work for publication in magazines such as Time, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Look. During World War II, he studied at the Signal Corps Motion Picture School in Queens and made still and motion pictures for the United States Army Signal Corps. He focused much of his work during this time on China, Burma, and India. Gutmann retired from teaching in 1973 and began to print and edit his earlier work for exhibition and publication. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a two-man exhibition in 1976 of John Gutmann and Walker Evan’s work focusing on images of the Great Depression and the American culture that emerged from it. Two years later he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1984 his first publication titled The Restless Decade was published by Harry N. Abrams, showcasing his work from the 1930s. Beginning in 1989 a major retrospective, Beyond the Document, traveled from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gutmann died on June 12, 1998 in San Francisco.

Gutmann brings a strong modernist sensibility to his black-and-white documentary photographs. Using a Rolleiflex camera and shooting from the waist, he combines unusual angles, close cropping, and careful – almost classical – framing to create works that are as poetic as they are impactful. Like Walker Evans, he finds beauty in ordinary and everyday subjects such as advertisements, street scenes, and automobiles–subjects he would return to throughout his career. His straight-style depictions of Depression-era America often include an element of humour, capturing quiet moments of human drama, charged with anxiety, but also hope.

Anonymous. “John Gutmann,” on the International Center of Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Joan Liftin (American, 1933-2023)
Drive-in Owners, North Carolina
1987
Chromogenic print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Helen Levitt
© Joan Liftin

Joan Liftin (American, 1933-2023)
Marseille
2008
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Andrea Stern
© Joan Liftin

Joan Liftin (American, 1933-2023)
70-40, Clairsville, Ohio
1978
Dye coupler print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of artist
© Joan Liftin

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Untitled
1973
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. John Knaus
© The Rogovin Collection

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Untitled
1985
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. John Knaus
© The Rogovin Collection

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Untitled
1992
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. John Knaus
© The Rogovin Collection

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Untitled
1963
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy
© The Rogovin Collection

Rollie McKenna (American, 1918-2003)
David Jackson and James Merrill, Stonington, Connecticut
1961
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Rosalie Thorne McKenna Archive
© Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation

David Noyes Jackson (September 16, 1922 – July 13, 2001) was the life partner of poet James Merrill (1926-1995).

A writer and artist, Jackson is remembered today primarily for his literary collaboration with Merrill. The two men met in May 1953 in New York City, after a performance of Merrill’s play, “The Bait.” They shared homes in Stonington, Connecticut, Key West, Florida, and Athens, Greece. “It was, I often thought, the happiest marriage I knew,” wrote Alison Lurie, who got to know both men in the 1950s and thought enough of the relationship to write a memoir about it more than forty years later, Familiar Spirits (2001).

Over the course of decades conducting séances with a Ouija board, Merrill and Jackson took down supernatural transcriptions and messages from otherworldly entities. Merrill’s and Jackson’s ouija transcriptions were first published in verse form in The Book of Ephraim (printed for the first time in Divine Comedies, 1976, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1977).

Jackson collaborated with James Merrill on much of his most significant poetic output. The Book of Ephraim (1976), Mirabell: Books of Number (1978), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980) were all written with Jackson’s assistance. Together, they constitute the epic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover, a 560-page apocalyptic poem published in its entirety in 1982.

He and James Merrill are buried side by side at Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington. Jackson’s former wife and Merrill’s friend, Doris Sewell Jackson is buried behind them.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Rollie McKenna (American, 1918-2003)
Georgia O’Keeffe with René d’Harnoncourt, Director of MoMA, at the Georges Seurat Opening, NYC
1958
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Rosalie Thorne McKenna Archive
© Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation

Rosalie Thorne “Rollie” McKenna (November 15, 1918 – June 14, 2003) was an American photographer. Writers photographed by McKenna include Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Truman Capote. McKenna had a long-term friendship with John Malcolm Brinnin, who helped her come in contact with many of the people she photographed. In addition to portraiture, McKenna also had an interest in architecture, particularly the architecture of Stonington, Connecticut.

John Yang (American, 1933-2009)
Untitled
1948
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
John Yang Archive
© Naomi Yang

John Yang (1933-2009) was an American architect and photographer. Born in China, he settled in the United States with his family in 1939. His interest in photography began as a child and was later developed when he was a student at The Putney School in Vermont where he was classmates with other future photographers such as Tim Asch. In the summer of 1951, he studied with Minor White at The California School of the Fine Arts. He graduated from Harvard College majoring in Philosophy, and in 1957 he earned a MA in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania studying under Louis Kahn. Before becoming a photographer full-time, Yang worked as an architect and continued in that practice until 1978.

Yang photographed the architecture and streets of New York as well as the surrounding landscape and gardens. Using traditional equipment and alternative darkroom techniques, he produced exquisite large format contact prints, often toned rich magentas: 11″ x 14″, 8″ x 10″, 5″ x 7″ and 10″ x 78″ panoramas. All work was printed by Yang himself.

Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023)
Ronis Wedding II, Easton Pennslyvania
January 1989
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Purchase
© Larry Fink

Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023)
Melzer Family Picnic, Eastport, Long Island, New York
June 2002
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Purchase
© Larry Fink

Harold Jones (American, b. 1940)
John and Sandy’s Wedding
1980
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Harold Jones
© Harold Jones

Harold Jones (born 1940) has contributed to photography as an artist, educator, curator and arts administrator. Born in Morristown, New Jersey in 1940, he graduated from the Maryland Institute with a BFA in Painting and Photography, and from the University of New Mexico with an MFA in Art History and Photography. After graduation Jones worked as an assistant curator at the George Eastman House and in 1971 became the first director of LIGHT Gallery in New York City, the first gallery to exclusively represent contemporary photographers, such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer. In 1975 Jones became the founding director of the Center for Creative Photography and then went on to start the photography program at the University of Arizona where he taught for the next 30 years. Presently he is professor emeritus and volunteer coordinator of the Voices of Photography oral history project at the Center. Jones continues to be a constant student and practitioner of photography.

Harold Jones’s photography is difficult to categorise, and there are no generalisations that satisfactorily describe his varied body of work. His original training in painting and photography led to a practice that Jones referred to as “photodrawings” – gelatin silver prints worked with a variety of hand-coloured surfaces. Over the years, Jones used ink, food colouring, and oil paints as well as a variety of chemical toners to produce effects that range from subtle to direct. The resulting images are unique and cannot be duplicated. Initially he was ambivalent about altering the surfaces of his prints, feeling that it was an impure practice, but ultimately concluded that creating the photograph was the first phase of drawing, and surface treatments and colouring constituted the second phase. Jones’ approach has varied even within his unaltered prints. He has worked with both multiple and long-duration exposures to capture motion. Jones’s subjects are everyday objects arranged in compositions that require viewing and re-viewing. The photographer has described his delight in the process in which a person moves beyond a superficial reading of his work for closer inspection. His images reinforce the idea that a world continues beyond the picture plane; that one is seeing a fragment of a larger whole. Although he often photographs mundane objects, such as a water tower or laundry hanging, his unusual vantage points or unexpected cropping, produce a range of effects from humour to mystery.

The Harold Jones Archive contains over 150 prints, including a number of unique photodrawings, correspondence, biographical materials, teaching and exhibition files, records of the Society for Photographic Education, publications and clippings, and ephemera covering his career. Correspondents include Robert Heinecken, Jim Alinder, Robert Fichter, Beaumont Newhall, Jerry Uelsmann, and many others. An archive highlight is: University: A Photographic Inquiry, 1984-85: a 2-volume maquette from a project titled Universe City, containing 44 gelatin silver prints and 3 colour prints. Jones’s career can also be studied at the Center for Creative Photography through the LIGHT Gallery archive.

Anonymous. “Harold Jones,” on the International Center of Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

John Simmons (American, b. 1950)
The Cotillion
2015
Inkjet print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the artist
© John Simmons

Miguel A. Gandert (American, b. 1956)
Juanito with Jesus Tattoo, Albuerquerque, NM
1986
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Alan Manley
© Miguel Gandert

David Hume Kennerly (American, b. 1947)
President Barack Obama And First Lady Michelle Obama Attend The Inaugural Balls
2009
Chromogenic print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
David Hume Kennerly Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

David Hume Kennerly (born March 9, 1947) is an American photographer. He won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his portfolio of photographs of the Vietnam War, Cambodia, East Pakistani refugees near Calcutta, and the Ali-Frazier fight in Madison Square Garden. He has photographed every American president since Lyndon B Johnson. He is the first presidential scholar at the University of Arizona.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Rosalind Solomon (American, b. 1930)
On the Ranch, Wyoming, USA
1977
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Rosalind Solomon Archive
© Rosalind Solomon, all rights reserved

The photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon turned her camera on Washington, D.C., between 1977 and 1979. With access to spaces ranging from artist studios to the White House, Solomon made probing portraits, such as this one of First Lady Rosalynn Carter aboard Air Force 2. During her years as first lady, Carter (born in Plains, Georgia, in 1927) expanded the role of the presidential spouse, regularly attending cabinet meetings and representing her husband, Jimmy Carter, in an official capacity at home and abroad.

Carter continues to devote her life to public service. For more than four decades, she has championed the needs of people with mental illness while also advocating on behalf of numerous other causes, including the Equal Rights Amendment, early childhood immunisation, the Cambodian refugee crisis, and homelessness. In 1982, she and her husband co-founded the Carter Center to promote peace and human rights worldwide. They jointly received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999.

Text from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery website

Rosalind Solomon (American, b. 1930)
First Lady Rosalyn Carter, Airforce 2 en route Orlando, USA
1978
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Rosalind Solomon Archive
© Rosalind Solomon, all rights reserved

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

Opening hours:
Monday and Tuesday Museum closed
Wednesday: 10am – 7pm
Thursday – Sunday: 10am – 5pm

Phoenix Art Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 4th April – 9th July, 2023

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Two Women at a Parade
1978
Gelatin silver print
Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan Museum purchase
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Engaging each other in light

Dialogue: Old English dialogas (plural), from Latin from Greek dialogos, from dia ‘through’ + logos ‘word’

“As we define it, dialogue is “a communicative process in which people with different perspectives seek understanding.” To be in dialogue means that participants are not only engaging each other in light of their different views, but they are also striving to achieve a degree of mutual understanding.”

Jason Combs. “What is Dialogue?” on the University of Dayton website Monday October 28, 2019 [Online] Cited 01/07/2023

Short and sweet because I’m not feeling well.

What an inspired pairing for an exhibition. “Each [artist] addresses race, class, representation, and systems of power in their work, creating photographic series grounded in Black history and realities that speak to the human condition.”

From street-based photographs of everyday life to conceptual excavations of Black Histories, they produce incisive thought provoking works “that intermingle past and present, referenc[ing] African Americans whose lives and stories have been co-opted or lost.”

I love them both for their commitment to and passion for life in all its different forms. Bringing people together. Expressing a degree of mutual understanding.

#BlackLivesMatter #AllLivesMatter

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.

Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems have been friends and colleagues for more than 40 years. Each addresses race, class, representation, and systems of power in their work, creating photographic series grounded in Black history and realities that speak to the human condition. This exhibition sheds light on their unique trajectories and modes of presentation, and their shared consciousness and principles. Organised by the Grand Rapids Art Museum.

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
The Woman in the Light, Harlem, NY
1980
Gelatin silver print
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Self and Shadow, New York, NY
1980
Gelatin silver print
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Young Man Resting on an Exercise Bike, Amityville, NY
1988
Gelatin silver print
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Couple in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY
1990
Gelatin silver print Getty Museum
© Dawoud Bey

In 1976 I had been making photographs for a couple of years. I had certainly been looking at a lot more photographs than I had actually made. From looking at photographs in books and magazines and going to exhibitions of pictures by Mike Disfarmer at MoMA, Richard Avedon at Marlborough, and haunting whatever other places there were to see photographs in New York in the early 1970s, I had begun to educate myself, with the intent of adding something to the conversation through my own pictures.

The artist Janet Henry, who was from the same Jamaica, Queens neighborhood that I lived in, had gotten a job in the Education Department at the Studio Museum in Harlem, then located above a Kentucky Fried Chicken on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in a large second floor loft space. When Frank Stewart, the museum’s staff photographer and photo teacher, left to do a commissioned project in Cuba, Janet called me and asked if I would take over the class. On the first day of class a few students straggled in. One of them, a seemingly shy woman with big expressive eyes, introduced herself, “Hi, my name is Carrie. Do you think I could be a photographer?” she asked, holding her Leica camera in her hand. That began what has now been 33 years of friendship and camaraderie with one of the most brilliant people I know.

From the very beginning, Carrie Mae Weems has had a sharp intelligence that was looking for a way into the world. From her early documentary photographs to the more expansive and materially varied recent works, she has consistently set out to visually define the world on her own terms and to redefine for all of us the nature of the world that we are in. After all these years I still anticipate her work with a fresh sense of wonderment, knowing that her restless search for the deeper meaning of things will yield a continuing rich trove of objects and images. On a Sunday morning in May I called from my home in Chicago to reconnect with my dear friend while she was traveling in Seville, Spain.

Dawoud Bey quoted in “Carrie Mae Weems by Dawoud Bey,” on the BOMB Magazine website July 1, 2009 [Online] Cited 18/06/2023

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Taneesha
1999
Dye diffusion prints
Collection of Jack and Sandra Guthman
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
The Birmingham Project: Wallace Simmons and Eric Allums
2012
Inkjet prints
Rennie Collection, Vancouver
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
The Birmingham Project: Taylor Falls and Deborah Hackworth
2012
Inkjet prints
Rennie Collection, Vancouver
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
The Birmingham Project: Braxton McKinney and Lavone Thomas
2012
Inkjet prints
Rennie Collection, Vancouver
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
The Birmingham Project: Betty Selvage and Faith Speights
2012
Inkjet prints
Rennie Collection, Vancouver
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Boy on Skateboard, Harlem, NY
2014
Inkjet print
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Former Renaissance Ballroom Site, Harlem, NY
2015
Inkjet print
© Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Untitled #15 (Forest with Small Trees)
2017
Gelatin silver print
Getty Museum, purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Dawoud Bey

Since meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1977, Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems have been intellectual colleagues and companions.

From the outset of their careers, both have operated from a deep social commitment to participate in, describe, and define culture. In seeking to express themselves fully, each has expanded possibilities within photography and video to address their chosen subjects.

Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue, on view April 4 through July 9, 2023, brings together for the first time a focused selection of work from a period of over 40 years by two of today’s most important and influential photo-based artists. Each grapples with issues of race, class, and representation in their work, making art grounded in the experiences and realities of Black Americans while also speaking to the broader human condition.

“The Museum’s Department of Photographs has made great strides in recent years in building an exhibitions program that highlights more expansive narratives of photographic history,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems are two artists who reframe American traumas that have been ignored or simplified in the national historical record. We are proud to showcase their work in dialogue with one another.”

Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs, adds, “These artists are two of the most dynamic and insightful of our time. As presented in this extraordinary exhibition, their eloquent dialogue gives unique perspective on their shared concerns as image makers.”

Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953) creates photographs that focus on individuals, communities, and important but often overlooked American histories. His carefully composed images convey the dignity and rich inner lives of his subjects. Carrie Mae Weems (American, born 1953) first gained recognition in the 1980s for exploring identity, race, power, and history, themes that still fuel her art. Over her career, Weems has turned increasingly to staged photography and the use of text to heighten the emotional intensity of her work.

This exhibition is divided into five sections, starting with early pictures that both artists made in the photodocumentary tradition and followed by ambitious, groundbreaking explorations of the medium as it developed technologically and artistically. The exhibition then focuses on how both artists moved beyond candid pictures of everyday life and began making larger scale work that is more planned than spontaneous. Bey’s portraiture evolved from street-based glimpses of the world made with a handheld camera to portraits that are formal but intimate, in which his subjects appear at ease and engage directly with the lens. With her Kitchen Table Series, Weems transitioned from representing real people in their natural environments to creating staged photo essays. For each artist, the techniques developed in this period became the foundation for future projects.

In Resurrecting Black Histories, each artist addresses the 19th century and its legacies in distinctive ways. Bey’s carefully composed landscapes evoke the experience of fleeing along the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network that helped enslaved people escape the South. Weems, by incorporating texts that intermingle past and present, references African Americans whose lives and stories have been co-opted or lost.

In Memorial & Requiem, Bey and Weems reference traumatic 20th-century events. They worked with community partners to stage scenes meant to reinvigorate discussion of the American legacy of racial violence. Each photographer also created a related video, bringing their own sensibility – Bey’s searching, intimate gaze; Weems’ choreographed social commentary – to the moving image, using sequencing and sound to deepen engagement with American history.

The exhibition ends with Revelation in the Landscape, where both Bey and Weems contemplate the built environments in which we live and how those spaces affect our perceptions of the world and ourselves. Bey returns to the Harlem neighbourhoods he photographed in the late 1970s, tracking the changes wrought by gentrification. Weems photographs imposing sites in Rome, inserting herself into historical places imbued with power and legacy. Both series reveal the economic and institutional forces that shape daily life.

In conjunction with the exhibition Getty has created a community program inspired by the exhibition, L.A.: In Dialogue. This program brings Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue to a wider Los Angeles community, furthering the influence of the two artists and introducing their work to a new generation of artists and viewers. The artist-led program will host educational workshops for local teens and young adult photographers, and will teach participants techniques in black-and-white photography and the artistic practice of capturing portraiture and place. They will explore themes from the exhibition, collaborate with peers, and explore their local communities: Culver City (Black Image Center), South L.A. (LA Commons), Downtown L.A. (Inner-City Arts), and Venice Beach (Venice Arts). This program will result in a satellite exhibition that will open in June 2023.

Related programming includes Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems in Conversation on Tuesday, April 4 at 4pm. That evening at 7pm, the Museum presents master saxophonist David Murray in concert with his newly formed quartet as part of the exhibition programming.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
First Self Portrait
1975
Gelatin silver print
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Harlem Street
1976-1977
Gelatin silver print
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Woman in Shorts, Boardwalk, Santa Monica
1980-1982
Gelatin silver print
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Reclining Girl, Fiji
1982-1983
Gelatin silver print
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Woman and daughter with children)
1990
Gelatin silver print
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Woman standing alone)
1990
Gelatin silver print
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup)
1990
Gelatin silver print
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
See No Evil
1991
Dye diffusion print (Polaroid Polacolor)
61 × 50.5cm (24 × 19 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Road Sign
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Ebo Landing)
1992
Two gelatin silver prints and one screenprinted text panel
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
You Became a Scientific Profile / An Anthropological Debate / A Negroid Type / A Photographic Subject
1995-1996
From From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
The Edge of Time – Ancient Rome
2006
Chromogenic print
© Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
The Tragedy of Hiroshima
2008
Inkjet print
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

The pose of the figures, other than the obvious reference to the Pieta, reminds me of that famous and most moving Eugene W. Smith photograph Tomoko and Mother in the Bath (1971)

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

Opening hours:
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The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Projects: Ming Smith’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 4th February – 29th May 2023

Projects: Ming Smith is organised by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and Habiba Hopson, Curatorial Assistant, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Circular Breathing, Hart Leroy Bibbs, Paris
1980
Vinyl wallpaper
147 1/2 × 262″ (374.7 × 665.5cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Free spirit

Another fascinating, stimulating, challenging artist finally getting their due.

Music, spirit, transcendence, light, blur, dreams, improvisation, composition, jamming, joy, rhythm, respect, wonder, emotion, African American culture. Conjoined in a mysterious, reverent wistfulness…

“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”

I feel that too. Creativity has kept the black dog from the door, creativity has helped me survive. I’m sure it does for many artists.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”

“My work as a photographer was to record, culturally, the period of time in which I lived – and I recorded it as an artist.”

“Oh no, it’s all discovery, it’s all improvisation. It’s like when jazz musicians solo. They improvise, and photography is definitely that, for me.”

“Whether I’m photographing a person on the street, someone I know, or on an assignment, I’m doing it because I admire them. I like the sense of exchange – they’re giving and I’m taking, but I’m also giving them something back. There were certain people who would understand what I was looking for and would try to give me a photograph by posing. Whatever I’m shooting, whether it’s a portrait or a place, my intention is to capture the feeling I have about that exchange and that energy.”

“I evolved as a photographer with the series Invisible Man [1990-1991], just like a jazz musician who plays the head [the known melody of a song] before they start improvising. Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man [1952] was an inspiration, especially the idea of what it means not to be seen, but I didn’t consciously set out to make work about it. I wanted to capture the feeling of painting and make photographs on an artistic scale. Living in a Black environment, the people I photographed didn’t have to put on any airs, they were just living their life. The series was about a feeling, an expression. Anyone could identify it. We were present but we weren’t there. We were visible but also invisible.”

“Living in Harlem was an authentic experience for me, and I was trying to capture that authenticity. I was living and my work came out of my life. I would go out with my camera to shoot events like the Million Youth March [1998] or meet musical figures like Dr. Edward Boatner or academics like Dr. John Henrik Clarke, and even watch Duke Ellington on TV – these people had so much history in them. Some people look at certain areas and only see the depravity and the struggle, but there’s so much love and genius there; there’s warmth. I think that was my motive in photographing Harlem, to communicate that warmth.”

Ming Smith

The moody magic of a long exposure photograph | Ming Smith | UNIQLO ArtSpeaks

Photography curator Oluremi Onabanjo examines Smith’s 1991 “Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere,” a poignant image from this series inspired by Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man.”

Installation views of Projects: Ming Smith, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from February 4, 2023 – May 29, 2023
Photos: Robert Gerhardt

The Museum of Modern Art announces Projects: Ming Smith, on view in the Museum’s street-level galleries from February 4 through May 29, 2023. A photographer who has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s, Ming Smith has served as a precedent for a generation of artists engaging the politics and poetics of the photographic image. Through a deep exploration of the artist’s archive, the exhibition will offer a critical reintroduction to Smith’s work through her distinctive approach to movement, light, rhythm, and shadow, highlighting how she transforms the image from a document of photographic capture into a space of emotive expression. Projects: Ming Smith is organised by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and Habiba Hopson, Curatorial Assistant, Permanent Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

As Oluremi C. Onabanjo states, “For Ming Smith, the photographic medium is a site where the senses and the spirit collide. Calling attention to the synesthetic range of her photographic approach, this exhibition highlights how her images collapse the senses, encouraging us to attend to the hue of sound, the rhythm of form, and the texture of vision.” Works featured in the exhibition showcase a wide array of subjects, ranging from finely attuned studies of Black avant-garde musicians and dancers to depictions of everyday life in Harlem and Pittsburgh’s Hill District through photographic series made in response to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man and August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle of plays.

