Since Art Blart started in November 2008 there has been only one posting on the glorious and groundbreaking work of American photographer Stephen Shore, way back in 2018 at MoMA. Shore’s photographs picture “the threadbare banality of the American scene, the jerry-rigged down-at-heels seediness of our rural landscapes and the spatial looseness of our towns.”1
I was so happy that I was going to be able to do another posting on this artist’s work only to be totally let down by the 10 media images provided by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. The installation photographs of the exhibition are great but the actual images only provide a meagre insight into the singular style and pictorial depth of the photographer.
“Two Stephen Shore chromogenic colour prints from 1976 where the colours are still true and have not faded. This was incredible – seeing vintage prints from one of the early masters of colour photography; noticing that they are not full of contrast like a lot of today’s colour photographs – more like a subtle Panavision or Technicolor film from the early 1960s. Rich, subtle, beautiful hues with the photograph having this amazing presence, projected through the construction of the image and the physicality of the print.”
I said in my comment on the MoMA exhibition in 2018, “Shore was showing the world in a different light… and he was using an aesthetic based on the straight forward use of colour. Colour is just there, part of the form of the image. Of course there are insightful subjective judgements about what to photograph in American surburbia, but this subjectivity and the use of colour within it is subsumed into the song that Shore was composing. It all comes back to music. Here’s a Mozart tune, this is his aesthetic, for eternity.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ See Stephen Shore, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography (London: Mack Books, 2022), 172. These lines from Venturi are cited on the back cover of Uncommon Places quoted in Hugh Campbell. “The poorest details of the world resurfaced,” on the Places Journal website, August 2023 [Online] Cited 26/08/2024
Many thankx to the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Stephen Shore’s photographs of the American vernacular have influenced not only generations of photographers but the medium at large. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years.
Text from the Aperture Instagram web page
“[F]or attention is of the essence of our powers; it is that which draws other things toward us, it is that which, if we have lived with it, brings the experiences of our lives ready to our hand. If things but make impression enough on you, you will not forget them; and thus, as you go through life, your store of experiences becomes greater, richer, more and more available. But to this end you must cultivate attention – the art of seeing, the art of listening …. To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention.”
Louis Sullivan. Kindergarten Chats (1918) from the epigraph of Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places (1973-1986)
With over a hundred images shot between 1969 and 2021 across the United States, Vehicular & Vernacular is the first retrospective of Stephen Shore’s work in Paris in nineteen years. On view at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson until September 15, the exhibition shows the photographer’s renowned series – Uncommon Places and American Surfaces – alongside lesser-known projects never shown in France.
Installation views of the exhibition Stephen Shore: Vehicular & Vernacular at the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson, Paris
Since the 1960’s, mobility has been central to Stephen Shore’s practice. In 1969, while on a trip to Los Angeles with his father, he took photographs from the car window. During the 1970s and 1980s, he went on several road trips across the United States, resulting in his two most famous series: American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. As the new millennium began, he resumed photographing from different means of transportation: from car windows, trains and planes. For his most recent project, which began in 2020, he used a camera-equipped drone to photograph changes in the American landscape. For over half a century, he developed a form of “vehicular photography”.
The vernacular has been an ever-present interest in North American photography: the culture of the useful, the local and the popular, so typical of the United States. Shore’s work is permeated by multiple aesthetic and cultural issues. The vernacular is one of them. Shore’s mobility allows him to multiply perspectives and encounters with this “Americanness”. In the works selected for this exhibition, the vehicular is, in fact, placed at the service of the vernacular.
Exhibition
With over a hundred images shot between 1969 and 2021 across the United States, Vehicular & Vernacular is the first retrospective of Stephen Shore’s work in Paris in nineteen years. On view at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson until September 15, the exhibition shows the photographer’s renowned series – Uncommon Places and American Surfaces – alongside lesser-known projects never shown in France. A fragment of the Signs of Life exhibition in which Shore participated in 1976 is exceptionally recreated for the occasion. Finally, the photographer’s most recent series, shot using drones, is exhibited for the first time in Europe.
Biography
Born in New York in 1947, Stephen Shore began photographing at the age of nine. At the age of fourteen, Edward Steichen bought him three photographs for the MoMA collections. In 1971, he became the first living photographer to have his work exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. Shore was one of eight photographers included in the legendary 1975 New Topographics exhibition at Rochester’s George Eastman House, which redefined the American approach to landscape. He is part of the generation that led to the recognition of colour photography as an art form. Rich, diverse and complex, his work transforms everyday scenes into opportunities for meditation.
Press release from the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson
For the epigraph of Uncommon Places, Shore used lines from Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats (1918):
“[F]or attention is of the essence of our powers; it is that which draws other things toward us, it is that which, if we have lived with it, brings the experiences of our lives ready to our hand. If things but make impression enough on you, you will not forget them; and thus, as you go through life, your store of experiences becomes greater, richer, more and more available. But to this end you must cultivate attention – the art of seeing, the art of listening …. To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention.” 10
The surfeit of seeing the Uncommon Places images offer means that, even as they seem to make available to view every detail of a highly particularised location, they achieve an archetypal or universal character; they are arguments not so much for the value of specific places as for a more general attentiveness to inhabited environments. In a conversation with Lynne Tillman, Shore discusses the “inherent architecture” of his scenes – the formal and spatial relationships produced through his deliberate technique. He notes how the view camera’s descriptive power “allowed [him] to move back farther and take pictures that were more packed with information, more layered.” This layered distance “allows for lots of different points of interest to exist in the same picture.”11 …
Shore has always been attracted to such scenes of visual coherence won out of incoherence, be it social, economic, or architectural. Back in the 1970s, when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown commissioned him to make photographs for a number of exhibitions (notably Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City, mounted at the Smithsonian in 1976), the architects were interested in how to capture “the threadbare banality of the American scene, the jerry-rigged down-at-heels seediness of our rural landscapes and the spatial looseness of our towns.”14
10/ Sullivan’s autobiography, The Autobiography of an Idea (1924), notes key episodes of “paying attention” – to a tree, a building, etc. – and the resulting “ideas” as formative in his intellectual and spiritual development.
11/ Shore, Uncommon Places, 182.
14/ See Stephen Shore, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography (London: Mack Books, 2022), 172. These lines from Venturi are cited on the back cover of Uncommon Places.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unknown photographer Rena Drexler on the day of her liberation from Auschwitz Poland, 1945 Private collection
Installation view of the exhibition “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli at the New-York Historical Society showing at centre, a photograph by an unknown photographer Rena and Harry Drexler at Drexler’s Deli, North Hollywood, CA (c. 1970s, below)
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.
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
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
Unidentified artist (American) Photographer in the Field 1907 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Life in all its variety!
A fascinating look at American real photo postcards and the stories they tell about the US in the early 20th century. They “reveal truths about a country that was growing and changing with the times – and experiencing the social and economic strains that came with those upheavals.”
Sometimes all is not as clear cut as the professional (vernacular) photographers would have us believe when they recorded a moment that would otherwise have been lost to posterity. For example, the Just Government League formed in 1909 – Maryland’s largest organisation advocating for women’s suffrage – was, like many suffrage organisations, predominantly white, Protestant, highly-educated, and financially well-off.
“In the early 20th century, in addition to its large African American population, Baltimore saw an influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who were Jewish and Catholic. Anti-immigrant sentiment was widespread and supported by the eugenic science of the period, to which many of Baltimore’s elite subscribed.”
As with everything in life and photography, nothing is ever black and white. While the photograph captures one moment, one time freeze, the hidden stories embedded in light and language can be excavated with patience and understanding to reveal the many truths of life – that is, the hopes and fears, the discriminations and freedoms of fallible human beings.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unidentified artist (American) Lumberjacks 1907 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) The Lions, Scio, Oregon 1907 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Telephone Operator 1907 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Through occupational portraits as well as workplace snapshots, real photo postcards served as means of visually representing women’s work outside the home. Snapshot photography’s aesthetic norms may have privileged domesticity, but the same cannot be said for real photo postcards, which illustrate a broad gamut of jobs that women undertook outside of the domestic realm. In this way, real photo postcards both captured women’s participation in public life and, through the cards’ subsequent distribution, visually reinforced it.
Women’s work as shown in real photo postcards includes representations of both exceptional forms of labor and quotidian but under acknowledged ones. Some postcards illustrate the degree to which women were beginning to enter lines of work widely considered too hazardous for their participation. One card, for example, depicts a female lion tamer named Holmes, brandishing a whip as she poses flanked by four lions who sit neatly on pedestals (187). Others show an early female truck driver, Luella Bates (193), and the race car driver Irene Dare (194).
