A huge two-part posting on one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, an extravaganza of 77 photographs by August Sander (German, 1876-1964) from his magnum opus People of the 20th Century (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts) (1892-1954) which consists of over 600 photographs organised into seven categories and 49 portfolios (see below).
There are many photographs I have never seen before in the two postings.
I have ordered the photographs in the postings by alphabetical title not by Sander’s classificatory system. It’s just much easier for me to make the postings this way (which takes many hours). As the text from the curator Judy Ditner makes clear, “Sander’s categories are not as fixed as they may at first appear, with many individuals and motifs showing up across different classifications.”
“What makes Sander’s work so powerful is the tension: each portrait is at once a deeply personal image and a window into a broader social type.”
Many thankx to the Yale University Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All photographs were printed by Gerd Sander (German, 1940-2021). Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See Part 2 of the posting.
“The individual does not make the history of his time, but he both impresses himself on it and expresses its meaning.”
This category serves as the foundation of his taxonomy, celebrating the “earthbound man” and rural life.
~ Portfolio of Archetypes ~ The Young Farmer ~ The Farmer’s Child and the Mother ~ The Farmer’s Family ~ The Farmer—His Life and Work ~ Farming Types
2/ The Skilled Tradesman
This volume highlights individuals in specialized professions and manual labor.
~ The Skilled Tradesman ~ The Apprentice / Journeyman ~ The Workshop and Factory ~ The Technician and Inventor
3/ The Woman
Dedicated to women in various life stages, social roles, and occupations.
~ The Woman ~ The Family ~ The Woman at Work ~ The Intellectual and Practical Occupation ~ The Elegant Woman
4/ Classes and Professions
This category spans the socio-economic hierarchy, from physical laborers to the political and business elite.
~ The Working Youth ~ The Soldier ~ The Student ~ The Scholar and Academic ~ The Clergy ~ The Jurist / Official ~ The Teacher and Educator ~ The Doctor and Pharmacist ~ The Artist (Performing Arts) ~ The Businessman ~ The Industrialist / Banker ~ The High Nobility
5. The Artists
This group focuses entirely on the creative and bohemians fields.
~ The Musician ~ The Poet ~ The Painter and Sculptor ~ The Architect
6. The City
An exploration of urban environments, public life, and various services or entertainment figures.
~ The City ~ The Representative of the City ~ The City Dweller ~ The Street Life ~ The Waiter / The Publican / The Cook ~ The Entertainer / The Showman ~ The Travel / The Circus / The Fairground ~ The Types and Originals ~ The Sportsman (Winter/Summer) ~ The Soldier ~ The Emigrant
7. The Last People
This poignant category focuses on the margins of society, specifically the themes of old age, sickness, and death.
~ Old Age ~ The Blind ~ The Sick ~ The Insane / Idiots ~ The Dying / The Dead
The German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) is one of the most significant and influential photographers of the 20th century. This exhibition presents Sander’s ambitious and groundbreaking portrait series Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century) (1892-1954), a canonical work in the history of photography. The presentation – of over 600 prints from the series – represents the most comprehensive installation of his life’s work.
For this monumental archive of modern humanity, Sander photographed German citizens from all classes and backgrounds, organising them into categories such as “The Skilled Tradesman,” “The Farmer,” “The Artist,” and “The Woman.” Sander conceived of the project in the 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, but included in it photographs he had made as early as 1892. His portrayal of marginalised individuals, including people with disabilities and the unemployed, provided visibility to those often excluded from mainstream representations and drew the ire of the Nazis. Striking for their unflinching realism and skilful observations of character, his images reflect the changing social landscape of Germany in the first half of the 20th century.
Text from the Yale University Art Gallery website
Installation views of the exhibition August Sander’s People of the 20th Century at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, February – June, 2026
The Westerwald (German pronunciation: [ˈvɛstɐvalt]; literally ‘Western forest’) is a low mountain range on the right bank of the river Rhine in the German federal states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia. It is a part of the Rhenish Massif (Rheinisches Schiefergebirge or Rhenish Slate Mountains). Its highest elevation, at 657 m above sea level, is the Fuchskaute in the High Westerwald.
The Eifel (German: [ˈaɪfl̩]; Luxembourgish: Äifel, pronounced [ˈæːɪ̯fəl]) is a low mountain range in western Germany, eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. It occupies parts of southwestern North Rhine-Westphalia, northwestern Rhineland-Palatinate and the southern area of the German-speaking Community of Belgium.
The Yale University Art Gallery announced August Sander’s People of the 20th Century, an ambitious exhibition showcasing the work of one of the most influential photographers of the modern era.
August Sander (1876-1964) devoted decades of his career to capturing and cataloguing the sociocultural spectrum of German life. In his groundbreaking series, Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century) (1892–1954), he attempted to create a comprehensive sociological archive by photographing individuals from various classes, occupations, and backgrounds and then arranging the images into archetypal groups and subgroups, such as “The Skilled Tradesman,” “The Farmer,” “The Artist,” and “The Woman.” The Gallery’s presentation retains his original organisational framework.
Taken in sum, Sander’s portraits show his keen observation of Germany’s shifting cultural landscape in the first half of the 20th century. The extensive project encompasses independent works, commissioned sittings, and scenes of family life. They reflect a diverse nation rooted in tradition yet transformed by war and increasing urbanisation. Each photograph presents not just a generalised type but an individual, highlighting the tension between social conformity and personal identity. Sander’s categories, while systematic, also reveal an inherent fluidity, as certain types and individuals appear across different groupings, challenging strict classification.
Heavily influenced by the Cologne Progressive and New Objectivity art movements, Sander adopted a representational style free from idealisation. His inclusion of marginalised groups, such as people with disabilities and the unemployed, asserted the value of each individual, subverting the exclusionary ideologies of National Socialism. In 1936 the Nazi regime destroyed an early version of his work. Undeterred, Sander continued to photograph throughout World War II, subsequently adding portfolios titled “Foreign Workers,” “The Persecuted” (depicting German Jews), and “Political Prisoners” (with images that his son Erich smuggled out of prison, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for anti-Nazi activities).
Although Sander produced tens of thousands of negatives for this project, the majority were destroyed during World War II and in a 1946 house fire. The gelatin silver prints in the exhibition were created from surviving original glass-plate negatives by Gerd Sander, the artist’s grandson, in the 1990s, guided by vintage prints and the artist’s extensive notes. These prints are recent acquisitions by the Yale University Art Gallery, made possible through the Société Anonyme Acquisition Fund and the Katharine Ordway Fund.
The exhibition comprises the full set of 619 prints, making it the most comprehensive museum presentation of Sander’s landmark project to date. By expanding the boundaries of portraiture into social commentary, exploring the concept of collective belonging, and experimenting with the artistic potential of the archive, Sander’s work remains remarkably resonant and impactful today.
Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry, and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.
Further challenging the project’s claim to offer a neat and neutral study of social types is the deeply personal character of some of the pictures. Indeed, People of the 20th Century incorporates intimate portraits of Sander’s family, including the poignant My Wife in Joy and Sorrow showing his wife, Anna, with their twin infants, one of whom did not survive.
Judy Ditner is the Richard Benson Curator of Photography and Digital Media
Yale University Art Gallery Spring 2026 Magazine
Yale University Art Gallery 1111 Chapel Street (at York Street) New Haven, CT
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) What is Time? 1994 Gelatin silver print 16 × 19 7/8 inches (40.6 × 50.5cm) Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
“Time is the duration of everything, and life is an event, a fluttering of wings.”
Duane Michals
There is no time
Vale the transcendent Duane Michals – storyteller.
Magician, poet, philosopher and dreamer.
An artist, like Joseph Cornell, who I have always felt a special affinity / infinity towards.
I wrote in earlier postings on his work:
“As he says, his work goes beyond description, beyond surfaces, to reveal the subject – not as it looks but as it feels. In his sequences he usually achieves this by posing a question that has no answer, a question that is like a Zen koan… what is the sound of one hand clapping? The grandfather ascends smilingly to heaven with little wings on his back as the child waves goodbye (if youth knew, if age could); the man as human condition turns into a galaxy; and the spirit leaves the body as it was left before. …
Michals staged, narrative scenes take us on a journey into his reality, one which “has entered a realm beyond observation.” He poses difficult questions that force us to examine ideas beyond the world of phenomena, beyond the world of surfaces. He challenges our repressed inner lives and our idealised image of ourselves, disturbing the boundaries of personality, ego, and identity.”1
And
“Duane Michals is one of the greatest photographic storytellers of the twentieth century. His parables – seemingly simple stories used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson – resonate, vibrate, with energy, and insight into, the human condition. They are as profound as the air we breathe but cannot see – expressing the invisible, presencing the spiritual. I feel, I know these stories, intimately. Those things-for-which-there-are-no-words. …
There are things here not seen in this photograph. The spirit leaves the body. William Blake and Duane Michals. Enchanted melancholy. The mysterious / music. In swift embrace. In love. In memory. In death. The fluidity of the line of the artist. Things are queer. The world implodes and ravages itself. Paradise is reborn. The letter, and love, from my father that I, also, never did receive. The nature of reality. Truth? … When I was young. What was time?”2
It was Michals great skill as an artist and a human being that enabled us the possibility of accessing some aspect of the mystery of our existence.
Stepping beyond … his spirit has left his body.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Marcus Bunyan. “Exposing your/self,” on the exhibition ‘Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals’ at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, November 2014 – February 2015 on the Art Blart website January 30, 2015 [Online] Cited 11/06/2026
2/ Marcus Bunyan. “The things-for-which-there-are-no-words,” on the exhibition ‘Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan’ at The Morgan Library & Museum, October 2019 – February 2020 on the Art Blart website January 24, 2020 [Online] Cited 11/06/2026
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I write with this photograph not to tell you what you can see, rather to express what is invisible.”
Duane Michals 1966 in Johnson, B. (ed.,) 2004, ‘Photography speaks: 150 photographers on their art’, Aperture, New York p. 150
“The nature of consciousness is always the central question,” he asserted. In The Human Condition, his panel of six photographs from 1969 begins with a man standing on the 14th Street subway platform; the train arrives and he is bathed in a halo of light; the light becomes a swirl and in the last frame he is swept into a white disc the size of a galaxy passing through the night sky. From the immediate to the universal in six frames.
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Things Are Queer 1973 Nine gelatin silver prints Images: 5 × 7 inches (12.7 × 17.8cm) each Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) The Spirit Leaves the Body 1968 Gift of Richard and Ronay Menschel The Morgan Library & Museum
Curator: Sabine Zorn (Head of Conservation/Restoration of Graphic Art and Photography, Hamburger Kunsthalle); Guest Curator: Dr. Bernd Pappe (Freelance restorer and art historian specialising in portrait miniatures)
I discovered this exhibition while surfing online and I couldn’t miss it before it closes tomorrow. Resistance is futile, especially for an avid collector of object d’arts.
I love miniatures, their sensitivity, their sensuality, their size. The fact they were held in the hand and carried close to the heart. Portraits of the self, relying on mirrors to capture the artist’s own reflection, portraits of loved ones, artists, anonymous men and women.
“Many master miniaturists (like Daguerre himself) used optical tools like the Camera Obscura to map proportions before painting. Using early cameras felt like a natural mechanical extension of this process.” (Wikipedia)
“Portrait miniaturists were already experts at arranging subjects for flattering, highly personalised, and dignified depictions. They brought these same framing, angling, and lighting rules – such as emphasising the face – to the camera.” (Wikipedia)
“As miniature painters attempted to mimic the technical precision of daguerreotypes, they lost the intimate, distinct appeal of their art form. As the former Metropolitan Museum scholar Harry Wehle put it in 1927, “The miniature in the presence of the photograph was like a bird before a snake; it was fascinated – even to the fatal point of imitation – then it was swallowed”.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
For me, there is a delicacy and romanticism to the painted miniature which can never be matched by the photographic miniature. Despite both being housed in small, protective leather and wood cases, each are constructed realities of a different aspect – one created through the eye and creativity of the painter, the other created through the eye and creativity of the photographer and the maximal, granular reality of the camera.
Where possible I have added bibliographic and other pertinent information for the artists in the posting.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Hamburger Kunsthalle for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (née Labille; 11 April 1749 – 24 April 1803), also known as Adélaïde Labille-Guiard des Vertus, was a French miniaturist and portrait painter. She was an advocate for women to receive the same opportunities as men to become great painters. Labille-Guiard was one of the first women to become a member of the Royal Academy, and was the first female artist to receive permission to set up a studio for her students at the Louvre.
Adélaïde Labille was born on 11 April 1749 in Paris. Her father, Claude-Edme Labille (1705-1788) was a haberdasher.