Projects: Ming Smith is the fourth exhibition in MoMA’s ongoing Projects collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem. It takes up the work of a photographer who is important to the history of both museums. MoMA was the first institution to acquire Smith’s work (in 1979), and the Studio Museum has shown Smith’s work since the beginning of her career, when she was the first female member of the trailblazing Black photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop.

Thelma Golden says, “Almost from the day she arrived in New York City, Ming Smith was at the centre of an extraordinary cultural ferment, contributing to the Black Arts Movement while creating a space for herself within Harlem’s legendary Kamoinge Workshop. Working for over five decades, her contribution to modern photography is deeply significant – she continues to influence countless photographers through her singular documentation of, society’s humanity and pageantry. I’m thrilled that audiences who know her work will have the opportunity to revisit and reappraise her many achievements, and that new audiences will have the excitement of discovering her graceful, stunning images through Projects: Ming Smith.”

Projects: Ming Smith is accompanied by Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere, a new volume in MoMA’s One on One series, written by Oluremi C. Onabanjo. The book provides a sustained meditation on Smith’s photograph Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere (1991) in MoMA’s collection.

Press release from the Museum of Modern Art

Introduction

For Ming Smith, photography is a site where the senses and the spirit collide through the prism of light. “I’m dealing with all these elements, getting that precise moment,” Smith has said. “Getting the feeling, the way the light hits the person – to put it simply, these pieces are like the blues.”

Projects: Ming Smith offers a critical reintroduction to a photographer who has lived in New York since the 1970s, and whose work has served as a precedent for generations of artists engaging the politics and the poetics of the photographic image in relation to experiences of Blackness. Through her skilful deployment of long exposures – which involves slowing the shutter speed of the camera lens to render movement as blur – Smith dissolves the boundaries between her subjects and their surroundings. Her dreamlike, abstract compositions are led by intuition and perfected through repetition.

The result of a deep dive into Smith’s archive, this exhibition reckons with the crucial position of this artist in the history of photography, and in the institutional memories of both The Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. MoMA was the first institution to acquire Smith’s work (in 1979), and the Studio Museum has shown Smith’s work since the beginning of her career, when she was the first female member of the trailblazing Black photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop. Bridging the distance between the present and the past, Projects: Ming Smith creates a photographic portal through which to encounter Smith’s images anew. It highlights how her pictures collapse the senses, encouraging us to attend to the hue of sound, the rhythm of form, and the texture of vision.

Text from the Museum of Modern Art

Installation view of Projects: Ming Smith, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from February 4, 2023 – May 29, 2023
Photo: Robert Gerhardt

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Page from Projects: Ming Smith extended labels (photographs below)

3. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Sun Breeze After the Bluing, Hoboken, NJ
1972
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 72 × 47″ (182.9 × 119.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

5. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Black Dance
1981
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 40 × 60″ (101.6 × 152.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist

6. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
The Window Overlooking Wheatland Street Was My First Dreaming Place
1979
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 40 × 60″ (101.6 × 152.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

9. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Sun Ra Space II
1978
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 47 × 72″ (119.4 × 182.9cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

11. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Roxbury Interior, Boston, MA
1978
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 16 × 24″ (40.6 × 61cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

14. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Pharoah Sanders at the Bottom Line
1977
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 47 × 72″ (119.4 × 182.9cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

16. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Cascading Light
1981
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 16 × 24″ (40.6 × 61cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

The stellar photographer Ming Smith remembers walking past the Museum of Modern Art when she was in her early 20s and telling herself, “I’m going to be in that museum one day.”

Anyone hearing her might have thought: Dream on. This was the 1970s. Smith was Black, female, new to New York City, with zero art credentials of the kind demanded by any museum of even the brashest up-and-comer, which Smith – a self-described low-key loner – was not.

But even then some changes were afoot – a few, isolated, sporadic – for artists and institutions alike. In 1979, in response to an open call by MoMA’s photography department for new work, Smith dropped off her portfolio. (The receptionist assumed she was a courier.) The museum bought two pictures, making her the first Black woman photographer to enter MoMA’s collection.

Forty years later came another landmark. In 2019, when MoMA opened its new Geffen Wing and the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Smith had shown over several decades, closed to build its new home, the two institutions began collaborating on exhibitions at MoMA’s Midtown and Long Island City locations.

The current show, called “Projects: Ming Smith,” installed on the ground floor at MoMA on 53rd Street (which has free public access), is the latest of these joint ventures, and it’s a beauty. With 52 pictures, mostly black and white, several being exhibited for the first time anywhere, it gives a good sense of Smith’s subject range and of her distinctive, self-invented style: improvisatory, multilayered, painterly, shadow-soaked, with images blurred as if shot at very high or low velocity, or viewed through retreating memory, or a volcanic rain.

Born in Detroit, raised in Columbus, Ohio, Smith started taking pictures when she was young – her pharmacist father was an amateur photographer – and learned the formal ropes as she went. While majoring in premed biology at Howard University she took a photography class and was told by the teacher that, given her race and gender, her prospects of a career in that field were next to nil. After graduating in 1971, she moved to New York City, where she supported herself as a fashion model, and kept taking pictures.

She soon plugged into a crucial support system. In 1972 she joined the Kamoinge Workshop, a Black photography collective based in Harlem. Kamoinge’s first female member, she participated in their notoriously hard-hitting group crits and for a while worked closely with one of the originating members, Anthony Barboza, accompanying him on a working trip to Senegal.

As was clear from a traveling survey of Kamoinge artists organised by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2020 – it later came to the Whitney Museum – the collective’s original members were eclectic in their styles and interests. But almost all their work adhered to the genre loosely known as “street photography,” grounded in a direct capturing of images, candid and unposed, of everyday life, with results that were documentary in effect and humanistic in intent. Smith’s work basically comes out of this aesthetic too, but also radically, romantically departs from it.

Many of her images, including the 1972 “Raise Your Window High,” the show’s earliest entry, are of city life, which became a long-term subject. A selection of Harlem-related pictures includes shots of the Apollo Theater marquee, a church service in progress, Alvin Ailey’s 1989 funeral, and a fist-pumping rally for the 1998 Million Youth March.

At the same time, much of her urban photography is not event-oriented, or even geographically specific. A series of photos taken in Pittsburgh in 1991, conceived as a visual response to a series of plays by August Wilson set there, could, by the look of them, have been shot in almost any city. A woman and child sit pensively on a Greyhound bus. A man in a pool hall practices cue moves. A dark silhouette of a figure trudges at night down a snow-covered street. Mood, not place or even people, is the real subject here. The title of the snowstorm picture, “Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere,” says as much. So does the fact that the image once appeared in a MoMA show devoted to New York City.

Smith is a longtime jazz and blues devotee. She married a musician (saxophonist David Murray) and has photographed many. A visual equivalent of jazz performance has produced her most experimental work. Applied to street photography’s fairly set subject matter, her use of quick, reflexive shooting, manipulated shutter speeds, and multiple exposure printing opens the possibility for perceptual accident, and for improvisation, to be followed wherever it might lead, which is often in an abstracting direction. In addition, her penchant for framing small areas of light in fields of prevailing darkness gives a bluesy cast to all of this.

The show’s organisers — Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, an associate curator of photography at MoMA, working with curatorial fellows Kaitlin Booher and Habiba Hopson – provide a chance to consider a wide and varied sampling of work at a glance in a group of 17 photographs from the 1970s and ’80s, printed large and small, and installed up and across a high gallery wall.

Many of Smith’s favoured subjects are here: city life, performance, travel. A white cloth whips in the wind on a tenement clothesline. The moon, a vortex of brightness, hangs tangled in trees in a Tokyo park. Alvin Ailey dancers flicker like vigil lights in a dark theater. Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders looks rock-solid onstage in New York while another musician, Sun Ra, is clearly an ET about to lift off, his sparkling gold scarf streaming like a comet tail behind him.

There’s a street-level mystic at work in Smith’s art. You sense it in her tremorous cityscapes, especially in her images of people – the primary subject, after all, of street photography. She shoots straightforward portraits, sometimes identifying the sitter by name (composer Edward Boatner; dancer Judith Jamison; writer Amiri Baraka), sometimes not. She makes self-portraits, though they’re hard to read. In one from 1992 called “Womb,” which Smith shot on a trip to Egypt, she appears to be emanating, barely materialised, from a pyramid behind her.

And then there are what I can only call holy pictures in which charismatic figures are transcendentally lifted up. In one, from 1979, titled “James Baldwin in Setting Sun Over Harlem,” Smith, using double exposure, overlays very faintly a photo she took of Baldwin onto a skyscape of light-shot dark clouds. In a second picture using the same technique, she floats above the city the visage of the immortal Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee. Sure, these images are just blatant hero worship. They’re also, like so much of Smith’s art, just wow.

Holland Cotter. “Ming Smith’s Poetic Blur,” on The New York Times website 16 February 2023 [Online] Cited 19/02/2023

1970s

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
West Indian Parade, Brooklyn
1972
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 × 18 1/2″ (30.5 × 47cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Luxembourg Gardens, Paris
1974
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 13 × 18 1/2″ (33 × 47cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Oopdeedoo, Brooklyn
1976
from the series Coney Island
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 17 3/4 × 13″ (45.1 × 33cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Jump, Harlem, New York
1976
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 × 13 1/2″ (48.3 × 34.3cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Professor Edward Boatner, New York City, New York
1979
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 3/4 × 18 1/4″ (32.4 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
James Baldwin in Setting Sun Over Harlem, New York
1979
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 1/2 × 18 1/4″ (31.8 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Amina and Amiri Baraka “Lovers,” New York
1980
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 13 × 18 1/2″ (33 × 47cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

“The image is always moving, even if you’re standing still.”

Ming Smith

“I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out,” the photographer Ming Smith has said. “I go with my intuition… it’s about always looking at lines and the quality of the movement. It’s about seeking energy, breath, and light. The image is always moving, even if you’re standing still.”1 For Smith, these are the central tenets of her approach to image-making: a practice attuned to bodily movement and spatial relations that maintains a commitment to the poetry of light and shadow.

In the early 1970s, Smith arrived in New York City after graduating from Howard University. She had studied microbiology and chemistry, but took the university’s only photography class to sustain a passion for the image inculcated in her by her father. Supporting herself as a model while shooting on the city streets, Smith spent time in Anthony Barboza’s studio and met photographers such as Louis Draper and Joe Crawford, swiftly becoming immersed in fiery debates about the stakes of photography as an art form.2 In 1972, Draper invited Smith to join The Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African American photographers who gathered weekly to review and critique each other’s work. Its name derived from the Kikuyu word for “a group of people acting together,” Kamoinge was founded in 1963 and emerged as a shared political and artistic space for photographic improvement and, especially, self-determination. It was a powerful sentiment at a time of pivotal gains for the US Civil Rights Movement and decolonization across the African continent.

Joining Kamoinge was transformational for Smith’s photography and self-perception as an artist. She cut her teeth as a photographer and sharpened her conceptual focus, mining the structural and psychological tensions that animate experiences of Blackness. By turns dense and diaphanous, Smith’s pictures sustain hefty blacks alongside frothy swirls of gray and white. These mercurial, moody scenes resist spectacular clarity or straightforward interpretation. As historian and curator Maurice Berger has said, “Ms. Smith’s subjects are often suspended between visibility and invisibility: faces turned away, or are blurred or shrouded in shadow, mist or darkness, a potent metaphor of the struggle for African-American visibility in a culture in which black men and women were disparaged, erased or ignored.”3 In this way, Smith gives shape to the quotidian idiosyncrasies of Black life.

In an unending oscillation between light and darkness, Smith revels in the emotive elements of her subjects. Key to this is the photographer’s command of the blur, which critic Jessica Lynne succinctly defines as “the technique by which Smith collapses the boundaries between a photograph’s subject and its background.”4 Executed with rhythmic pacing and maintaining an acuity of vision, her engagement with sonic and lyrical forms is particularly notable. Subjects and captions refer to the plays of August Wilson, the words of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and the music of Marvin Gaye and Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and David Murray. These intertextual references bring forward recognizable figures while affirming the function of these photographs as speculative compositions, shaped through intuition. “In the art of photography, I’m dealing with light, I’m dealing with all these elements, getting that precise moment,” Smith has said. “Getting the feeling, getting the way the light hits the person – to put it simply, these pieces are like the blues.”5

Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, 2022

1/ Ming Smith quoted in “A Portrait of the Artist: Ming Smith in Conversation with Janet Hill Talbert,” in Ming Smith (New York & Dallas: Aperture & Documentary Arts, 2020). 15.

2/ Ibid., 12.

3/ Berger, Maurice. “A Photographer Who Made Ghosts Visible,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017. Accessed online. https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/a-photographer-who-made-ghosts-visible-ming-smith/

4/ Lynne, Jessica. “Jessica Lynne Revisits Ming Smith’s ‘Amina and Amiri Baraka (Lovers),'” Frieze, August 20, 2020. Accessed online. https://www.frieze.com/article/jessica-lynne-revisits-ming-smiths-amina-and-amiri-baraka-lovers

5/ Ming Smith quoted in “Photographer Ming Smith Shows Just How Much Black Life Matters,” by Siddhartha Mitter. The Village Voice, February 7, 2017. Accessed online. https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/02/07/photographer-ming-smith-shows-just-how-much-black-life-matters/

1990s

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere
1991
Oil paint on gelatin silver print
18 11/16 × 12 9/16″ (47.4 × 32cm)
Gift of Kathleen Lingo in memory of Linda McCartney
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
The Black Jewels of the U.S.A. II
c. 1991
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Little Brown Baby Wif Spak’lin’ Eyes, For Paul Laurence Dunbar
1991
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 × 18 1/4″ (30.5 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Greyhound Bus, Pittsburgh
1991
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 22 1/4 × 17″ (56.5 × 43.2cm)
Image: 18 × 12″ (45.7 × 30.5cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
August Blues
1991
From Invisible Man
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 × 13 1/2″ (48.3 × 34.3cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
African Burial Ground, Sacred Space
1991
From Invisible Man
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 24″ (50.8 × 61cm)
Image: 12 1/2 × 18 1/4″ (31.8 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Mother and Child Deciding, Pittsburgh
1991
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 3/4 × 14″ (50.2 × 35.6cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

In Mother and Child Deciding (1991), a young woman is seated at a diner booth with a child, both bundled in winter jackets. Her body is turned to the right, with her leg hoisted onto the booth’s seat, revealing a worn sneaker; her right elbow is placed on the booth’s table, and her little finger touches her lower lip. Her turned face and her outward gaze into the middle distance indicate that she is contemplating the menu posted on a board, or the photographs hung on the wall above the wood paneling. But her wistful face tells us that her thoughts are occupied by worries that have accompanied her here – worries that she cannot share with the child.

M. Neelika Jayawardane. “Ming Smith’s Photographic Tribute to August Wilson,” on the Aperture website February 4, 2021 [Online] Cited 07/05/2023

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Yes, Immigrants
1991
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 × 13 1/2″ (48.3 × 34.3cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Past Any Reason for Song
1991
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 1/2 × 18 1/4″ (31.8 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Womb
1992
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 × 18″ (30.5 × 45.7cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Khalid Muhammad, Million Youth March, Harlem, New York
1998
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 18 3/4 × 13 1/4″ (47.6 × 33.7cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Million Youth March, Raised Fists, Harlem, New York
1998
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 × 13 1/2″ (48.3 × 34.3cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

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Phone: (212) 708-9400

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Exhibition: ‘Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media’ at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Exhibition dates: 3rd March – 14th May 2023

Curator: Julie Robinson is Senior Curator, Prints, Drawings and Photographs at AGSA

Bob Adelman (American, 1930-2016)
Andy Warhol on the red couch at the Factory, New York
1964
Pigment print
Courtesy of Bob Adelman Estate

LOOK – SOCIAL

CELEBRITY–POLAROID

SELF – PORTRAIT

STUDIO–STREET

SCREEN – PRINT

QUEER – INFLUENCE(R)

CAMP–POP

PHOTO–GRAPHIC – PRODUCTION

PICTURE–ART

the photograph is a vehicle for performance

“In the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture …. The gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which – if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form – I am photo-graphed.”

~ Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 106

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

SEE MORE INTERESTING AND ESSENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDY WARHOL:

1/ Andy Warhol unplugged 2 May 2015

2/ Andy Warhol unplugged December 2014

3/ ‘Andy Warhol: Polaroids / MATRIX 240’ at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, January – May 2012

Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media reveals an unseen side of celebrated Pop artist Andy Warhol through his career-long obsession with photography. Whether he was behind or in front of the camera, photography formed an essential part of his artistic practice while also capturing an insider’s view of his celebrity social world.

Exclusive to AGSA, this exhibition features photographs, experimental films and paintings by Warhol, including his famed Pop Art portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley from the 1960s. It also contains works by his photographic collaborators and creative contemporaries such as Christopher Makos, Gerard Malanga, Robert Mapplethorpe, David McCabe, and Duane Michals.

Decades before social media, Warhol’s photography was candid, collaborative and social, attuned to the power of the image to shape his public persona and self-identity. Many of his photographs from the 1970s and 1980s offer behind-the-scenes glimpses into his own life and the lives of friends and celebrities such as Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Liza Minnelli, Lou Reed and Elizabeth Taylor. This exhibition asks the question, was Warhol the original influencer?

Text from the AGSA website

“A good picture is … of a famous person doing something unfamous. It’s about being in the right place at the wrong time.”

Andy Warhol

“Warhol was a famously detached person, and numerous accounts call attention to the verbal, psychological and technological barriers the artist created between himself and the world around him. Yet, here he describes technology as integrated into the social dynamic of the Factory. Photography became a vital tool in the formation and commemoration of this emerging countercultural community, and the photographs of Name, Berlin and other Factory denizens document everything from the making Warhol’s films and paintings to the Factory crowd at lunch at the local diner. Similar to the family reunion, the tourist vacation or a growing child, the Factory seems to realise itself through this kind of documentation. As the saying goes: pictures, or it didn’t happen.”

Catherine Zuromskis, Associate Professor, School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, College of Art and Design, at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

“In subtitling the show, A Social Media, Robinson is emphasising the way Warhol surrounded himself with two kinds of people: those who were to be photographed, and those who were photographing him. In the first category there was room for the whole world. In the second, we find a succession of photographers of varying levels of professionalism. Early on there is Billy Name, who took over camera duties when Warhol became bored with the technical stuff. There was David McCabe, whom Warhol paid to follow and photograph him for a whole year in 1964-65. There were long-term friends and colleagues such as Brigid Berlin and Gerard Malanga; and finally, Makos, a constant companion in the latter part of Warhol’s career, who took those startling pictures of the artist made up as a glamorous blonde woman.

John McDonald. “Fame is power: Andy Warhol’s embarrassing pictures of the rich and famous,” on The Sydney Morning Herald website April 28, 2023 [Online] Cited 03/05/2023

Christopher Makos on Andy Warhol

Henry Gillespie on Andy Warhol

Installation views of the exhibition Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Photos: Saul Steed

“My idea of a good photograph is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous. It’s being in the right place at the wrong time.”

~ Andy Warhol

The first exhibition in Australia to explore Andy Warhol’s career-long obsession with photography opens at the Art Gallery of South Australia on 3 March 2023, as part of the 2023 Adelaide Festival. Exclusive to Adelaide, Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media will reveal an unseen side of the celebrated Pop artist through more than 250 works, spanning photographs, experimental films, screenprints and paintings, many on display in Australia for the first time.

Warhol’s close friend and collaborator, Christopher Makos, will travel from New York City to join Andy Warhol and Photography curator Julie Robinson in conversation as part of the exhibition’s opening weekend program. Speaking about his decade-long friendship with Warhol and his own career as a photographer, Makos will reminisce about his time as part of Warhol’s inner circle, socialising with celebrities at Studio 54 and Warhol’s studio, always with a camera by his side.

Decades before social media, Warhol’s photography was candid, collaborative and social, attuned to the power of the image to shape his public persona and self-identity. Andy Warhol and Photography offers a fresh perspective on the influential artist, as well as behind-the-scenes glimpses into his own life and the lives of friends and celebrities, including Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Liza Minnelli, Lou Reed and Elizabeth Taylor.

Headlining the 2023 Adelaide Festival’s visual arts program, Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media is curated by AGSA’s Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs, bringing together works from national and international collections, as well as AGSA’s own extensive collection of 45 Warhol photographs which will be shown together for the first time.

AGSA Director, Rhana Devenport ONZM says, ‘Some 35 years after his death, this exhibition attests to Andy Warhol’s enduring relevance as an artist and cultural figure in an era defined by social media. With cross-generational appeal, this is an exhibition of our times which begs the question, was Warhol the original influencer?’

Revealing Warhol from both in front of and behind the camera, the exhibition will also feature works by his photographic collaborators and creative contemporaries such as Brigid Berlin, Nat Finkelstein, Christopher Makos, Gerard Malanga, Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals and Billy Name. Andy Warhol and Photography will also include iconic Warhol paintings never-before-seen in Adelaide, including his famed Pop Art portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley from the 1960s, demonstrating how Warhol translated many of his photographs into paintings and screenprints.

Exhibition curator, Julie Robinson says, ‘Photography underpinned Warhol’s whole artistic practice – both as an essential part of his working method and as an end in its own right. He took some 60,000 photographs in his lifetime. His candid images, which capture his own life as well as the lives of his celebrity friends, offer audiences a revealing insight into Warhol the person, taking viewers beneath the veneer of his Pop paintings and persona.’

Adelaide Festival Artistic Director, Ruth Mackenzie CBE, said, ‘It is thrilling to be working with AGSA to explore Andy Warhol’s ground-breaking work which speaks so immediately to everybody. Today more than ever, with the popularity of social media, Warhol’s idea of 15 minutes of fame is incredibly relatable and this exhibition will be a must-see during the festival season next year.’