In other fields of work outside the home, women constituted a more expected class of labourers. Postcards depicting telephone exchanges featured women operators, who quickly came to dominate this field of work, owing in part to employers’ belief that they had better telephone manners than men, and in part to the fact that they could be paid considerably less than men.11 On the back of one postcard (188), which depicts an Elmira, New York, roomful of telephone exchange operators clad in shirtwaists and skirts, the sender identifies herself as one of those pictured: “This is where I hold forth,” she writes. Another operator (195), this one pictured solo at the switchboard as she offers a smile to the camera…
Annie Rudd. “Between Private and Public,” in Lynda Klich and Benjamin Weiss (eds.,). Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation. MFA Publications, 2022, p. 177.
Unidentified artist (American) Street paving, Wyalusing, Pennsylvania 1907 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
This postcard depicts street layers working outside the Wyalusing Hotel in the town of Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, in 1907. According to the book, real estate development provided good opportunities for photo postcard photographers.
Unidentified artist (American) Photographer and Sitter with Dog 1907 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Votes for Women 1907 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
In 1903, at the height of the worldwide craze for postcards, the Eastman Kodak Company unveiled a new product: the postcard camera. The device exposed a postcard-sized negative that could print directly onto a blank card, capturing scenes in extraordinary detail. Portable and easy to use, the camera heralded a new way of making postcards. Suddenly almost anyone could make photo postcards, as a hobby or as a business. Other companies quickly followed in Kodak’s wake, and soon photographic postcards joined the billions upon billions of printed cards in circulation before World War II.
Real photo postcards, as such photographic cards are called today, captured aspects of the world that their commercially published cousins never could. Big postcard publishers tended to play it safe, issuing sets that showed celebrated sites from towns across the United States like town halls, historic mills, and post offices. But the photographers who walked the streets or set up temporary studios worked fast and cheap. They could take a risk on a scene that might appeal to only a few, or capture a moment that would otherwise have been lost to posterity. As the Victorian formality of earlier photography fell away, shop interiors, construction sites, train wrecks, and people acting silly all began to appear on real photo postcards, capturing everyday life on film like never before.
Featuring more than 300 works drawn from the MFA’s Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive, this exhibition takes an in-depth look at real photo postcards and the stories they tell about the US in the early 20th century. The cards range from the dramatic and tragic to the inexplicable, funny, and just plain weird. Along the way, they also reveal truths about a country that was growing and changing with the times – and experiencing the social and economic strains that came with those upheavals.
Today, real photo postcards open up the past in ways that can surprise and puzzle. Few of them come with explanations, so over and over again even the most striking images leave only questions: “why?” and sometimes even “what?” “Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation” is a forceful reminder that memory and historical understanding are evanescent.
Text from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website [Online] Cited 06/05/2022
Unidentified artist (American) A man poses in an Uncle Sam costume in Patchogue, Long Island, New York c. 1908 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
A man poses for a studio photo in an Uncle Sam costume in Patchogue – a village in Long Island, New York – circa 1908. The author writes: ‘Uncle Sam as a symbol for the U.S. was ensured not only by the works of nineteenth-century cartoonists like Thomas Nast and James Montgomery Flagg’s “I Want You” recruiting poster during WWI, but also because of everymen like this one, who emulated Sam’s long white whiskers and stars-and-stripes suit.’
Sarah Holt and Sadie Whitelocks. “Step back in time to yesteryear America: Fascinating new book of vintage photo postcards reveals life in the U.S during the early 20th century, from gun gangs to Grand Canyon visits,” on the Mailonline website 14 April 2022 [Online] Cited 02/05/2022
Unidentified artist (American) Group of men outside the post office in the city of Lenox, Iowa 1909 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Streetcar in Columbus, Ohio around 1909 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) The Strike is On 1910 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Smith Studio (publisher) U.S President Theodore Roosevelt speaking to a crowd at Freeport, Illinois 1910 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Look up and you’ll see former U.S President Theodore Roosevelt speaking to a crowd at Freeport, Illinois. It’s thought the picture was captured in 1910, the year after his presidency came to an end. The book reads: ‘In 1910, Roosevelt undertook a transcontinental trip that passed through Illinois, stopping in Freeport, Belvedere, and Chicago. The events in Freeport were planned for September 8, 1910’.
Sarah Holt and Sadie Whitelocks. “Step back in time to yesteryear America: Fascinating new book of vintage photo postcards reveals life in the U.S during the early 20th century, from gun gangs to Grand Canyon visits,” on the Mailonline website 14 April 2022 [Online] Cited 02/05/2022
Unidentified artist (American) Man in a fur coat 1910 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Featuring a moustachioed man in a fur coat, this postcard is from 1910. ‘Bearing a message in Norwegian, this card, addressed to Ole Flatland, of Canby, Minnesota, is testimony to the large and vibrant Scandinavian community in the upper Midwest,’ the book notes. It says in the absence of contextual information, ‘it is still possible to read images through clues offered in the physical object of the postcard itself, such as a caption on the front or message on the back, the clothes or uniforms that were worn, an object that was held, a person’s expression or body position, or the props and background chosen by the sitter to express a meaningful representation of themselves’
Unidentified artist (American) Flood at H. H. Miller’s Place Sample Room, Galena, Illinois 1911 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Men huddle together outside a bar, HH Miller’s Palace Sample Room, in the small town of Galena in Illinois, during the Valentine’s Day flood of 1911. The book says that the town ‘faced flooding every spring, but the Valentine’s Day flood of 19111 was particularly bad’. It continues: ‘HH Miller, the proprietor of the bar in this postcard, used the card as a New Year’s greeting the following January: “This is my saloon, the water was to the floor. Behind poast [sic] is myself and Berne and the man with white coat is my bartender. Good night.”‘ The tome also notes that these ‘news-style’ photo postcards, documenting ‘fires, floods, explosions, political rallies, strikes, and parades’ were ‘the direct forebear to the citizen journalism of the digital age, captured by ubiquitous smartphones and disseminated through social media’.
Unidentified artist (American) R. & H. Photo (publisher) Seen in Chinatown, San Jose, California 1912 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Electricia, the Woman Who Tames Electricity 1912 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Gensmer & Wolfram Grocery Store, Portland, Oregon 1913 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Suffragists about 1912 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Mary F. Mitchell Feeding Chickens, Wichita, Kansas about 1912 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Washerwomen 1913 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Long’s Place Lunch Car about 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Teacher in the Classroom about 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) National Woollen Mills in Wheeling, West Virginia around 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Men Drinking about 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Tourists at Mariposa Grove of Big Trees about 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
T. W. Stewart (American, active early 20th century) Members of the Just Government League of Maryland 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Established in 1909, the Just Government League became the largest organisation in Maryland advocating for women’s suffrage. Local chapters were founded throughout the state including in Westminster in 1913. By 1915 statewide membership numbered 17,000. The League’s campaign centred on public education to affirm the social benefits of votes for women. After Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1920, the League turned its focus to women’s civil and political rights, and won the right for women to hold public office in Maryland in 1922.
The Just Government League formed in 1909. Its leaders were Edith Houghton Hooker, a former Hopkins medical student, and her husband Donald Hooker, a Hopkins physician. They were aided by two close friends: Mabel Glover Mall, Edith’s classmate, and Florence Sabin, who completed her MD at Hopkins and became its first female senior faculty member.
Starting in 1910, suffragists began using cross-country hikes to “reach all sorts and conditions of people” outside of urban centres. The women of Maryland’s Just Government League hiked from Baltimore through Garrett County, about seventy miles, holding public meetings along the way.
Edith Hooker admired the direct-action approach of Alice Paul, and helped Paul to split the more radical National Woman’s Party from the moderate NAWSA. Though the Just Government League joined the National Woman’s Party in 1917, it remained more focused on diplomatic than on militant efforts, conducting intensive lobbying in Annapolis and Washington.
Despite their interest in reaching “all sorts” of people, the League, like many suffrage organisations, was predominantly white, Protestant, highly-educated, and financially well-off. In the early 20th century, in addition to its large African American population, Baltimore saw an influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who were Jewish and Catholic. Anti-immigrant sentiment was widespread and supported by the eugenic science of the period, to which many of Baltimore’s elite subscribed.