Labille-Guiard became a master at miniatures, pastels, and oil paintings. Little is known about her training due to the practices of the 18th century which dictated masters (who were predominately male) should not take on female pupils. During this time, women were perceived as incapable to follow instruction alongside men. During her adolescence, Labille-Guiard studied miniature painting with oil painter François-Élie Vincent and her early work was exhibited at the Académie de Saint-Luc.
Labille-Guillard married Louis-Nicolas Guiard in 1769, but separated from him eight years later, already able to support herself through her artwork. She apprenticed with the pastel master Quentin de la Tour until 1774. From 1776 to 1780, she began to study oil painting with her childhood friend François-André Vincent (the eldest son of François-Élie Vincent), who would later become her husband.
Exhibitions at the Académie de Saint-Luc
Labille-Guiard was admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc in 1767 when she was twenty years old. Her admission piece has since disappeared and sadly no records of its existence survive today. The Académie de Saint-Luc provided Labille-Guiard with a space to practice art professionally. In 1774, she exhibited her work at its Salon. This show was so successful that the Royal Academy took offence, and with the backing of the monarchy, issued an edict in March 1776 abolishing “guilds, brotherhoods, and communities of arts and crafts”, forcing the Académie de Saint-Luc to close its doors in 1777. However, this did not stop Labille-Guiard’s ambitions as an artist.
Becoming a member of the Royal Academy
Once the Académie de Saint-Luc closed its doors, Labille-Guiard began to learn oil painting, so she could apply to the Royal Academy which required her to present at least one oil painting for admission. During the late 1770s, she painted several portraits of leading academicians, creating contacts with the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture.[6]
Labille-Guiard chose to display some of her work at the Salon de la Correspondance in 1779 and 1783. This included her self-portrait in pastel and oil portraits, which were well received by critics. Labille-Guiard’s talent as an oil painter and pastellist was quickly noticed, and she received national recognition, ultimately leading to her acceptance into the Royal Academy. On 31 May 1783 Labille-Guiard was accepted as a member of the French Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Her rival, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, was also elected on that day; the two of them were the first women to be inducted. Both Labille-Guiard and Vigée Le Brun were immediately criticised following their admission by those who were furious at women’s entry; Labille-Guiard suffered attacks against both her art and character. One anonymous pamphlet Suite de Malborough au Salon 1783, accused Labille-Guiard of exchanging sexual favours for help with painting. The pamphlet punned on François-André Vincent’s name (though still unmarried, he was her rumoured paramour), saying that Labille Guiard had “vignt cents” (twenty-hundreds, or two thousand) lovers. Still, becoming accepted into the Royal Academy opened doors for Labille-Guiard as she gained patronage from the royal family. …
Style and context
Labille-Guiard often did not fit comfortably within the boundaries of feminine virtue in the 18th century. In order to appeal to a wide variety of viewers including upper-class men and women, she often incorporated recent fashions into her paintings, which allowed her to showcase her artistic ability. She was good at rendering details, such as showing luxurious folds and layers of complex skirts that were in fashion at the time. However, often she painted with a twist such as having women face directly at the viewer or with a low neckline, which was an uncommon practice in the 18th century when portraying women.
Further evidence of Labille-Guiard’s boldness can be seen in her self-portraits, which leave her exposed slightly more than usual, but not enough to evoke allegations of promiscuous behaviour. This is seen in her painting Self-Portrait with Two Pupils. Unlike some other paintings of female artists in the 18th century, Labille-Guiard chose to depict herself actively working rather than passive and at rest. Labille-Guiard also pushed against other restrictions, such as those that limited the number of females that could attend the Royal Academy. By depicting two female students in Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Labille-Guiard suggests more women should be allowed in to the Royal Academy. In this sense, Labille-Guiard was daring, but not too daring as to sabotage her reputation and lose the respect she worked hard to gain within the art world.
At the time, female artists were frequently related to the goddess Minerva. Therefore, Labille-Guiard and her rival Vigée Le Brun were both referred to as “modern Minervas.” Their rivalry was encouraged by both academicians and patrons at court.
Today, Labille-Guiard’s masterpiece, Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, after the Louvre rejected it in a final dismissal of the artist’s talent.
Friedrich Carl Gröger was a north-German portrait painter and lithographer. One of the most respected portraitists of his time in northern Germany, his works are to be found in several museums, including the Hamburger Kunsthalle, as well as in north German, Holstein and Danish private collections.
Johann Dominik Bossi, also known as Domenico Bossi, was a painter. Bossi, a student of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, was born in Trieste and worked primarily as a miniaturist in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Russia before he settled down in Munich, where he lived at Theresien Straße 19 in Munich around 1850.
Carl (Karl) Friedrich Demiani was born in 1768 in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), and died in 1823 in Dresden. He studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and specialised in portrait miniatures.
Joseph Nicolaus Peroux was born in 1771, in Ludwigsburg. He was a well-known German miniature painter, etcher and lithographer of the Romantic era. Peroux was a student of the “Peintre du Duc de Wurtemberg” (first painter at the Württemberg court) Nicolas Guibal, who taught at the Académie des Arts and the Hohen Karlsschule in Stuttgart until his death in 1784. Peroux initially worked in Frankfurt am Main (from 1795) and in Hamburg from 1800, where he exhibited a portrait of Emma Hamilton and a self-portrait in 1803. He then opened an art school in Lübeck and became the young Friedrich Overbeck’s first drawing teacher. The turmoil of the French Period brought him back to Frankfurt in 1806. Accordingly, his works can be found primarily in the museums in Frankfurt, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and in the Behnhaus in Lübeck. The artist died in 1849, in Frankfurt am Main.
Text from the Wikipedia website translated from the German
[Stelzner] was the stepson of the portrait and miniature painter Carl Gottlieb Stelzner, who trained him in painting. In 1825 he traveled through Schleswig-Holstein and painted portraits of peasants and citizens. At the end of the 1820s he made study trips to Hamburg, Stockholm , Copenhagen and then to Paris where from 1831 to 1834 he was mentored by prominent miniature painters Jean-Baptiste Isabey and Claude Marie Dubufe. On return to Hamburg in 1837 he opened a studio, painting portrait miniatures.
Hearing of the new technique of photography, Stelzner returned quickly to Paris in 1839 to learn in person from Louis Daguerre how to make daguerreotypes. He then opened a daguerreotype studio in Hamburg with Hermann Blow (1804-1850). The partnership was short-lived and in 1843 he returned to his old studio to become the first daguerreotypist in Schleswig-Holstein and ultimately one of the best in Germany. His output was mainly portraits. His first wife Anna Caroline Stelzner (above), a miniaturist artist who was also his half-sister, coloured many of them and did the rephotography of the plates, since copying was the only way to reproduce the daguerreotype.
Despite the constraints of his medium, Selzner’s portraits rarely appear ‘frozen’. The position of Caroline’s arms and her sideways gaze are reinforced by the position of props such as the book on the table as a counterpoint to the one in her hand which infers movement, and the framing of the foliage of pot plants, repeated in the fabric of her dress and the tablecloth.
You can see Selzner experimenting with his own pose in these two self-portraits [one of which you can see below] on which Caroline no doubt assisted. Though these two images are dated five years apart on the Hamburg Art Museum website, the photographer’s clothing, hair and the background are identical. The only change is in the pose and a lowering of the camera to provide a more regal impression in the second image.
Associate Professor James McArdle. “December 30: Action,” on the On This Date In Photography website 30/12/2016 [Online] Cited 05/06/2026
With FOR YOUR EYES ONLY: Miniatures from the Romantic Era, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting the first major exhibition devoted to the multifaceted art of miniature painting in Hamburg, from its heyday circa 1800 to the 1840s, when it was replaced by early photography. These miniature portraits, usually measuring around 6 to 10 cm and artfully painted in watercolour and gouache on wafer-thin ivory plates, backed in some cases with silver foil, still fascinate us even today. A total of over 250 objects will be on view.
The show is based on portrait miniatures from the Kunsthalle’s own collection that were restored and catalogued in 2023–24. Around 60 of these miniatures will be shown for the first time here, together with some 200 works on loan from European and private collections, some of them also making their public debut.
These small portraits set in frames, brooches or cases were among the most personal and intimate likenesses people had painted of themselves. They were intended only for the eyes of the recipient and could be worn – often directly over the heart – and viewed at will. The portraits were a way to keep memories alive in the event of a long separation or to provide comfort after the loss of a loved one.
Portrait miniatures were widespread in Europe around 1800. Often made for the nobility, they also became popular with the aspiring bourgeoisie – including in Hamburg, which experienced an economic boom in the late eighteenth century that impacted the art world. Private collections were formed, the Kunstverein was founded, and exhibitions, liberal auction laws and new techniques such as the daguerreotype and lithography contributed to Hamburg’s emergence as an important art centre. Internationally renowned miniaturists such as Domenico Bossi and Pierre-Louis Bouvier lived and worked for a time in the Hanseatic city, which itself produced outstanding artists including Heinrich Jacob Aldenrath, Friedrich Carl Gröger, and Ferdinand and Caroline Stelzner.
Hénard was born in Bourg-en-Bresse on 11 February 1756. He was the son of the goldsmith Vincent Hénard and of Elisabeth Cadet. After having studied with Taraval, Hénard worked in both France and England. He exhibited at London’s Royal Academy from 1785 to 1800, and in Paris in 1791 and from 1806 to 1812. He worked in Hamburg from mid-1796 to the spring of 1797. After emigrating to the United States in 1811 on board of the Susquehanna, he lived in Baltimore and showed some of his works in 1812 and 1813 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
With FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. Miniatures from the Romantic Era, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting its first major exhibition devoted to the multifaceted art of miniature painting in Hamburg, from its heyday circa 1800 to the 1840s, when it was replaced by early photography. The show is based on portrait miniatures from the Kunsthalle’s own collection that were restored and catalogued in 2023-2024. Around 60 of these miniatures will be shown for the first time here, together with some 150 works on loan from European and private collections, some of them also making their public debut. Accompanying the miniature portraits are a number of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, for example a self-portrait by the painter and miniaturist Bernhard Peter von Rausch (1793-1865). This material sheds light on how miniatures were made as well as their special function and the technical modifications they required. In total, over 250 objects are on display in the Harzen Cabinet that tell of an era marked by social transformation, European exchanges and technological innovations.
Even today, people still like to carry a likeness of a loved one on their person. Before the advent of photography, such miniature portraits were precious one-offs that took hours to paint. Their small format – usually around 6 to 10 cm – and skilled execution in watercolour and gouache on wafer-thin ivory plates, sometimes backed with silver foil, hold an enduring fascination. Set in frames, brooches or cases, these miniatures were among the most personal and intimate likenesses people had painted of themselves. The miniaturists held several sittings with their clients, painting “ad vivum” [from life], often on specially developed painting desks. One such desk from the estate of the miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin (1759-1832) is exhibited here for the first time, along with painting utensils and measuring instruments such as a pantograph for the true-to-scale reduction of drawings. These aids illustrate the traditional technique used to produce minia-tures on ivory and white-primed paper as well as reproduction methods devel-oped in the late eighteenth century known as Bou-Magie and Physionotrace.
The commission to make a miniature arose from an intimate relationship between two people. The likeness was intended only for the eyes of the recipient, who might wear it as jewellery – often directly over the heart – and could admire it at will. Often, such portraits were designed to keep memories alive in the event of a long separation or to provide comfort after the loss of a loved one. Added locks of hair, artful plaits, inscriptions or symbolic messages hidden in the portrait in the form of flowers, objects or animals underscore the personal nature of these works while offering a glimpse of the emotional climate in the period around 1800.
Portrait miniatures were widespread in Europe during that era. No longer reserved for the nobility, they enjoyed increasing popularity among the aspiring bourgeoisie – including in Hamburg, which experienced an economic upswing in the late eighteenth century. After the setbacks of the Napoleonic era, a prolonged period of prosperity would have a lasting influence on the arts scene in the Hanseatic city. The first private collections were formed, the Kunstverein was founded in 1817, and exhibitions, liberal auction laws and new techniques such as lithography and later daguerreotype contributed to Hamburg’s rapid rise as an important northern art centre.
Internationally renowned miniaturists such as Giovanni Domenico Bossi (1767-1853), Carl Friedrich Demiani (1768-1823), Pierre-Louis Bouvier (1765-1836), Charles Hénard (1756-1813), Jan Gottlieb Jannasch (c. 1755-1804) and Edmé Quenedey (1756-1830) lived and worked in Hamburg for a time. And the Hanseatic city itself produced some outstanding artists during this period, including Leo Lehmann (1782-1859), Ernst August Abel (1720-1790), Karl Friedrich Kroymann (1781-1849) and Christopher Suhr (1771-1842). Friedrich Carl Gröger (1766-1838) and Heinrich Jakob Aldenrath (1775-1844) were particularly influential.