Press release from the AGSA

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Elvis
1963
Synthetic polymer paint and screenprint on canvas
208.0 x 91.0cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1973
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

The cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz gave a name to the process by which those outside a social, racial, or sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture, not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary representations (staying in their own lane, so to speak), but by transforming mainstream representations for their own purposes. They might do this by identifying with models of aspiration or experience denied to them. Muñoz called this ‘disidentification’; to ‘disidentify’ was ‘to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject’ with which one was ‘not culturally coded to “connect”‘.[7] LGBTQI people have long understood this kind of identification intuitively. (This is not quite the same as drag, though there is similar energy in drag-ball performances of categories like ‘Executive Realness’, for example.[8]) Disidentifying means identifying in spite of, or at an angle to, the model prescribed for you by a dominant culture; it involves the scrambling and reconstructing of coded meanings of cultural objects to expose the encoded message’s universalising – and therefore exclusionary – machinations, recircuiting its workings to include and empower minority identifications.[9]

We see something like this in the early works by Warhol that draw on found photography. Elvis, 1963, [fig1, above] for instance, uses a publicity still from the iconic singer’s role in the Western Flaming Star (1960) as the basis for an image that references the sex idol star’s performative embodiment of a particular mythic trope of US masculinity – the frontiersman caught on the edge of a moral dilemma. The ‘outlaw sensibility’ associated with such a model, Elisa Glick argues, came to signify in gay male culture in a version of what Muñoz would call disidentification.[10] Other examples might include Montgomery Clift in Red River, or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (not a Western, but with similar energies).[11] Apparently straight figures, apparently the embodiment of the spirit of liberty, promise and rebellion, a heady (and sometimes internally contradictory) mix in popular US culture, they are also objects of coded identification at an angle (of disidentification) for queer subjects, black subjects (etcetera).

Elvis is emblematic of Warhol’s interest in performance and replication, in other words, but also, viewed as an act of disidentification, deeply transgressive. Most of the celebrities the artist would go on to image in similar serial form would be female, often women who had suffered some kind of trauma. These are disidentificatory subjects too, but they are also perhaps more cautious models for a queer artist (especially one whose sensibilities were formed before the Stonewall Rising), whether models of resilience or of sacrifice, in a hostile, straight-male-dominated world. Or, as Jonathan Katz argues, activating the suggestiveness of Warhol’s most iconic represented commodity, they constitute ‘camp bells’ (perhaps also belles) in Warhol’s oeuvre.[12] They announce something, chiming with popular press adoration of the beautiful, but they do not sound the alarm bells that might have rung had Warhol focused (only) on beautiful men. Perhaps there was something too obviously queer in Elvis more easily hidden in plain sight in representations of women.

Extract from Andrew van der Vlies. “Andy Warhol’s Queer Practice: Disidentification and Utopian Desire,” on the Art Gallery of South Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 03/05/2023

[7] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999, p. 12.
[8] One might recall the memorable Harlem Ballroom scenes in Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning (1990).
[9] See Muñoz, Disidentifications, p. 31.
[10] Elisa Glick, Materializing queer desire: Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2009, 145.
[11] Of course, modern audiences for those films might now know more about both stars’ sexuality, but the point is that they performed a certain kind of sensibility that (closeted) gay men in the 1950s and 1960s did not feel was available to them, or which they performed as cover.
[12] Jonathan D. Katz, ‘From Warhol to Mapplethorpe: postmodernity in two acts’, in Patricia Hickson (ed.), Warhol & Mapplethorpe: guise & dolls, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, CT, and London, 2015. The allusion is to Campbell’s soup cans, the subject of one of Warhol’s most famous early works. Katz notes the ‘repeated evocation[s] of a historically specific mode of queer political redress spoken in and through the names of iconic female stars’ (p. 22).

Bob Adelman (American, 1930-2016)
Andy Warhol in Gristedes Supermarket, New York City
1965
Pigment print
Courtesy of Bob Adelman Estate

Steve Schapiro (American, 1934-2022)
Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol, and others at a party
1965
Gelatin silver photograph
31.5 x 47.1cm (image)
40.0 x 49.9cm (sheet)
Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery
© estate of Steve Schapiro

Nat Finkelstein (American, 1993-2009)
Silver Clouds installation, Leo Castelli Gallery
1966
Pigment print
Private collection
© Nat Finkelstein Estate

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Cream of mushroom soup
1968
Colour screenprint on paper
81.0 x 47.5cm (image)
88.8 x 58.5cm (sheet)
South Australian Government Grant 1977
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Curator’s Insight – Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media

Julie Robinson

Exclusive to Adelaide, Andy Warhol & Photography: A Social Media is the first Australian exhibition to survey Warhol’s career-long obsession with photography. As the title suggests, the exhibition explores the social aspects of Warhol’s photography, including the collaborative nature of his photographic practice, the role photography had in his social interactions with others, and the candid social media ‘look’ of his images, which were taken decades before today’s obsession with social media.

These concepts apply to the two strands of Warhol’s photographic practice that are brought together in this exhibition – photography as an essential part of his working method and photography as an end in its own right.

From the beginning of Warhol’s career, photographs became important source material and were used by the artist as the basis of his paintings and screenprints. Included were existing photographs from magazines, advertisements, publicity portraits of movie stars, and photographs taken by his friends. Warhol’s painting of Elvis Presley, for instance, is based on a publicity still from the movie Flaming Star (1960); while photographs by Edward Wallowitch, Warhol’s boyfriend at the time, formed the basis of Warhol’s printed imagery in A Gold Book, 1957.

During the 1970s and 1980s, when commissioned portraits became a significant part of his artistic practice, Warhol based these portraits on Polaroid snapshots taken by him during photo shoots in his studio. The instantaneous nature of Polaroid photography allowed Warhol and the sitter to immediately select a favoured image to be transformed into a painting. Warhol’s studio photo shoots were often a social and collaborative affair, with studio assistants and others photographing alongside Warhol, while studio guests watched on. Film and video footage provides rare behind-the-scenes insights into Warhol’s studio practice for several of his portraits, including the excitement in the studio on Friday 17 February 1978, when John Lennon unexpectedly arrived during Liza Minnelli’s photo session, with the two celebrities meeting for the first time.

During the 1960s, in addition to creating his Pop Art paintings, Warhol was a leading underground film maker, making hundreds of experimental films. Some were silent, some were loosely scripted and others were largely improvised; most invariably relied upon friends and acquaintances as ‘actors’, such as in his 1965 film Camp. The exhibition also includes various screentests or ‘stillies’ – three-minute silent portraits of sitters who were instructed to sit motionless and gaze directly at the camera.

Warhol’s engagement with still photography for most of the 1960s was through the myriad of photographers who were drawn into his circle and studio, which was known as the Silver Factory.[1] Their images captured an insider’s view of Warhol’s world and studio practice, as Billy Name, the Factory’s resident photographer explained, ‘Cameras were as natural to us as mirrors. We were children of technology … It was almost as if the Factory became a big box camera – you’d walk into it, expose yourself and develop yourself’.[2] As well as Name, other photographers from this period represented in the exhibition include Duane Michals, David McCabe, Bob Adelman, Nat Finkelstein and Steve Schapiro. In 1969 Warhol’s closest confidante and a fellow artist, Brigid Berlin, bought a Polaroid camera and over the next five years obsessively photographed her life and surroundings. Inspired by her example and attracted to the immediacy of the medium, Warhol himself bought a Polaroid camera and similarly used it to compulsively document his life and social milieu until 1976, when he purchased a new type of camera, which took on this role in his photographic practice.[3] The new camera, a Minox 35 EL, the smallest type of 35 mm camera at that time, facilitated a new direction for him – black-and-white photography – which lasted until his death in 1987 and resulted in many thousands of 8 x 10 inch gelatin-silver photographs, each of which exists as a work of art in its own right.

Warhol took his camera everywhere; it was a constant presence in private and social situations, where he captured his friends and celebrities in candid moments with a ‘snapshot’ aesthetic. The nature of Warhol’s gelatin-silver photographic practice was publicly revealed when he published his first photographic book, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, in 1979. At that time he described his philosophy on photography: ‘My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous. It’s being in the right place at the wrong time’.[4] Warhol also stated that his favourite photographer was paparazzi photographer Ron Galella. The pair occasionally found themselves photographing at the same social events – Galella as a press photographer and Warhol as an invited guest, an insider.

In 1980 Warhol’s Swiss-based gallerist, Bruno Bischofberger, published the only two editioned portfolios of Warhol’s photographs. In this exhibition these two portfolios – one comprising twelve photographs and the other, forty photographs – are for the first time in Australia being shown together. Bischofberger, who had a long association with Warhol, considers Warhol’s gelatin-silver photographs to be part of his diaristic tendency to record his life, writing that Warhol’s tape recordings and dictated diaries could be regarded as his verbal memories, while his photographs became his ‘pictorial or visual memory’.[5] Warhol’s contact sheets reveal his daily journeys, the people he meets, and his wry observations of details from everyday life, including shop windows, signage and roadside rubbish.[6] Warhol’s eye was also drawn to serial imagery and abstract patterns, such as a shadow on a sidewalk, images he was collecting for his intended ‘stitched’ photographs.

Most of Warhol’s gelatin-silver photographs were printed by Christopher Makos; each week they would review the contact sheets together and select the images for printing. Makos, one of the young photographers working for Warhol’s Interview magazine, was also art director of the book Andy Warhol’s Exposures, and became a key photographic companion of and collaborator with Warhol. As Makos said, ‘I undoubtably learnt a great deal from him, but he also learnt from me, especially about photography. We were in constant confrontation, continually exchanging impressions and ideas’.[7] They often photographed the same subjects side by side – whether travelling or in the studio – and Makos also took many photographs of his friend. The exhibition includes Makos portraits of Warhol doing everyday or ‘unfamous things’, including rowing a boat on a lake in Paris, having a massage, or posing wearing a clown nose. Perhaps their most enduring collaboration was the suite of Altered Image photographs: Warhol dressed in male attire but with female wigs and make-up. Makos remembers that Warhol ‘didn’t want to look like a beautiful woman, he wanted to show the way it felt to be beautiful’.[8]

Warhol exhibited very few of his photographs during his lifetime, although in January 1987, just weeks before he died, he revealed a new approach to his photography in an exhibition of ‘stitched photographs’ at Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Made by sewing several identical photographs together in a grid formation, these works frequently used photographs with strong abstract qualities in order to enhance the visual impact of the work.

AGSA’s exhibition Andy Warhol & Photography: A Social Media presents a new perspective on Warhol for Australian audiences.[9] Tracing Warhol’s photographic practice both behind and in front of the camera, and focusing primarily on portraiture, the exhibition explores the social nature of Warhol’s photographic practice and in doing so offers new insights into his art and life.

Julie Robinson is Senior Curator, Prints, Drawings and Photographs at AGSA

[1] So called because from 1964 to 1968 Warhol’s studio was on the site of a former hat factory on East 47th Street. Warhol asked Billy Linich, known as Billy Name, to decorate the interior with silver foil and paint, as Billy had done for his own apartment.
[2] Billy Name, All tomorrow’s parties, Frieze, London and D.A.P. New York, 1997, p. 18.
[3] In the studio, however, Warhol continued to use his Polaroid camera for portrait shoots for the rest of his career.
[4] Andy Warhol, with Bob Colacello, ‘Introduction: social disease’ in Andy Warhol’s Exposures, Hutchison, London, 1979, p. 19.
[5] Bruno Bischofberger, ‘Andy Warhol’s visual memory’, 2001, p. 4, https://www.brunobischofberger.com/_files/ugd/d90357_015362edc78746d3b4ec6654231933ef.pdf accessed 23 December 2022.
[6] Warhol’s contact sheets archive is held at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
[7] Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol, Charta, in collaboration with Edition Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, 2002, p. 8.
[8] Christopher Makos, ‘Lady Warhol the book, Altered Image’, https://www.makostudio.com/gallery/2717, accessed 23 December 2022.
[9] I am grateful to the many supporters who have made this exhibition possible, including sponsors and donors, lenders in Australia and overseas, artists and artists’ estates, sitters and their families, colleagues at other institutions, and the staff at AGSA.

Gerard Malanga (American, b. 1943)
Andy Warhol
1971
Gelatin silver photograph
33.7 x 22.6cm (image), 35.6 x 27.8cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1973

Oliviero Toscani (Italian, b. 1942)
Andy Warhol
1975
Pigment print
32 x 46cm (image)
40 x 50cm (sheet)
Public Engagement Fund 2021
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
© Oliviero Toscani

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Bianca Jagger at Halston’s house, New York, no. 1 from the portfolio Photographs
1976, published 1980
Gelatin silver photograph
40.8 x 28.8cm (image)
50.5 x 41.0cm (sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
James and Diana Ramsay Fund 2020
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Halston at home, New York, no. 7 from the portfolio Photographs
c. 1976-1979, published 1980
Gelatin silver photograph
42.2 x 29.4cm (image)
50.5 x 40.8cm (sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
James and Diana Ramsay Fund 2020
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Truman Capote at home, New York, no. 4 from the portfolio Photographs
c. 1976-1979, published 1980
Gelatin silver photograph
30.5 x 42.9cm (image), 41.0 x 50.5cm (sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
James and Diana Ramsay Fund 2020,
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy taping Christopher Reeves for ‘Interview’ magazine
1977
Gelatin silver photograph
21.2 x 32.2cm (image), 27.5 x 35.3cm (sheet)
Private collection
© Christopher Makos

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Muhammad Ali, his infant daughter, Hanna, and wife, Veronica at Ali’s training camp in Deer Lake, PA
August 18, 1977
Gelatin silver photograph

Robin Platzer (American)
Andy Warhol showing his artistry
1978
Pigment print
Getty Images Collection
© Robin Platzer/ Images Press
Photo: Images Press

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli
1978
Gelatin silver photograph
26.9 x 34.1cm (image)
40.6 x 50.3cm (sheet)
Private collection
© Christopher Makos

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy Warhol Kissing John Lennon
1978
Gelatin silver photograph
27.7 x 41.7cm (image)
40.7 x 50.4cm (sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
V.B.F. Young Bequest Fund 2022
© Christopher Makos

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Liza Minnelli
1978
Polaroid™ Polacolor Type 108
9.5 x 7.3cm (image)
10.8 x 8.5cm (sheet)
V.B.F. Young Bequest Fund 2012
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Debbie Harry
1980
Polaroid™ Polacolor Type 108
10.8 x 8.6cm (sheet)
9.7 x 7.3cm (image)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
V.B. F. Young Bequest Fund and d’Auvergne Boxall Bequest Fund 2018
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy Warhol in a row boat in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne
1981
Gelatin silver photograph
27.7 x 35.6cm (sheet)
18.3 x 27.9cm (image)
Private collection
© Christopher Makos

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Altered Image from the portfolio Altered Image: Five Photographs of Andy Warhol
1981; published 1982
Gelatin silver photograph
44.8 x 32.2cm (image)
50.6 x 40.8cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1982
© Christopher Makos

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Woman on the street
1982
Gelatin silver photograph
25.3 x 20.3cm (sheet)
22.3 x 15.6cm (image)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
V.B. F. Young Bequest Fund and d’Auvergne Boxall Bequest Fund 2018
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy Warhol in American flag, Madrid
1983
Gelatin silver photograph
32.3 x 21.6cm (image)
35.6 x 27.6cm (sheet)
Private collection
© Christopher Makos

Warhol’s queer practice – what we might, with a nod to the mechanics of repetition at the heart of the project, call his queer ‘technics’ – involved less an embrace of commodification than a recognition of radical difference and equality. These were always mutually dependent in Warhol’s work and the basis for what we might regard as a philosophical commitment, one that informed his entire career.

I believe we see this especially in Warhol’s films and photography, those aspects of artistic practice most overlooked by the critical establishment who rushed to canonise Warhol as the High Prince of affectless serial pop in the 1990s. Warhol’s photographs and films not only attest to the radical collectivism and performance-art culture of his Factory (the name is significant), they are also the most resistant to market logic. The photographs have been reproduced as saleable commodities less often – or to lesser degree – than his work in other media (screenprints, paintings). They also attest to some of the key paradoxes at the heart of Warhol’s whole body of work.

Photographs, after all, are often treated as aide-mémoire ephemera and are (almost) endlessly reproducible: the negative renders theoretically infinite numbers of positives. Warhol’s photographs, however, tended to the singular as well as the serial: polaroids (one of a kind) and silver-gelatin prints (from a negative, able to be multiplied), the ephemeral (throwaway records of a moment) and the auratic (emanating the aura of singularity and originality). They could be both simultaneously, too. Warhol’s photographic subjects are also more varied than the celebrity images that many associate with his screenprint practice: they range from unidentified objects of vicarious desire to glitterati – although Warhol’s celebrity subjects were often represented in ways that subverted or manipulated their mass-produced public image for effect, in line with the radical equality that is the essence of machine reproduction.

Extract from Andrew van der Vlies. “Andy Warhol’s Queer Practice: Disidentification and Utopian Desire,” on the Art Gallery of South Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 03/05/2023

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Henry Gillespie
1985
Synthetic polymer paint and screenprint on canvas
101.6 x 101.6cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
South Australian Government Grant 1996
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Self-portrait no.9
1986
Synthetic polymer paint and screenprint on canvas
203.5 x 203.7cm
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the National Gallery Women’s Association, Governor, 1987
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Curiosity Killed the Cat
1986
Gelatin silver photograph
20.1 x 25.3cm (image & sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
V.B. F. Young Bequest Fund and d’Auvergne Boxall Bequest Fund 2018,
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Nonetheless, the openness to technology and looseness of approach to the medium that Hujar identifies in Warhol’s practice suggest ways in which we might understand much of Warholian photographic work. This is particularly the case if we consider how his practice predicts our own moment of photographic hyperproduction, casualisation, and omnipresence: Warhol’s use of the Polaroid almost has the immediacy of the camera phone – although without the same capacity for taking an image discreetly, even voyeuristically, or the potential for instant global transmission. But like the inundation of images awash on social media today (and the status of digital photograph as virtual ‘object’), the polaroid has the potential for public circulation, as well as total privacy – the image of the beloved, the erotic image that requires no third party to develop and print it. Warhol’s polaroids of male nudes, but also those of him in drag, activate energies of the private-public continuum, teasing the public viewer with imagery that suggests a zone of private erotic fetish as much as an exploration of the limits and mutability of the self.[11] Warhol’s Polaroid nudes also anticipate the social media phenomenon of people trading explicit images of the self (and sometimes of others as deceptive proxies for a fantasy self) as tease, invitation, or souvenir of intimate encounters.

Despite the clear differences in their practice and philosophy of photography, Warhol and Hujar produced bodies of photographic work that are significantly connected and entangled. This is not only attributable to their having in common queer subjects like Factory stars Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, early reality television icon Lance Loud, theorist and writer Susan Sontag, and poet John Ashbery, each of whom had their image made by both artists to very different effect.

If Hujar left us with hauntingly beautiful – and often painterly – images of such figures, photographs that seem to capture the sitter’s animating spirt, Warhol offers a more direct impression of what his subjects were like as people in the world on a particular day.

The connections and possible dynamics of influence are also evident in Hujar’s and Warhol’s parallel movement between impulses of street photography [fig 1], studio work, celebrity and self-portraiture, documentation and celebration of the male nude (whether eroticised, stylised, or aestheticised), fascination with animal and architectural subjects, as well as their exploration of the performance culture of drag. While Warhol’s images across these genres may not occupy the same category of ‘beauty’ as Hujar’s, there is unmistakable beauty of a different variety; this might be characterised as a beauty of immediacy, of the candid moment and ephemeral gesture, a beauty that takes informality as its impulse, and which does not try to hide its flaws. It is, in a real sense, a very democratic beauty.

Extract from Patrick Flanery. “Queer Influencers: Hujar and Warhol,” on the Art Gallery of South Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 03/05/2023

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Andy Warhol
1986
Gelatin silver photograph
61.0 x 51.0cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1989

Art Gallery of South Australia
North Terrace Adelaide
Public information: 08 8207 7000

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm (last admissions 4.30pm)

Art Gallery of New South Wales website

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Exhibition: ‘ “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli’ at the New-York Historical Society

Exhibition dates: 11th November 2022 – 2nd April 2023

Co-curated by Skirball curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart and Lara Rabinovitch, renowned writer, producer, and specialist in immigrant food cultures. The exhibition was coordinated at New-York Historical by Cristian Petru Panaite with Marilyn Kushner, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections.

Ei Katsumata (American)
Carnegie Deli, New York, NY
2008
Photo by Ei Katsumata /Alamy Stock Photo

Culture and its history – past, present and future – is always so fascinating!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the New-York Historical Society for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Our special exhibition examines how Jewish immigrants, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, imported and adapted traditions to create a uniquely American restaurant and reveals how Jewish delicatessens became a cornerstone of American food culture.

Organised by the Skirball Cultural Center, “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli examines how Jewish immigrants, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, imported and adapted traditions to create a uniquely American restaurant and reveals how Jewish delicatessens became a cornerstone of American food culture.

The exhibition explores the food of immigration, the heyday of the deli in the interwar period, delis and Broadway, stories of Holocaust survivors and war refugees who worked in delis, the shifting and shrinking landscapes of delis across the country, and delis in popular culture. On display are neon signs, menus, advertisements, deli workers’ uniforms, and video documentaries. The local presentation is enriched with artwork, artefacts, and photography from New-York Historical’s collection along with restaurant signs, menus and fixtures from local establishments, mouthwatering interactives, and a Bloomberg Connects audio tour. And families: Be sure to pick up a copy of our kid-centric guide to the exhibition in the gallery.

Text from the New-York Historical Society website

2nd Ave Deli // “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli

New-York Historical Society

What makes the 2nd Ave Deli so special? The New-York Historical Society takes a trip to the Midtown landmark to talk to the owner, managers, workers, and customers about the special magic of the decades-old delicatessen where they “prepare the foods that our mothers and grandmothers made.”

James Reuel Smith (American, 1852-1935)
Louis Klepper Confectionary and Sausage Manufacturers, 45 E. Houston Street, New York
c. 1900
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society

James Reuel Smith (1852-1935) was an American photographer and amateur historian who worked in the late 19th century to early 20th century. He was known for his documentary photographs of historical springs and wells in New York City before they were buried beneath the concrete of the rapidly growing city. Many of these natural water resources disappeared as the New York municipal water system developed.