Unidentified artist (American) Rose Studio (publisher) Railroad worker, Portland, Oregon 1911 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Butcher and his Son about 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Woman with Flowers about 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Roller skater, Frankfort, Michigan about 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Featuring more than 300 works drawn from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive, a promised gift to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation takes an in-depth look at the innovative early-20th-century medium that enabled both professional and amateur photographers to capture everyday life in U.S. towns big and small. The photographs on these cards, which range from the dramatic and tragic to the inexplicable and funny, show this moment in history with striking immediacy – revealing truths about a country experiencing rapid industrialisation, mass immigration, technological change, and social and economic uncertainty. The exhibition is on view from March 17 through July 25, 2022 in the Herb Ritts Gallery and Clementine Brown Gallery. It is accompanied by an illustrated volume, Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation, produced by MFA Publications and authored by Lynda Klich and Benjamin Weiss, the MFA’s Leonard A. Lauder Senior Curator of Visual Culture, with contributions by Eric Moskowitz, Jeff. L Rosenheim, Annie Rudd, Christopher B. Steiner and Anna Tome.
In 1903, at the height of the worldwide craze for postcards, the Eastman Kodak Company unveiled a new product: the postcard camera. The device exposed a postcard-sized negative that could print directly onto a blank card, capturing scenes in extraordinary detail. Portable and easy to use, the camera heralded a new way of making postcards. Suddenly almost anyone could make photo postcards, as a hobby or as a business. Other companies quickly followed in Kodak’s wake, and soon photographic postcards joined the billions upon billions of printed cards in circulation before World War II.
“Real photo postcards bring us back to the exciting early years of photojournalism. The new flexibility and mobility of this medium created citizen photographers who captured life on the ground around them. These cards particularly excite me because we learn from them both the grand historical narrative and the smaller events that made up the daily lives of those who participated in that history,” said Leonard A. Lauder.
Real photo postcards, as such photographic cards are called today, caught aspects of the world that their commercially published cousins never could. Big postcard publishers tended to play it safe, issuing sets that showed celebrated sites from towns across the U.S. like town halls, historic sites and post offices. But the photographers who walked the streets or set up temporary studios worked fast and cheap. They could take a risk on a scene that might appeal to only a few, or record a moment that would otherwise have been lost to posterity. As the Victorian formality of earlier photography fell away, shop interiors, constructions sites, train wrecks and people being silly all began to appear on real photo postcards – capturing everyday life on film like never before.
Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation is organised thematically, with groupings of postcards centred around various events and activities that captivated both professional and amateur photographers at the time – from public festivities and organised sports to people at work in professions ranging from telephone operators to farmers. Many of the cards convey local spot news – fires, floods, explosions, political rallies, strikes and parades – presaging the digital journalism of our own age. The exhibition also features a wide array of postcard portraits, which were inexpensive and affordable to people from most walks of life. Popular categories of postcard portraits included workers posing with the tools of their trade or people posing with studio props or backgrounds, sitting on paper moons or “flying” in a fake airplane or hot-air balloon. Collectively, these portraits offer a rare view of a modern America in the making – one constructed by the people, for themselves.
“The postcards in this exhibition are precious, intricately detailed windows into life a century ago. In exploring the Lauder Archive, we selected and arranged the cards with the hope of conveying a measure of the intimacy and serendipity that might come from walking the streets of a town of that time,” said Weiss.
“Some of those cards reveal their history in great detail, while others are resolutely mute about who made them and why. That is one of the pleasures of working with postcards, and one of the things that makes the Lauder Archive such an inexhaustible mine of stories and mysteries,” added Klich.
Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation is the third exhibition at the MFA drawn from the Leonard A. Lauder Archive, following The Art of Influence: Propaganda Postcards from the Era of World Wars (2018-2019) and The Postcard Age: Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection (2012-2013).
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Unidentified artist (American) Circus at Bi-County Fair, Union City, Indiana 1917 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
An image taken at Union City Bi-County Fair in Indiana around 1917. The book says of the photo postcard industry: ‘Just as postcard studios could flourish in the quieter corners of the country, away from the commercial photo studios of the big cities, so could postcard photographers find success close to home. They just needed to make sure that their products were tailored to local tastes: local celebrities, local sports teams, champion livestock and vegetables, the midway at the county fairgrounds, or the local quack–medicine salesmen’.
Unidentified artist (American) Man and Woman in an Automobile 1918 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Thank you to Varun Coutinho for letting me know that the automobile is a 1917 Crow-Elkhart 20Hp Model 33 Cloverleaf De Luxe Roadster
Unidentified artist (American) Swimmers at Saltair, Utah Levene 1918 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) The Northern Photo Company (publisher) Advanced Room, Indian School, Wittenberg Wisconsin 1919 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Harbaugh Photo (publisher) Paper Moon Portrait of a Barber about 1914 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Paper Moon Portrait of a Young Woman 1917 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Amish market in Lancaster, Pennsylvania 1925 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Unidentified artist (American) Assembly line, Ford Motor Company factory, Dearborn, Michigan mid-1920s Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
An assembly line of the Ford Motor Company factory photographed in the mid-1920s in Dearborn, Michigan. The authors write: ‘The photographs on these cards capture the United States in the early twentieth century with a striking immediacy. It was a time of rapid industrialisation, mass immigration, technological change, and social uncertainty – in other words, a time much like our own’.
Unidentified artist (American) Alma Mae Bradley 1926 or later Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
Sometime in the early 1930s, a young Black woman posed for a portrait in what appears to be a makeshift photo studio, set up perhaps on the grounds of her high school campus (144). Affixed to the wall behind her is a cloth banner, its creases still visible from where it had been neatly pressed prior to being unfolded as a backdrop. Although the felt letters on the banner are mostly cut off from the image’s frame, there are enough letters visible to make out that the photograph was taken at Downingtown Industrial and Agricultural School, a vocational high school established in 1905 to educate Black children in and around Chester County, Pennsylvania. The young woman is dressed in the uniform of her school team, and she is wearing a pair of Ball-Band high-top canvas rubber-soled sneakers, the latest innovation in competitive athletic footwear. She stands with one foot in front of the other, her left knee slightly bent, and she appears ready to throw a basketball while looking off somewhere into the distance. Although the photograph represents a unique likeness or portrait of this individual, the image closely follows the stylistic conventions of this period – photographing athletes in the artificial surroundings of a photo studio while presenting them as if caught in a frozen moment of action during a game or sporting event. On the back of the postcard is written: “When you look at this, think of me. Keep this to remember me by. Love Alma Mae Bradley.” Beyond the small clues presented in the brief handwritten text and in the image, virtually nothing else is known about this young woman – who she was, whom she was writing to, and how exactly she would want to be remembered.1 Like so many other portraits on photo postcards produced in the early twentieth century, this one has been separated from its original context and from its intended recipient. What had started as a personal memento from a life being lived, is now a public document detached from individual experience and meaning.
Christopher B. Steiner. “When You Look at This, Think of Me,” in Lynda Klich and Benjamin Weiss (eds.,). Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation. MFA Publications, 2022, p. 138.
Mitchell (American, photographer) Birger and his gang October 1926 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
This incredible photograph was taken in Harrisburg, Illinois, by local resident and photographer Alvis Michael Mitchell and shows notorious gangster Charlie Birger and his gun-toting gang. Birger, reveals the book, was ‘as notorious as any gangster anywhere from 1926 to 1928’, with one newspaper story at the time describing Al Capone as ‘the Charlie Birger of Cook County’. Birger’s gang, we learn in the tome, ‘controlled bootlegging and “adult entertainment” across Southern Illinois’, with Birger eventually convicted of orchestrating the murder of a small-town mayor and becoming the last man publicly hanged in Illinois on April 19, 1928. He can be seen in the picture sitting sidesaddle on the porch rail at back-right in a bulletproof vest, the book reveals. Adding further insight, it says: ‘The inscription on [this] card, “Birger and His Gang”, vaults the viewer from quietly eyeing a band of outlaws to considering what photographer Mitchell might have felt as he steadied his camera before all that brandished firepower… though Mitchell suggested to a reporter years later that he had arranged the photo, family lore has it the other way: Birger’s gang enlisted the reluctant photographer, knocking on the door and spooking his wife.’ Despite the 1927 notation on the card, the book’s authors say the date ‘can be narrowed down to within a few days in October 1926, based on the movements, arrests, and deaths of the pictured gang members’.
Unidentified artist (American) Two elegantly dressed women at the Grand Canyon January 14, 1929 Gelatin silver print on card stock Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive
This photo, taken on January 14, 1929, shows two elegantly dressed women at the Grand Canyon. The book says of the shot: ‘The women stand before what is today a hackneyed tourist view… but what was then remarkable, a novelty. Their heeled shoes and clutches indicate that they did not rough it to get there, but were neatly dropped, likely by a driver, in a predetermined location designed to ensure that they could procure a photograph that would communicate, in effect, that they had “been there, done that”‘.
Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation book cover. The cover picture shows tourists at the Wawona Tree in California’s Yosemite National Park in 1908.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Avenue of the Arts 465 Huntington Avenue Boston, Massachusetts
Opening hours: Monday and Tuesday 10am – 5pm Wednesday – Friday 10am – 10pm Saturday and Sunday 10am – 5pm
Curator: Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met
Unknown American photographers and Daisy Studio (American, active 1940s) Studio Portraits 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver prints The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
First of a two-part posting on these mostly 1940s living expressions of past but present people and the African American experience.
In one photograph, I just love the hearts on the pockets of the jeans of one of the young men. Wonderful style and a touching intimacy are evident in many of the images.
“The poignancy of these small photographs lies in the essential respect the camera offers its subjects, who sit for their portraits as an act of self-expression.”
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“To the eye and spirit, pictures are just what poetry and music are to the ear and heart.”
“With the clear perception of things as they are, must stand the faithful rendering of things as they seem. The dead fact is nothing without the living expression.”
Frederick Douglass. “Pictures and Progress”
“True art, when it happens to us, challenges the ‘I’ that we are.”
Jeanette Winterson. “Art Objects,” in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, 1996
This exhibition will present more than one hundred and fifty studio portraits of African Americans from the mid-twentieth century, part of an important recent acquisition by The Met. Produced by mostly unidentified makers, the photographs are a poignant, collective self portrait of the African American experience during the 1940s and 1950s – a time of war, middle-class growth, and seismic cultural change.
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print with hand colouring The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American maker Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print with hand colouring The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print with hand colouring The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
African American Portraits: Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s, on view June 26 through October 8, 2018,will present more than 150 studio portraits from the mid-20th century. The exhibition offers a seldom seen view of the African American experience in the United States during World War II and the following decade – a time of war, middle-class growth, and seismic cultural change. Part of an important acquisition made by The Met in 2015 and 2017, these photographs build on and expand the Museum’s strong holdings in portraiture from the beginning of photography in the 1840s to the present. The exhibition is made possible by the Alfred Stieglitz Society.
The portraits on view generally feature sitters in a frontal pose against a painted backdrop – soldiers and sailors model their uniforms, graduates wear their caps and gowns, lovers embrace, and new parents cradle their infants. Both photographers and subjects remain mostly unidentified.
In the wartime economy, photographic studios became hubs of activity for local and regional communities. Some studios were small and transient, others more established and identifiable, such as the Daisy Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. Using waterproof direct positive paper rather than film, the studios were able to offer their clientele high quality, inexpensive portraits in a matter of minutes. The poignancy of these small photographs lies in the essential respect the camera offers its subjects, who sit for their portraits as an act of self-expression.
African American Portraits: Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s is organised by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met.
Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Billboard December 4 , 1948 p. 72
Popular Photography May 1948 p. 99
Direct positive paper is primarily suited for use in pinhole cameras where exposure and processing in conventional black and white photo chemistry achieves a unique positive print – without the need for a film negative or inter-negative. The paper can also be successfully used in other applications such as direct exposure in large format cameras or by cutting small sheets for exposure in LOMO type cameras.
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print with hand colouring The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017 Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
Opening hours: Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm Closed Wednesday
I’ve never liked the term ‘”vernacular” photography’ because, for me, every time someone presses the shutter of the camera they have a purpose: to capture a scene, however accidental or incidental. That context may lie outside recognised networks of production and legitimation but it does not lie outside performance and ritual. As Catherine Lumby observes, what the promiscuous flow of the contemporary image culture opens up, “is an expanded and abstracted terrain of becoming… whereby images exceed, incorporate or reverse the values that are presumed to reside within them in a patriarchal social order.”1 Pace Evans.
His art of an alternate order, his vision of a terrain of becoming is so particular, so different it has entered the lexicon of America culture.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Lumby, Catharine. “Nothing Personal: Sex, Gender and Identity in The Media Age,” in Matthews, Jill (ed.,). Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997, pp. 14-15.
Walker Evans: “The passionate quest to identify the fundamental features of American vernacular culture… the term “vernacular” designates those popular or informal forms of expression used by ordinary people for everyday purposes – essentially meaning all that falls outside art, outside the recognised networks of production and legitimation, and which in the US thus serves to define a specifically American culture. It is all the little details of the everyday environment that make for “Americanness”: wooden roadside shacks, the way a shopkeeper lays out his wares in the window, the silhouette of the Ford Model T, the pseudo-cursive typography of Coca-Cola signs. It is a crucial notion for the understanding of American culture.”
Text from press release
Many thankx to the Centre Pompidou for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.
Walker Evans (1903-1975) was one of the most important of twentieth-century American photographers. His photographs of the Depression years of the 1930s, his assignments for Fortune magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, and his “documentary style” influenced generations of photographers and artists. His attention to everyday details and the commonplace urban scene did much to define the visual image of 20th-century American culture. Some of his photographs have become iconic.
Conceived as a retrospective of Evans’s work as a whole, the Centre Pompidou exhibition presents three hundred vintage prints in a novel and revelatory thematic organisation. It highlights the photographer’s recurrent concern with roadside buildings, window displays, signs, typography and faces, offering an opportunity to grasp what no doubt lies at the heart of Walker Evans’ work: the passionate quest to identify the fundamental features of American vernacular culture. In an interview of 1971, he explained the attraction as follows: “You don’t want your work to spring from art; you want it to commence from life, and that’s in the street now. I’m no longer comfortable in a museum. I don’t want to go to them, don’t want to be ‘taught’ anything, don’t want to see ‘accomplished’ art. I’m interested in what’s called vernacular. For example, finished, I mean educated, architecture doesn’t interest me, but I love to find American vernacular”.
In the English-speaking countries, and in America more notably, the term “vernacular” designates those popular or informal forms of expression used by ordinary people for everyday purposes – essentially meaning all that falls outside art, outside the recognised networks of production and legitimation, and which in the US thus serves to define a specifically American culture. It is all the little details of the everyday environment that make for “Americanness”: wooden roadside shacks, the way a shopkeeper lays out his wares in the window, the silhouette of the Ford Model T, the pseudo-cursive typography of Coca-Cola signs. It is a crucial notion for the understanding of American culture. It is to be found in the literature as early as the 19th century, but it is only in the late 1920s that it is first deployed in a systematic study of architecture. Its importance in American art would be theorised in the 1940s, by John Atlee Kouwenhoven, a professor of English with a particular interest in American studies who was close to Walker Evans himself.
After an introductory section that looks at Evans’s modernist beginnings, the exhibition introduces the subjects that would fascinate him throughout his career: the typography of signs, the composition of window displays, the frontages of little roadside businesses, and so on. It then goes on to show how Evans himself adopted the methods or visual forms of vernacular photography in becoming, for the time of an assignment, an architectural photographer, a catalogue photographer, an ambulant portrait photographer, while all the time explicitly maintaining the standpoint of an artist.
This exhibition is the first major museum retrospective of Evans’s work in France. Unprecedented in its ambition, it retraces the whole of his career, from his earliest photographs in the 1920s to the Polaroids of the 1970s, through more than 300 vintage prints drawn from the most important American institutions (among them the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) and also more than a dozen private collections. It also features a hundred or so other exhibits drawn from the post cards, enamel signs, print images and other graphic ephemera that Evans collected his whole life long.
“You don’t want your work to spring from art; you want it to commence from life, and that’s in the street now. I’m no longer comfortable in a museum. I don’t want to go to them, don’t want to be ‘taught’ anything, don’t want to see ‘accomplished’ art. I’m interested in what’s called vernacular.”
Walker Evans, interviewed by Leslie Katz (1971)
Through more than 400 photographs and documents, this retrospective of the work of Walker Evans (1903-1975) explores the American photographer’s fascination with his country’s vernacular culture. Evans was one of the most important of twentieth-century American photographers. His photographs of the Depression years of the 1930s, his “documentary style” and his interest in American popular culture influenced generations of photographers and artists. Bringing together the best examples of his work, drawn from the most important private and public collections, the exhibition also accords a large place to the artefacts that Evans himself collected throughout his life, to offer a fresh approach to the work of one of the most significant figures in the history of photography.
Study of his images – from the very first photographs of the 1920s to the Polaroids of his last years – reveals a fascination with the utilitarian, the domestic and the local. This interest in popular forms and practices emerged very early, when he started to collect postcards as a teenager. More than ten thousand items he had gathered by the time of his death are now held by the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Other everyday objects from his personal collection – enamel signs, handbills and adverts – are exhibited here.