With the invention of photography in 1839, a medium rose to popularity that would take over the function of the portrait miniature and eventually replace it completely. The daguerreotype (also known as helio-graphy) made it possible to produce small-format portraits that were not only more realistic but also sig-nificantly faster to realise. A sitting for a miniature portrait soon took less than a minute. Thanks to the low cost of production, artists could now attract a new clientele. Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (1805-1894) from Hamburg and his wife Caroline (1808-1875) initially painted miniatures before Carl Ferdinand in particular successfully turned his attention to portrait photography in 1842. And yet, the portrait miniature did not go completely out of fashion. The artist Enrichetta Fioroni-Narducci (1806-1892), who worked in Rome, and her sister Teresa Fioroni (1799-1880), for example, augmented their income with miniature versions of famous paintings that were extremely popular with mid-nineteenth-century travellers. The Kunsthalle is home to five of their works, on display in the exhibition.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication (Michael Imhof Verlag, edited by Sabine Zorn and Bernd Pappe, approx. 160 pages), which is available in the museum shop or at http://www.freunde-der-kunsthalle.de for a price of 29 euros, as well as in bookstores.
Among all of the daguerreotypes produced before the advent of the wet-plate swept it aside, it is rare to see pictures of animals. Slezner’s portrait of his dog stands out as a tribute to his attaining an unusual facility in his medium.
No doubt obedient, Ulla the dog has nary a muscle during the long exposure, which, even if by 1860 Slezner was achieving high speeds with his lens and by pimping the daguerreotype process, would have still run into tens of seconds. It is quite a feat; a faint double image of snout and then only the slightest movement around the collar and end of the nose, due to a dog’s rapid breathing, can be discerned.
Associate Professor James McArdle. “December 30: Action,” on the On This Date In Photography website 30/12/2016 [Online] Cited 05/06/2026
Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (German, 1805-1894)
Carl Ferdinand Stelzner was a began his career as a lithographer and engraver, but became interested in photography in the early 1840s. He learnt the daguerreotype process from Louis Daguerre himself and opened his own studio in Berlin in 1845.
Stelzner quickly became known for his high-quality daguerreotypes, which were prized for their clarity and detail. He used a large-format camera that allowed him to capture images with incredible precision, and he experimented with different lighting techniques to create dramatic effects.
As well as his technical skill, Stelzner was also known for his artistic ability. He often posed his subjects in carefully composed scenes and was adept at capturing their personalities and emotions.
Stelzner’s work was exhibited widely throughout Europe and he won numerous awards for his photography. He continued to work as a photographer until his death in 1894 at the age of 88.
Today, Stelzner’s daguerreotypes are highly prized by collectors and museums around the world. They offer a fascinating glimpse into the early days of photography and continue to inspire photographers today.
Text from the Picryl website [Online] Cited 05/06/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Curators: Ron Magliozzi, Curator, with Katie Trainor, Film Collections Manager and Cara Shatzman, Collection Specialist, Department of Film.
Bob Beerman (American) Rock Hudson c. 1953 Sheet: 9 15/16 x 8″ (25.2 x 20.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Silhouetting the celebrity
MoMA always puts on interesting photography exhibitions and this one is no exception. Of course, they have a huge collection to draw from, but it still takes intelligence and curatorial inspiration to bring it all together.
It took me a long time to compile the posting. There were not many media images available but with a bit of digging around on the MoMA collection web pages, and searching online, I managed to find enough photographs to illustrate the exhibition / plus the installation photographs / and the addition of movie posters and magazines to illuminate the films the still photographs were taken from (please note: not in the exhibition). While many of the publicity shots were taken by unknown stills photographers, I have also added bibliographic information for the known photographers where possible.
This would be my only criticism of the exhibition: the inability of the viewer to visualise how these “covered with masking tape, marked up with crayon, or reconfigured with ghostly halos of white-out” photographs were actually used (in the press in everyday life) to create the fantasy ideals of Hollywood glamour stars. Perhaps this was a deliberate curatorial strategy, to concentrate on the pre-production rather than the post-production, to concentrate just on the still photos, without the distraction of further stimuli. And I can understand that decision.
In this posting I can show you three examples of how these still photographs were used: the untouched photograph Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in “This Earth is Mine”] by an unknown photographer (1959, below) has then been colourised and used on the front cover of the DVD release of this film; the Limehouse Blues movie poster (1934, below) features a white-out around George Raft’s head, similar to the white-out around Joan Crawford or Rock Hudson (above); and the hair of Elsa Manchester in Elsa Lanchester [in “The Bride of Frankenstein”] by an unknown photographer (1935, below) is graphically stylised and coloured in the The Bride of Frankenstein movie poster (1935, below).
Silhouetting, in-painting, masking, sectioning, and collage were all hands-on practices that readied the photographs for the press whilst in press they promoted the desirous ideal of the glamorous movie starlet, heroic action man, the fantasy ready and available for consumption by the reading public: the beautiful heroine available to the male gaze, aspirational for so many young women.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Though Iris Barry, who in 1935 became the founding curator of The Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library, aimed to preserve the history of moving images as an art form, she didn’t stop at moving images. “She was trying to save the record of film history,” explains Ron Magliozzi, a curator in what is today known as the Department of Film. “When the department was founded, the silent period had just ended. And its whole history was considered irrelevant and of no interest. That’s why she was so aggressive in collecting it. Films were the most important thing, and images from film history were second.”
Today, the Museum’s Film Stills Collection includes well over a million publicity photos, production stills, and more – and it’s not all pristine, glossy prints. In the current exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography, many of the images are covered with masking tape, marked up with crayon, or reconfigured with ghostly halos of white-out. It’s an occasionally startling reminder that the manipulation of photographs – and of celebrity itself – long predates Photoshop and Instagram.”
Jason Persse, Assistant Director, Content Team, MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art announces Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography, the first major exhibition of Hollywood studio portraiture to be drawn from the Museum’s film stills archive since 1993. On view in the Titus and Morita Galleries, the exhibition will offer a revisionist look at the Department of Film’s photographic archive, examining the evolution of editorial practice before the digital age, AI technology, and social media reshaped the experience of celebrity.
Face Value will feature over 200 works from 1921 to 1996, including studio photography of Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Katharine Hepburn, Dennis Hopper, Lena Horne, Bela Lugosi, Carmen Miranda, Elvis Presley, Diana Ross, Barbara Stanwyck, Elizabeth Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Oprah Winfrey, and many others.
Text from the MoMA website
Installation views of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing in the left hand block of 9 photographs of the bottom image, from left to right top row to bottom row: Ray Jones’ Margaret Sullavan c. 1939 (below); Clarence Sinclair Bull’s Hedy Lamarr c. 1940; Adolph L. “Whitey” Schafer’s Rosalind Russell c. 1940; Ray Jones’ Mischa Auer c. 1940; Unknown photographer Harry Belafonte [in “The Angel Levine”] 1970; Irving Lippman’s George Raft c. 1933; Hal Phyfe’s Miriam Hopkins c. 1930; Unknown photographer Dorothy Gish c. 1929; and Imandt’s Joan Bennett c. 1939 Photos: Jonathan Dorado
Ray Jones (American, 1901-1947) Margaret Sullavan c. 1939 Sheet: 13 7/8 x 10 7/8″ (35.2 x 27.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Installation view of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing at right in the bottom image at third left in top row, Unknown photographer Jackie Robinson c. 1950 Photos: Jonathan Dorado
Unknown photographer Jackie Robinson c. 1950 Sheet: 10 x 8″ (25.4 x 20.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
The Museum of Modern Art announces Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography, the first major exhibition of Hollywood studio portraiture to be drawn from the Museum’s film stills archive since 1993. On view in the Titus and Morita Galleries from June 28, 2025, through June 21, 2026, the exhibition will offer a revisionist look at the Department of Film’s photographic archive, examining the evolution of editorial practice before the digital age, AI technology, and social media reshaped the experience of celebrity.
Face Value will feature over 200 works from 1921to 1996, including studio photography of Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Katharine Hepburn, Dennis Hopper, Lena Horne, Bela Lugosi, Carmen Miranda, Elvis Presley, Diana Ross, Barbara Stanwyck, Elizabeth Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Oprah Winfrey, and many others.
Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography is organised by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, with Katie Trainor, Film Collections Manager, and Cara Shatzman, Collection Specialist, Department of Film.
“Face Value will encourage viewers to see through the facade of glamour at how celebrity is fabricated and exploited,” says Ron Magliozzi. Showcasing work by over 58 photographers, the exhibition will juxtapose “untouched” images like Otto Dyar’s Carole Lombard (c. 1933) with those altered through traditional press practices such as silhouetting, in-painting, masking, sectioning, and collage, like James Manatt’s Joan Crawford portrait for the film Letty Lynton (1932). Face Value examines how these methods shaped representations of not only film stars but also sports figures, socialites, and politicians, from Jackie Robinson to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Eleanor Roosevelt. Presented in thematic suites, the installation highlights radical editing techniques, stylised visual motifs, and the gendered aesthetics embedded in the system, offering a revealing perspective on the fabrication of glamour and fame.
Since the Museum’s founding, photography has played a vital role in how it has documented the history of motion pictures. Face Value traces the origin of this early initiative to MoMA’s first film curator, Iris Barry, whose archival efforts led to the acquisition of editorial collections from Photoplay (1911-1980) and Dell (1921-1976), two leading publications that helped define Hollywood’s star system. The exhibition includes images of comic stars Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Lupe Velez, and Mae West; pioneering actress Hattie McDaniel with Ruby Berkley, the first Black accredited Hollywood correspondent; famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart on a Hollywood film set; and the last photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe.
Featuring promotional portraits crafted to cultivate celebrity personas, such as Ray Jones’s Anna May Wong portrait for the film Limehouse Blues, Soul of a Dragon (1934), the exhibition explores how these images were manipulated for public consumption through hands-on editing techniques long before digital tools became standard.
Press release from MoMA
Installation views of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing in the bottom two photographs, video stills from Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Benedetta Barzini, Ingrid Superstar, Nat Finkelstein: Danny Williams footage of unknown documentary film shoot c. 1965, processed 2024 (below) Photos: Jonathan Dorado
Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Benedetta Barzini, Ingrid Superstar, Nat Finkelstein: Danny Williams footage of unknown documentary film shoot c. 1965, processed 2024 The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Edie Sedgwick dances in Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory during a photoshoot
Installation view of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing at top centre, Jacqueline Kennedy with Caroline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr. 1960s; and a bottom centre, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher with Michael Wilding Jr. andChristopher Wilding 1960s Photo: Jonathan Dorado
Installation view of the exhibition Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 – June 2026 showing from top left to right, top to bottom, Unknown photographer Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine 1957 (below); Gene Lester (American, 1910-1994) Dean and Jeannne Martin 1958; Bob Beerman (American) Rock Hudson c. 1953 (top of posting); Unknown photographer Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in “This Earth is Mine”] 1959 (below); Unknown photographer Jean Simmons [in “The Big Country”] 1958; Unknown photographer Elizabeth Threatt and Dewey Martin [in “The Big Sky”] 1952; Unknown photographer Dorothy Malone and Anthony Quinn 1957; Unknown photographer André De Toth and Veronica Lake 1944; Unknown photographer Edmund O’Brien and Tom D’Andrea [in “Fighter Squadron”] 1948; Unknown photographer Ward Bond and Ida Lupino [in “On Dangerous Ground”] 1951; Unknown photographer Aldo Ray and Katharine Hepburn [in “Pat and Mike”] 1952 Photo: Jonathan Dorado
Unknown photographer Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine [in “Island in the Sun”] 1957 Sheet: 6 15/16 × 9 1/16″ (17.6 × 23 cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Unknown photographer Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in “This Earth is Mine”] 1959 Sheet: 8 x 9 15/16″ (20.3 x 25.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
This Earth is Mine (1959) DVD cover
Otto Dyar (American, 1892-1988) Carole Lombard c. 1933 Sheet: 13 7/8 x 10 1/2″ (35.2 x 26.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Hollywood stills photographers like Dyar “were not mirroring life, but illusion; their subjects were not humans but gods – of love, of allure, of luxury, perfection incarnate from the golden age of Hollywood glamor”
John Kobal (ed), Hollywood glamor portraits, Courier Corporation, 1976, p.V on the Wikipedia website
Otto Dyar was a prominent stills photographer who began his career at the Paramount studios in the 1920s. Initially working as an assistant on major film productions such as the 1927 ‘Wings’, Dyar quickly rose through the ranks to become one of Hollywood’s most notable image-makers.