Smith’s photographs documented a vanishing way of life in urban America. Drawing and fetching water had been an essential activity of daily life prior to the development of the modern municipal water system. In the 1870s New York City undertook efforts to eradicate the natural open wells and springs as they were perceived to be hazardous to health. The official municipal source for city water was the Croton Aqueduct which was endorsed by the NYC sanitation officers, rather than local neighbourhood wells and springs.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Hester Street, Lower East Side
c. 1900
Postcard
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society

Unknown photographer (American)
Anne Russ Federman serving customers at New York’s Russ & Daughters, with Hattie Russ Gold in the background
1939
From the collection of Russ & Daughters

Benjamin Segan (American, 1924-2017)
Letter to Judith Berman, April 23, 1944
Caserta, Italy
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society

Benjamin David “Ben” Segan was born in New York City on 27 August 1924, to Jacob and Lillian Segan, immigrants from Vilnius, Lithuania. Ben attended George Washington High School in Manhattan, where he met his future wife, Judith “Judy” Berman. During his senior year he attended school by night to work in a defense plant by day.

Nineteen-year-old Ben was drafted into the United States Army as a private on 28 April 1943. His initial processing took place at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he began his correspondence with Judy, writing to her almost daily until he left the service. By mid-May 1943 he was at Camp Croft, South Carolina, where he remained in basic training through late September and to operate radio equipment.

By October 1943 he was sent to Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, and from there shipped to Italy to join the 93rd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. In Europe he served in Italy, southern France, and Germany. During the Battle of Monte Cassino (a.k.a. the Battle for Rome), January-May 1944, he worked in the 93rd’s communication section.

Although he saw combat, Ben refrained from graphic descriptions in writing to his fianceé. Some of his reticence was due to restrictions imposed by the censors. For example, on 7 April 1945, during the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp from the Nazis, which he witnessed, Ben wrote, cryptically (in letter 574), “I’ve been extremely busy recently darling, & don’t think it’s so necessary to tell you as you must have a[n] inkling from the latest news reports on our progress.”

The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, but Ben was still there as late as November 10th (the date of his last letter in the collection), when he wrote from the French port of Le Havre, unsure of which ship he’d be on or indeed when it would sail.

Ben was honoured with the American Service Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Service Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.

Once home he married Judy on 10 March 1946 at Temple Ansche Chesed on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They raised two children and worked together for many years in New York City’s Garment District.

Anonymous. “Biographical/Historical Note: Guide to the Benjamin Segan Letters 1943-1945,” on the New-York Historical Society website Nd [Online] Cited 26/02/2023

Lionel S. Reiss (American born Poland, 1894-1988)
Frankfurter and Lemonade from Manhattan Crosstown series
c. 1945
Watercolour, black ink, white gouache, and graphite on paper
11 × 8 in. (27.9 × 20.3cm)
New-York Historical Society, Foster-Jarvis Fund, and contribution of Harry Goldberg

Lionel S. Reiss (1894-1988) was a Polish-American Jewish painter born in Jaroslaw, Poland (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he studied commercial art. His family had moved to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. As immigrants to the United States, Reiss’ parents joined the ranks of other Eastern European Jews who were fleeing their native countries at the start of the 20th century. Lionel Reiss’ family settled on New York’s Lower East Side neighbourhood and Reiss himself spent the majority of his life in the city. Reiss worked as a commercial artist for newspapers, publishers, and a motion picture company. Eventually he became art director for Paramount Studios and is credited to be the creator of the Leo the Lion logo of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.

Reiss became known for his portraits of Jewish people and landmarks in Jewish history, which he made during his trip to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East in the early 1920s. Being American and Jewish himself, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the Old World. In 1919 Reiss temporarily left the United States to travel to the aforementioned regions, and recorded the everyday life that he encountered in the ghettos. His trip resulted in exhibitions in major American cities.

At the dawn of the Holocaust in 1938, Reiss, who had long returned to the United States, published his book My Models Were Jews, in which he illustratively argued that there is no such thing as a “Jewish ethnicity”, but the Jewish people are rather a cultural group, whereby there is significant diversity within Jewish communities and between different communities in different geographical regions. Reiss was therefore presenting an argument against what he considered to be a common misconception that existed about the Jews. Later works included a 1954 book, New Lights and Old Shadows, which dealt with “the new lights” of a reborn Israel and the “old shadows” of an almost eradicated European Jewish culture. In his last book, A World of Twilight, published in 1972, with text by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Reiss presented a portrait of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Reuben’s Delicatessen Menu [autographed by Arnold Reuben]
1946
Patricia D Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society

This fall, New-York Historical Society presents “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli, a fascinating exploration of the rich history of the Jewish immigrant experience that made the delicatessen so integral to New York culture. On view November 11, 2022 – April 2, 2023, the exhibition, organised by the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where it is on view through September 18, examines how Jewish immigrants, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, imported and adapted traditions to create a cuisine that became a cornerstone of popular culture with worldwide influence. The exhibition explores the food of immigrants; the heyday of the deli in the interwar period; delis in the New York Theater District; stories of Holocaust survivors and war refugees who found community in delis; the shifting and shrinking landscapes of delis across the country; and delis in popular culture. On display are neon signs, menus, advertisements, and deli workers’ uniforms alongside film clips and video documentaries. New-York Historical’s expanded presentation includes additional artwork, artefacts, photographs of local establishments, and objects from deli owners, as well as costumes from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a mouthwatering interactive, and a Bloomberg Connects audio tour.

“It’s our great pleasure to present an exhibition on a topic so near and dear to the hearts of New Yorkers of all backgrounds,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical. “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli tells a deeply moving story about the American experience of immigration – how immigrants adapted their cuisine to create a new culture that both retained and transcended their own traditions. I hope visitors come away with a newfound appreciation for the Jewish deli, and, with it, the story of the United States.”

“Whether you grew up eating matzoball soup or are learning about lox for the first time, this exhibition demonstrates how Jewish food became a cultural touchstone, familiar to Americans across ethnic backgrounds,” said co-curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart. “This exhibition reveals facets of the lives of Central and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that echo in contemporary immigrant experiences. It shows how people adapt and transform their own cultural traditions over time, resulting in a living style of cooking, eating, and sharing community that is at once deeply rooted in their own heritage and continuously changing.”

“I’ll Have What She’s Having” is co-curated by Skirball curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart along with Lara Rabinovitch, renowned writer, producer, and specialist in immigrant food cultures. It was coordinated at New-York Historical by Cristian Petru Panaite with Marilyn Kushner, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections. The exhibition explores topics including deli culture, the proliferation of delis alongside the expansion of New York’s Jewish communities, kosher meat manufacturing, shortages during World War II, and advertising campaigns that helped popularise Jewish foods throughout the city.

Highlights include a letter in New-York Historical’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library collection from a soldier fighting in Italy during World War II writing to his fiancée that he “had some tasty Jewish dishes just like home” thanks to the salami his mother had sent – a poignant addition to Katz’s famous “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army” campaign. Images show politicians and other notable figures eating and campaigning in delis. Movie clips and film stills include the iconic scene in Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally…, which inspired the exhibition title. This and other movie scenes underscore the prominent role of Jewish delis in American popular culture.

Unique to New-York Historical’s presentation is a closer look at the expansion of Jewish communities at the turn of the 20th century, not just on the Lower East Side but also in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. In the 1930s, some 3,000 delis operated in the city; today, only about a dozen remain. The exhibition gives special attention to dairy restaurants, which offered a safe meatless eating experience; a portion of the neon sign from the Famous Dairy Restaurant on the Upper West Side is on display. Salvaged artefacts, like the 2nd Avenue Delicatessen storefront sign and vintage meat slicers and scales from other delis, are also on view, along with costumes by Emmy Award-winning costume designer Donna Zakowska from the popular Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Visitors are invited to build their own sandwiches named after celebrities, such as Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker, Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman, and Sammy Davis Jr., in a digital interactive inspired by menu items from Reuben’s Deli and Stage Deli. On the Bloomberg Connects app, exhibition goers can enjoy popular songs like “Hot Dogs and Knishes” from the 1920s, along with clips of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia discussing kosher meat pricing, 1950s radio ads, and interviews with deli owners forced to close during the pandemic lockdown.

In a nostalgic tribute to departed delis that continue to hold a place in the hearts of many New Yorkers, photographs show restaurants that closed in recent years. Eateries include the Upper West Side’s Fine & Schapiro Kosher Delicatessen, Jay & Lloyd’s Kosher Delicatessen in Brooklyn, and Loeser’s Kosher Deli in the Bronx. An exuberant hot dog-shaped sign from Jay & Lloyds Delicatessen, which closed in May 2020, and folk artist Harry Glaubach’s monumental carved and painted signage for Ben’s Best Kosher Delicatessen in Queens, also pay tribute to beloved establishments. The exhibition concludes on a hopeful note, highlighting new delis that have opened their doors in the past decade, such as Mile End and Frankel’s, both in Brooklyn, and USA Brooklyn Delicatessen, located steps from the site of the former Carnegie and Stage Delis in Manhattan.

Support

“I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli is organised and circulated by the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California. Exhibitions at New-York Historical are made possible by Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang, the Saunders Trust for American History, the Evelyn & Seymour Neuman Fund, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. WNET is the media sponsor.

Press release from the New-York Historical Society

Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978)
Save Freedom of Worship: Buy War Bonds
1943
Poster; offset lithograph
28 x 20 inches
Public domain

World War II poster encouraging individuals to buy war bonds. The poster includes an image by Norman Rockwell and was published by the United States Government Printing Office in Washington, DC, in 1943.

The poster depicts men and women of various races and faiths, including a woman with rosary beads, with hands clasped in prayer. Norman Rockwell was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine for more than four decades. The Four Freedoms or Four Essential Human Freedoms is a series of four oil paintings that Rockwell produced in 1943 for reproduction in The Saturday Evening Post alongside essays by prominent thinkers of the day. Later they were the highlight of a touring exhibition sponsored by the Saturday Evening Post and the United States Department of the Treasury. The Four Freedoms theme was derived from the 1941 State of the Union Address by United States President Franklin Roosevelt in which he identified four essential human rights (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear) that should be universally protected. The Office of War Information printed four million sets of Four Freedoms posters by the end of the war. World War II was a massive conflict which involved a majority of the nations of the world, and became the most widespread and deadliest event in human history; it had profound ramifications politically and economically that lasted into the next century. …

Posters were used extensively throughout the war by countries on both sides for purposes such as propaganda, morale, and the broad dissemination of information. The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a U.S. government agency created during World War II to consolidate government information services. It operated from June 1942 until September 1945. It coordinated the release of war news for domestic use, and, using posters and radio broadcasts, worked to promote patriotism, warn about foreign spies and recruit women into war work. The office also established an overseas branch, which launched a large scale information and propaganda campaign abroad. The War Finance Committee was placed in charge of supervising the sale of all bonds, and the War Advertising Council promoted voluntary compliance with bond buying. More than a quarter of a billion dollars worth of advertising was donated during the first three years of the National Defense Savings Program. The government appealed to the public through popular culture. Norman Rockwell’s painting series, the Four Freedoms, toured in a war bond effort that raised $132 million.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unknown photographer
Rena Drexler on the day of her liberation from Auschwitz
Poland, 1945
Private collection

Unknown photographer (American)
Rena and Harry Drexler at Drexler’s Deli, North Hollywood, CA
c. 1970s
Private collection

Unknown photographer (American)
Vienna Beef Factory, inspecting sausages
Chicago, IL c. 1950s
Vienna Beef Museum

Unknown photographer (American)
Vienna Beef Factory, curing pastrami
Chicago, IL, c. 1950s
Vienna Beef Museum

Paula Weissman’s Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union Books
1958-1983
Courtesy of Paula Weissman

Installation view of ads from the “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye” campaign (1960s). Despite the campaign’s success, the ads relied on both ethnic stereotypes and a narrowly focused white, Eurocentric view of Jewish identity that excluded Jews of Color.
Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

With a self-reflection that is arguably as Jewish as its subject, the exhibition doesn’t shy away from an awareness that the deli, created by Eastern and Central European immigrants, is an almost exclusively Ashkenazi institution, and thus limited in its view of Jewish life and culture. Take, for example, the commentary on the posters featuring the famous “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s” series of rye bread ads. Considered progressive for their time because of the diversity of the models, in retrospect the ads suggest that racial diversity among the Jewish community is an anomaly, which is not the case.

Edie Jarolim. “”I’ll Have What She’s Having” Explores the American Jewish Deli (And Leaves You Hungry),” on the Nosher website July 21, 2022 [Online] Cited 26/02/2023

Howard Zieff (photographer)
You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye
[New York : s.n., 1965?]
Photomechanical print (poster): offset, colour
Library of Congress
Public domain

Menu from 2nd Avenue Delicatessen (outside cover)
New York City, 1968
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York. Historical Society

Menu from 2nd Avenue Delicatessen
New York City, 1968
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York. Historical Society

Katz’s Delicatessen Napkin
1980-2000
Paper
Overall: 5 × 5 in. (12.7 × 12.7cm)
Gift of Bella C. Landauer

Unknown photographer (American)
Abe Lebewohl with hero, from the 2nd Ave Deli, New York, NY
c. 1990

Unknown photographer (American)
Snack at Manny’s Delicatessen
Chicago, IL, 2010
Image Professionals GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street)
New York, NY 10024
Phone: (212) 873-3400

Opening hours:
Monday CLOSED
Tuesday – Thursday 11am – 5pm
Friday 11am – 8pm
Saturday – Sunday 11am – 5pm

New-York Historical Society website

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Exhibition: ‘Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus’ at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen

Exhibition dates: 16th October 2021 – 27th March 2022

Installation view of the exhibition Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen showing from left to right, Armando Cristeto (Mexico, b. 1957) Apolo urbano, c. 1981; Antonio Reynoso, La Gorda, c. 1960; Herb Ritts, Wrestling Torsos, Hollywood, c. 1987

I’m working from my iPad at the moment as my computer has gone down, so this will be short and sweet.

It’s disappointing, to say the least, that in this day and age a museum provides so few media images on such an important theme that I had to spend many hours digging around trying to find images for this posting. I examined the labels on the installation photographs, and then looked at the museum’s Instagram account where there was much more information, before searching for large enough images online for the posting. Some artists are little known so this proved very difficult.

It’s good to see Arlene Gottfried’s strong, brash, direct photographs of gay icons, Jewish bodybuilders and street urchins but they are standard clubbing / street fare and there is little subtlety in her work.

While Gottfried may have survived to tell her story her own way the work only documents. For a photograph is that ever enough? Here the photographs in no way provide a fresh perspective on a clubbing street aesthetic grounded in the milieu of the mid 70s to early 80s Studio 54, pre-AIDS, groovy, disco party vibe. Nostalgia, history and memory are their appeal today.

Tastes have changed. Personally I find more power and sensitivity in Kike Arnal’s Untitled (Emmanuel, trans man and tattoo artist) (2018, below) than most of Gottfried’s graphic photographs – her subjects caught as if the lights had come up in the club at 6am (believe me this has happened many times, all of us looking like startled rabbits). Strike a pose!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Installation view of the exhibition Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen showing from left to right, Shohei Miyachi, Untitled, c. 2018; Leonard Freed, Handcuffed, New York City, from Police Work series, c. 1978; Larry Clark, Chuck, c. 1981

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Angel and Woman on Boardwalk, Brighton Beach
1976
Vintage gelatin silver print
Framework: 59.5 x 46.5cm
Photo: 27.9 x 35.5cm
Pedro Slim Collection

How does your gender impact your work as an artist? The candid photographs of Arlene Gottfried have become everlasting memories of New York’s fast-evolving culture(s). For over 40 years, Gottfried photographed the intimate stories of the American domestic life, as well intrepid snapshots of the Puerto Rican community or the wild nights inside Studio 54.

She emphasised that being a female photographer back in the 70s was very different than now:

‘A lot of the male photographers [in the past] felt threatened and didn’t like it. […] It’s changed so much with women working. They’re more visible now. I don’t know the statistics on museums and how many are being collected. But on an everyday level, you see women in jobs that used to be male – bus driver, train conductor – typically male jobs that now have female employees and photography was the same. It used to be only guys, really. And actually, in my first photography class, I was the only young woman in the class and I had a lump in my throat, like I wanted to cry, only guys there. But it wound up being a very supportive environment and I learned a lot.

Unless you’re doing something that’s a very feminine kind of a topic, I don’t think gender is really all that visible.’

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Guy With Radio, East 7th Street
1977
Vintage gelatin silver print
Framework: 59.5 x 46.5cm
Photo: 35.5 x 27.9cm
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Pituka at Bethesda Fountain, Central Park
1977
Vintage gelatin silver print
Framework: 59.5 x 46.5cm
Photo: 35.5 x 27.9cm
Pedro Slim Collection

The legendary street photographer who captured more than neutral subjects, but also the living faces and bodies of people along with their memories. Arlene Harriet Gottfried photographs preserve cultural heritage of the urban atmosphere.

One of the most quintessential projects Gottfried produced was a black-and-white series of street photography from the 1970s and 80s in New York. Her work will form part of our exhibition Clandestine. This is a photo exhibition about the human body. One of the most dominant themes in the exhibition is the constant dialogue between culture and bodies. This is something Arlene Gottfried captures particularly well. Arlene Gottfried documented scenes of ordinary daily life. The everyday life from the past that still lives vividly in her photographs. Her work embodied stories and memories of people who although you will never get to know, you can easily feel familiarised.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Disco Sally at Studio 54
1979
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Pose
Early 1980s
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Le Clique
Early 1980s
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Installation view of the exhibition Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen showing Arlene Gottfried’s portrait Marsha P. Johnson c. 1983

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Marsha P. Johnson
c. 1983
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Marsha P. Johnson was an African-American trans woman who lived in New York and is celebrated for her contribution to the LGBTQI+ movement. She was often referred to as ‘Saint Marsha’ for serving as a “drag mother” aiding and welcoming homeless people as well as young members of the LGBTQ movement.

Marsha P. Johnson was the Rosa Parks of the LGBT+ movement. She was a devoted activist, drag performer, sex worker and at some point she even modelled for Andy Warhol. She established safe spaces for transgender people and was thoroughly dedicated to defending the rights of trans people, sex workers, people with HIV/AIDS and prisoners.

‘You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights.’ ~ Marsha P. Johnson

Our exhibition, Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus presents stories in black and white photographs about people who have not been recognised yet for their bravery. Today, Marsha lives in the hearts of brave activists as well as many transgender people.

The human body is the central theme of the Clandestine photo exhibition. About a hundred black-and-white photographs express an unreserved love of the body in all its manifestations: perfect, imperfect, elegant, erotic, proud or, on the contrary, very vulnerable. The works come from the extensive collection of photographer and collector Pedro Slim (Beirut, Lebanon, 1950) and are shown in the Netherlands for the first time.

Clandestine showcases photography by some 60 artists, including Diane Arbus, Horst P. Horst, Arlene Gottfried, Graciela Iturbide, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diana Blok, Helmut Newton and Man Ray. The exhibition presents original and contemporary prints (including silver on gelatine, photogravure), collages and photomontages. These photographs are placed in the context of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, where many were taken. Pedro Slim’s photo collection holds a unique place in the field of photography. In 1985, Slim started collecting photographs in which the human body plays a central role. With his collection, Slim highlights the power of images and seeks to transform and break open the paradigm that dictates what is feminine, masculine, non-binary or trans. Pedro Slim’s collection consists of more than 300 vintage prints and has rarely been exhibited.

The beauty of the photographs lies especially in the personal expression of those portrayed. The artists seek to go beyond the prevailing standards and ideals of beauty, and make a plea to appreciate the body in all its manifestations. The photographs are thus an ode to diversity and are still very relevant today.

Three themes

The exhibition revolves around three themes. The first part of the exhibition focuses on past and present ideals of beauty. The photographs show a diversity of body types and invite us to transcend judgements such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. The photographs within the second theme show people living on the fringes of society,  many of the recorded scenes are raw, everyday situations. The visitor sees sex work, drug use and indecency. There are painful stories behind the provocative looks and poses.

The third part of the exhibition is entirely devoted to the work of Arlene Gottfried (1915-2017). Gottfried specialised in the genre known as street photography, recording life in the less well-to-do neighbourhoods of New York.  Her themes included gospel, schizophrenia, the Puerto Rican community, and the women in her family. Pedro Slim owns more than twenty original prints by Gottfried. This makes him the most important collector of her work.

About the collector

Photographer and collector Pedro Slim was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1950. He studied architecture and photography in Mexico and New York. Since the early 1990s, he has exhibited in various museums and galleries. His most recent exhibition was in 2017 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. His passion for photography led him to start a collection.

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Brothers with their Vines, Coney Island, NY
1976
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Third Avenue Shopping, El Barrio
1978
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Men’s Room at Disco
1978
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Doorway in Soho, NY
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Savage Riders at The Puertican Day Parade
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Hassid and Jewish Bodybuilder
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Riis, Nude Bay, Queens
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

After completing a two-year photography program at FIT, Arlene moved to Greenwich Village in 1972, when the community was still an affordable outpost for artists, musicians and bohemians. She took a job as an assistant with an advertising agency. “I did everything: printing, processing, lighting, studio work, on location, a lot of it was for comps and sometimes it was for the ad itself, for sales promotion and point of purchase,” Arlene revealed in her final book, Mommie. “I didn’t always love what it was about but I always took photographs on the weekend and used their fantastic darkroom.”

“It’s nice to be young and be able to run across the beach like wild and be able to meet people and take their picture,” she continued. “That’s what I remember about it: Having a great time, and having a job so I could pay for things, and having a darkroom where I could print everything. You couldn’t ask for anything better. It was like a little grant at a little job, you know, a moderate income but just enough.”

Arlene made “just enough” to carry her through the next 45 years of her life, transforming her home in the West Village’s famed Westbeth Artists Housing into a bohemian palace. Above her kitchen table, she hung her photographs in a plastic carousel designed to air-dry intimate apparel. She entertained visitors, serving cherries and chocolate-covered espresso beans with a bottle of seltzer at the ready. When her cancer treatments stole her brunette curls in the years before her death, Arlene donned a burgundy velvet turban for her nights out.

Although she disliked hustle culture before it was named as such, Arlene maintained resolute faith in the importance of her work and the vitality of her gifts. Where other photographers sought to be a fly on the wall, Arlene was a butterfly in the mix, always aligned with the energy so that her presence only added to the beauty of the images she made. She loved to laugh, to sing, to dance and to celebrate the extraordinary stars in her orbit. In Mommie, Arlene remembers, “The clubs were very provocative then: People putting on these shows, taking their clothes off, acting things out. There’d be a theme and they’d be doing all kinds of crazy things like giving birth to dolls, simulating sex in public. I went in with my camera, took photographs and it was great.”