Walker Evans’s attraction to the vernacular finds expression, above all, in his choice of subjects: Victorian architecture, roadside buildings, shopfronts, cinema posters, placards, signs, etc. His pictures also feature the faces and bodies of ordinary people, whether victims of the Depression or anonymous passers-by. Something else “typically American” was the underside of progress. During the 1930s in particular, the American landscape was strewn with ruin and waste. Evans kept an eye on them ever after. Industrial waste, building debris, automobile carcases, wooden houses in ruins, Louisiana mansions fallen in the world, antiques, garbage, faded interiors, bare patches in exterior render: these were the other face of America. Just as much as the towering skyscraper or the gleaming motor car, all this was an element of the modern. This concern with decline and obsolescence gave the photographer a critical edge and reveals a profound fascination with the mechanisms of overproduction and consumption characteristic of the age.
Evans didn’t just collect the forms of the vernacular, he also borrowed its methods. In many of his images, he adopts the codes of applied photography: the shots in series, the frontality, the apparent objectivity. Waiting, camera in hand on the corner of the street or in the subway, he accumulated portraits of city-dwellers by the dozen, releasing his shutter with the mechanical regularity of a photo booth. Working like a post-card photographer or architectural photographer, Evans built up, in surprisingly systematic fashion, a catalogue of churches, doors, monuments and small-town main streets. Sculptures, wrought-iron chairs, household tools: all seem to have been selected for their unique qualities as objects. The repetitivity, the apparent objectivity and the absence of emphasis in these images are typical of commercial photographs produced to order. In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, asked Evans to photograph the six hundred sculptures of the exhibition of “African Negro Art”. The method he adopted was that of the catalogue photographer, rigorously avoiding dramatic effects by eliminating shadow; tightly framed and set against a neutral background, the pieces find a new elegance. The photographer would often have recourse to this regime in the years that followed, notably for a portfolio entitled “Beauties of the Common Tool”, published in Fortune magazine in July 1955. This adoption of the forms and procedures of non-artistic photography even as Evans laid claim to art prefigures – some decades in advance! – the practices of the conceptual artists of the 1960s.
Clément Chéroux Julie Jones in Code Couleur, No. 28, May – August 2017, pp. 14-17
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E
This polymorphic album of an exhibition by Patrick Pound at NGV Australia, Melbourne is unfortunately stuck with a most ridiculous title.
The great “show and tell” consists of 6 large galleries which are crammed full of thousands of photographs from the artists collection and artefacts from the NGV collection which form a (according to the exhibition blurb) “diagrammatic network of intersections, and in that way shows one of the underlying ideas of the whole exhibition, which is to seek out patterns and similarities and connections across objects and works of art and ideas. In other words, one thing leads to another.”
Not necessarily.
Pound is interested in the writing of Georges Perec (a member of the Oulipo group of writers and mathematicians which formed in France in 1960) and his use of “restrictions in his writing as a way of encouraging new patterns and structures.” Perec wrote a whole novel in 1969, A Void, translated from the original French La Disparition (literally, “The Disappearance”) entirely without using the letter e (except for the author’s name). Oulipo writers sought to produce a document that undermines its own reliability. Through structures – or constraints – on composition, Oulipo writers sought to produce new and interesting works.
In a similar vein Pound restricts his collections of photographs to restrictive themes, such as people falling, sleepers, holes, readers, the air, lamps, listening to music, hands, shadows, interventions, backs, possibly dead people, holding cameras, self-portraits, doubles, entrants, etc. He seeks to gather his thoughts through these collections, and proposes that collecting found photographs “is like taking cuttings from the world.” A form of collage.
For me the grouping of all these “found” photographs together in display cases is a form of conceptual conceit: the collection of such varied instances of the shadow of the photographer appearing in every image, for example, means very little. Unlike the restrictions that Perec proposes which lead to interesting outcomes, Pound’s restrictions do not enrich the individual photographs by placing them all together, in fact the opposite. The totality is less than the sum of the parts. Reductio ad absurdum.
As individual photographs (as seen below in this posting), the images have presence, they have an aura which emanates from the moment, and context, in which the photograph was taken. Different in each instance. But in this exhibition we are overwhelmed by thousands of images and cannot give them due attention; the photographic “trace” becomes specious. The aura of the singular image is denuded; the aura of the collective does not exist. The collections become the collective photograph (of space) as reassurance: that the interrupting time freeze of individual photographs is not unique and occurs again and again and again. Pound’s collections are a form of photographic cancer… a kind of photographic plate-spinning, where the artist tries to keep all topics rotating in mid-air.
Pound’s existential typologies and classifications are a form of superficial play, using one photo to beget another. The addition of artefacts from the NGV collection only highlights the folly, in which two ceramic parrots paired with a photograph of two parrots is the indulgent nadir. The typologies and collections can, however, be seen as an ironic comment on the nature of our image saturated society, where millions of photographs are uploaded and viewed on the www every day. They can also be seen as a comment on the way people view photography in contemporary culture, where every selfie or picture of what I had for breakfast is posted online for consumption. While I admire Pound’s pugnaciousness and the obsessiveness needed to collect all of these images (being a collector myself) and, further, the tenacity required to catalogue and arrange them all – I really wonder about the clinamen, a term coined by Lucretius to describe the unpredictable swerve of atoms in his version of physics. It was adopted by the Oulipo set as – quoting Paul Klee – ‘the error in the system’. By gathering all of these photographs together in groups, the periphery becomes the centre … AND LOSES ITS UNPREDICTABILITY – the collective photographs loose their punctum, their unpredicatability. The photographs loose their individual transcendence of time. Perec’s missing eeeeeeeeeeeeeee’s at the beginning of this text thus exclude chaos, randomness, the capital E.
Other statements and ideas also grate. “The camera reduces the world to a list of things to photograph. When I click BUY on eBay – for me that’s the equivalent of taking a photograph. The mouse is my camera.” Well, no actually. The camera never reduces the world, it just is, it’s a machine. It is the person who takes the photograph, the human, that reduces the world to what they want to photograph. And when you click BUY on eBay it is not the equivalent of taking a photograph. You have used your money, your capitalism, your CAPITAL, to purchase your DESIRE. You are taking someone else’s vernacular, their moment of deciding what to photograph, to purchase their desire so that you can possess it yourself. You are coveting time and space. “Eventually every photograph is a photograph of a dead person.” Well, no actually, because not every photograph is of a person. “The camera is an idling hearse.” Yes, and so is your body, and the motor car, and walking across the road. The effect of these oblique statements is to further dumb down the public understanding of photography.
The work in the exhibition starts to come alive in Room 2 The Museum of There / Not there, where all of the things in the room are asked to stand in for an absence, where everything is a remnant or a trace. “Each thing here is a reminder of something else, it can be seen a surrogate or a partial representation.” The dissociative associations challenge the viewer to create their own connections and narratives from the objects placed before them. They mentally challenge the viewer to imagine. This challenge is further heightened in some of the best work in the exhibition, the series Portmanteau – definition: a large travelling bag; a word blending the sounds and combining the meanings of two others: podcast is a portmanteau, a made-up word coined from a combination of the words iPod and broadcast – in which visually disparate images (a cloud, a person blowing gum; a golf ball hovering over the cup, an eclipse) make unusual but sympathetic and intriguing connections across time and space. Photographs such as High wire act (2015) and The Fountainhead (2016, both below) are complex and creative examples of focused image making which reminded me of the Bauhaus collages of Josef Albers where Albers nowhere changes, “the rules of the game more profoundly than in his collages that feature a multitude of photographs. His collage of a bullfight in San Sebastian can be read as a short story or experimental film, where we as viewers recognise that we are being transported to a distant time and place, no less enchanting for its impossibility.” Randomness and synchronicity are back in the game.
Speaking of games, my favourite Pound objects in the exhibition were his Solander box series The game of things (2016, below). Their charm, wittiness, beauty, visual and mental acuity put paid to many other forced associations in the exhibition. He observes that, “Some things have little to do with each other until they come into contact.” But even when they do come into contact, they can still have very little to do with each other. Why The game of things series works so well is that Pound restricts himself (yes that Perec restriction that actually means something) in order / disorder to create something new and interesting, a document that undermines its own reliability (its a game!). The clinamen, the unpredictable swerve which, according to Lucretius occurs “at no fixed place or time” and which provides the “free will which living things throughout the world have” appears. Pound’s free will combines disparate elements in a pared down aesthetic, a playful game, where there is no need for thousands of photographs to focus his ideas.
While Pound’s description of multiplicities, repetitions and differences is engaging in a humorous and ironic way as “lines of escape from the generalities of society,” they create distance from laws and norms even while still re-enacting them. Much more interesting are Pound’s subversions of a singular reality through the overlapping of images – both mental and physical. While existing in a physical space, the “game of things” actually lives in my mind because humanness is the ultimate clinamen.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 1,372
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See Part 1 of the posting.