During the 1930s and 40s, Dyar developed his own, highly dramatic style of lighting and photography that deviated from the neoclassical glamor of the 1920s. Edgy and expressionistic, Dyar’s photographs pushed the iconic features of movie stars like Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Kay Francis and Joan Crawford to a grittier place that was more in accord with the aesthetics of films made in those decades. Of particular note are Dyar’s star portraits taken outside of the studio, an unusual and daring step at the time.
Despite all the high-contrast lighting, skewed angles and often tiny ‘surrealist’ interventions that point to the influence of photographers like Man Ray, Dyar faithfully accomplished the task of elevating the studio stars to the realm of deities. Like his peers George Hurrell, Ted Allen and Clarence Sinclair Bull, Dyar was not concerned with the psychologies of his sitters. What interested him was amplifying and consolidating the image the stars exuded in their roles, which was usually so powerful that it eclipsed the ‘real’ person that was in front of the camera.
Vigen Galstyan. “Dyar, Otto,” on the Lusadaran: Armenian Photography Foundation website 2015 [Online] Cited 02/04/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Otto Dyar (American, 1892-1988) Louise Brooks c. 1927 Sheet: 13 15/16 x 10 15/16″ (35.4 x 27.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Otto Dyar (American, 1892-1988) Anna May Wong 1930s Sheet: 13 7/8 x 10 7/8″ (35.2 x 27.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Ray Jones (American, 1901-1947) Anna May Wong [in “Limehouse Blues”] 1934 Sheet: 12 7/8 x 10″ (32.7 x 25.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Limehouse Blues (1934) movie poster
Unknown photographer Anna May Wong c. 1934 MoMA Film Stills Archive Sheet: 8 x 6″ (20.3 x 15.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Unknown photographer Myrna Loy [in “Across the Pacific”] 1926 Sheet: 11 x 14″ (27.9 x 35.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Advertisement for the American romantic adventure film Across the Pacific (1926) with Monte Blue and Myrna Loy, on pages 6 and 7 of the October 26, 1926 Film Daily
John Miehle (American, 1902-1952) Dolores del Rio and Edmund Lowe [in “The Bad One”] 1930 Sheet: 13 7/8 x 10 15/16″ (35.2 x 27.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
John Miehle was born on August 7, 1902 in Los Angeles, California. Being born so close to Hollywood Miehle went to work as an assistant camera man on the 1931 movie “Delicious” starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell.
He then worked exclusively in the Camera and Electrical Department doing uncredited still photography on some of the best known films, such as “What Price Hollywood?,” “Rain,” “Little Women,” “Top Hat,” “Kitty Foyle,” “Rope” and “Portrait of Jennie.”
He photographed many of the greats as well including Constance Bennett, Joan Crawford, Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Ann Harding, William Powell, Joel McCrea, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Delores Del Rio, Randolph Scott, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Ruth Hussey, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymoore, Laraine Day, Franchot Tone, Ann Blyth, Farley Granger, and Dana Andrews…
In addition, he did many publicity shots of such stars as Carole Lombard, Marilyn Monroe, and Lucille Ball.
Don’t Forget The Illustrator! “The Classics and “Ginger Rogers” photographer John Miehle,” on the Vintage Movie Star Photos blog Thursday, March 28, 2013 [Online] Cited 12/05/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
The Bad One (1930) movie poster
William Walling Jr (American, 1904-1983) Carole Lombard c. 1933 Sheet: 13 7/8 x 11 15/16″ (35.2 x 30.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
William Richard Walling, Jr. (October 6, 1904 – December 11, 1983) was an American actor, inventor, and portrait photographer for film studios.
Robert Coburn (American, 1900-1990) Vera Zorina [in “The Goldywyn Follies”] c. 1937 Sheet: 13 13/16 x 10 15/16″ (35.1 x 27.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Robert Coburn was one of the most influential portrait photographers working in the major Hollywood movie studios from the 1930’s to 1960’s. His star subjects included Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Kim Novak, Carole Lombard, William Holden, Glenn Ford, and Orson Welles. Coburn’s most infamous portraits immortalised Hollywood’s greatest icons and helped to define this era as the Golden Age of Cinema. In 1940, Robert Coburn began a twenty-year career with Columbia Pictures as the head of the still production department and the studio’s chief portrait photographer for many landmark films including “Picnic”, “Gilda”, and “The Big Heat”.
Text from the Fahey/Klein Gallery website
Goldwyn Follies (1937) movie poster
Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography Introductory text
For MoMA’s founding film curator, Iris Barry, building an archive of images that documented the history of motion pictures was second only to collecting films. Photographs from the study collection that she created were among the first works exhibited in MoMA’s theater gallery. Barry’s initiative eventually led to the acquisition of editorial archives from Photoplay (1911-1980) and Dell (1921-1976), leading fan magazine publishers supporting the Hollywood star system. The portrait photography featured in these publications was produced by film studios to promote the glamorous celebrities under contract to them. Face Value looks at these images and surveys how they were manipulated for public consumption in the decades before digital tools, AI technology, and social media revolutionized the process.
Over sixty photographers are represented in this installation, which intermingles images that survive untouched with those that show evidence of the hands-on practices that readied them for the press. The standard techniques used – silhouetting, in-painting, masking, sectioning, and collage – were applied not only to photographs of entertainers but to sports figures, socialites, and politicians as well. Organised in suites that highlight radical editing practices, stylised visual motifs, and the gender stereotypes inherent in the studio system, the exhibition offers a demystifying perspective on the glamour of celebrity.
Wall text from the exhibition
George P. Hommel (American, 1901-1953) Clara Bow c. 1929 Sheet: 14 x 11″ (35.6 x 27.9 cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Overshadowed by the work of 1920s Paramount colleagues Donald Biddle Keyes and Eugene Robert Richee, stillsman George P. Hommel crafted thoughtful portraits highlighting both the beauty and sorrow of those he photographed. Like Keyes, the peripatetic Hommel always looked for new challenges, new opportunities, keeping him on the move. Unobstrusive and elegant, Hommel’s work reveals hidden depths in those he shot. …
Hommel’s straightforward portraiture captured the vulnerability of his sitters, revealing a wistful and often melancholic look in their expressive eyes. His pensive work focused on serious matters, not straining to create fleeting moods but revealing the heart of those he photographed. Employing simple, dark-textured background, Hommel focused on the eyes and lips, creating a sharp image with an often soft-focus background. His portraits often feature shadows and strong angular lines, creating dramatic composition. Hommel could also capture the sometimes insouciant or even overly exuberant emotions of sitters, often covering their vulnerability and pain, such as in his Pierrot portraits of Clara Bow as clown.
James Manatt (American, 1896-1989) Joan Crawford [in “Letty Lynton”] 1932 Sheet: 13 x 10″ (33 x 25.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Letty Lynton (1932) movie posters
Elmer Fryer (American, 1898-1944) Lili Damita [in “The Match King”] c. 1932 Sheet: 14 1/16 x 11″ (35.7 x 27.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
The Match King (1932) movie poster
Bert Longworth (American, 1893-1964) Amelia Earhart with Helen Hayes [on set of “A Farewell to Arms”] 1932 Sheet: 13 15/16 x 10 7/8″ (35.4 x 27.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
As the studio system came into place with the advent of talkies, studios hired many stillsmen to take scene stills, off-camera images, and candids of both above and below the line talent. Photographers took massive amounts of stills around the lot, at public events, premieres, at homes, in posed shots, to be widely distributed to magazines and newspapers for free publicity promoting upcoming films, new talent, and established stars. The journals, fan magazines, and newspapers splashed these images throughout their pages, building awareness and star popularity.
Bert “Buddy” Longworth was one of the stills photographers taking these images. Longworth began his career shooting scene stills at MGM for Greta Garbo’s first three films, including “Flesh and the Devil,” with Longworth capturing the passion of Garbo and John Gilbert as they fell in love. He was employed for a short time at Paramount, but from 1929 on, he worked at Warner Bros. as an action specialist, working on Busby Berkeley’s spectacular musicals, crime pictures, off-set candids, as well as portraits. Scholar David Shields calls him “Hollywood’s foremost expressionist, often using unusual perspective, occasional use of multiple exposures.”
Unknown photographer Elsa Lanchester [in “The Bride of Frankenstein”] 1935 Sheet: 13 1/2 x 9 3/16″ (34.3 x 23.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) movie poster
I want to talk more about the edited photographs. In many of the photos white-out has been used to separate the subject’s head or face – and in one notable case, their bare legs – from the rest of the image. What are some ways in which these disembodied segments were used by the studios and by the magazines?
RM: We know they were from Photoplay magazine, so if we have a still that’s been edited for Photoplay, Cara went and looked for the issue that published the photograph to see how it was used. It might have been a feature on women’s legs, so that’s why they only focused on the legs.
There’s one grouping of photographs, I call it the “eat face grouping,” where the stars are very close up. There’s a photograph of someone eating someone’s chin. Those were all taken for a particular issue of Photoplay – that’s why they’re all edited in the same way.
With research and detective work you can determine how they were actually used in print. The floating heads, they would attach to biographies. They call that silhouetting, with the white-out.
CS: A lot of the uses I found were very gossipy, which was interesting, a lot of rumor columns. And then of course, like Ron said, highlighting certain aspects of celebrities’ bodies or features.
Back in 1980 MoMA’s exhibition Hollywood Portrait Photographers, 1921 to 1941 actually used a couple of the same images that appear in this show. But that nnnexhibition celebrated the artistry and glamor of these images. Why did you choose to focus more on the ways that these images have been manipulated and edited?
RM: The audience for photographs like this has changed. In 1980 there was a whole generation of people who knew who these performers were, who appreciated them as performers and appreciated their celebrity. Nowadays, younger audiences, in many cases, have no idea who these folks are. Even we sometimes have trouble identifying everyone. Displaying them in that way seemed dated. We wanted to mount them in a way that reflected how visitors today would need to look at them.
The photographs in 1980 were all matted in a very formal way that encouraged appreciation for the beauty of the photograph. I wasn’t interested in how beautiful the images were. I wasn’t interested in the celebrities. We’re mostly interested in the photographs. I wanted them to look like working photographs, and that’s reflected in the way they’re displayed. We did ours on plexi traps, which turned out to be very elegant, but the notion was that it would be a less precious way of mounting them so we would look at them in a less precious way.
The other thing we did differently was to have large numbers of photographs grouped in very dense clusters. To me that reflects social media today. The way we encounter images daily is so dense, and we’re forced to sort through a lot of images that come our way in any one moment. So I wanted visitors to have a contemporary view. It was meant to reflect a digital-age perspective, because analog-versus-digital was a subtext of the show in our heads.
There were two shows that were touchstones for this one: the Hollywood Portrait show of 1980, and the Fame After Photography show, a wonderful show in 1999 that MoMA’s Photography department mounted. They borrowed a lot of film stills for that show, which was also investigating celebrity and fame.
Unknown photographer Louis Armstrong [in “Cabin in the Sky”] 1943 Sheet: 8 x 10″ (20.3 x 25.4 cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Cabin in the sky (1943) movie poster
Unknown photographer Hattie McDaniel and Ruby Berkley Goodwin c. 1948 Sheet: 9 1/16 x 7″ (23 x 17.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
“[Ruby Berkley Goodwin] was also Hattie McDaniel’s publicist. And she was Ethel Waters’s publicist. She was the first Black American to have a syndicated newspaper column. She wrote this very famous autobiography called It’s Good to Be Black that was very, very popular. She was a poet. She was a fascinating person, and I was not familiar with her. That was a great aspect of learning about all of these people in these photographs.”
Unknown photographer Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis c. 1950 (detail) Sheet: 8 1/16 x 10″ (20.5 x 25.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Elvis Presley [Fans’ Star Library magazine, No. 13] 1959 Sheet: 7 x 5 1/8″ (17.8 x 13cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Yousuf Karsh (Armenian-Canadian born Mardin, Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), 1908-2002) Anna Magnani 1959 Sheet: 20 x 15 15/16″ (50.8 x 40.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection
Anna Maria Magnani (Italian, 1908-1973)
Anna Maria Magnani (Italian; 7 March 1908 – 26 September 1973) was an Italian actress. She was the first Italian woman to win an Academy Award.
Born and raised in Rome, Italy or Alexandria, she worked her way through Rome’s Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained disabled. She was referred to as “La Lupa”, the “perennial toast of Rome” and a “living she-wolf symbol” of the cinema. Time described her personality as “fiery”, and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was “volcanic”. In the realm of Italian cinema, she was “passionate, fearless, and exciting”, an actress whom film historian Barry Monush calls “the volcanic earth mother of all Italian cinema.” Director Roberto Rossellini called her “the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse”. Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo (1955) specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress.