After the party, Arlene described the feeling of a glorious high that comes from a night on the town, surrounded by people doing what they love. She walked out of the club into the crisp winter air as snowflakes floated down from the sky like confetti in a parade. She then began strolling down Fifth Avenue, heading home, like the final scene of a Hollywood film.

Extract from Miss Rosen. “Sex clubs, Studio 54, Central Park: A portrait of NYC in the 70s & 80s,” on the i-D website 15 October 2021 [Online] Cited 16/10/2021

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Giant Dildo, Les Mouches Party, NY
1979
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Miguel Pinero and Friend
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

As an insider, Gottfried was able to tell the story on her own terms, capturing a slice of life that has vanished forevermore. “Now the only way to know what New York was like is from fleeting glimpses in movies made years ago like Taxi Driver, Death Wish, or Midnight Cowboy,” Gilbert Gottfried observes. “I remember there were neighbourhoods you didn’t want to be in and we lived in a few of those. Arlene had already been living on her own when me, my mother, and my other sister Karen moved to Avenue A. People were saying, ‘You’re nuts.'”

Arlene Gottfried flourished amongst her own, whether palling around with poet Miguel Piñero at the Nuyorican Poets Café, kicking it at Brooklyn’s famed Empire Roller Skating Center, or trooping uptown to the streets of El Barrio. Wherever she went, there she was, ready for whatever would come her way.

“I met Miguel Piñero at the Poet’s Café. I loved to dance and you could really dance over there!” she told me in 2014, roaring with laughter at the memory of her youth. “Salsa. R&B. There was a lot of good energy there. It was rough and raw. Not trendy. And that’s an amazing thing – that the Poet’s Café has lasted so long. I loved it. I stayed there until the sun came up, literally. That doesn’t last forever, these moments in time.”

Though Gottfried and many she photographed have passed, their legacies live on in her warm and loving photographs. Gottfried followed her heart and went with the flow, documenting everything from her years singing gospel with the Eternal Light Community Singers to her long-standing relationship with Midnight, a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

For Gottfried, the camera was her diary and confidant. “I don’t know exactly when Arlene started taking pictures, but I know she got into it and then it was all the time,” her brother says with a laugh. “Sometimes we were both on the bus with my mother. I would be helping my mother off and Arlene was taking pictures. I was thinking, ‘Put down the camera and help me help her out of the bus!'”

Gottfried’s archive holds vast treasures of New York at a time when everyone was a character yet no one would stare because that would suggest you were a tourist, unfit to make it here. Her photographs are a tribute to Old New York, to a city of myth, magic, and madness that many did not survive. Yet in her pictures, their lives are restored to the pantheon of grit, glamour, and glory.

It is a city the lingers like wafts of weed smoke on a warm summer day, a city that still exists if you look for it. Gilbert Gottfried remembers, “A year or two ago I was walking with my wife and we saw these two homeless men. One was fixing the other guy’s hair with his hand, and my wife said, ‘Ahh. That’s an Arlene picture.'”

Extract from Miss Rosen. “Arlene Gottfried photographed the magic and madness of Old New York,” on the Document Journal website June 28, 2019 [Online] Cited 16/10/2021

George Hoyningen-Huene (American-Russian, 1900-1968)
A.E. Sudan
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives

Let’s talk about representation. A Russian man takes a photo of a Sudanese man. Superficially, this might seem problematic, but why?

In our exhibition, Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus, the portrait by the Russian photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, titled A.E. Sudan presents a naked Sudanese.

In a traditional setting, material items like clothes and jewellery help people express their values and beliefs. In this photo, the Sudanese man is alien from any form of expression. In addition, presented in front of a white wall strips the subject away from his situational contexts – such as time and place. This photo shows a person in a blank state, disconnected from any form of cultural or individual expression.

Despite these characteristics (or lack of characteristics), the photographer still opted to include the nationality of the subject in the title – Sudanese. We do not know if the artist understood the semantic power of the title, but by giving us some context, we know this person is not simply a naked model detached from his culture, but rather a ‘Sudanese’ man.

Here is where the questions that concerns representation starts gaining weight. Artists, including photographers, carry tremendous responsibility. Through their medium, they have the power to frame a subject as they please. In the creative process, it is possible that the view of the artist becomes the dominant perception understood by the audience.

For instance, in this case the Sudanese man has no voice concerning how the viewer perceives any of the characteristics that represent his identity, such as his skin colour, nationality, gender or age. It is virtually impossible to discuss all the concerns linked to cultural representation in a post, hence this conversations is far from over. Also, we do not intend to shame the way the artist framed the Sudanese man, but rather our whole aim, inspired by the Cobra movement, is to present new ways to think critically about art, ourselves and society.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Edmund Teske (Chicago, Illinois, 1911 – Los Angeles, California, USA, 1996)
Male Nude, Davenport Iowa
1942
Vintage gelatin silver print
Framework: 59.2 x 48.9cm
Photo: 33 x 23.5cm
Pedro Slim Collection
© Estate of Edmund Teske, Courtesy Gitterman Gallery

Installation view of the exhibition Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen showing from left to right, Nan Goldin’s Ivy wearing a fall Boston 1973 and Antonio Reynoso’s La Gorda (The Fat Woman) c. 1960

Antonio Reynoso (Mexican, 1919-1996)
La Gorda (The Fat Woman)
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. This phrase stresses that beauty is thoroughly subjective and only limited by social constructs.

One would argue that beauty is different from sciences like physics or chemistry since it is not quantifiable or measurable. Nonetheless, through non-scientific agreement people still know how to distinguish what is pretty from what is not. For instance, a swampy pond is less pretty than a turquoise ocean. This is the shared opinion, of at least the majority, but is this a view shared by everyone? Even more importantly, is this our view or was it simply bestowed upon us without our prior consent?

Being critical when looking at a work of art, or more frankly when looking at anything, is an exercise to strengthen our own individuality and potential to envision a new beauty. This does not mean one should automatically discredit beauty from something or someone that is socially considered beautiful but to question it. This is a call to acknowledge that the notion of beauty can be challenged, abstracted or even reconstructed.

This is a portrait by Mexican photographer Antonio Reynoso La Gorda (The Fat Woman). It invites us to reconsider the meanings of several attributes including, beauty, sensuality and femininity.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Ivy wearing a fall
Boston 1973
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Allen Frame (American, b. 1951)
Young Man, New York
1974
Gelatin silver print
Framework: 40.5 x 50.5cm
Photo: 27.9 x 35.5cm
Pedro Slim Collection

Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006)
Handcuffed, New York City
c. 1978
From Police Work series
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Arthur Rimbaud in New York
1978-1979
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arthur Rimbaud in New York, one of David Wojnarowicz’s few incursions into photography, is the articulation of a testimony to urban, social and political change in New York.

Wojnarowicz, using the figure of the accursed poet as the only way for an artist to intervene in reality, chronicles his own life and his emotional relationship with New York City in the late 1970s. The artista portrays a number of friends with a life-size mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, thereby taking on his identity and highlighting the parallels in their lives: the violence suffered in their youths, the feeling of being denied freedom, the desire to live far away from the bourgeois environment and the fact of their homosexuality. Wojnarowicz is juxtaposing the historical time of the symbolist poet with the artist’s present.

The series, taken in places that the artist used to frequent with photographer Peter Hujar, represents the emergence of identity politics and queer visibility in contemporary art, and the debates surrounding the public sphere as a space for individual non-conformity that were to shape the 1980s. The series also represents a contemplation of the end of the experimental artists’ collectives on the Lower East Side, as gentrification and urban speculation transformed the neighbourhood, and AIDS had begun to decimate the gay community, also causing the early death of the artist in 1992.

Salvador Nadales. “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” on the Museo Reina Sofía website Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2022

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
B.J. Robinson
c. 1980
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

What happens when people become labelled as objects of inspiration?

Popular culture often exotifies or objectifies a group of people who are slightly different from the majority. Sayings such as ‘you cannot fail if you have not tried’ accompanied by a photo of a person with a disability, portrays the subject as a source of exceptional inspiration for the viewer. This may objectify the subject in the photo.

This is something that happens in the art world too. For instance, the monumental achievements of artists with a disability, such as Frida Kahlo or Vincent van Gogh, are sometimes phrased as a direct outcome of their condition. By doing so the condition of the artist becomes bigger than the persona. This undermines the different elements that constitute the artist as a whole.

For the photographer George Dureau, whose work is displayed in our exhibition Clandestine, photography is a medium with the potential to empower people with disabilities by simply representing them, without objectifying them. By photographing people with disabilities the same way traditional photographers captured images of models, Dureau reconceptualised the standards of beauty.

The conversation revolving around objectification is far from over. Dureau’s views present an interesting way to think about the topic, but we still need more critical and engaged dialogue and we want to hear your opinion. Where is the boundary between admiration and objectification?

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Larry Clark (American, b. 1943)
Chuck
c. 1981
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Armando Cristeto (Mexican, b. 1957)
Apolo Urbano (Urban Apollo)
Mexico City, 1981
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection
© Armando Cristeto

Born in 1957 in Mexico City, photographer and historian Armando Cristeto began to study photography in 1977 at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico. He was a member of the photography collective known as the Grupo de Fotografos Independientes, one of the numerous cooperatives of artists known as ‘Los Grupos’ proliferating during the late 1970s in Mexico.

Founded by Amando Cristeto’s brother Adolfo Patino, the Fotografos Independientes sought to reach new audiences by taking their exhibitions out onto the street, where their works could interact with the urban context and be appreciated by new classes of people. Their exhibitions were installed along the sidewalks of Mexico City, employing clothesline to hang their photographic prints, or were even paraded through the streets on wheeled carts.

Anonymous text. “Armando Cristeto,” on the ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon website June 9, 2020 [Online] Cited 23/03/2022

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Most Beautiful Part of a Woman’s Body
c. 1986
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Most Beautiful Part of a Man’s Body
c. 1986
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Magnolia, Juchitán, México
1986
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Is symmetry more beautiful than asymmetry?

The notion of symmetry is occasionally interchanged with the one of beauty as if these would be synonyms. Artists and philosophers from different cultures and times have championed equilibrium and positioned symmetry on an untouchable pedestal, but culturally speaking, asymmetry might be more valuable.

The mathematical notion of symmetry suggests that if an object is changed – say a cube or a sphere is rotated – it stays the same as before it was moved. Aiming for symmetrical forms seems reasonable from the functional standpoint of an architect or a mathematician, but why do our cultures dismiss or shame asymmetry?

Asymmetry presupposes that something, or someone, changes after its circumstances changed. Transforming when situations demand it, is necessary to evolve. One symmetric thought or body would entail that it does not change when it is moved. That said, maybe it is time to reevaluate the way we perceive notions of beauty and reformulate our societal desires. Asymmetric bodies might be much more sexy and beautiful after all.

The exhibition, Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus, presents black and white photographs of the human body. The photographs render asymmetric human bodies.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Wrestling Torsos, Hollywood
c. 1987
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Merry Alpern (American, b. 1955)
Dirty Windows #16
1994
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Merry Alpern (American, b. 1955)
Untitled from the series Dirty Windows
1994
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

How to take dramatic photos of strangers? Wait, should you ask for their consent before photographing them?

In most countries, it is legal to take photos of people, including children in public. The question of whether it is morally right or wrong to take photos of strangers remains problematic. Some would say that it depends on the purpose of the photo. Judging a body of work that is intended to be used for profit, such as to promote a product, is different from photojournalism or a photo exhibition.

When seeing the photos exhibited in our exhibition Clandestine- The Human Body in Focus, one wonders if every single body was aware it would end up framed in the museum, or in the Instagram account of the museum itself.

To give this situation a context, consider Merry Alpern’s Dirty Windows series from 1994. Rather than posing her subjects, Alpern captured women (and men) crowded into the tiny bathroom of a sex club in the Wall Street district of Manhattan. Her photos were taken at night, in dim light, from a friend’s apartment, one story higher and about five meters away from the bathroom window. Her obsessive, voyeuristic, and even paranoic project as well as her overtly sexual scenes, caused a national controversy at the time.

With these images, Alpern encapsulated and reduced the identity of her subjects as ‘sex workers’. By taking a single shot of a person and framing it as the complete one, the photo runs the risk of stripping the full identity away from the subject. The women in the Dirty Windows series could be mothers, daughters, great sports players, activists and so on, but not everyone gets to see that part of the story.

Let this be a reminder that when taking a photo of a person, you should make sure the person is aware of the photo’s purpose as well as what part of the story- of their identity – is framed.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Shohei Miyachi (Japanese, b. 1989)
Untitled
c. 2018
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Kike Arnal (Venezuelan)
Untitled (Emmanuel, trans man and tattoo artist)
2018
From the series Revealing Selves – Transgender Portraits from Argentina
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

When it comes to transgender rights, Argentina is a country rife with contradictions. After being subject to widespread medicalization and incarceration throughout the 20th century, Argentina’s transgender community began to see a number of windfall legal and political wins in the early 21st century that would secure them progress once only dreamed of. These included the Gender Identity Law of 2012, landmark legislation which guarantees transgender Argentinians the right to change their sex in the public record, access free gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy that doesn’t require medical or psychological diagnoses, and enshrines transgender discrimination protections in law.

But the gulf between legislative gains and reality can be wide in many countries, and Argentina is no exception. Despite these rights, 88 percent of Argentinian trans women have never had a formal job; their average life expectancy is 35, whereas the national average is 77; and only 40 percent graduate from high school. Transgender Argentinians still face massive cultural and social stigma, which can lead to family rejection and poverty.

In Revealing Selves: Transgender Portraits from Argentina … documentary photographer Kike Arnal provides a window into the homes and lives of Argentina’s transgender community, one that captures these contradictions.

Anonymous text. “Revealing Portraits from Argentina’s Transgender Community,” on the Them website April 10, 2018 [Online] Cited 23/02/2022

Cobra Museum of Modern Art
Sandbergplein 1, 1181 ZX Amstelveen

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

Cobra Museum of Modern Art website

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Exhibition: ‘The Human Cost: America’s Drug Plague’ at the Bronx Documentary Center, New York

Exhibition dates: 5th June – 5th July 2021

Curators: Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera

Artists: James Nachtwey; Jeffrey Stockbridge; Mark Trent

*PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS PHOTOGRAPHS OF DRUG USE – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
A woman, who goes by Jen, struggling to inject herself in the freezing cold in Boston on Jan. 14. 2018
2018
James Nachtwey for TIME

Nature ∞ nurture

Last year, over 81,000 men, women and children were lost to drug overdoses in America. Visualise that number of people if you can… nearly 4/5ths capacity of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in Australia.

According to medical doctors (see quotation below), the causes of addiction “may involve an interaction of environmental effects – for example, stress, the social context of initial opiate use, and psychological conditioning – and a genetic predisposition in the form of brain pathways that were abnormal even before the first dose of opioid was taken.” So both nature and nurture.

Through experience, I understand both strands that lead to possible addiction: a genetic, psychological illness within family members coupled with the need for escape, the need for pleasure, peer group activity and the desire to loose oneself from the world. Luckily, I do not have a personality that easily becomes addicted, but the possibility within people is always there, no matter their background or social position in the world. While the photo stories in this posting concentrate on human beings from lower socio-economic backgrounds, addiction can affect anyone at anytime. Again through experience, I know that lots of high performing professional people suffer from chronic addiction but keep the fact well hidden from the community.

Addiction occurs when dependence interferes with daily life… when independence, that much searched for freedom from outside control or support (you don’t need or accept help, resources, or care from others), morphs into ‘in dependence’ – where the independence of the self, in addiction, opposes the autonomy of the self (meaning that you have free will and that you can stand behind your actions and their values while still exchanging support and care with others). In autonomy, no one is forcing you to do something you disagree with; in addiction, ‘in dependence’, those actions can no longer be justified. These are just my thoughts… but they can be seen to be linked to Self-Determination Theory (STD). “The interplay between the extrinsic forces acting on persons and the intrinsic motives and needs inherent in human nature is the territory of Self-Determination Theory.” Nature and nurture.

The word addicted (adjective) arises in the “mid 16th century: from the obsolete adjective addict ‘bound or devoted (to someone’), from Latin addict- ‘assigned’, from the verb addicere, from ad- ‘to’ + dicere ‘say’.” Its use has diminished from the 18th century until now. Conversely, the word addiction (noun) comes from the same root, but was unknown until 1900 with the use of the word skyrocketing since the 1950s onwards (with a particular spike in the use of the word in the 1960-70s, the era of free love). Perhaps this says a lot about the pressure of living in a high intensity, 24 hour world, a world where the gods of capitalism can write off 81,000 people in a year, in one country, without the blink of an eye.

What all three photo stories in this posting have ad- ‘to’ + dicere ‘say’ is this: every human being has a story worth listening to.

By embedding themselves in the communities they were photographing (instead of being “snatch and grab” photojournalists), all three photographers give their participants an opportunity to have their voice heard. To tell their stories in their own words and have those stories told with dignity and respect, through images and text. (I have linked all three segments to the full stories online).

As Jeffrey Stockbridge comments, “Everyone’s wading through problems that are unique to them, and I think it’s important to tell these stories… Hearing people discuss their past in their own words is something that you can’t ignore. It’s very powerful. I want the general public to forget what they thought they knew about prostitution, drug addiction, homelessness and poverty, and just listen to an actual person explain what they’ve been through. It’s important to remember that life is unpredictable!” James Natchwey observes, “Photography can cut through abstractions and rhetoric to help us understand complex issues on a human level.”

This is the crux of the matter: photography helps us understand these complex issues on a human level.

Every human being is a life, has a life, and is valuable as such. Every story, every breath, every death is connected to Mother Earth. In their indifference, what capitalism and society do to others, we do to ourselves.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Brain abnormalities resulting from chronic use of heroin, oxycodone, and other morphine-derived drugs are underlying causes of opioid dependence (the need to keep taking drugs to avoid a withdrawal syndrome) and addiction (intense drug craving and compulsive use). The abnormalities that produce dependence, well understood by science, appear to resolve after detoxification, within days or weeks after opioid use stops. The abnormalities that produce addiction, however, are more wide-ranging, complex, and long-lasting. They may involve an interaction of environmental effects – for example, stress, the social context of initial opiate use, and psychological conditioning – and a genetic predisposition in the form of brain pathways that were abnormal even before the first dose of opioid was taken. Such abnormalities can produce craving that leads to relapse months or years after the individual is no longer opioid dependent.”

Thomas R. Kosten, M.D. and Tony P. George, M.D. “The Neurobiology of Opioid Dependence: Implications for Treatment,” in Science & Practice Perspectives. 2002 Jul; 1(1), pp. 13-20.

“Photography can cut through abstractions and rhetoric to help us understand complex issues on a human level. Never is photography more essential than in moments of crisis. To witness people suffering is difficult. To make a photograph of that suffering is even harder. The challenge is to remain open to very powerful emotions and, rather than shutting down, channel them into the images. It is crucial to see with a sense of compassion and to comprehend that just because people are suffering does not mean they lack dignity.”

James Natchwey

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Holly, detoxing in the Montgomery County Jail in Dayton, Ohio, on July 3, 2017
2017
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

Last year, America lost 81,000 men, women and children to drug overdoses. Driven primarily by the opioid crisis – and abetted by the pill-pushing of pharmaceutical companies – millions of individuals and countless families were devastated by addiction.

The war on drugs has failed: from sea to shining sea, fentanyl, heroin, K2, crystal meth, cocaine and other drugs are available in nearly every town and city. Drug-related violence has endangered many of our streets, including Courtlandt Avenue, home to the Bronx Documentary Center.

After decades of ever changing anti-drug strategies, we are still left with familiar and yet unanswered questions: how to stop the overdoses; how to keep our youth from addiction; how to stop drug-related violence; how to offer humanitarian treatment.

The Bronx Documentary Center’s upcoming photo exhibition, The Human Cost: America’s Drug Plague, explores these issues and portrays the human toll of America’s drug scourge. The deeply personal stories told here – of losing children, families and freedom – provide a stark but compassionate look at a very complex dynamic.

James Nachtwey, the dean of American conflict photographers, reports with visual journalist and editor, Paul Moakley, from New Hampshire, Ohio, Boston, San Francisco and beyond. Jeffrey Stockbridge documents Philadelphia’s Kensington neighbourhood over the course of 6 years. And Mark Trent follows a tight-knit group of friends in West Virginia through cycles of substance abuse and tragic death. The BDC hopes this exhibition will lead to productive discussions about an intractable American problem.

Exhibition curated by Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera.

Press release from the Bronx Documentary Center

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Dorothy Onikute, 33, a deputy sheriff with the Rio Arriba County sheriff’s office, responding to an overdose call on Feb. 4, on the side of the road in Alcalde, N.M.
Nd
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

‘This sort of thing happens so often, it’s sad to say it’s on to the next once they are out of our care.’

~ Dorothy Onikute

The Opioid Diaries – James Nachtwey and Paul Moakley

The opioid crisis is the worst addiction epidemic in American history. Drug overdoses kill more than 64,000 people per year, and the nation’s life expectancy has fallen for two years in a row. But there is a key part of the story that statistics can’t tell. In 2017, for over the course of a year, photographer James Nachtwey set out to document the opioid crisis in America through the people on its front lines. Alongside TIME‘s deputy director of photography, Paul Moakley, the pair traveled the country gathering stories from users, families, first responders and others at the heart of the epidemic. Here, Nachtwey’s images are paired with quotes from Moakley’s interviews, which have been edited. The voices are a mix of people in the photos and others who are connected to them. The Opioid Diaries is a visual record of a national emergency – and it demands our urgent attention.

Text from the Bronx Documentary Center website

The full text and more images from the series can be found on the TIME website

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Chad Colwell, 32, being revived by EMS workers after overdosing in his truck in Miamisburg, Ohio, on July 4, 2017. He says this, his fourth overdose, led him to seek treatment
2017
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

‘Heroin grabs ahold of you, and it won’t let go. It turned me into somebody I never thought I would be.’