A page from Georges Perec’s book Species of Spaces (Espèces d’espaces) and Other Pieces 1974
Entrance to the exhibition Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition with the work The photographer’s shadow (2000-2017) right Photo: Wayne Taylor
Installation view of Patrick Pound’s work The photographer’s shadow (2000-2017, detail) Photo: Wayne Taylor
Installation view of Patrick Pound’s work The photographer’s shadow (2000-2017, detail) Photo: Wayne Taylor
Installation views of the exhibition Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition at NGV Australia, Federation Square. Presented as part of the NGV Festival of Photography. Photos: Wayne Taylor
Installation views of Patrick Pound’s work Damaged 2008-2017 (detail) Photos: Wayne Taylor
Installation views of The Museum of there / Not there 2016-2017 (detail) with (above) John Brack’s Self-portrait (1955), David Potts Cat show, London (1953), Eugène Atget’s Eclipse (1911, top right), Lee Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore (1969, middle right) and Erich Salomon’s Banquet at the Quai d’Orsay, Paris, August 1931 (bottom right). Photos: Wayne Taylor
Erich Salomon (German, 1886-1944) Banquet at the Quai d’Orsay, Paris, August 1931. ‘A le voilà, le roi des indiscrets!’ 1931, printed 1970 Gelatin silver photograph, ed. 3/100 Purchased, 1971
Here are some examples of how The Museum of There / Not there works:
From Rodin’s marble head without its helmet …
to a sculpture that’s lost its head yet remains holding onto its hair …
and from a broken comb found in an Egyptian tomb to a novelty wig …
it is full of missing parts, surrogates and substitutions, apparitions and disappearing acts.
Every representation is, after all, something of a conjurer’s trick.
Patrick Pound
The Museum of There / Not there is a collection of my things, and the NGV’s things. All of the things in this room are asked to stand in for an absence. To make its presence shimmer.
From a ventriloquist’s dummy to a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; from a photo of an empty shell to a nineteenth-century bustle; from an American toy border patrol car to a painting of an immigrant – everything in this room is a remnant or a trace. They speak of being there or not being all there.
Each thing here is a reminder of something else, it can be seen a surrogate or a partial representation. There are things that are unfinished or incomplete; there are ghosts and traces; things that are missing parts or that are simply missing. Meanings too might have changed, or become fluid, with the passing of time. In effect, this is a giant collage where things are asked to stand in for other things. They are material realisations of ephemeral and ethereal states.
There is also a soundtrack, featuring music ranging from Tom Petty’s “Refugee” to Aretha Franklin’s “I Wonder (Where You Are Tonight)”.
“To collect is to gather your thoughts through things.”
“When I began collecting photographs I was thinking of the way the camera reduces the world to a list of things to photograph. I thought that to photograph was to collect the world in the form of pictures… As writer Susan Sontag said, photography is not so much a representation of the world but a piece of it. Collecting found photos is like taking cuttings from the world. For me it is a form of collage.”
“I did suggest the call the show ‘Enough Already’ but they went with ‘The Great Exhibition’. Perhaps the best thing about that is that even people who really don’t like it will still have to call it ‘The Great Exhibition’.”
“The camera reduces the world to a list of things to photograph. When I click BUY on eBay – for me that’s the equivalent of taking a photograph. The mouse is my camera.”
“As Honoré de Balzac said, “A hobby, a mania, is pleasure transformed into the shape of an idea!””
“Some things have little to do with each other until they come into contact.”
“To collect is to look for like-minded things. One thing inevitably leads to another. When you pair one thing with another, some things start to make sense – or not. In the end, every collection is, after all, a reflecting pool.”
“Every representation is, after all, something of a conjurer’s trick.”
“Art traditionally becalms her sitters.”
“Photography stops people in their tracks. Eventually every photograph is a photograph of a dead person. The camera is an idling hearse.”
Patrick Pound
Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition is the first comprehensive exhibition of the New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist. An avid collector, Patrick Pound is equally interested in systems and the ordering of objects: an attempt, perhaps, to make things coherent. As Pound says, ‘to collect is to gather your thoughts through things’.
Through complex arrangements and installations of objects drawn from the artist’s expansive archives, Pound’s work playfully and poetically explores the art of collecting, and the ways in which things can hold and project ideas. For this exhibition Pound has created several vast new collections, which he describes as ‘museums of things’. Objects that are seemingly redundant or overlooked are meticulously collected by the artist and put back into ‘use’ in these museums. There are museums of falling, sleepers, and of holes.
The Museum of there / not there houses objects ranging from a souvenir spoon to a mask, a mourning locket to a painted ruin – one thing standing in for another. Within each museum a new logic or narrative is created for the viewer to unravel or identify. In several of Pound’s museums, works from the NGV Collection are grouped into their own categories or sit alongside his ‘things’, with the artist inviting us to rethink these works and consider what it means to collect.
“This room started with my collection of photos of reflections, and of photos of pairs of things; of twins and double exposures. I then began researching the NGV Collection and found an abundance of “pairs and doubles”, assembled within paintings, decorative arts objects, prints and photographs.
To collect is to look for like-minded things. One thing inevitably leads to another. When you pair one thing with another, some things start to make sense – or not. In the end, every collection is, after all, a reflecting pool.”
William De Morgan & Co., London (manufacturer, England 1872-1911) William De Morgan (designer, England 1839-1917) Startled tigers, dish c. 1880 Earthenware Felton Bequest, 1980
Man Ray (born United States 1890, lived in France 1921-1939, 1951-1976, died France 1976) Solarised double portrait 1930s Gelatin silver photograph Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Miss F. MacDonald Anderson and Mrs E. E. O. Lumsden, Founder Benefactors, 1983
Guercino (Italian, 1591-1666) Study for Esther before Ahasuerus c. 1639 Red chalk Felton Bequest, 1923
Patrick Pound (New Zealander/Australian, b. 1962) The collection of shelves (installation view) 1999-2017 Circles 1999-2015 28 (screwed) 2004 Knife blocks 1999-2017 Things Change 2015 The Collector 2000-2017 Some French things 2014 Museum darts 1989-2017 Twenty six and one books 2010 Tangled 2012-2015 Blade magazine 2014 Criminal records 2012 Index cards 2012 Lost birds 1999-2014 Index photos 2013 The names 2007 Small arms 2000-2017 Soldiers 2009 Lockets 1989-2016 26 brown things 2002 Site specific installation comprising objects collected by the artist Photos: Wayne Taylor
Installation view of Patrick Pound’s work Twenty six and one books 2010 (detail) Photo: Wayne Taylor
These shelves house a range of collections which Pound has been gathering over many years: they demonstrate how collections of things gradually evolved into works of art. These collections tend to be smaller than others seen throughout this exhibition, and each one operates according to a very specific constraint. Their organisational technique derives from Pound’s interest in the Oulipo group of writers and mathematicians which formed in France in 1960 and, specifically, in the writing of key member Georges Perec. Pound is fascinated by Perec’s use of restrictions in his writing as a way of encouraging new patterns and structures, and has translated some of those ideas into the formation of these collections.
In Pound’s work Twenty six and one books, 2010, each book has a number in the title, starting with Ground Zero, all the way through to Maxim Gorky’s story collection Twenty-Six and One. The entire 26 brown things, 2002, collection was found and purchased by the artist in one shop, on the same day, with everything being – you guessed it – brown.
Like some vast novel cycle, collections reflect the world. The use of such constraints when organising the collections allows for surprising and poetic responses. If we look closely enough, things are found to reflect, to hold and to project ideas.
Installation view of the exhibition Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition at NGV Australia with the work Portmanteau (2015-2017) at middle centre. Presented as part of the NGV Festival of Photography. Photo: Wayne Taylor
Photographs, objects and curios sourced from the internet and op shops will be organised alongside artworks from the NGV Collection in a wondrous series of encyclopaedic displays for Patrick Pound’s major exhibition Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition.
An avid collector, the New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist is fascinated by the categorisation and ordering of objects. Irreverently titled The Great Exhibition, with a knowing nod to the epic ambitions of the famous London exposition of 1851, in his largest ever presentation Pound will showcase more than 50 collections, which he describes as ‘museums of things’, featuring hundreds of items from the artist’s expansive archives.
Pound has also extensively researched the scope of the NGV Collection, identifying more than 300 works from across all of the NGV collecting departments to incorporate into his ‘museums of things’. The connections that Pound draws between objects will allow audiences to see the NGV’s diverse holdings in surprising new contexts.