After meeting director Goffredo Alessandrini, she received her first screen role in The Blind Woman of Sorrento (La cieca di Sorrento, 1934) and later achieved international attention in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), which is seen as launching the Italian neorealism movement in cinema. As an actress, she became recognised for her dynamic and forceful portrayals of “earthy lower-class women” in such films as L’Amore (1948), Bellissima (1951), The Rose Tattoo (1955), The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962). As early as 1950, Life had already stated that Magnani was “one of the most impressive actresses since Garbo”.
Curator: Ann Shumard, Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington
Mathew B. Brady (American, 1822-1896) John C. Calhoun 1849 Whole-plate daguerreotype Image/Sight: 20.2 x 15cm (7 15/16 x 5 7/8″) Mat (brass): 24.3 x 19.4cm (9 9/16 x 7 5/8″) Frame: 35 x 30 x 2.5cm (13 3/4 x 11 13/16 x 1″) Case closed: 5.8 x 34.3 x 39.7cm (2 5/16 x 13 1/2 x 15 5/8″) Case open: 5.8 x 72.7 x 39.7cm (2 5/16 x 28 5/8 x 15 5/8″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Gift of Stephan Loewentheil
Mathew Brady’s mastery of the whole plate is on full display in this compelling portrait – the last daguerreotype made of Senator John C. Calhoun before his death in 1850. A contemporary praised the portrait as one of “the best which Mr. Brady has taken himself,” adding, “So perfect was it regarded by the family [of Calhoun], that several copies of it have been made at their request.” Commenting on his subject’s most notable feature, Brady observed, “Calhoun’s eye was startling, and almost hypnotised me.” A painting based on this daguerreotype was commissioned by Brady and now hangs in the U.S. Senate.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
High-class portraits
Eight white men (all whole-plate daguerreotypes) and one black woman (whole-plate tintype) – sounds about right.
“To put the era’s pricing in context, a year’s supply of coal for a working-class family in 1850 cost $15 – the minimum price for a Southworth & Hawes whole-plate daguerreotype. The whole plate was therefore too expensive for most consumers… A whole-plate tintype was likely priced from $.75 to $1 in the 1860s, when the average daily wage of a labourer was only $2.”
Picture and price / detail and scale / delicacy of lights and shadows / beauty of execution – execution being the operative word, considering the upcoming devastation of the American Civil War.
Thus, from unapologetic enslaver (Calhoun) who “staunchly defended chattel slavery and its expansion beyond the American South” and whose painting based on Brady’s daguerreotype hangs in the American senate (really!) – to an unidentified literate Black woman, birthplace unknown, born May 10, 1811 taken by an unknown photographer.
I know which one I would rather honour.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Competition prompted photographers such as Mathew Brady and Southworth & Hawes to produce advertisements that provided a wealth of detail about the services offered by their respective establishments … I am inclined to think that word of mouth may well have played a greater role in motivating patronage. In the case of Brady and Southworth & Hawes, the knowledge that these studios counted national celebrities among their clientele could have been a strong inducement for the general public to patronise them as well. …
While the National Portrait Gallery’s collection of early photography is substantial, it’s the rare whole-plate daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes that stand out for their detail and scale. This exhibition allows visitors to consider how new photographic processes impacted the quality and appeal of the medium … As an aside, the impetus for ‘From Shadow to Substance’ was the extraordinary gift to the museum in 2023 of Mathew Brady’s iconic whole-plate daguerreotype of the powerful antebellum senator John C. Calhoun. A subsequent review of other whole-plates in the Portrait Gallery’s collection sparked consideration of the format’s staying power as a top-of-the-line offering through the succession of early photographic processes. This is the story the exhibition seeks to illuminate.”
Ann Shumard, Senior Curator of Photographs quoted in Kate Garibaldi. “How Portrait Photography’s ‘Grand-Scale’ Origins Changed History,” on the Petapixel website Aug 01, 2025 [Online] Cited 26/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing Mathew B. Brady (American, 1822-1896) John C. Calhoun 1849 (above)
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing Francis D’Avignon (French, 1813 – c. 1871) Copy after Mathew B. Brady (American, 1823? – 15 Jan 1896) John Caldwell Calhoun, 18 Mar 1782 – 31 Mar 1850 1850
Francis D’Avignon (French, 1813 – c. 1871) Copy after Mathew B. Brady (American, 1822-1896) John Caldwell Calhoun, 18 Mar 1782 – 31 Mar 1850 1850 Lithograph on paper Sheet: 56.7 x 40.6cm (22 5/16 x 16″) Book:The Gallery of Illustrious Americans National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
During the first half of the nineteenth century, John C. Calhoun held sway as one of the nation’s most influential politicians. While serving as a senator from South Carolina (1832-1843; 1845-1850), he was unyielding in his advocacy for Southern interests. Under the banner of states’ rights, he supported the concept of nullification. This doctrine maintained that states had the authority to ignore federal laws by declaring them null and void. An unapologetic enslaver, Calhoun staunchly defended chattel slavery and its expansion beyond the American South. Though he died more than a decade before the Civil War began, his views were widely embraced in the Southern states. They ultimately provided justification for secession from the Union. Mathew Brady’s daguerreotype of Calhoun, on view nearby, is faithfully reproduced in this print. It is one of twelve lithographic portraits in a portfolio published by Brady and titled The Gallery of Illustrious Americans.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Installation views of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026
Photographers seeking customers during the medium’s early years often urged the public to “Secure the shadow, ere the substance fade.” Hinting at life’s fragility, this tagline underscored photography’s ability to capture a fleeting likeness and preserve it for posterity. Portraits in the impressive whole-plate format – measuring 8.5 x 6.5 inches – were among the premier offerings of the nation’s leading photographic studios.
Drawing on the National Portrait Gallery’s extensive early photography collection, this exhibition traces the evolution of the grand-scale, whole-plate format from the high-end daguerreotype to the mid-range ambrotype to the more affordable tintype. Examples of whole plates in each of these mediums illustrate how the format evolved as new photographic processes were introduced. Featured works include daguerreotypes representing U.S. senators Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, as well as papal nuncio Gaetano Bedini; an ambrotype portrait of American landscape artist John Frederick Kensett; and a tintype likeness of an unidentified African American woman.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing Southworth & Hawes’ Issac P. Davis 1771-1855 and William Hickling Prescott 1796-1859 c. 1850 (below)
Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862) Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894) Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901) Isaac P. Davis, 7 Oct 1771 – 13 Jan 1855 William Hickling Prescott, 4 May 1796 – 28 Jan 1859 c. 1850 Whole-plate daguerreotype Image/Sight: 20.3 x 15.2cm (8 × 6″) Mat (brass): 23.6 x 18.6cm (9 5/16 x 7 5/16″) Case open: 25.3 x 40.2 x 2.3cm (9 15/16 x 15 13/16 x 7/8″) Case closed: 25.3 x 20.7 x 3.5cm (9 15/16 x 8 1/8 x 1 3/8″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Purchase funded by the photography acquisitions endowment established by the Joseph L. and Emily K. Gidwitz Memorial Foundation
Isaac P. Davis, 7 Oct 1771 – 13 Jan 1855 Born Plymouth, Massachusetts
William Hickling Prescott, 4 May 1796 – 28 Jan 1859 Born Salem, Massachusetts
This portrait depicts two prominent Bostonians who enjoyed considerable success in their respective careers and were also known for their philanthropy. Isaac P. Davis (left) amassed a sizeable fortune in manufacturing and real estate. An original member of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, which Paul Revere helped found, he was also a patron of American artists, including Gilbert Stuart. Historian William H. Prescott (right) first earned international acclaim for his three-volume History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (1838). Blind in one eye and with low vision in the other, Prescott was a generous supporter of Boston’s Perkins Institute for the Blind.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 Southworth & Hawes’ Lemuel Shaw 1787-1861 c. 1851 (below)
Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862) Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894) Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901) Lemuel Shaw, 9 Jan 1781 – 30 Mar 1861 c. 1851 Whole-plate daguerreotype with silver-plated copper sheet support Plate (sight): 21.5 x 16cm (8 7/16 x 6 5/16″) Case Open: 23.4 x 36.3 x 0.9cm (9 3/16 x 14 5/16 x 3/8″) Case Closed: 23.4 x 18.2 x 1.8cm (9 3/16 x 7 3/16 x 11/16″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Conservation made possible by a grant from the Smithsonian’s Collections Care and Preservation Fund
Lemuel Shaw, 9 Jan 1781 – 30 Mar 1861 Born Barnstable, Massachusetts
The impact of rulings by Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court (1830-1860), extended well beyond the borders of his home state. Particularly in cases affecting business and industry, his decisions influenced commercial law interpretation in courts throughout the nation. He also rendered judgments in key cases concerning the fate of those who had escaped from their enslavers. Though personally opposed to slavery, Shaw believed it was “too deeply interwoven in the texture of society to be wholly or speedily eradicated.” In 1851, he issued the principal opinion supporting the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing showing Southworth & Hawes’ Jonas Chickering 1853 (below)
Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862) Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894) Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901) Jonas Chickering, 5 Apr 1798 – 8 Dec 1853 1853 Whole-plate daguerreotype Image: 20 x 15cm (7 7/8 x 5 7/8″) Frame: 31.1 x 25.7 x 2.5cm (12 1/4 x 10 1/8 x 1″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Jonas Chickering, 5 Apr 1798 – 8 Dec 1853 Born Mason Village, New Hampshire
“The father of American piano making,” Jonas Chickering advanced the development of a one-piece, cast-iron frame that revolutionised piano construction. The result was an instrument that could withstand the tension exerted by its strings and resist extremes in temperature and humidity that impacted its ability to remain in tune. Chickering’s patented innovations also yielded pianos of greater volume and superior resonance. Honoured at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London, his pianos became the instruments of choice in U.S. and international concert halls.
When he posed for this portrait by Boston’s premier daguerreotypists, Chickering was at the zenith of his career.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing Mathew B. Brady’s John Frederick Kensett 1816-1872 c. 1856 (below)
Mathew B. Brady (American, 1822-1896) John Frederick Kensett, 22 Mar 1816 – 15 Dec 1872 c. 1856 Whole-plate ambrotype Image: 18.4 x 13.2cm (7 1/4 x 5 3/16″) Case Open: 23 x 36.4cm (9 1/16 x 14 5/16″) Case Closed: 23 x 18.4cm (9 1/16 x 7 1/4″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
John Frederick Kensett, 22 Mar 1816 – 15 Dec 1872 Born Cheshire, Connecticut
In a newspaper advertisement that was published on September 29, 1855, photographer Mathew Brady announced he was now offering “AMBROTYPES – a New Style of Picture on Glass, more durable and perfect than any known method of portraiture.”
Brady’s ambrotype represents artist and engraver John Frederick Kensett, one of the most popular members of the Hudson River School’s second generation of American landscape painters. Kensett was admired for his keen observations of nature, refined compositions, and sensitive rendering of light. A member of the prestigious National Academy, he helped found New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
National Portrait Gallery Presents “From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years”
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will present “From Shadow to Substance: Grand Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years” June 20 through June 7, 2026. Drawing from the museum’s extensive early photography collection, this exhibition traces the evolution of the grand scale, whole-plate portrait format from the high-end daguerreotype and mid-range ambrotype to the more affordable tintype. The exhibition is curated by Senior Curator of Photographs Ann Shumard.
Photographers seeking customers during the medium’s early years, from 1840 to 1860, often urged the public to “Secure the shadow ere the substance fade.” Hinting at life’s fragility, this tagline underscored photography’s ability to capture a fleeting likeness and preserve it for posterity. Portraits in the impressive whole-plate format – measuring 8 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches – were among the premier offerings of the nation’s leading photographic studios.
“This exhibition marks the first time these whole-plate daguerreotype, ambrotype and tintype portraits will be shown together at the Portrait Gallery,” Shumard said. Examples of whole plates in each of these mediums illustrate how the format evolved as new photographic processes were introduced. Featured works include daguerreotypes representing U.S. Senators Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, an ambrotype portrait of American landscape artist John Frederick Kensett and a tintype likeness of an unidentified African American woman. Also included are original advertisements issued by photographers Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, and Mathew B. Brady to promote their respective businesses. The exhibition will be presented in the Early Photography Alcove on the museum’s first floor.
Press release from the National Portrait Gallery
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing at left, Southworth & Hawes’ Daniel Webster 1782-1852 c. 1845; and at right, Unidentified photographer Daniel Webster 1782-1852 c. 1850
Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862) Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894) Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901) Daniel Webster 1782-1852 c. 1845 Whole plate copy daguerreotype National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Conservation made possible by a grant from the Smithsonian’s Collections Care and Preservation Fund
Daniel Webster 1782-1852 Born Salisbury, New Hampshire
Daniel Webster emerged as a major force in national politics at a time when rising sectionalism threatened to split the country apart. During his service in the House (1823-1827) and Senate (1827-1841; 1845-1850), Webster’s brilliant orations in defence of the Union marked him as one of the great public figures of his generation.