~ Chad Colwell

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Billy, 31, right, preparing to use drugs in Boston on Jan. 14
Nd
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Cheryl Schmidtchen, 67, being consoled at the funeral for her granddaughter Michaela Gingras in Manchester, N.H., on September 17th, 2017. Gingras, a heroin user, was 24
2017
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

‘After Michaela died, I saw it clear as day. They’re not only destroying themselves, they’re destroying us.’

~ Cheryl Schmidtchen

What I Saw

James Natchwey

Like most people, I’d heard about the opioid epidemic. It was especially hard to get my mind around a statistic from 2016: almost as many deaths from drug overdoses as in all of America’s recent wars combined. But numbers are an abstraction. I had no idea what it looked like on the ground. The only way to make real sense of it, I told my editors, was to see what happens to individual human beings, one by one.

Photography can cut through abstractions and rhetoric to help us understand complex issues on a human level. Never is photography more essential than in moments of crisis. To witness people suffering is difficult. To make a photograph of that suffering is even harder. The challenge is to remain open to very powerful emotions and, rather than shutting down, channel them into the images. It is crucial to see with a sense of compassion and to comprehend that just because people are suffering does not mean they lack dignity.

Over the past 35 years, my work as a photojournalist has taken me to other countries to document wars, uprisings, natural disasters and global health crises. In revisiting my own country I discovered a national nightmare. But the people living through it aren’t deviants. They are ordinary citizens, our neighbours, our family members. I don’t think I met one user whom I would consider to be a bad person. No one wants to be an addict.

I also saw signs of hope, particularly from the people who are dealing with the crisis at the street level. Some of them are former users who have lifted themselves up and are using their experience to help others. They are refusing to allow our country to be defined by this problem. Instead, they are helping us define ourselves by finding solutions. We must join them.

James Natchwey

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Bobby
2010
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

Kensington Blues – Jeffrey Stockbridge

Kensington Blues by Jeffrey Stockbridge is a decade-long documentary project about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Featuring large-format photography, audio interviews, journal entries and video Stockbridge utilises a combination of styles and formats to humanise those suffering from addiction.

“During the 19th century the neighbourhood of Kensington in North Philadelphia was a strong working-class district, a national leader of the textile industry and home to a diverse population of immigrants. Like many rust belt cities, industrial restructuring of the mid twentieth century led to a sharp economic decline including high unemployment and a significant population loss.

Today, half of Kensington residents live at or below the poverty line. The neighbourhood has become an epicentre of the opioid crisis and is infamous for open air drug use, prostitution and violent crime. With the roaring El train overhead, Kensington Avenue (the major business corridor in the neighbourhood) is in a state of perpetual hustle. Heroin, Fentanyl, K-2, Crystal, Crack, Xanax, Subs – just about any drug that exists in the modern world is bought and sold in Kensington. Women, some as young as twenty years old, and others who’ve been working the Avenue for decades, populate the neighbourhood in great numbers. Prostitution has become a social norm. Drug users sell clean packaged needles for a dollar a piece – five needles equals a bag of dope.

Working with a large-format film camera, I chose a slow photographic process in order to literally slow down the rapid speed of life as it happens along the Ave. The focus of my photographic work is portraiture. I want to tap into the state of mind of those who are struggling to survive their addiction. Together my subjects and I have entered into a collaboration of sorts. Through audio recordings, journal entries and video, we are working to highlight the voices of those with lived experience. This work would not be possible without their trust and guidance. By sharing the intimate details of their plight, those I photograph are taking a stand to effectively humanise addiction and challenge the stigma that all drug addicts are morally corrupt. As the opioid crisis has taught us, addiction can happen to anyone.”

Text from the Bronx Documentary Center website

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Jamie
2012
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Carol
2010
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

LC: Drug addicts, prostitutes and the homeless are often seen as “the other” in our society. Your photos show a different side of this – a side that people can relate to and empathise with. Can you say more?

JS: There are a million different reasons why people become homeless to begin with. You dehumanise people by lumping them into the lowest common denominator. By looking down on them and saying, “You’re all homeless because you couldn’t get your lives together” – that doesn’t help anybody. Everyone’s wading through problems that are unique to them, and I think it’s important to tell these stories. Alongside the photographs I feature a short bio or quotes; sometimes I’ll also incorporate diary entries written by my subjects, and I’ve recorded audio interviews that I post on my Kensington Blues blog.

Hearing people discuss their past in their own words is something that you can’t ignore. It’s very powerful. I want the general public to forget what they thought they knew about prostitution, drug addiction, homelessness and poverty, and just listen to an actual person explain what they’ve been through. It’s important to remember that life is unpredictable! I could end up on Kensington Avenue if certain circumstances occurred – anybody could.

…

LC: The images are “still” and considered. They communicate a feeling of respect and consent. You don’t seem to shoot from the hip or take the “fearless flashgun” approach like many street photographers. Can you talk about your process?

JS: I shoot with a 4 x 5 view camera. For these photographs to work, there has to be consent! My subjects have to hold still – if they move an inch forward or an inch back, they’ll be out of focus. It’s a slow-moving, old-looking camera, so it’s automatically a topic of conversation. People look at it and think, “Woah, what is that?” But it has certain limitations – you can’t photograph quickly. It takes time. I have to set it up, I have to focus, use the dark cloth, take a meter reading … It’s at least five minutes until I’m ready to go. Meanwhile, my subject has to stand around waiting. So consent is fairly important!

I’m not looking at the back of an LCP screen when I shoot; I’m in the moment. I’m connecting entirely with my subject, not just communicating with a computer. The camera is a trusted friend that’s standing there by my side. In the Kensington project it really grounded me in the neighbourhood. I think it put people at ease, because they knew I wasn’t going to take a photo and run off – I was stuck with a tripod and a big heavy camera!

Jeffrey Stockbridge, interviewed by Francesca Cronan. “Kensington Blues,” on the LensCulture website 2016 [Online] Cited 03/06/2021.

The full text and more images from the series can be found on the LensCulture website.

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Kevin
2011
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

Surviving Kensington: behind the photos of ‘Kensington Blues’

What used to be a proud blue-collar neighbourhood in Philadelphia is now a deteriorating haven for drugs, crime, and prostitution. Kensington is famous for the place to get your fix; and for the place you end up stuck when you’ve let your vices get the best of you.

For the last five years, Philly-based photographer Jeffrey Stockbridge has been taking intimate portraits of current residents (‘survivors’) in Kensington. But the stories he finds here aren’t just about Philly: Jeffrey’s photographs and raw interviews show a side of the desperation, hopelessness, and broken dreams that plague America’s addicts across the country.

Through a walk with Jeffrey on the Avenue, we get a glimpse of what it’s like to survive on Kensington.

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Krysta
2009
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

Mark E. Trent (American)
Allie in traffic after losing a close friend in her recovery group to an overdose
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

Despair, Love and Loss – Mark E. Trent

None of us knew what was happening or how destructive this would be. We began seeing more and more overdoses and suicides in our community. The details were scarce and the stigma that came with drug abuse masked the early deaths until it was so common it didn’t phase us anymore; the word pillhead began being used to describe those people on drugs. This was long before it touched nearly everyone in West Virginia and across the country.

With the help of friends I travelled to interview small time dealers, addicts and local law enforcement in an attempt to understand the scope of it all. I never did. This body of work started taking shape when I was at a softball game with a long time friend. Her name is Allie. I told her what I was trying to do and she said “Stick with me and I will show you what’s going on.”

From there it was a matter of seeing what was right in front of me. I documented Allie and her friends and lovers as they struggled in active addiction and slowly lost themselves and each other. This group of women let me into their lives behind closed doors and gave me access to make this work possible. They didn’t have to. They are the reason this work exists. They were star basketball players, young mothers, and individuals that held jobs and had real dreams. One day a knee injury supplied the prescription opiate that led to the addiction that spread through their group of friends and community.

My goal with this project was longevity. I wanted to follow it through until the end. My hope is that these photographs will tell a story about a small group of individuals that suffered through a crisis few saw coming. Today Allie is six years sober. Peakay is working toward sobriety with medical assisted treatments. Barbie died of an overdose in her bed alongside her lover Kim. Jessie tells me she is “going good,” but to be honest I never know the truth with her.

Text from the Bronx Documentary Center website

Mark E. Trent (American)
Allie freebasing a prescription opioid
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

There were times whenever I was really strung out and I didn’t realise how bad I was. What you always say is, ‘Well at least I’m not doing it to anyone else. At least I’m not hurting anyone. I’m just hurting myself. I’m not sticking needles in anyone else. It’s just me.’ But I didn’t realise how much I’d hurt my family, and my mom.

I don’t know how many people died in the house I was living in, I can’t even – three off the top of my head, because of drugs, overdoses.

But it just didn’t, it just didn’t hit me that way, I didn’t think – I wasn’t ready to see it that way I think. I feel like I had to go through everything I went through to be where I am.

Mark E. Trent (American)
Jessie injecting Barbie with morphine
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

Barbie really was like my big sister.

She told me a year before she died she had to go to the doctor for something. They couldn’t find a vein and she had to make them put it in her neck. And they asked about the scarring on her neck.

They asked her, ‘Do you shoot in your neck? Jesus.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah.’ And they were like, ‘You’re going to be dead in a year anyway.’ But I sort of didn’t believe it. Barbie really was invincible.

Mark E. Trent (American)
Cooking pills for injection next to dinner
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

Mark E. Trent (American)
Allie crying, facing jail time and missing Barbie who died of an overdose, after a long night of using
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

Sometimes I thought it was fine; other times I thought, ‘How did I get here? What did I do?’ I was supposed to be somebody. I was supposed to do something great with my life. I was supposed to go places. I wanted to travel. I wanted to play basketball. I wanted to be all these things.

And instead I was living in a house with no electricity, crying in the bathroom because I can’t find a vein, miserable. Absolutely miserable.

It took me getting sober and being sober for a while to look back and be like, ‘That was all really low, man. That was all really low.’

“Allie Rambo tells her story below in her own words” in ‘Despair, Love and Loss: A Journey Inside West Virginia’s Opioid Crisis’ on the NY Times website Dec. 13, 2018 [Online] Cited 03/06/2021

The full text and more images from the series can be found on the NY Times website

Mark E. Trent (American)
Allie and Regina catching snowflakes after a close friend’s funeral
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

Bronx Documentary Center Annex Gallery
364 E 151st St, Bronx, NY 10455

Opening hours:
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Saturday – Sunday 12 – 5pm

Bronx Documentary Center website

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Exhibition: ‘Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang’ at Cleveland Museum of Art

Exhibition dates: 25th October 2020 – 28th February 2021

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

For a few brief moments, rebels with a cause

This is one of my favourite photo essays of all time. The story Davidson tells of this male-orientated Brooklyn gang and its culture through his photographs is one of brotherhood, friendship, rivalry, love, longing, agony, depression and death at a time of utter poverty and rock ‘n roll rebellion. He produced “unflinchingly honest images of these American youths.” Now, all these years later, the photographs possess a powerful nostalgia for the era mixed with the desolation of destroyed lives and lost youth.

Davidson gets under the skin of his subjects, embeds himself firmly in their milieu. The subjects allow him to photograph their most intimate moments, seemingly free from worry or anxiety. There is an insouciance to their attitude, a knowing insouciance. In one photograph inside Helen’s Candy Store, Bob Powers stares directly and disarmingly at the camera while the girl playing with the yo-yo and the youth in the background also stare directly into the lens, forming a strong compositional triangle of the gaze. Powers said he was voted “most likely to die before I was 21 years old.” He lived with his seven siblings and alcoholic parents in a three-bedroom apartment that had a coal-powered cookstove and no hot water or central heating.

There is a dark undertone to the narrative. While there are moments of joy and happiness, you can sense the isolation and despair of these disaffected youths. Cathy O’Neal, seen in front of a cigarette machine at Coney Island, committed suicide by shotgun. Jimmie and his family were wiped out by drugs. Junior Rice became a heroin dealer. Lefty od’d in bed at 19. “He was the first in the group to die from a drug overdose… within a few years, drugs would claim the lives of many in the gang and in the neighbourhood.” In picturing their lives, the photographs gather moments (in time), enunciating how the gang members railed against the conformity and materialism of 1950s America whilst imbibing its rebellious iconography. Only occasionally does the artist pull back to show us the wider picture, the context of the action, with photographs of New York skyscrapers seen in the distance and the Statue of Liberty.

Davidson does not let his spontaneity slip. He is informed, aware, absent (but present) in all of these photographs waiting for that special moment. In the photograph above, a bird-like creature swoops down on something invisible on the ground. In informal yet tightly focused photographs – of sunbathing or walking the boardwalks of Coney Island, gang members fixing their hair, rolling up their sleeves, dead beat(s) in the back of the bus, making out in the back seat of a car, walking in the park or hooning around on the Metro – Davidson is there to capture the off-beat moments of gang existence and the members relationship to each other.

Through a superb eye, a feeling, a sensibility and connection towards the gang members desperation and isolation, universally acknowledged by the photographer himself, Davidson sets them all on the path to immortality. Do not forget, these photographs seem to be saying. For a few brief moments these people did exist, their lives were valuable, these rebels with a cause.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

One of Davidson’s best-known series, Brooklyn Gang was inspired by a news story he read about a teenage gang called the Jokers.

Davidson contacted the Jokers, one of Brooklyn’s roughest gangs, through their social worker. In the summer of 1959, Davidson roamed the streets of New York with these teens, loitered in stores that the Jokers called their own, and sunbathed with them on the beach at Coney Island. Eventually they allowed him to photograph even their most intimate, private moments. He responded by producing unflinchingly honest images of these American youths.

Gang membership was exclusively male, but the members’ girlfriends appear frequently in Davidson’s photographs. Some of the pictures depict the teenagers exploring lust and love and the boys struggling to define and prove their masculinity. Looking back at the series in 1998, Davidson said that he felt “the reason that body of work has survived is that it’s about emotion. That kind of mood and tension and sexual vitality, that’s what those pictures were really about.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The pleasures and agonies of teenage romance are captured in Bruce Davidson’s photographs of the gang’s dance parties, which were held variously in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, at a neighbourhood school, and in members’ homes. The basement wallpaper seen here – with its fairy-tale figures, including horses, queens, knights, marionettes, and jokers – suggests a domestic setting. The event could have been a farewell party for an older gang member going off to join the army, which was a common occurrence.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16 x 23.9cm (6 5/16 x 9 7/16 in.)
Paper: 20.3 x 25.2cm (8 x 9 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

This rooftop view in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was taken from a building in the gang’s “turf,” which was a block anchored by the intersection of 17th Street and 8th Avenue. Davidson spent the summer hanging out with the gang and photographing them. Describing his process, the artist said, “I stay a long time. … I am an outsider on the inside.” Park Slope, now one of New York’s most desirable neighbourhoods, was then a poor, mostly Irish area.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 21.9 x 14.6cm (8 5/8 x 5 3/4 in.)
Paper: 25.1 x 20.2cm (9 7/8 x 7 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.1 x 24.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.2 x 25.3cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Childhood pastimes like playing yo-yo were a thing of the distant past for 15-year-old Bob Powers, a Joker seen here leaning against a fixture in Helen’s Candy Store. He had already been in and out of the court system numerous times by 1959. Powers stabbed someone when he was 12 and had been incarcerated for bringing zip guns (homemade firearms) and chains to school, where, Powers said, he was voted “most likely to die before I was 21 years old.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The gang members, most of whom were 15 or 16 years old, thought tattoos made them look older and might help them get served at bars. Tattoos were also a demonstration of masculinity and a rite of passage. Bob Powers, seen here at age 15 displaying his first tattoo, recalled years later that “the first time you get a tattoo it’s scary. I was sitting back with a cigarette like it’s nothing. Meanwhile, it was killing me. … I got ‘Bobby’ with stars around it. … They said, ‘Get your name.’ … I hated it forever.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 61 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

One of the gang members – Bob Powers – suggested that Davidson follow him to a rooftop on the gang’s block. “I remember thinking,” said Davidson, “‘This kid’s going to throw me off the roof and then rob me,’ but he’s pointing down at the stickball game (an informal form of baseball played in the street) and saying, ‘Get that,’ and saying: ‘Oh, there’s the Statue of Liberty. You can see it through all these television antennas.'”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6 cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The gang members were very concerned with their appearance, although they did not have much money to spend on grooming or clothes. “If you see a picture of me,” said former gang member Bob Powers, “the broken tooth, my teeth were green because I didn’t go to the dentist. We never had any money even though my father worked. … We used Vaseline petroleum jelly to make our hair stick like iron in a pompadour. We combed our hair constantly, wore sunglasses, and all thought we were Marlon Brandos.”

The Jokers’ slicked-back pompadours … and their clothing echoed the greaser style, a rebellious youth subculture that was promoted by cinematic antiheroes of the era. Role models included Marlon Brando’s portrayal of a motorcycle gang member in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean as a troubled teen in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The “bad boy” image flouted the aspirational role model of the time, the upwardly mobile white-collar worker in a business suit and short haircut.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Petey, a Jokers member who looks out the second-story window here, was injured in that fight. Petey’s best friend, fellow Jokers member Bob Powers, walks by the house. Housing in the gang’s neighbourhood, the then-impoverished Park Slope, Brooklyn, was overcrowded and rundown. Powers lived with his seven siblings and alcoholic parents in a three-bedroom apartment that had a coal-powered cookstove and no hot water or central heating.

One of the most highly respected and influential American documentary photographers of the past half century, Bruce Davidson spent several months photographing the daily lives of a teenage street gang for his 1959 series Brooklyn Gang. A new exhibition in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang features 50 black-and-white photographs from that series, which are part of a recent anonymous gift to the museum of extensive selections from the artist’s archives. The exhibition is on view now through February 28, 2021.

Brooklyn Gang was Davidson’s first major project after joining the distinguished photo agency Magnum and was the fruit of several months spent immersing himself in the daily lives of the Jokers, one of the many teenage street gangs worrying New York City officials at the time. He recorded the teenagers’ pleasures and frustrations as they attempted to define masculinity and mimic adult behaviour. The photographs reflect the group’s camaraderie but also their alienation from societal norms. While many officials and commentators at the time saw the gangs as evidence of social deterioration resulting from poverty, others regarded them as the most visible manifestations of a socially disengaged generation of males – rebels without a cause.

“Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang presents an intimate portrayal of the teens’ lives,” said William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “Davidson was an outsider, but one who spent so much time with the gang that he became, as he liked to say, ‘an outsider on the inside.’ Davidson offered an independent look at the lives of these disadvantaged youths; this view of society was quite different from the age of visual and social homogenisation of the 1950s presented in mainstream magazines such as Life and Look and predicts the social turmoil of the 1960s.”

The images reflect the time Davidson spent with the teens hanging out on street corners and in the local candy store and accompanying them to the beach at Coney Island with their girlfriends. Included are several sets of variant images, affording a rare glimpse into Davidson’s working process.

“Despite a more than ten-year age difference, Davidson describes recognising his own repression in his subjects and feeling a connection to their desperation,” said Barbara Tannenbaum, the CMA’s chair of prints, drawings, and photographs and curator of photography.

Press release from the Cleveland Museum of Art

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 40.6 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The museum owns several groups of images from the series taken during the same shoot at Coney Island. They provide a rare glimpse of the artist’s selection process (see 2018.688, 2018.696, 2018.697, 2018.701, 2018.706, and 2018.735). The size of these prints, and the fact that the artist printed them long after they were shot, suggest he considered all four images worthwhile. In an exhibition print, the white marks on the woman’s cheek here, made by dust on the negative, would have been covered up with ink or dye, a process known as spotting. This may be a work print, made to aid in decisions on exactly how to print this picture. It has become one of the better-known images from Brooklyn Gang.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

In this photograph, gang member Bob Powers talks with friends in one of the many Coney Island bathhouses where people could change, shower, or swim in pools. “We’d come down on a Friday and sometimes we’d stay the whole weekend till Monday, down on the beach, me, Lefty, Junior,” Powers recalled. “The girls would stay too… We would light fires and bury all the cans of beer. I remember stealing cars and driving down there. We’d drive the car under the boardwalk and bring it right onto the bay and leave it there.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 50.8 x 61cm (20 x 24 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Shown here on the Coney Island boardwalk, from left to right, are gang members Junior Rice, Bob Powers, and Lefty, who “was a pretty tough guy in the gang and then he went to jail for about a year,” according to Powers. “He came out and he just lost it. He wasn’t the same guy. Something happened and nobody knew what. … We protected him a bit, but he caught a couple of bad beatings and lost his reputation. He ate a lot of pills one night and never woke up. His mother found him dead. OD’d in bed at 19. He was the first in the group to die from a drug overdose.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.1 x 24.1 cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.2 x 25.3 cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

This print is vintage – made soon after the picture was shot – and its 8 x 10-inch size was typical of the period and preferred for making reproductions for magazines and books. As photography began gaining acceptance into the gallery and museum world in the 1980s, larger prints became the norm. The museum also owns an unusually large print of the same image, made in the 1990s or 2000s, which was created to be exhibited in galleries and museums. The two may look the same on the computer screen, but do not feel the same when viewed in real life.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15.8 x 24.1 cm (6 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.1 x 25.4 cm (7 15/16 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

After a day at the beach at Coney Island, the teens “would take the long bus ride back to their neighbourhood,” remembered Bruce Davidson. “As they sat in the rear of the bus, the sunlight burned through the windows, giving them an angelic glow. They would drift into their dreams and awake alert to the mean streets awaiting them.”

Bruce Davidson

Barbara Tannenbaum

Curator of Photography

A hot topic in the 1950s, gangs were avidly analysed by sociologists, the press, and artists. Gordon Parks’s photographs of a young black Harlem gang leader were published in Life magazine in 1948. The musical West Side Story, which pitted a Polish gang against a Puerto Rican one, debuted on Broadway in 1957. The following year, a seven-part series in the New York Times analysed the social, economic, and psychological causes of this juvenile delinquency.

In the summer of 1959, Bruce Davidson went to Brooklyn to meet and photograph a teenage street gang called the Jokers. Davidson’s series Brooklyn Gang provided an in-depth view into the daily activities of an Irish and Polish gang whose turf was a block in the impoverished Park Slope neighbourhood. The Jokers were teenagers who were mostly students at the neighbourhood Catholic school or dropouts. They shoplifted and fought with members of rival gangs in rumbles that involved bricks, bats, knives, and occasionally zip (homemade) guns.