Among the ‘museums’, viewers will encounter vast displays of found photographs which, at closer glance, reveal their common thread, such as The hand of the photographer, a display in which the eclipsing thumb of the photographer is ever-present, and Damaged, a huge display of photographs which have been defaced by their original owners; faces marred by cigarette burns, marker or ripped out of the photo entirely.
Other ‘museums’ incorporate seemingly disparate items, like The Museum of there / Not there, which explores the idea of absence and presence, illustrated by a curated selection of objects such as an obsolete Australian $2 banknote and a mourning locket alongside a milk jug produced to commemorate the forthcoming coronation of King Edward VIII, who abdicated before he was crowned.
Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, commented, “Through complex arrangements of items drawn from the artist’s archives alongside works from the NGV Collection, Pound’s installations playfully explore the art of collecting, and the ways in which things can hold and project ideas. Within each museum a new logic or exciting narrative is created for the viewer to unravel or identify.”
Pound last exhibited at the NGV in the 2013 exhibition Melbourne Now with his popular “Gallery of Air”, a wunderkammer of diverse artworks and objects that held the idea of air, drawn from the NGV Collection and the artist’s archives.
Press release from the NGV
Room 5
Installation views of the exhibition Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition at NGV Australia, Federation Square. Presented as part of the NGV Festival of Photography. Photos: Wayne Taylor
This room contains several of Pound’s collections which intersect with each other in various ways, revealing what the artist describes as a ‘matrix of connections’. Occasionally the collections also connect to works of art in the NGV Collection, and vice versa. The room is a vast diagrammatic network of intersections, and in that way shows one of the underlying ideas of the whole exhibition, which is to seek out patterns and similarities and connections across objects and works of art and ideas. In other words, one thing leads to another.
This installation also reflects the way in which Pound searches on the internet, and the ways in which the internet leads us from one thing to another via algorithms. The room is a visual representation of what Pound describes as ‘thinking through things’.
Man Ray (born United States 1890, lived in France 1921-1939, 1951-1976, died France 1976) Eye and tears 1930s, printed 1972 Gelatin silver photograph Purchased, 1973
The photographs collected by Patrick Pound include masses of family and vernacular snapshots, as well as newspaper archives and movie stills, which he describes as being ‘unhinged’ from their original sources. Pound does not create photographs in the traditional sense; rather, he spends hours searching for, sorting and buying prints on the internet. He describes this process as a form of ‘retaking’ the photograph.
The images are then organised according to an idea or theme or pattern, such as: ‘readers’, ‘the air’, ‘lamps’ or ‘listening to music’. Pound says he likes the idea of photographing something you cannot otherwise see. Unexpected connections, repetitions and coincidences emerge when the images are placed together in this way. Looking through these images reminds the viewer of the dramatic changes that have occurred in photography – not only in terms of the evolving technology of cameras and prints, but also in terms of what people photograph, why, and how these photographs are shared.
“When I began collecting photographs I was thinking of the way the camera reduces the world to a list of things to photograph. I thought that to photograph was to collect the world in the form of pictures. I love the way photography is so directly connected with the world. It has a remarkable familiarity. We all think we can understand it immediately. As writer Susan Sontag said, photography is not so much a representation of the world but a piece of it. Collecting found photos is like taking cuttings from the world. For me it is a form of collage.
Typically, the analogue photograph stopped life in its tracks. It couldn’t stop time, of course, but it could hold it up to a mirror. The vernacular snap reminds us that the camera is both a portal and a mirror. Photographers used to put photographs in albums and in boxes to be viewed and reviewed at will. Photographs were never made to be scanned and redistributed on eBay. Whether they are analogue or digital, printed photographs have an afterlife that no one saw coming. Photography used to be the medium of record. Now it is equally the medium of transmission.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Room 6
Installation view of the exhibition Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition at NGV Australia with at left, People from behind 2016-2017; at centre, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t 2011-2014; and at right, The sleepers 2007-2017. Presented as part of the NGV Festival of Photography. Photo: Wayne Taylor
The exhibition ends as it began, with figures whose backs are turned to us. Alongside are images of people who are asleep for the moment, and some forever; this gallery houses images of people who are all somehow removed from us. They are absorbed in their actions; they are unconscious, or not conscious, of us as they look away. There is a peculiar aspect of voyeurism that is afforded by the camera; the people in these photographs cannot see us looking at them. The camera also has a long association with the idea of stopping time – of freezing, or embalming, fleeting moments.
As Pound says, “Photography stops people in their tracks. Eventually every photograph is a photograph of a dead person. The camera is an idling hearse.”
Exhibition dates: 15th April – 4th September, 2016
Curator: Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator, Photography at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Unknown maker (American) Group at pond c. 1910s Gelatin silver print 3 × 4 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Dis/membering the snapshot
To say that I dislike the term “snapshot” is an understatement. The term snap/shot implies a lack of consideration in the physical act of taking the photograph. In a snap it was shot – like a snap of the fingers or a bolt out of the blue. But if we think about the photographs in this posting … and we then think about the photographs of Henri Lartigue, or Robert Frank and his travels across 1950s America, I would argue that the only difference between Lartigue, Frank and the former “Unknown makers” is that they were embarked upon a photographic project, and, latterly, were decreed artists.
I believe, and I have always believed, that the taking of photographs is a matter of intention on the part of the photographer.
If you look at these photographs from Unknown makers was it their intention to take this photograph, did they think about what they were doing before they pressed the shutter. And the answer is unequivocally, yes they did. Their aim, their purpose, was that they had the intention to take the photograph they did, they determined of their own free will how to frame these photos and at what split second to press the shutter so as to suit their aim, their thought about what they wanted to capture in the image. This is not a “snap” shot in contemporary parlance, but a considered action and intention.
To say, as Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator, Photography does in the press release, that “Snapshots represent a collective visual unconsciousness of 20th-century American culture,” could not be farther from the truth. They may represent a form of collective subconscious, where these images hover in collective memories and dreams waiting to be visualised, but a collective visual unconsciousness? I don’t think so.
Vernacular photography is about a conscious decision to take a photograph and, at its most poignant, it is about a collective movement that emerges from the subconscious of people all the way around the world – in order (a taxonomic state) to document the world around them.
The joy of the women on the bed, the man and women in the cornfield, the couple in love with the Christmas tree, the man riding the bucking horse bareback, even the close-up of child’s mouth – all of the photographs were taken with an inquiring mind, with an intention to look and see, to feel the memory of that event, that time and space – not as a snap/shot but as an expression of (everlasting) life.
“To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.“
William Blake
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the The Nelson-Atkins 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.
Unknown maker (American) Man and woman in corn c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 3 × 4 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Couple with Christmas tree c. 1940s Gelatin silver print 3 × 3 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Woman with drink on bed 1950s Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 x 4 inches Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Close-up of child’s mouth 1956 Gelatin silver print 3 × 3 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Superman with dumbbell 1972 Ektacolor print 3 1/8 × 3 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
When photography was introduced in 1839, the making of even a single picture was difficult and painstaking. The medium was transformed in the 1880s with the introduction of easier processes and the simple Kodak camera. Amateur photography was born: images became casual and spontaneous, and they were called “snapshots.”
Amateur snapshots are highlighted in An Anonymous Art: American Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Gift, which opens at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City April 15. The Chicago-born Cohen, an investment manager who now lives in New York, bought his first snapshots at a flea market in 1991. Within 20 years he had amassed more than 50,000 of them, and has given away as many as 12,000 snapshots. Cohen gifted the Nelson-Atkins with 350 photos.
“This incredible exhibition of amateur snapshots depicts broadly shared aspects of everyday life,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, Menefee D. and Mary Louise Blackwell CEO and Director of the Nelson-Atkins. “It highlights the deep cultural importance of photography, a visual tradition that flourishes today in images that are made and shared in a variety of ways.”
There are snapshots of pets, baseball games, Christmas trees, amateur plays, vacation fun – and even subjects snapping themselves in mirrors, which could be considered the original selfies.
“The large themes of this exhibition have tremendous continuity,” said Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator, Photography. “Snapshots represent a collective visual unconsciousness of 20th-century American culture – a connection to basic human concerns that is both direct and mysterious.”
Each of the 238 snapshots in An Anonymous Art was hand-selected by Davis himself from an extensive survey of the Cohen collection. The exhibition suggests the medium’s profound social importance as well as its quirky and surprising nature. It features groupings of works illustrating key visual traits and cultural motifs, ranging from accidental multiple exposures to comic and play-acting images. An Anonymous Art runs through Sept 4.