Boston-based photographers Southworth & Hawes excelled in creating whole-plate daguerreotypes of unrivalled quality. Consequently, their studio attracted numerous prominent figures, including Webster. Their majestic Webster portrait was so popular that it may have inspired them to produce this daguerreotype, a copy of the original.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Unidentified photographer Daniel Webster 1782-1852 c. 1850 Sixth-plate daguerreotype National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
A sixth-plate daguerreotype such as this portrait of Daniel Webster, would have sold for a fraction of the cost of a whole plate. To put the era’s pricing in context, a year’s supply of coal for a working-class family in 1850 cost $15 – the minimum price for a Southworth & Hawes whole-plate daguerreotype. The whole plate was therefore too expensive for most consumers.
Retailing for about $3, a sixth-plate was a more affordable option. There were tradeoffs, however. While the whole plate allowed for a dramatic, standing view of Webster, the Sith-plate accommodated only a bust-length image.
In a period when American federalism faced increasing challenges from states’-rights supporters, Daniel Webster emerged as one of the Union’s most eloquent defenders. Having gained acclaim as a lawyer who argued some of the young republic’s pivotal Supreme Court cases, Webster became a major force in national politics through his service in the House and in the Senate. There, his brilliant orations on behalf of the indivisibility of the Union marked him as one of the greatest public figures of his generation. Despite his national stature, Webster fell short of mustering the broad support that might have won him the presidency.
This daguerreotype represents Webster around the time of his controversial endorsement of the Compromise of 1850. In supporting the measure, Webster sought to preserve the Union through concession and compromise but succeeded principally in incurring the wrath of his northern constituents, who abhorred the legislation’s Fugitive Slave Act. Although attacks from his critics left Webster shaken and burdened by “the crushing weight of anxiety and responsibility,” he soldiered on until a liver ailment claimed his life in October 1852. The evergreen sprig preserved with this daguerreotype serves as a reminder of Webster’s endurance as a symbol and an icon in American history.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing a wood engraving by an unidentified artist of Southworth & Hawes’ Daguerreotype Rooms c. 1849 (below)
Unidentified Artist Southworth & Hawes’ Daguerreotype Rooms c. 1849 Wood engraving 20 x 12.7cm (7 7/8 x 5″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Gift of an anonymous donor in honour of Carlos G. Vertanssian
In 1843, photographer Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901) formed a creative partnership that yielded daguerreotypes unrivalled for their artistry and technical achievement. Committed to the highest standards, the duo excelled in producing beautiful composed, evocative portraits, particularly in the large (8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.) and technically demanding whole-plate format.
In this advertisement for their Boston studio, Southworth & Hawes offered potential customers the assurance: ‘In style of execution and picturesque effect – in boldness of character and beauty of expression – in variety of size and delicacy of lights and shadows, we shall aim at the highest perfection’.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Southworth & Hawes (active 1843-1862) Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894) Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901) Gaetano Bedini, 1806-1864 1853 Whole-plate daguerreotype Image: 20 x 15cm (7 7/8 x 5 7/8″) Case Open: 25.4 x 40.8 x 1cm (10 x 16 1/16 x 3/8″) Case Closed: 23.1 x 18.1 x 1.7cm (9 1/8 x 7 1/8 x 11/16″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Transfer from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Conservation made possible by a grant from the Smithsonian’s Collections Care and Preservation Fund
Gaetano Bedini, 1806-1864 Born Sinigaglia, Italy
In 1853, Italian archbishop Gaetano Bedini travelled to the United States at the request of Pope Pius IX to assess the condition of the Catholic Church in North America and to study the possibility of establishing a papal mission in Washington, D.C. Bedini’s multi-month, fact-finding tour coincided with an intense wave of anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant feeling fanned by the newly ascendant American (or Know-Nothing) Party. In several cities, his presence sparked hostile demonstrations. Upon returning to the Vatican, Bedini advocated successfully for the creation of a North American College in Rome to prepare Roman Catholic clergy for service in the United States.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing a wood engraving by an unidentified artist of Brady’s Daguerreotypes 1854 (below)
Unidentified Artist Brady’s Daguerreotypes 1854 Wood engraving on paper Image: 21.8 x 14.8cm (8 9/16 x 5 13/16″) Sheet: 24 x 18.6cm (9 7/16 x 7 5/16″) Mat: 45.8 x 35.6cm (18 1/16 x 14″) Published in the Illustrated American Biography, 1854 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Gift of George S. Whiteley IV
Mathew Brady placed this full-page advertisement in the Illustrated American Biography, a publication that marketed itself as a biographical volume but was actually a glorified business directory. With its cutaway image of a camera, Brady’s ad presents a fanciful view of the process by which sunlight passes through the camera’s lens to produce an image.
In 1851, Mathew Brady submitted forty-eight daguerreotypes to the “Great Exhibition,” the vast international fair organised by Britain’s Prince Albert at the Crystal Palace in London. A critic for the London Illustrated News noted, “The likenesses of various distinguished Americans by Mr. Brady are notable examples of this style of art.” It is reasonable to assume that whole-plate portraits were among the works Brady exhibited. When jurors pronounced his daguerreotypes “excellent for beauty of execution,” he proudly claimed one of the fair’s highly coveted medals.
Well aware of the marketing value of his prize, Brady touted it in full-page advertisements, such as this example. Presenting a cutaway image of a camera’s interior, the ad offers a fanciful view of the way in which sunlight, represented by an allegorical figure, passes through the lens to produce an image.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography’s Formative Years at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, June 20, 2025 – June 7, 2026 showing a whole-plate tintype by an unidentified photographer of an Unidentified Woman c. 1865 (below)
Unidentified photographer Unidentified Woman c. 1865 Whole-plate tintype Image/Sheet: 21.6 x 15.2 cm (8 1/2 x 6″) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Unidentified Woman Birthplace unknown
A penciled note attached to the back of this tintype reads simply, “Born May 10 1811.” Regrettably, the woman pictured is not otherwise identified. However, her handsome dress, her gold-accented jewelry, the book on the table beside her, and the slim volume in her hands suggest she was a literate woman who could afford a top-of-the-line tintype.
This portrait’s large scale and studio setting distinguish it from the small, inexpensive tintypes commonly produced by itinerant photographers. A whole-plate tintype such as this was likely priced from $.75 to $1 in the 1860s, when the average daily wage of a labourer was only $2.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website
National Portrait Gallery 8th and F Sts NW Washington, DC 20001
“Evans took photographs worth taking – unadorned, clearly seen, focused, descriptive photographs (of ordinary things) of the utmost beauty and honesty.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
In the medium of photography the work of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) is rightly exalted, subject to the highest praise. “His work directly inspired photographers like Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.” Some of the most important photographers of the 20th century.
In the near 18 year history of Art Blart his importance can be gauged by the number of exhibition postings he has accumulated over the journey, this being the 8th posting on the artist, joining a select few at the top of the tree: Julia Margaret Cameron, August Sander, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol.
I have written extensively on Evans’s work in previous postings links to which can be found below. Suffice to say that, through awareness, his personal journey of conscious choice and deliberate self-creation has led to his photographs entering the American vernacular – through a direct pointing to a photographic reality that reflects the time in which they were taken. Which transcend the time in which they were taken.
Evans took photographs worth taking – unadorned, clearly seen, focused, descriptive photographs (of ordinary things) of the utmost beauty and honesty. He was a passionate photographer. You can feel that passion in his images. Today with a world full of AI images, fragmentation, and conceptual hoo-hah, it might do us all well to ponder the stare of this great artist so that we, in our own way, can die knowing something.
To transform your own destiny into awareness!
“When I first looked at Walker Evans’ photographs, I thought of something Malraux wrote: ‘To transform destiny into awareness.’ One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But, how else are you going to justify your failure and your effort?” ~ Robert Frank
Many thankx to Fundación Mapfre for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I was a passionate photographer and, for a time, I carried a certain feeling of guilt. I thought photography was replacing something else: writing. I wanted to write. But I felt deeply committed to everything that could come out of a camera, and I became a compulsive photographer. I was responding to a genuine impulse.”
“Stare. It is the way to educate the eye, and something more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Walker Evans
“Walker Evans is serious and smart and purposeful. He is trying to show you very clearly what he is seeing. It is very unadorned, as if nobody had taken the photograph. He conveys what is in front of him as clearly as possible.”
Interview with Chris Killip about his exhibition Work at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofia, October 2013 [Online] Cited 11/02/2021
”Good clothes and good conversation, wit and erudition, originality and inventiveness, the charms of smart and pretty women – Walker took pleasure in being alive… He photographed objects as if they were people and people as if they were souls. All the while, he never forgot Blind Joe Death. The annihilations of the First War, the extinctions of the epidemic that followed it, the pyres and the pits – these he never forgot. The still silence of his images was, to the very last, transcendental, and always he remembered the skull beneath the skin.”
Michael Levy. Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories. New York: Blast Books, 2022
Walker Evans. Now and Then offers a renewed look at the career of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. In a broad anthology bringing together images made over more than fifty years, the exhibition invites viewers to rediscover the direct, restrained, and analytical gaze with which Evans documented everyday life in the United States. Far from the theatrical, the artist championed precise and honest photography, always attentive to the cultural and social context.
The exhibition is structured around several essential threads of his work: his interest in the signs of the city (shop signs, storefronts, billboards, etc.), through which Evans captured a compelling reflection of the collective identity of his era; anonymous individuals (pedestrians, subway riders, workers), whom he portrayed with a spontaneity that blends formal precision and deep respect for his subjects; and his fascination with modest environments and small towns, where he found an authenticity that large cities tended to obscure. Alongside these major axes of his oeuvre, the exhibition also presents his late experiments with the Polaroid camera, which reveal a more intimate shift without losing the clarity of his vision.
The photographer Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri, 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1975) is an essential figure of modern photography and one of the great visual chroniclers of the United States during the twentieth‑century. His images, seemingly simple yet profoundly complex, lucidly portray everyday life, urban landscapes, and the anonymous faces of a country in transformation. Rooted in the documentary style, Evans combined a direct, austere gaze with an inexhaustible curiosity for the signs of popular culture, which led him to define an era even as he questioned it.
Walker Evans began his work in photography in the 1920s, after a stay in Paris; and over the course of his extensive career, which spanned more than fifty years, he produced some of the most recognized photographs in the medium. He explored a wide range of subjects, from street snapshots taken surreptitiously to meticulous and precise architectural studies, although his best‑known photographs remain those he made in the American South beginning in the 1930s. Evans also embraced new artistic and technical developments, and toward the end of his life he explored the possibilities offered by the Polaroid camera. What unified his entire body of work was a deep interest in and affection for the appearance and essence of everyday life in a society increasingly obsessed with the new and the immediate.
Evans remains, even today, one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century. With a style that is both simple and analytical, his deeply careful way of photographing, resulting in elegant compositions that are free of rigidity, has attracted countless followers. In addition to being an extraordinary photographer, Evans was also an editor, writer, and designer, and he took great care in how his work reached the public through magazines, books, and exhibitions, personally involving himself in the process.
In 2009 Fundación Mapfre launched its photography program with a retrospective dedicated to Walker Evans. Seventeen years later, the institution is pleased to present a new exhibition curated by David Campany, creative director of the International Center of Photography in New York. The show offers an extensive review of his work and of his lasting influence on generations of artists. It brings together key photographs and projects spanning his entire career – from his self‑portraits of the 1920s to his Polaroid experiments in the 1970s – alongside books and publications that reflect his inexhaustible capacity for observation. Through these works, the exhibition reveals a creator who not only documented the world around him, but also invited viewers to question the role of photography.
Key Themes
Signs of the city
Walker Evans stood out for deliberately and systematically incorporating all kinds of urban signage into his photographs – from sophisticated commercial signs to handmade notices, billboards, and shop windows – unlike other photographers of his generation, who often excluded them in pursuit of a supposed aesthetic purity. Evans believed these signs were reflections of society and its values; in this sense, his work resonates with artistic movements such as Pop Art and Postmodernism. His images of signs not only explore the relationship between word and image, but also question the role of photography as art, document, and commercial tool, underscoring the need for dialogue between photography and popular culture.
Anonymous people, anonymous places
Walker Evans showed no interest in portraying celebrities; on the contrary, he was always drawn to the anonymous individuals he encountered on the street or in the subway. He created portraits with a lightweight camera, privileging the spontaneity of isolated figures, crowds, beach scenes, or laborers at work. In this way, the simplicity of what he believed photography should be was reflected in the subjects he chose: a detached, direct, and unadorned kind of photography with carefully composed images that were nonetheless profoundly lyrical.