At age 25, Davidson was an outsider to them. He had been raised in a Jewish family in suburban Chicago and held an MFA in photography from Yale University. His images were being published in major magazines, and he had just joined Magnum, a distinguished, artist-run photographic agency. The Jokers’ role models were the greasers, a rebellious youth subculture promoted by cinematic antiheroes such as Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang member in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean’s troubled teen in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The gang members’ “bad boy” image, replete with Vaseline-slicked pompadours and blue-collar clothing, flouted the era’s aspirational role model of an upwardly mobile white-collar worker in a business suit and short haircut.

Davidson did not sport a pompadour, but making a living as a freelance photojournalist was itself a rebellion against the nine-to-five office world. He spent the summer with the Jokers, hanging out on street corners, in the local candy store, and on the beach at Coney Island. His images reflect their alienation and anxieties but also their camaraderie. The boys explore male bonding rituals and act out their visions of maleness and adulthood. They may roughhouse, but gang ethics dictated that they were not to hurt each other. Real violence was reserved for rival gangs and, like their criminal acts, was not shown by Davidson.

He did capture the teens’ early experiences with lust and love. The Lothario in the back seat of a car is Lefty, of whom Bob Powers, a gang member who wrote a memoir 40 years later, remarked, “We never thought he was good-looking, but all the girls loved him.” This well-known image of Lefty is joined in the exhibition by three others from that same make-out session. Together they form an almost cinematic progression. Several other groups of related images of events are also included in the exhibition. These rare glimpses into the artist’s shooting and editing processes are all drawn from the recent anonymous gift to the museum of 367 works from Davidson’s archive, selections that span his 70-year career.

Davidson was careful not to pass judgment in his Brooklyn Gang photographs. The youngsters’ hairstyles, tattoos, and underage drinking, smoking, and sex were considered ruinous behaviour at the time. The memoirs of Bob Powers and the reminiscences of other members give the Jokers’ story a dark tone. The best-known image in the series, taken in front of a cigarette machine at Coney Island, shows Artie Giammarino, who later became a transit police detective, and Cathy O’Neal, whom the boys considered “beautiful like Brigitte Bardot.” Cathy is seen here at age 13 or 14, around the time she began dating the “coolest” of the gang, Junior Rice. At 14 she got pregnant. Though they were both under the legal age, they married. They later divorced, and Junior became a heroin dealer and user; within a few years, drugs would claim the lives of many in the gang and in the neighbourhood. Years after their divorce, Cathy committed suicide by shotgun.

Davidson would always remain an outsider to the gang, but his working process allowed for intimacy and trust to grow between the gang members and the photographer. By the end of the summer, Davidson realised that he and the Jokers were all considered outsiders in the conformist, materialistic 1950s. “I could see my own repression in them, and I began to feel a connection to their desperation,” he remembered. “I began to feel their isolation and even my own.”

Cleveland Art, Fall 2020

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 61 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Although most of the gang members’ time was spent in their neighbourhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, the Jokers sometimes took excursions. Few had access to cars, so most travel was by bus and subway. The subway fare of 15 cents – the equivalent of $1.33 today – would take them anywhere in New York City. Here a gang member and his girlfriend wait for a train on the neighbourhood subway platform. The beach at Coney Island was a favourite summer destination for the gang.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

“We used to hang out in [Brooklyn’s] Prospect Park all the time,” recalled Jokers member Bob Powers. “We did a lot of drinking and sleeping overnight in the park. … The cops with their bats would push us along, tell us to move. We were very defiant. If we moved, we moved ten feet. Then they had to tell us to move another ten feet. We’d kind of like move around in a circle and come back to where we originally started. The cops were mean at that time, but then we weren’t the best of kids either.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 13.9 x 17.6cm (5 1/2 x 6 15/16 in.)
Image: 11.4 x 16.9cm (4 1/2 x 6 5/8 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The Jokers roughhoused and fought among themselves but were not allowed to hurt each other. Real violence was reserved for those in other gangs or occasionally for civilians. “Did we fight with chains and pipes and knives? Yeah,” gang member Bob Powers reminisced years later. “Did people get stabbed? Yeah, people got stabbed. And people got their heads cracked open with bats.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The gang member making out in the back seat of a car on the way home from Coney Island is Lefty, identifiable by his tattoo. “We always wondered why the girls liked him,” recalled Jokers member Bob Powers. “We never thought he was good-looking, but all the girls loved him. It was amazing.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 61 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Jimmie, an older member of the gang, watched over the younger members with his brother Johnny. In 1998, Jokers member Bob Powers recalled, “Later, the whole family, all six of them … died, wiped out, mostly from drugs. It’s amazing because at this particular time, if you see Jimmie, he’s like the ‘Fonz,’ like James Dean – handsome. He was good-looking, he had the women, and he was always working on cars.”

Cleveland Museum of Art
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Exhibition: ‘Peter Hujar: Speed of Life’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 15th October 2019 – 19th January 2020

Curators: Joel Smith and Quentin Bajac

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.”

Mark Alice Durant. “Peter Hujar’s Photographic Truth,” on the Saint Lucy website [Online] Cited 01/11/2019

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Public Garden, Taormina, Sicily
1959
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Sheep, Pennsylvania
1969
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Gay Liberation Front Poster Image
1970
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Gay Liberation Front poster image

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.

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Gay Liberation Front Poster Image (installation view)
1970
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Candy Darling on her Deathbed
1973
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Candy Darling

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.

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Candy Darling on her Deathbed (installation view)
1973
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Fran Lebowitz at Home in Morristown, New Jersey
1974
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Self-Portrait Jumping (1)
1974
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Self-Portrait Jumping (1) (installation view)
1974
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Susan Sontag
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Susan Sontag (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Christopher Street Pier (2) (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Christopher Street Pier (2)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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.

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.

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
From Rockefeller Center: The Equitable Building
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Reclining Nude on Couch
1978
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Boy on Raft
1978
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Surf (2)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Boys in Car, Halloween
1978
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Dana Reitz’s Legs, Walking
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Dana Reitz’s Legs, Walking (installation view)
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Gary in Contortion (2)
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Wojnarowicz Reclining (2)
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Wojnarowicz Reclining (2) (installation view)
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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.

Philip Gefter. “Peter Hujar’s Downtown,” on the NYR Daily website [Online] Cited 01/11/2019

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Wojnarowicz
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Wojnarowicz (installation view)
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

“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.”

Peter Schjeldahl. “The Bohemian Rhapsody of Peer Hujar: Photographs at the crossroads of high art and low life,” on The New Yorker website January 29, 2018 [Online] Cited 01/11/2019

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Ethyl Eichelberger as Minnie the Maid
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Greer Lankton
1983
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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.

Richard B. Woodward. “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life @Morgan Library,” on the Collector Daily website February 21, 2018 [Online] Cited 01/11/2019

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Gary Indiana Veiled
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Some iPhone installation photographs and others

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Woman and Girl in Window Italy
c. 1963
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Young Man and Boy, Italy (installation view)
1958
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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.

Richard B. Woodward. “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life @Morgan Library,” on the Collector Daily website February 21, 2018 [Online] Cited 01/11/2019

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Young Man and Boy, Italy
1958
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Palermo Catacombs #11, Rows of Bodies
1963
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Man in Costume on Toilet, Backstage at Palm Casino Review (installation view)
1974
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Nude Self-Portrait, Running / Nude Self-Portrait Series (Avedon Master Class) (installation view)
1966
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Group Picture (installation view)
1966
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Stephen Varble, Soho, Franklin Street (III) (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Stephen Varble, Soho, Franklin Street (III)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Beauregard Under Plastic (1) (installation view)
1966
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Beauregard Under Plastic (1)
1966
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Bill Elliott (installation view)
1974
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Bill Elliott
1974
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Dean Savard Reclining (installation view)
1984
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Dean Savard Reclining
1984
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Chloe Finch (installation view)
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Chloe Finch
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Skippy on a Chair (installation view)
1985
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Jackie Curtis and Lance Loud (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Zachy and Gamal Sherif (Twins) (installation view)
1985
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Zachy and Gamal Sherif (Twins)
1985
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Ethyl Eichelberger, Dressed as a Man (installation view)
1983
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Girl in My Hallway (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Girl in My Hallway
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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.

Mark B. “Peter Hujar’s brilliant, too brilliant icons,” on the 48hills website October 22, 2018 [Online] Cited 01/11/2019

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
St. Patrick’s, Easter Sunday (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
St. Patrick’s, Easter Sunday
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Boy on a Park Bench (installation view)
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Boy on a Park Bench
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Mural at Piers (installation view)
1983
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Mural at Piers
1983
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Self Portrait (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Self Portrait in White Tank Top
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Gary in Contortion (1) (installation view)
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Gary in Contortion (1)
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Daniel Schook Sucking Toe (Close-up) (installation view)
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Daniel Schook Sucking Toe (Close-up)
1981
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Pascal Imbert Scarred Abdomen (installation view)
1985
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Pascal Imbert Scarred Abdomen
1985
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Manny Vasquez (Back with Bullet Wound) (installation view)
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Robert Levithan on Bed (installation view)
1977
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Robert Levithan on Bed
1977
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Randy Gilberti, High Heels, Halloween (installation view)
1980
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Randy Gilberti, High Heels, Halloween
1980
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Nina Christgau (2) (installation view)
1985
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Nina Christgau (2)
1985
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Paul Hudson (Leg) (installation view)
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Paul Hudson (Leg)
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Isaac Hayes (installation view)
1971
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Isaac Hayes
1971
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
William S. Burroughs (1) (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
William S. Burroughs (1)
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Warrilow (1) (installation view)
1985
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Warrilow (1)
1985
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Jerome Robbins at Bridgehampton (3) (installation view)
1977
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Jerome Robbins at Bridgehampton (3)
1977
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Hudson River (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Hudson River
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Paul Hudson (installation view)
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Paul Hudson
1979
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Rockefeller Center (2) (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Rockefeller Center (2)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Cat atop a cash register in a liquor store (installation view)
1957
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Louise Nevelson (2) (installation view)
1969
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Louise Nevelson (2)
1969
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Bill Rafford and Vince Aletti in Dresses Fire Island (installation view)
1971
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Bill Rafford and Vince Aletti in Dresses Fire Island
1971
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Robyn Brentano (1) (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Robyn Brentano (1)
1975
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Dog in the Street, Provincetown (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Dog in the Street, Provincetown
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Greer Lankton’s Legs (installation view)
1983
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Greer Lankton’s Legs
1983
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Paul Thek (installation view)
1973
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Paul Thek
1973
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Christopher Street Pier #4 (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Bruce de Ste. Croix (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Bruce de Ste. Croix
1976
Gelatin silver print
The Morgan Library & Museum, achat en 2013 grâce au Charina Endowment Fund
© Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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

Opening hours:
Tuesday: 11.00 – 21.00
Wednesday – Sunday: 11.00 – 19.00
Closed Monday

Jeu de Paume website

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Exhibition and auction, photographs and text: ‘The Gay Day Archive 1974-83’ – photographs by Hank O’Neal; text by Alan Ginsberg

Exhibition dates: 15th June – 20th June 2019

Auction: 20th June, 2019 at 1:30pm

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Gay Daddies)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

“Born gay and free”

I was born in 1958 and came out as a gay man in 1975, six short years after the Stonewall uprising, the nominal (the UK had decriminalised homosexuality in 1967) but official start of Gay Liberation around the world, especially in the United States of America. I survived the plague that hit in the early 1980s. A lot of my friend’s didn’t.

These fabulous photographs and lilting prose make wonderful bedfellows, shining a light on those very early years of outness, campness, empowerment and sexual and personal freedom pre HIV/AIDS. From Gay Daddies to Gay Teachers, from being nowhere (in sight) … to being everywhere. As Ginsberg eloquently proposes, “wearing their hearts on a banner for nothing but love.” Gay youth, dignity and equality, proud of my gay son whoever he may be.

There is such a sense of joy, happiness and love contained in these photographs. The two lads in “Untitled [summery mouths]” are redolent of the era. Cute as a button: platform shoes, tight flared jeans, keys hanging, hands clasped around, small waists, tight singlets, sultry curly hair. Disco love is in the air. I could have been one of these men, memories of those days, those halcyon 70s days.

There are heroes too. Marsha P. Johnson, performance artist, drag mother, transgender, gender nonconforming survival sex worker political activist human… probably murdered by thugs after the 1992 pride parade. And Harvey Milk, that assassinated visionary who became a martyr to the cause, marching in spirit with the crowd. The man carrying a wreath with his name – head down, black armband, gay rights t-shirt – is such a poignant image of the loss of a hero. And then Ginsberg’s text, “Harvey Milk died for your sins.” (He had initially written “our” but crossed it out).

That erasure is so important. I remember working at Channel 7 as a set painter in Melbourne in the late 1980s to pay for university. It was a typical male only workplace at the time, all “blokes”, and I was confronted one day by one of them about being openly gay. My response: I’m quite happy being how I am, it’s you that obviously has the problem. Why don’t you look at yourself first before you start attacking other people.

This is why it is so important that Ginsberg crossed out “our” and wrote “your” sins. LGBTQI people have not sinned. There just are. They have nothing to forgive themselves for. It is the prejudice of others that leads them to fight for dignity and equality. As one of the posters in the photographs says, “People should love one another regardless of race, religion, age or sex.” A men to that.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. The exhibition of these photographs is only on for a few days. Please see them if you can.

The photographs and text are used under “fair use” for the purposes of freedom of speech, research, education and informed comment. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

A festive visual compilation by the NY-based photographer and author O’Neal of the parade signifying the Gay Liberation Movement. Pictured are an array of fun-loving and politically-motivated participants, several openly displaying affection. With photographs of the transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson. Silver prints, various sizes, with most of the sheets 6 x 7 1/2 inches, 15.2 x 19 cm., or the reverse; each captioned by Ginsberg, and signed and dated by O’Neal on verso. 1974-1983. AND – An additional group of approximately 165 photographs by O’Neal of the NYC parades, comprising 95 silver prints, various sizes but most 11 x 14 inches, 28 x 35.6 cm., and the reverse, 5 are signed and dated by O’Neal and contain Ginsberg’s captions; and 70 smaller silver prints, various sizes to 8 x 10 inches, 20.3 x 25.4 cm., and the reverse, a few with O’Neal’s hand stamp and notations and many are dated, in pencil, on verso; with duplicates and triplicates. 1974-1983.

Estimate $70,000 – 100,000

Text for the Swann Auction Galleries website [Online] Cited 30/05/2019. No longer available online

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (WE ARE EVERYWHERE)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled [WE ARE EVERYWHERE] (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

We all look pretty normal,
boy next door, handsome punk,
ad man’s delight, daughters of the
American Revolution.

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Hikin’ Dykes)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Hikin’ Dykes) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Black white brown boy girl what idealism! –
wearing their
hearts on a banner for nothing but love

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (GAY YOUTH 1969-1979)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (GAY YOUTH 1969-1979) (verso)
1974-83
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

The Guy in the right looks like my daddy when
he was young (and alive).

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Dominant/Submissive Love)
1974-83
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Allen Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997)

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet, philosopher and writer. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the counterculture that soon followed. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression and was known as embodying various aspects of this counterculture, such as his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions. He was one of many influential American writers of his time who were associated with the Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

Ginsberg is best known for his poem “Howl”, in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. In 1956, “Howl” was seized by San Francisco police and US Customs. In 1957, it attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it described heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. “Howl” reflected Ginsberg’s own sexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that “Howl” was not obscene, adding, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”

Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York’s East Village. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. At Trungpa’s urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974.

Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. His poem “September on Jessore Road”, calling attention to the plight of Bangladeshi refugees, exemplifies what the literary critic Helen Vendler described as Ginsberg’s tireless persistence in protesting against “imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless.”

His collection The Fall of America shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979, he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992.

Full text “Alan Ginsberg,” on the Wikipedia website

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Miss Rollerind)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Miss Rollerind) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Miss Rollerind, queen of late 70s
disco world universe drama, observed by
a (gay??) black man on the asphalt.

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (COME! DIGNITY + EQUALITY)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (COME! DIGNITY + EQUALITY) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Come all over the sky, look up!

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (ADOLPH ANITA JOE – The REAL ThREAtS to HUMANITY!)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (ADOLPH ANITA JOE – The REAL ThREAtS to HUMANITY!) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

What a pleasant conversation they are having under Hitler’s head,
guy with handsome bicep chest, holding the banner aloft
lightly, and the eye passed smiling inquirer.

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (GAY MEN’S HEALTH PROJECT)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (GAY MEN’S HEALTH PROJECT) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

See anyone there you’d like to leave VD with?

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Good tight dress)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Good tight dress) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Good tight dress, totally olive oil lady
from midtown, but the top’s a baseball
capped ruffian whistling at the whore

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (I’m PROUD of my Gay Son)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (I’m PROUD of my Gay Son) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Resolute parents that have gone thru the mill
& seen the skeleton in the closet & come out of the
gruesome fun house into the light – now they’re on their own feet
older + dignified; with house dresses + majestic walrus mustaches.

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Look at her! Mad but actually handsome)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Look at her! Mad but actually handsome) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Look at her! Mad but actually handsome

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Cops with personal mustaches)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Cops with personal mustaches) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Cops with person mustaches, shun photogs, big tit guy in pancake suffering their own vision in the sun, and a thin socialist dyke

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Gay Rights)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Gay Rights) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

You mean all that hair + teeth is gay?

Hank O’Neal

Hank O’Neal (born June 5, 1940) is an American music producer, author and photographer.

Photography

He began taking photographs while a teenager, and began to pursue the field seriously in 1969, when he bought a professional camera and began documenting recording sessions and jazz concerts that he was producing. Long before Berenice Abbott admonished him to always have a project, he undertook his first, in rural East Texas during 1970-1973. These photographs led to his first exhibition in September 1973, at The Open Mind Gallery in New York City.

In the 1970s he associated with a diverse group of photographers, notably Walker Evans, André Kertész and most importantly, Berenice Abbott, with whom he worked for the last 19 years of her life.

From 1970 to 1999 (in addition to undertaking many photographic projects), O’Neal also published numerous books related to photography. In 1999, at the urging of gallery director Evelyn Daitz, he had a major retrospective of his work to that point at The Witkin Gallery. Since that time, he has focused his activities toward photography, and continues to mount exhibitions yearly throughout the U.S. and Canada. In 2003 his photographic career was summarised in a profile in The New York Times.

Books (text and illustrations)

The Eddie Condon Scrapbook of Jazz (St. Martin’s Press, 1973)
A Vision Shared (St. Martin’s Press, 1976)
Berenice Abbott – American Photographer (McGraw-Hill, 1982)
Life Is Painful, Nasty and Short … In My Case It Has Only Been Painful and Nasty – Djuna Barnes L 1978-81 (Paragon, 1990)
Charlie Parker (Filipacchi, 1995)
The Ghosts of Harlem (Filipacchi, 1997) French language edition
The Ghosts of Harlem (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009) English language edition
Hank O’Neal Portraits 1971-2000 (Sordoni Art Gallery, 2000)
Billie & Lester in Oslo (A Play with Music, 2005)
Gay Day – The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade (Abrams, 2006)
Berenice Abbott (Steidl, 2008)
The Unknown Berenice Abbott – Steidl (October 15, 2013)
A Vision Shared – 40th Anniversary Edition – Steidl (December 1, 2016)
Berenice Abbott – The Paris Portraits – Steidl (November 22, 2016)

Books (photographs only)

Allegra Kent’s Water Beauty Book (St Martin’s Press, 1976)
All the King’s Men (Limited Editions Club, 1990)
XCIA’s Street Art Project: The First Four Decades (Siman Media Works, 2012)

Portfolios

Berenice Abbott – Portraits In Palladium (Text Only, Commerce Graphics / Lunn Limited, 1990)
Hank O’Neal – Photographs (Text and 12 gravure prints), Limited Editions Club, 1990)
The Ghosts of Harlem (Text and 12 photographs), Glenside Press, 2007)

Text from “Hank O’Neal,” on the Wikipedia website

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled [MY SON IS GAY AND THAT’S OK]
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (MY SON IS GAY AND THAT’S OK) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

She’s an old anarchist from the
30’s. She read Marcel Proust in the
slums of Barcelona. She used to be a movie
Star in Berlin in 1923. Now she lives
in Queens in disguise as a typical american
mother.

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (GOD is GAY)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (GOD is GAY) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

According to Barbelo Gnostic theory,
God reflected on himself (or herself) & thus shone Sophia,
the First Word-thought, who thereat made sex
with herself and birthed the first Aeon,
Laldabaoth

Barbēlō refers to the first emanation of God in several forms of Gnostic cosmogony. Barbēlō is often depicted as a supreme female principle, the single passive antecedent of creation in its manifoldness. This figure is also variously referred to as ‘Mother-Father’ (hinting at her apparent androgyny), ‘First Human Being’, ‘The Triple Androgynous Name’, or ‘Eternal Aeon’. So prominent was her place amongst some Gnostics that some schools were designated as Barbeliotae, Barbēlō worshippers or Barbēlōgnostics.

Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: γνωστικός gnostikos, “having knowledge”, from γνῶσις gnōsis, knowledge) is a modern name for a variety of ancient religious ideas and systems, originating in Jewish Christian milieux in the first and second century AD. These systems believed that the material world is created by an emanation or ‘works’ of a lower god (demiurge), trapping the divine spark within the human body. This divine spark could be liberated by gnosis, spiritual knowledge acquired through direct experience. Some of the core teachings include the following:

1/ All matter is evil, and the non-material, spirit-realm is good.
2/ There is an unknowable God, who gave rise to many lesser spirit beings called Aeons.
3/ The creator of the (material) universe is not the supreme god, but an inferior spirit (the Demiurge).
4/ Gnosticism does not deal with “sin,” only ignorance.
5/ To achieve salvation, one needs gnosis (knowledge).

Laldabaoth is the demiurge (a heavenly being, subordinate to the Supreme Being, that is considered to be the controller of the material world and antagonistic to all that is purely spiritual) from Gnostic Christianity.

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (a big crowd)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (a big crowd) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

a big crowd of boys + girls + …? – but
that tall girl looks worried, doesn’t she have a baloon?

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (STONEWALL CHORALE)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (STONEWALL CHORALE) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Masculine & Feminine Sopranos!
marching on the Stone
floor on Manhattan, Explaining Life

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (WHERE IS your HUSBAND TONIGHT?)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (WHERE IS your HUSBAND TONIGHT?) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

What pretty wives!
are they photocopies of men?
do they smoke cigars in secret?