Press release from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Unknown maker (American) Flying bi-plane c. 1920s Gelatin silver print 5 3/8 × 3 3/16 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Whoa! 1928 Gelatin silver print 3 3/16 × 2 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
“Especially poignant are the images captioned “Me,” depicting both adults and children. We may imagine a grown woman writing “me” at the bottom of her childhood photograph as a reminder that she was once a small, vulnerable girl. In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, French theoretician Roland Barthes writes, “In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder … over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”
And yet, despite Barthes’ melancholy, or our own sadness over images of loved ones who have died, each photograph exclaims and reclaims existence – that we have been here. The snapshot embodies an emotion that existed at the time as an agreement between the photographer and the photographed, and that experience bridges time’s distance. And while that may sound simplistic, it is part of the deeper social meaning of the photographic image as a souvenir of experience – a small, visual (auto)biography.
Barthes goes on to discuss his mother’s photograph, writing, “… [the] photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.” The image of his mother as a child evinced for Barthes his mother’s true nature – kindness. Similarly, these anonymous photos perhaps reveal the essence of the subjects depicted … daredevil brothers, goofy friends and sisters, sedate parents, and so on.”
Unknown maker (American) Allen and Gladys c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 2 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Dog being held by neck c. 1940 Gelatin silver print 3 1/2 × 2 1/2 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Doris 1949 Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 2 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Boy with bat c. 1950s Gelatin silver print 3 × 3 1/16 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 4525 Oak Street Kansas City, MO 64111
Exhibition dates: 29th October 2011 – 22nd January 2012
Many thankx to The Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Artist unknown (American) [Three women]
c. 1930s
Gelatin silver print
8.9 x 14.7cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) The Three Graces
c. 1930s
Gelatin silver print
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Look Pleasant c. 1910s
Gelatin silver print
8.9 x 8.6cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three women]
c. 1910s
Gelatin silver print
11.6 x 6.8cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Untitled
1910/1940 Image: 7.7 × 5.2cm (3 1/16 × 2 1/16 in.) Paper: 8.6 × 6.1 cm (3 7/16 × 2 7/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
After George Eastman introduced the handheld Kodak #1 camera in 1888, amateurs made millions of snapshots depicting friends and family, travels, and festive occasions such as weddings. Even while solidifying such thoroughly conventional behaviours, amateur photography developed a new pictorial language that privileged immediacy, spontaneity, and accident. Career photographers and art historians – but also antiques vendors and flea-market shoppers – have long recognised the value of the “snapshot aesthetic.” The rise of social media and smartphones in recent years has effectively ended the era of the snapshot as both a printed photograph and an image for a private audience.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Artist unknown (American) Untitled (Summer, Aug, 1920)
1920
Gelatin silver print
13.9 × 8.3cm (5 1/2 × 3 5/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Untitled
c. 1920-1929
Gelatin silver print
13.7 × 8.5cm (5 7/16 × 3 3/8 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
This exhibition explores the early years of vernacular photography through graceful snapshots of female trios. Displaying more than 500 “found” images the exhibition features photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are taken and kept with the aim of preserving moments in life for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot becomes an image “type” – transferred into the hands of a collector and folded into a broader cultural history?
This subject is explored in the Art Institute of Chicago’s The Three Graces – on view October 29, 2011, through January 22, 2012, in the museum’s Photography Galleries 3 and 4. The exhibition, featuring a private collection of more than 500 anonymous images depicting female trios, spans nearly a century of female role-playing for the camera. These mostly American “found” photographs, spanning from the 1890s to the 1970s, collectively reveal a great deal about the evolving ritual of women’s self-presentation, a theme already idealised in Classical culture with depictions of “The Three Graces.”
New York collector Peter J. Cohen, who has spent decades scouring flea markets, shops, and galleries in search of rare amateur photographs, amassed this image collection and gave it its title. Cohen was struck by the frequency of images featuring female trios, and had the wit to identify in them a playful echo of the Greek muses Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who are said to personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. Cohen owns some 20,000 anonymous snapshots spanning from the late 19th century until the 1970s. He has organised his mountainous holdings according to many classifications, among them “Double Exposures,” “Up on The Roof,” and “Dangerous Women.”
For Art Institute exhibition coordinator Michal Raz-Russo, who also authored the accompanying book, the “three graces” theme serves as a frame through which to chart shifts and continuities in women’s self-understanding across nearly a century. The 1888 introduction of the Kodak #1 camera and the 1900 debut of the Kodak Brownie made photography immensely popular, with much of the marketing was directed at women. Modern life and leisure in the 1920s coincided with the arrival of smaller cameras, faster film speeds, and automatic exposures; women of the expanding middle class became practiced at self-portraiture while vacationing or camping on their own. Later, in the mid-20th century, a clear convergence can be seen between women’s self-portraits and ideals of womanhood promulgated in films and glossy magazines. Throughout this history, men are clearly at work too, convincing women to participate in erotic poses according to another set of visual models. While the varieties of picturing and self-picturing are complex, The Three Graces demonstrates that women worked to define themselves as social beings through photography.
Visitors to the exhibition can find information on individual snapshots – gleaned from inscriptions and the clues provided by clothing and setting – at a special computer kiosk located in the gallery.
Press release from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women]
c. 1920s
Gelatin silver print
13.5 x 8.3cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stamped Clyde Banks Photo Services, Crystal Sheer, Aug 5 1932)
1930-1939
Gelatin silver print Paper: 11.7 × 7.1cm (4 5/8 × 2 13/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stony Creek Dude Ranch, July 1939, stamped Certified, Master Photo Finishers of America, Fountain Photo Service, May 15 1940)
Made 1939
Gelatin silver print Paper: 11.6 × 7cm (4 5/8 × 2 13/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stamped Master Photo Finishers of America, Service and Quality, Kay Tone 10 Point Process, Certified Reg. U.S. Pat Off., Caton Photo Co., Detroit, Michigan, Sep 11 1939)
Printed 1939
Gelatin silver print Paper: 10.7 × 7.9cm (4 1/4 × 3 1/8 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women]
c. 1940s
Gelatin silver print
11.7 x 7cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women and a photographer]
c. 1940s
Gelatin silver print
12.2 x 7.6cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Gym Teachers Linda “Sissy” House, Sarah Beth Jordan, Seanne Livingston, 9th Grade)
Printed 1961
Gelatin silver print Paper: 9 × 9 cm (3 9/16 × 3 9/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled
1960-1969
Internal dye diffusion transfer print Paper: 10.8 × 8.9cm (4 5/16 × 3 9/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) Untitled [Three women]
1967
Chromogenic print Image: 11.7 × 9.2cm (4 5/8 × 3 5/8 in.) Paper: 12.7 × 10.2cm (5 × 4 1/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled
Printed 1968
Chromogenic print
Paper: 9 × 8.6cm (3 9/16 × 3 7/16 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women]
c. 1930s
Gelatin silver print
14.5 x 8.7cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
The Three Graces: Snapshots of Twentieth-Century Women book cover
Hardcover – November 29, 2011
Featuring an amazing treasure trove of unpublished images, this intriguing and entertaining book looks at how women explored their identity through popular photography in the 20th century
Snapshots preserve more than individual likeness and memory. Photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are collected with the aim of constructing and preserving a personal identity for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot is subsequently discarded or displaced and becomes merely an “anonymous” image? This and many other questions are discussed in this fascinating selection of anonymous images depicting three women. Presumably all taken by nonprofessionals, these snapshots were acquired over time by a private collector interested in their eclectic yet familiar details, who named the grouping after the iconic Greco-Roman motif.
In traditional western iconography, the Three Graces personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. In the 150 snapshots assembled here, the remarkable consistency of confidence and poise projected by the trios of women – in varied settings, in various states of dress/undress, and over a period of more than fifty years – reveals the formal and behavioral conventions that evolved as photography’s popularity skyrocketed among amateurs. To this end, the iconography of The Three Graces provides a framework for understanding the generational differences and cultural influences that shaped women’s self-presentation in front of the camera in the first half of the 20th century.
!['Reuben's Delicatessen Menu [autographed by Arnold Reuben]' 1946](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/reubensdelicatessenmenu.jpg "'Reuben's Delicatessen Menu [autographed by Arnold Reuben]' 1946")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three women]' c. 1930s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1930s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three women]' c. 1930s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three women]' c. 1910s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1910s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three women]' c. 1910s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1920s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1920s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1920s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1940s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1940s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1940s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women and a photographer]' c. 1940s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1940s-b.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women and a photographer]' c. 1940s")
![Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) 'Untitled [Three women]' 1967](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/homburger-three-women.jpg "Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) 'Untitled [Three women]' 1967")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1930s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1930s-b.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1930s")
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