Tradition and the urban
One of Walker Evans’s core convictions was that the true character of any society was revealed more clearly in small towns than in large cities, which tended to blur individual particularities and traits. This emphasis on the popular and the vernacular set against the standardisation produced by major industries in big cities and metropolitan centers lies at the heart of American culture. Some of Evans’s finest and most celebrated photographs emerged from this belief, resulting in images of small‑town train stations and railcars, wooden buildings, traditional grocery stores and gas stations, as well as quintessential objects such as old pliers, rocking chairs, and fire hydrants.
Walker Evans information and keys from Fundación Mapfre
Sometimes a great photograph is a gift of time and space. Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, was taken from the United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1931. Had Evans asked for a room with a picture perfect view? Or did the view only look perfect in Evans’s picture taken on that day, at the moment? The scene has something of the proportioned urban vistas he would have seen on his European trip in 1926. There is something Parisian here.
Recent rain has presented a dreamy shimmer. The light is coming from the clearing weather in the distance. The slick road looks almost like a canal and blends into the sky. In neat rows the shiny automobiles are all black. The filigree of tree branches doodles across the frame.
Although this is one of Evans’s best known and cherished images, the vision of pictorial and social harmony is unusual. No screeching billboards or shop signs. No tension on the street. Sometimes the modern world does offer a rare moment of equanimity.
The town of Ossining, where Walker Evans lived for a short time, lies up the Hudson River from Manhattan. He made many photographs there. His views of its hillside communities and single building were shot with a large format camera, but he also made a number of snapshots on the street with a 35 mm Leica. He was experimenting, figuring out what could be done with such lightweight and versatile equipment. It was around this time that Henri Cartier-Bresson began to work with a Leica in Europe. Evans took two photographs of this couple in their parked car. In the other exposure the woman is smelling, but Evans preferred the more wary expression he caught here (the stern gaze of women recurs in his work). This photograph was included in his book American Photographs and because a source of inspiration for younger photographers such as Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.
Of all the celebrated photographers of the last century, the one who remains the most relevant today, and the one with the widest influence, is Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1975). His images, made in what he called the “documentary style”, are among the best known in the history of the medium. Direct and generous, analytical yet lyrical, carefully composed but unforced, his ways of photographing left the door open for countless others.
For a while, Evans’ reputation rested on the photographs he had made in the southern parts of the USA in the 1930s, but his achievement was wider than that. He worked with every camera format and photographed many subjects in different ways, from surreptitious street shots, to meticulous and exacting studies of architecture. He embraced new artistic and technical developments, and at the end of his life he explored what could be done with a Polaroid camera. What united it all was a deep interest in, and affection for, the look and feel of everyday life. In a culture increasingly obsessed with the new, Evans cherished things that were standing the test of time, be it a face or the facade of a warehouse.
Evans was also concerned with the ways photographic meaning is related to context, text, and relations between images, whether on the gallery wall, or on the pages of books and magazines. To be in control of one’s photographs means being in control how they are presented and circulated in the world. So, as well as being a remarkable image-maker, Evans was also an editor, writer and designer, shaping the way his work met its public. In this exhibition we see the range of Evans’ themes and approaches, and his understated resistance to the excesses and shallowness of so much American culture becomes clear.
A Young Modernist
Walker Evans spent most of 1926 in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne but struggling to become a writer. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were his models, while he paid attention to contemporaries such as James Joyce and Blaise Cendrars. He made a handful photographs with a pocket camera, notably a series of self-portraits.
Returning to New York, Evans began to take photography seriously. He knew the city photographs of Ralph Steiner, Charles Sheeler, and especially Paul Strand. Their bold compositions presented Manhattan as a quintessentially modern metropolis. Evans was also aware of the ‘New Vision’ in European photography, with its enthusiastic embrace of modernist form, especially in architecture. He published a portfolio in the journal Architectural Record, and supplied three photographs from around the Brooklyn Bridge for a deluxe publication of Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge (1930).
The economic crash of October 1929 and the ensuing cultural turmoil sharpened the creative and political minds of all the ambitious artists of Evans’ generation. He soon stepped back from the celebration of the city to look hard at the lives of those who inhabited it.
A Past Without Nostalgia: Nineteenth Century Architecture
In 1931 Evans was commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein, a wealthy friend and supporter of the arts, to photograph Victorian houses in and around Boston. Two years later, the pictures were presented in the architecture room of the recently established Museum of Modern Art, New York. While Evans was credited, the context and display clearly put the emphasis on the architecture rather than Evans’ authorship. Nevertheless, in the press release for the exhibition, Kirstein noted:
Walker Evans’ photographs are perfect. They have been taken during the last four years and form the beginning of a photographic history of American domestic building during its most fantastic, imaginative, and impermanent period. Many of the houses, neglected and despised, have disappeared in the short period since these photographs were made. Evans worked in bright sunlight, forcing the details into utmost clarity. The focus was so sharpened that some of the houses seem to exist in an airless atmosphere such as Edward Hopper suggests in his painting of similar subjects. These houses were photographed in New England and New York.
Cultural artefacts endangered by contemporary tastes were already a key subject matter for Evans, one he would return to at various points.
Signs of Images, Images of Signs
Slick commercial signs, hand-made vernacular signs, street wayfinding signs, billboards, posters and shop fronts: if anything defines the time and place of an urban situation it is signage. While most photographers of Evans’ generation avoided or limited its presence in their images (searching for some kind of ‘purity’), he embraced it whole-heartedly. His fascination with signage, and his conviction that it has much to say about a society and its values, chimed with everything from the Pop Art that emerged at the end of the 1950s to the postmodern arts of quotation and appropriation that were emerging just as Evans was reaching the end of his life in 1975.
Evans’ photographs of signs seem highly reflexive, bringing photography itself into question as a medium of representation, while blurring the distinction between word and image. Photography may be a fine art, but it is also a means to make functional documents, and a vital tool of commerce. Whatever its aesthetic ambitions, Evans understood that serious photography would have to contend with its place in common culture.
Cuba
In 1933 Evans was on commission to photograph Havana and its environs for Carleton Beals’ book The Crime of Cuba. Beals was a journalist committed to exposing the corruption of Gerardo Machado’s brutal rule and America’s complicity with it. Cuba had gained independence back in 1902 but America reserved the right to interfere in its affairs, overseeing its finances and foreign relations.
Evans was not politically naïve. His street shots are a counterpoint to Beals’ high rhetoric of abstract political force and faceless conspiracy. And yet, his wary self-consciousness makes his pictures of people difficult to assess. His Cuba work continues to challenge critics and historians. Should we read it as the snaps of a curious tourist with a great eye for composition and social detail? Or might they register the slight tremors, the “mood on the street” of a tense society watching its back? Evans rarely presented his Cuban pictures after their moment had passed.
Anonymous & Incognito
Evans came into photography just as anonymity was becoming a touchstone of the modern era. Laborers on production lines. Isolated figures in the street. The crowd through which a wanderer might move unnoticed, or subject to the suspicious gaze of others. His early street portraits had much in common with those made by Eugène Atget in France and August Sander in Germany in the 1920s. Lightweight cameras soon made more candid portraits possible and Evans began to experiment, making serial photographs of New York subway passengers, and people on streets in various cities.
Evans worked through a period marked by increasing surveillance, and increasing presence of photography and photographers in daily life. It made him wary of the idea that people could be judged quickly by their appearance. His texts for ‘Labor Anonymous’ (Fortune, October 1946), and ‘The Unposed Portrait’ (Harper’s Bazaar, March 1962) push the reader to think again about the limits of photography.
Car Culture
In 1903 (the year Walker Evans was born) there were 4,000 cars in America. By 1930 there were 26.7 million: one for every 4.5 people. The transformation was breathless. Roadsides were redefined by billboards, gas stations, and motels. Towns and cities were designed or adapted for car use.
Evans enjoyed driving, and much of his photography beyond New York required a car. However, the rapid changes that cars were bringing to the appearance and the functioning of society left him feeling ambivalent. In the mass media at least, cars were the embodiment of optimism and mobility. Waste and despoilment were kept out of site, on the stage wings of progress. Evans’ view of rusting cars in a field (Joe’s Auto Graveyard, 1936) is a glimpse behind the scenes. This theme stayed with him for life. In 1962 he published a photo-essay in Fortune titled ‘The Auto Junkyard’, and in the 1970s, he also made many Polaroid photographs of cars and trucks rusting in fields.
Three Tenant Farmer Families
In the summer of 1936, the writer James Agee was commissioned to make a report on cotton farm tenancy in the American south. He chose Evans as his photographer. They committed to the project with great energy but while at work they barely overlapped. Evans recalled: “We lived with [the three families] for three weeks, as I remember it. We told them exactly what we were doing, and we worked intensely and separately. I didn’t see Agee. He was working all day interviewing and taking notes, and I was photographing.”
When Agee’s text was ten times longer than planned, Fortune dropped the project leaving him and Evans to pursue it as a book. Evans assembled a discrete sequence of thirty-one photos that would be set apart from the text, with no captions. Such radical separation of word and image stood against the tide of more conventional documentary practices. The resulting book, Let us now Praise Famous Men, finally appeared in 1941. Evans’ sequence shows him perfecting a way of seeing that was stoic and inscrutable, associative yet anti narrative, with images that eventually became some of the most famous of the era, and of his career.
Chicago
In late 1946, Evans opened a major solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In February 1947, Fortune published his ambitious photo-essay ‘Chicago: a camera exploration’. Across ten pages he avoided the city’s “prized and remarkable postcard colossi” to show “sights that meet a leisured and untethered eye,” as he put it in his text for the piece. The layout looked celebratory but its tone was not: “Chicago decays as it does everything else – spectacularly and speedily.” The fourth spread is the most remarkable, showing citizens at the corner of State and Randolph Streets. These are post-war consumers, Caucasian, Asian and African-American. Evans places himself directly in their path. Trapped anxiously in bright sunlight the faces hint at the unrest beneath middle-class decorum.
Beyond street portraits, Evans made a comprehensive study of Chicago’s remarkably mixed architecture, allowing him to resume his ongoing interest in buildings as a kind of indirect portrait of a society. The Chicago photo-essay for Fortune was by far his most significant magazine work to date, giving him the confidence to develop and refine what he wanted to do with the printed page in the coming years.
Small Towns & Neighbourhoods
Although Evans’ photography began in New York and he made a substantial photographic portrait of Chicago, he remained convinced that it was the smaller towns that offered a more accurate sense of the nation. The major cities of the USA are always exceptional, and tend to think of themselves as such. Evans concerned himself with the typical, and with the pragmatic ways small towns work and grow. Away from intense modern progress, artefacts of the past persist until they no longer function, rather than being replaced for the sake of it. Some of Evans’ most loved and complex photographs came out of this commitment to typical places.
Message from the Interior
Evans’ deep interest in rooms was long-lasting, and it suited his slow and careful pace of observation. With no people present, an interior scene can become a portrait of an individual, a family, or a community. Moreover, the way a camera records will allow everything that is present to become significant, as in a still life composition. Details of décor. Treasured objects. Casual objects. Furniture. Fabrics. Even the atmosphere of a room can be communicated.
African Sculpture: an Art of Documentation
In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, commissioned Evans to document nearly five hundred sculptures gathered for an exhibition of African art. In the museum itself each object was shot separately (with a few objects documented in pairs) in long exposure, during which lights were sometimes moved around to produce an all-over, hyper-factual clarity. Prints were made for extensive teaching folios, and a travelling exhibition. The catalogue for MoMA’s exhibition African Negro Art (in which Evans is not credited) was a serious attempt to look at the origin and complexity of these objects beyond the crude reductions and exoticism of the attitudes of European surrealists and modernist artists of the time. Although it was a free-standing commission, we can view this work in the context of Evans’ earlier commission from the Museum of Modern Art to photograph Victorian architecture, as well commissions to document folk art at New York’s Downtown Gallery, and Diego Rivera’s political murals for the Workers’ School of New York.
Vernacular Designs, Common Objects
Evans took the forces of modernity and modernisation – economic, political, social, aesthetic – as a subject matter to be considered carefully. These forces could be sensed most acutely through objects that had somehow survived the onslaught of modernisation or were about to succumb to it. Even the titles of Evans’ Fortune magazine photo-essays signalled his suspicion of the new: ‘The Wreckers’, ‘These Dark Satanic Mills’, ‘Downtown: A Last Look Backward’, ‘Before they Disappear’, ‘The Last of Railroad Steam’, ‘The Auto-Junkyard’.