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (singing to skyscrapers)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (singing to skyscrapers) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

They’ve been meeting in secret + public
for years, & now sing to skyscrapers.

Today, at least a million spectators line the Pride parade route along Fifth Avenue. But, in its earliest days, the celebration was a much smaller event characterised by NY-style high energy, pithy signage, raucous crowd chants, extensive cruising and great music (remember disco?). Most of O’Neal’s photographs focused on NY’s West Village or Christopher Street, the epicenter of gaydom. A range of sub-cultures associated with the LGBTQ+ community are depicted: young and longhaired post-hippies, bare-chested muscle men, drag queens, fairies, leather-ites, Gay Daddies, protestors, pastors, parents of gays and the hikin’ dykes.

Some participants hold placards, including those protesting Anita Bryant, the once popular singer, who emerged as an strident anti-gay crusader in the late 1970s and teamed up with the divisive evangelical figure Jerry Falwell. A banner for the Gay Men’s Health Project is a harbinger of the tragic era to come.

Ginsberg first saw the photographs in 1982 and, according to O’Neal, was inspired to add his distinctive captions to the backs of the prints. His brief handwritten notes, which often reflect personal or historic observations, strike a wonderful tone. A caption that accompanies a picture of a group of men holding the banner WE ARE EVERYWHERE reads, “We all look pretty normal, boy next door, handsome punk, ad man’s delight, daughters of the American Revolution.” A shot depicting two men dressed in ancient Roman costume reads, “Clark Gable and Nero on a date, smiling for the 1920s Hollywood photogs.” His lengthy caption for the Johnson print (featured on the catalog cover) reads: “If I keep dressing up like this I’ll save the world from nuclear apocalypse. But will anyone love me for it? I’ll save the world anyway I know that looks good.” And still others honour the courageous and brave: one participant holds a wreath bearing the name Harvey Milk; Ginsberg wrote, “Harvey Milk died for your sins.” (He had initially written “our” but crossed it out).

O’Neal’s photographs were reproduced in the book, Gay Day: The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade, 1974-1983 (Abrams, 2006), with a Preface by William Burroughs. Interestingly during this same period Ginsberg had revisited his own Beat-era photographs, which were shot in the 1950s and processed at a local drugstore. He developed a unique hybrid picture-text style, adding detailed, handwritten mini-narratives to the lower margins of the prints, which captured his vivid, visual memories.

Text for the Swann Auction Galleries website [Online] Cited 30/05/2019. No longer available online

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (HARVEY MILK)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (HARVEY MILK) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Harvey Milk died for your sins

Harvey Milk (1930-1978)

Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician and the first openly gay elected official in the history of California, where he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Although he was the most pro-LGBT politician in the United States at the time, politics and activism were not his early interests; he was neither open about his sexuality nor civically active until he was 40, after his experiences in the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

In 1972, Milk moved from New York City to the Castro District of San Francisco amid a migration of gay and bisexual men. He took advantage of the growing political and economic power of the neighbourhood to promote his interests and unsuccessfully ran three times for political office. Milk’s theatrical campaigns earned him increasing popularity, and in 1977 he won a seat as a city supervisor. His election was made possible by a key component of a shift in San Francisco politics.

Milk served almost eleven months in office, during which he sponsored a bill banning discrimination in public accommodations, housing, and employment on the basis of sexual orientation. The Supervisors passed the bill by a vote of 11-1 and was signed into law by Mayor Moscone. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, who was another city supervisor. White had recently resigned to pursue a private business enterprise, but that endeavour eventually failed and he sought to get his old job back. White was sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter, which was later reduced to five years. He was released in 1983 and committed suicide by carbon monoxide inhalation two years later.

Despite his short career in politics, Milk became an icon in San Francisco and a martyr in the gay community. In 2002, Milk was called “the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States”. Anne Kronenberg, his final campaign manager, wrote of him: “What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us.” Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

Extract from “Harvey Milk,” on the Wikipedia website

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Blacks are most truthful)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Blacks are most truthful) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Blacks are most truthful,
it all goes back to deep
african religious ?

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Judy Garland)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Judy Garland) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Judy Garland’s got big-veined
fists & activist boyfriends
singing

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (PEOPLE SHOULD LOVE ONE ANOTHER)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (PEOPLE SHOULD LOVE ONE ANOTHER) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Well I’ll take 2 of these + 3 of those.
How old did you say you were?
Does that mean I have to sleep with 90 year old girls?

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (summery mouths)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (summery mouths) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Young meat Catholes (?)
appreciating each other’s
summery mouths

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (ANITA SLEEPS WITH BIG BUSINESS)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (ANITA SLEEPS WITH BIG BUSINESS) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Anita O’Day is still singing.

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (ANITA DEAR SHOVE IT)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (ANITA DEAR SHOVE IT) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

I’ll bet Anita had affairs in
high school with her girlfriends.
Pretty Girl.

Anita Bryant (American, b. 1940)

Anita Jane Bryant (born March 25, 1940) is an American singer and political activist. …

In the 1970s, Bryant became known as an outspoken opponent of gay rights in the US. In 1977, she ran the “Save Our Children” campaign to repeal a local ordinance in Dade County, Florida which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Her involvement with the campaign was condemned by gay rights activists. They were assisted by many other prominent figures in music, film, and television, and retaliated by boycotting the orange juice which she had promoted. This, as well as her later divorce, damaged her financially…

Victory and defeat

On June 7, 1977, Bryant’s campaign led to a repeal of the anti-discrimination ordinance by a margin of 69 to 31 percent. However, the success of Bryant’s campaign galvanised her opponents, and the gay community retaliated against her by organising a boycott of orange juice. Gay bars all over North America stopped serving screwdrivers and replaced them with the “Anita Bryant Cocktail”, which was made with vodka and apple juice. Sales and proceeds went to gay rights activists to help fund their fight against Bryant and her campaign.

In 1977, Florida legislators approved a measure prohibiting gay adoption.The ban was overturned more than 30 years later when, on November 25, 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Cindy S. Lederman declared it unconstitutional.

Bryant led several more campaigns around the country to repeal local anti-discrimination ordinances, including campaigns in St. Paul, Minnesota; Wichita, Kansas; and Eugene, Oregon. In 1978, her success led to the Briggs Initiative in California, which would have made pro-gay statements regarding homosexual people or homosexuality by any public school employee cause for dismissal. Grassroots liberal organisations, chiefly in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, organised to defeat the initiative. Days before the election, the California Democratic Party opposed the proposed legislation. President Jimmy Carter, governor Jerry Brown, former president Gerald Ford, and former governor Ronald Reagan – then planning a run for the presidency – all voiced opposition to the initiative, and it ultimately suffered a massive defeat at the polls.

In 1998, Dade County repudiated Bryant’s successful campaign of 20 years earlier and reauthorised an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting individuals from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation by a seven-to-six vote. In 2002, a ballot initiative to repeal the 1998 law, called Amendment 14, was voted down by 56 percent of the voters. The Florida statute forbidding gay adoption was upheld in 2004 by a federal appellate court against a constitutional challenge but was overturned by a Miami-Dade circuit court in November 2008.

Bryant became one of the first persons to be publicly “pied” as a political act (in her case, on television), in Des Moines, Iowa, on October 14, 1977. Bryant quipped “At least it’s a fruit pie,” making a pun on the derogatory term of “fruit” for a gay man. While covered in pie, she began to pray to God to forgive the activist “for his deviant lifestyle” before bursting into tears as the cameras continued rolling. Bryant’s husband said that he would not retaliate, but followed the protesters outside and threw a pie at them. By this time, gay activists ensured that the boycott on Florida orange juice had become more prominent and it was supported by many celebrities, including Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Paul Williams, Dick Clark (Bryant had made several appearances on his shows, especially his namesake television show), Vincent Price (he joked in a television interview that Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance referred to her), John Waters, Carroll O’Connor, Linda Lavin, Mary Tyler Moore, Charles Schulz, Billie Jean King, and Jane Fonda. In 1978, Bryant and Bob Green told the story of their campaign in the book At Any Cost. The gay community continued to regard Bryant’s name as synonymous with bigotry and homophobia.

Extract from “Anita Bryant,” on the Wikipedia website

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (I deserve a cute boy’s kiss) (Marsha P. Johnson)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (I deserve a Cute boy’s kiss) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

I deserve a Cute
boy’s kiss for this truthful hat. And he’s
so sensitive, look at that
tiny white dog!

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (BORN GAY AND FREE)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (BORN GAY AND FREE) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

What a pretty mother! Brave
handsome courageous + true.

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Marsha P. Johnson)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

Hank O’Neal (American, b. 1940) (photographer)
Alan Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997) (writer)
Untitled (Marsha P. Johnson) (verso)
1974-1983
From The Gay Day Archive
Gelatin silver print

If I keep dressing up like this
I’ll save the world from
Nuclear Apocalypse. But will anyone
love me for it? I’ll save the world
anyway. I know what looks good.

Marsha P. Johnson (American, 1945-1992)

Marsha P. Johnson (August 24, 1945 – July 6, 1992) was an American gay liberation activist and self-identified drag queen. Known as an outspoken advocate for gay rights, Johnson was one of the prominent figures in the Stonewall uprising of 1969. A founding member of the Gay Liberation Front, Johnson co-founded the gay and transvestite advocacy organisation S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), alongside close friend Sylvia Rivera. A popular figure in New York City’s gay and art scene, Johnson modelled for Andy Warhol, and performed onstage with the drag performance troupe, Hot Peaches. Known for decades as a welcoming presence in the streets of Greenwich Village, Johnson was known as the “mayor of Christopher Street”. From 1987 through 1992, Johnson was an AIDS activist with ACT UP.

Performance work and identity

Johnson initially called herself “Black Marsha” but later decided on “Marsha P. Johnson” as her drag queen name, getting Johnson from the restaurant Howard Johnson’s on 42nd Street. She said that the P stood for “pay it no mind” and used the phrase sarcastically when questioned about her gender, saying “it stands for pay it no mind”. She said the phrase once to a judge, who was humoured by it and released her. Johnson variably identified herself as gay, as a transvestite, and as a queen (referring to drag queen). According to Susan Stryker, a professor of human gender and sexuality studies at the University of Arizona, Johnson’s gender expression may be called gender non-conforming in absence of Johnson’s use of transgender, which was not used broadly during her lifetime.

Johnson said her style of drag was not serious (or “high drag”) because she could not afford to purchase clothing from expensive stores. She received leftover flowers after sleeping under tables used for sorting flowers in the Flower District of Manhattan, and was known for placing flowers in her hair. Johnson was tall, slender and often dressed in flowing robes and shiny dresses, red plastic high heels, and bright wigs, which tended to draw attention.

Johnson sang and performed as a member of J. Camicias’ international, NYC-based, drag performance troupe, Hot Peaches, from 1972 through to shows in the 1990s. When The Cockettes, a similar drag troupe from San Francisco, formed an East Coast troupe, The Angels of Light, Johnson was also asked to perform with them. In 1973, Johnson performed the role of “The Gypsy Queen” in the Angels’ production, “The Enchanted Miracle”, about the Comet Kohoutek. In 1975, Johnson was photographed by famed artist Andy Warhol, as part of a “Ladies and Gentlemen” series of Polaroids. In 1990, Johnson performed with The Hot Peaches in London. Now an AIDS activist, Johnson also appears in The Hot Peaches production The Heat in 1990, singing the song “Love” while wearing an ACT UP, “Silence = Death” button.

Stonewall uprising and other activism

Johnson said she was one of the first drag queens to go to the Stonewall Inn, after they began allowing women and drag queens inside; it was previously a bar for only gay men. On the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall uprising occurred. While the first two nights of rioting were the most intense, the clashes with police would result in a series of spontaneous demonstrations and marches through the gay neighbourhoods of Greenwich Village for roughly a week afterwards.

Johnson has been named, along with Zazu Nova and Jackie Hormona, by a number of the Stonewall veterans interviewed by David Carter in his book, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, as being “three individuals known to have been in the vanguard” of the pushback against the police at the uprising. Johnson denied she had started the uprising, stating in 1987 that she had arrived at around “2:00 [that morning]”, and that “the riots had already started” when she arrived and that the Stonewall building “was on fire” after cops set it on fire. The riots reportedly started at around 1:20 that morning after Stormé DeLarverie fought back against the police officer who attempted to arrest her that night.

Carter writes that Robin Souza had reported that fellow Stonewall veterans and gay activists such as Morty Manford and Marty Robinson had told Souza that on the first night, Johnson “threw a shot glass at a mirror in the torched bar screaming, ‘I got my civil rights'”. Souza told the Gay Activists Alliance shortly afterwards that it “was the shot glass that was heard around the world”. Carter, however, concluded that Robinson had given several different accounts of the night and in none of the accounts were Johnson’s name brought up, possibly in fear that if he publicly credited the uprising to Johnson due to her well-known mental state and gender nonconforming, then Stonewall, and indirectly the gay liberation movement, “could have been used effectively by the movement’s opponents”. The alleged “shot glass” incident has also been heavily disputed. Prior to Carter’s book, it was claimed Johnson had “thrown a brick” at a police officer, an account that was never verified. Johnson also claimed herself that she was not at the Stonewall Inn when the rioting broke out but instead had heard about it and went to get Sylvia Rivera who was at a park uptown sleeping on a bench to tell her about it. However, many have corroborated that on the second night, Johnson climbed up a lamppost and dropped a bag with a brick in it down on a cop car, shattering the windshield.

Following the Stonewall uprising, Johnson joined the Gay Liberation Front and participated in the first Christopher Street Liberation Pride rally on the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion in June 1970. One of Johnson’s most notable direct actions occurred in August 1970 when she and fellow GLF members staged a sit-in protest at Weinstein Hall at New York University after administrators canceled a dance when they found out was sponsored by gay organisations. Shortly after that, she and close friend Sylvia Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) organisation (initially titled Street Transvestites Actual Revolutionaries). The two of them became a visible presence at gay liberation marches and other radical political actions. In 1973, Johnson and Rivera were banned from participating in the gay pride parade by the gay and lesbian committee who were administering the event stating they “weren’t gonna allow drag queens” at their marches claiming they were “giving them a bad name”. Their response was to march defiantly ahead of the parade. During a gay rights rally at New York City Hall in the early ’70s, photographed by Diana Davies, a reporter asked Johnson why the group was demonstrating, Johnson shouted into the microphone, “Darling, I want my gay rights now!”

During another incident around this time, which landed Johnson in court, she was confronted by police officers for hustling in New York, and when they went to apprehend her, she hit them with her handbag, which contained two bricks. When Johnson was asked by the judge why she was hustling, Johnson explained she was trying to secure enough money for her husband’s tombstone. During a time when same-sex marriage was illegal in the United States, the judge asked her what “happened to this alleged husband”, Johnson responded, “Pigs killed him”. Initially sentenced to 90 days in prison for the assault, Johnson’s lawyer eventually convinced the judge to send her to Bellevue instead.

With Rivera, Johnson established the STAR House, a shelter for gay and trans street kids in 1972, and paid the rent for it with money they made themselves as sex workers. While the House was not focused on performance, Marsha was a “drag mother” of STAR House, in the longstanding tradition of chosen family in the Black and Latino LGBT community. Johnson worked to provide food, clothing, emotional support and a sense of family for the young drag queens, trans women, gender nonconformists and other gay street kids living on the Christopher Street docks or in their house on the Lower East Side of New York.

In the 1980s Johnson continued her street activism as a respected organiser and marshal with ACT UP. In 1992, when George Segal’s Stonewall memorial was moved to Christopher Street from Ohio to recognise the gay liberation movement, Johnson commented, “How many people have died for these two little statues to be put in the park to recognise gay people? How many years does it take for people to see that we’re all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race? I mean how many years does it take for people to see that we’re all in this rat race together.

Extract from “Marsha P. Johnson,” on the Wikipedia website

Swann Galleries
104 East 25th Street
New York, NY 10010
Phone: (212) 254-4710

Exhibition opening times:
Saturday, June 15 – 12 to 5pm
Monday, June 17 – 10am to 6pm
Tuesday, June 18 – 10am to 6pm
Wednesday, June 19 – 10am to 6pm
Thursday, June 20 – 10am to 12pm

Swann Auction Galleries website

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Exhibition dates: 8th March – 12th November 2023

Freedom of the self

About the exhibition

Exhibition dates: 4th April – 9th July, 2023

Engaging each other in light

Exhibition dates: 4th February – 29th May 2023

Free spirit

Introduction

1970s

“The image is always moving, even if you’re standing still.”

1990s

Exhibition dates: 3rd March – 14th May 2023

LOOK – SOCIAL

CELEBRITY–POLAROID

SELF – PORTRAIT

STUDIO–STREET

SCREEN – PRINT

QUEER – INFLUENCE(R)

CAMP–POP

PHOTO–GRAPHIC – PRODUCTION

PICTURE–ART

the photograph is a vehicle for performance

Curator’s Insight – Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media

Exhibition dates: 11th November 2022 – 2nd April 2023

Support

Exhibition dates: 16th October 2021 – 27th March 2022

Three themes

About the collector

Exhibition dates: 5th June – 5th July 2021

Nature ∞ nurture

The Opioid Diaries – James Nachtwey and Paul Moakley

What I Saw

Kensington Blues – Jeffrey Stockbridge

Surviving Kensington: behind the photos of ‘Kensington Blues’

Despair, Love and Loss – Mark E. Trent

Exhibition dates: 25th October 2020 – 28th February 2021

For a few brief moments, rebels with a cause

Bruce Davidson

Barbara Tannenbaum

Exhibition dates: 15th October 2019 – 19th January 2020

Free your mind

Gay Liberation Front poster image

Candy Darling

Early years

Portraits

New York

Bodies

Gracie Mansion Gallery, 1986

Andy Warhol

Some iPhone installation photographs and others

Exhibition dates: 15th June – 20th June 2019

“Born gay and free”

We all look pretty normal, boy next door, handsome punk, ad man’s delight, daughters of the American Revolution.

Black white brown boy girl what idealism! – wearing their hearts on a banner for nothing but love

The Guy in the right looks like my daddy when he was young (and alive).

Allen Ginsberg (American, 1926-1997)

Miss Rollerind, queen of late 70s disco world universe drama, observed by a (gay??) black man on the asphalt.

Come all over the sky, look up!

What a pleasant conversation they are having under Hitler’s head, guy with handsome bicep chest, holding the banner aloft lightly, and the eye passed smiling inquirer.

See anyone there you’d like to leave VD with?

Good tight dress, totally olive oil lady from midtown, but the top’s a baseball capped ruffian whistling at the whore

Resolute parents that have gone thru the mill & seen the skeleton in the closet & come out of the gruesome fun house into the light – now they’re on their own feet older + dignified; with house dresses + majestic walrus mustaches.

Look at her! Mad but actually handsome

Cops with person mustaches, shun photogs, big tit guy in pancake suffering their own vision in the sun, and a thin socialist dyke

You mean all that hair + teeth is gay?

Hank O’Neal

Photography

Books (text and illustrations)

Books (photographs only)

Portfolios

She’s an old anarchist from the 30’s. She read Marcel Proust in the slums of Barcelona. She used to be a movie Star in Berlin in 1923. Now she lives in Queens in disguise as a typical american mother.

According to Barbelo Gnostic theory, God reflected on himself (or herself) & thus shone Sophia, the First Word-thought, who thereat made sex with herself and birthed the first Aeon, Laldabaoth

a big crowd of boys + girls + …? – but that tall girl looks worried, doesn’t she have a baloon?

Masculine & Feminine Sopranos! marching on the Stone floor on Manhattan, Explaining Life

What pretty wives! are they photocopies of men? do they smoke cigars in secret?

They’ve been meeting in secret + public for years, & now sing to skyscrapers.

Harvey Milk died for your sins

Harvey Milk (1930-1978)

Blacks are most truthful, it all goes back to deep african religious ?

Judy Garland’s got big-veined fists & activist boyfriends singing

We all look pretty normal,
boy next door, handsome punk,
ad man’s delight, daughters of the
American Revolution.

Black white brown boy girl what idealism! –
wearing their
hearts on a banner for nothing but love

The Guy in the right looks like my daddy when
he was young (and alive).

Miss Rollerind, queen of late 70s
disco world universe drama, observed by
a (gay??) black man on the asphalt.

What a pleasant conversation they are having under Hitler’s head,
guy with handsome bicep chest, holding the banner aloft
lightly, and the eye passed smiling inquirer.

Good tight dress, totally olive oil lady
from midtown, but the top’s a baseball
capped ruffian whistling at the whore

Resolute parents that have gone thru the mill
& seen the skeleton in the closet & come out of the
gruesome fun house into the light – now they’re on their own feet
older + dignified; with house dresses + majestic walrus mustaches.

She’s an old anarchist from the
30’s. She read Marcel Proust in the
slums of Barcelona. She used to be a movie
Star in Berlin in 1923. Now she lives
in Queens in disguise as a typical american
mother.

According to Barbelo Gnostic theory,
God reflected on himself (or herself) & thus shone Sophia,
the First Word-thought, who thereat made sex
with herself and birthed the first Aeon,
Laldabaoth

a big crowd of boys + girls + …? – but
that tall girl looks worried, doesn’t she have a baloon?

Masculine & Feminine Sopranos!
marching on the Stone
floor on Manhattan, Explaining Life

What pretty wives!
are they photocopies of men?
do they smoke cigars in secret?

They’ve been meeting in secret + public
for years, & now sing to skyscrapers.

Blacks are most truthful,
it all goes back to deep
african religious ?

Judy Garland’s got big-veined
fists & activist boyfriends
singing

Well I’ll take 2 of these + 3 of those.
How old did you say you were?
Does that mean I have to sleep with 90 year old girls?

Young meat Catholes (?)
appreciating each other’s
summery mouths

I’ll bet Anita had affairs in
high school with her girlfriends.
Pretty Girl.

I deserve a Cute
boy’s kiss for this truthful hat. And he’s
so sensitive, look at that
tiny white dog!

What a pretty mother! Brave
handsome courageous + true.

If I keep dressing up like this
I’ll save the world from
Nuclear Apocalypse. But will anyone
love me for it? I’ll save the world
anyway. I know what looks good.