Nevertheless, it would be hasty to dismiss this as nostalgia, or a sentimental looking back in the knowledge that the juggernaut of progress could not be stopped. In 1956 Evans observed: “[N]ostalgia has become debased to mean a kind of syrup savoured by self-pitying people conjuring better days, funny hats and an innocence nobody ever had.” In a caption for a series of photographs of antique store window displays he declared: “Nostalgia I disdain: pray keep me forever separated from an atmosphere of moist elderly eyes just about to spill over at the sight of grandmother’s tea set. Design just a little dated will interest any artist. Design current is always terrible. Anyone who has tried to find a good contemporary lamp or clock will know what I mean.”
Walker Evans, ‘Before They Disappear’, Fortune, March 1957
The familiar insignia of the freight cars are like old ditties beating in the back of our heads. Once we knew them all by heart, they were with us like the weather, like the backs of books we collected, and like the streets we walked in.
Brought into focus by selection, you almost expect these brave and naïve emblems to emit the very sound of railroading – the iron whines, the Steely screechers, and the attenuated nocturnal moans of steam transportation.
They don’t quite do that. But they are worth examining, not only for the commemorative thoughts they carry, but because they are going to disappear from the US landscape one day you have only to notice the new, exceedingly distinguished lettering of the New Haven’s car sides, or the redesigned Boston & Maine signature, to see that the fell hand of the contemporary commercial designer is lurking near, T-square poised.
When we can no longer catch sight of the great Chinese red and black double tadpole of the Northern Pacific, or the simple old cross of the Santa Fe, then will a whole world of cherished association have been destroyed. Impiety could go no further.
Walker Evans, ‘The Auto Junkyard’, Fortune, April 1962
The nadir of landscape scenery is the great American auto-junk scrap pile. With the effect of some evil prank, these obscene perversities leer out of the countryside almost anywhere, often in the middle of idyllic rural spots … Pictorially speaking, the result is chaos abstracted, and this has considerable curious interest in itself. There is a secret imp in almost every civilized man that bids him delight in the surprises and in the mockery in the forms of destruction. At times, nothing could be gayer than the complete collapse of our fanciest contrivances. Scenes like these are rich in tragicomic suggestions of the fall of man from his high ride.
Walker Evans, ‘The U.S. Depot’‚ Fortune, February 1953
He who travels by rail over the lesser lines of the USA clangs and shunts straight into his own childhood. Most of the smalltown railroad stations up and down the country are now about fifty years old. Looked at collectively they seem more and more toylike – as model railroad toys grow more and more like the real thing. With only a slight effort of the imagination, these encrusted little buildings turn into miniature stage sets, and the people in them correctly costumed dolls. You feel an old affection for the way a station agent throws the block-signal lever there in his coal-heated office. And what in that green-paper note handed up on its looped stick to the engineer as the 3:52 breaks to a stop? Does it say “Train five Engine eight four nine six delayed at Millerton hot journal box,” or does it say “Tell Jeanie I’ll get pork chops?”
Walker Evans, ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’, Fortune, July 1955
Among the low-priced, factory-produced goods, none is so appealing to the senses as the ordinary hand tool. Hence, a hardware store is a kind of offbeat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear “undesigned” forms. The Swedish steel pliers pictured above, with their somehow swanlike flow, and the objects on the following pages, in all their tough simplicity, illustrate this. Aside from their functions – though they are exclusively wedded to function – each of these tools lures the eye to follow its curves and angles, and invites the hand to test its balance.
Who would sully the lines of the tin-cutting shears on page 105 with a single added bend or whorl? Or clothe in any way the fine naked impression of heft and bite in the crescent wrench on page 107? To be sure, some design-happy manufacturers have tampered with certain tool classics; the beautiful plumb bob, which used to come naively and solemnly shaped like a child’s top, now looks suspiciously like a toy space ship, and is no longer brassy. But not much can be done to spoil a crate opener, that nobly ferocious statement in black steel as may be seen on page 104. In fact, almost all the basic small tools stand, aesthetically speaking, for elegance, candour and purity.
Labor Anonymous is a 1946 photo series by Walker Evans, commissioned by Fortune magazine, documenting 50+ candid, close-up street portraits of Detroit workers. Capturing diverse, unposed facial expressions and postures, the project created a “physiognomy of a nation,” exploring modern anonymity and the dignity of laborers.
Shot on assignment for Fortune magazine in 1946, this Walker Evans photograph of an unknown Detroit office worker is reproduced from Labor Anonymous, just out from D.A.P. Publishing and Walther König. “When I knew him, Evans was beset by troubles of all kinds,” Jerry L Thompson writes, “money troubles, tax troubles, marriage troubles (he divorced a second time in 1972), health troubles, advancing age, declining strength: the full catastrophe that flesh is heir to. As he approached 70, most onlookers would have taken him (even by the standards of that time) to be at least a decade older. Yet every time he walked out to start his day he was ready to be an artist. Every day had some work in it – for Evans, work meant being an artist – and the work got done even if every practical concern – what ordinary people call work – fell by the wayside.”
Evans was in poor health when he began to work with the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973; he was attracted to the camera’s small, elegant design and the instant color prints it generated that required no tedious lab or darkroom work. Like the developing Polaroid print itself, with its miraculous and immediate image, Evans came to life and worked feverishly with the new camera. At the age of seventy, he returned to many of his lifelong themes, including vernacular architecture, domestic interiors, portraiture, and roadside signage.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
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“Aesthetically (both pictorially and in exhibition design) there is a wonderful frisson to the grouping of the photographs in these darker, enclosed, tightly curated gallery spaces that is so intoxicating to the senses.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 28th November, 2025 – 3rd May, 2026
Curator: Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography at the NGV
After being introduced to Pablo Picasso in 1935, Dora Maar became his lover, model and muse until their tumultuous liaison ended in 1943. During their time together, Maar famously documented the creation of the monumental painting Guernica in Picasso’s Paris studio. This portrait captures the artist at ease, bathed in an endlessly echoing lineation of shadows from the above reed screen. The portrait Maar took of Picasso a year later, displayed nearby, shows him seated outside, his eyes glinting with intensity. Both images were taken in Mougins, near Cannes, an area that Picasso returned to every summer.
Wall text from the exhibition
The interface of light
For much of its running length this exhibition of cinematic scope at the National Gallery of Victoria curated by the dependable Maggie Finch is a stimulating ride.
The early galleries in particular are a joy to behold, mixing as they do international and Australian female photographers mainly from the period between the two world wars. This placement of Australian photography in an international context (or vice versa) is something I have desired to see for a very long time in an Australian photographic exhibition. One informing the other. And it works so well!
Aesthetically (both pictorially and in exhibition design) there is a wonderful frisson to the grouping of the photographs in these darker, enclosed, tightly curated gallery spaces that is so intoxicating to the senses. Ruth Hollick meets Madame d’Ora, Florence Henri meets Yamawaki Michiko, and Olive Cotton meets Dora Maar on the gallery walls, interwoven into an intertextual conversation on photography that spans identities, countries and continents. Perhaps not a legacy of light rather the interface of light, a shared connection, one nexus to another. I could have breathed in these photographs for hours!
That energy starts to dissipate as the gallery spaces open out in the second half of the exhibition, especially in the section ‘People and Place’ (see below). Poor Farm Security Administration prints of now famous photographs printed very flatly in the mid-1970s and purchased for the gallery in the same time period don’t help the cause – they need to be replaced in the collection with more appropriate prints of these images.
By the time of the final section, ‘New Ways Of Seeing: Portraits, Intimacy, Liberation’ (see below), the international representation has disappeared altogether and all the intoxicating energy has gone. In this section we find strong, eloquent and important Australian photographs from the period – conceptual, feminist, and on liberation – but it would have been great to have seen them paired with photographs from international photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Mary Ellen Mark, and VALIE EXPORT for example.
On reflection I can say that this is a strong exhibition from the NGV coherently and intelligently curated by Maggie Finch. It is fantastic to see that the gallery has been “splashing the cash” in recent years – supported by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and the Bowness family – with over 170 new acquisitions for the photographic collection.
However for a public gallery, with most of the photographs already in the collection, to charge $25 entry price is really beyond the pale. I went twice to see the exhibition and $50 is a fair whack of money out of anyone’s budget.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Lee Miller Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below); Lee Miller Man Ray (1931, below); Gisele Freund’s Simone de Beauvoir (1952 printed c. 1975, below), Jean-Paul Satre (1939 printed c. 1975, below), Vita Sackville-West (1938 printed c. 1975, below) and Virginia Woolfe (1939 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light celebrates the wide-ranging photographic practices of more than eighty women artists working between 1900 and 1975. Featuring prints, postcards, photobooks and magazines, the exhibition explores the role of photographers as image-makers, and the ways in which women artists create an image of themselves, of others, of the times – from images of the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, through to the women’s liberation movement and beyond. From Melbourne to Tokyo, Paris to Buenos Aires, the exhibition showcases the works of trailblazing artists such as Berenice Abbott, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Imogen Cunningham, Mikki Ferrill, Sue Ford, Christine Godden, Ponch Hawkes, Annemarie Heinrich, Ruth Hollick, Florence Henri, Kati Horna, Germaine Krull, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Toyoko Tokiwa, Yamazawa Eiko and many more.
The exhibition reflects a recent collecting focus on celebrating the contributions of women artists of the early twentieth century in the NGV Photography Collection. Featuring portraiture, photojournalism, landscape photography, photomontage, experimental avant-garde imagery and more, Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light presents the diverse work of women photographers against the backdrop of significant social, political and cultural events.
Text from the NGV website
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Lee Miller Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below) and Lee Miller Man Ray (1931, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
At her Paris studio, Lee Miller photographed this self-assured portrait of Egyptian model Nimet Eloui Bey. The model’s direct, inescapable gaze grips the viewer, perhaps foreshadowing the conflict to come. In the years after Miller took this portrait, she and her subject’s businessman husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, would pursue a passionate affair, resulting in divorce and the explosive end to Miller’s relationship with artist Man Ray. After leaving Paris, Miller set up a successful new studio in New York in 1932, before marrying Aziz and moving with him to Cairo.
Wall text from the exhibition
Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) Man Ray (installation view) 1931 Gelatin silver photograph 23.1 x 17.5cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Joy And
Following a successful modelling career, Lee Miller moved to Paris in 1929. Intending to study under the Surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray, she soon became his assistant, model and lover. This portrait of Man Ray was taken in 1931, when Miller was working out of her small Montparnasse home studio. The artist appears to be lost in thought, his dilated pupils and furrowed brow suggesting an idea revealing itself. While the image shows reverence for the contemplative artist, it also hints at the couple’s domestic ease, with Man Ray appearing comfortable in the presence of Miller’s camera.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Gisèle Freund’s Simone de Beauvoir (1952 printed c. 1975) and Jean-Paul Satre (1939 printed c. 1975) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Gisèle Freund’s Vita Sackville-West (1938 printed c. 1975) and Virginia Woolfe (1939 printed c. 1975) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
In 1933 Gisèle Freund fled Frankfurt for Paris, where she studied photographic portraiture at the Sorbonne. Uniquely for the time, she used Kodachrome and Agfacolor positive film for her colour portraits of writers and artists in Paris – her portrait of James Joyce was selected as the first colour cover of Time magazine in 1939. That same year she photographed Virginia Woolf at her home in Tavistock Square, London. Freund later recalled of her encounter with Woolf, ‘frail, luminous, she was the very incarnation of her prose’.
Wall text from the exhibition
In Exchange: Social Milieu and Collaboration
The intertwined lives of avant-garde artists working in the interwar period often played out in works of art depicting friendship and love. Photographers captured these relationships, often revealing both the affection and the complex relations between themselves and their artistic collaborators, muses and subjects.
Paris in the interwar period was a hotbed for artistic exchange. Between 1935 and 1936, Dora Maar photographed her then partner Pablo Picasso in her Paris studio. She also created collaborative images with fellow Surrealists such as Léonor Fini, Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton. Lee Miller, also working in Paris during this period, photographed her lover and artistic partner Man Ray. Miller, in turn, was the subject of many of Man Ray’s own works.
In Mexico, Kati Horna frequently photographed her close friend, British-born painter and writer Leonora Carrington. Lola Álvarez Bravo’s image of the Spanish Surrealist artist Remedios Varo is another example of the playful and experimental collaborations between artists at the time. Such photographs demonstrate the mutual influence between women artists.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing photographs by Dora Maar including at second right, photographs of Picasso (1935-1936, below) and at right, Self-portrait at the window (c. 1935, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
(clockwise from bottom left)
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) No title (Pablo Picasso facing left) No title (Pablo Picasso facing right, holding a cigarette) No title (Profile of Pablo Picasso facing left) No title (Pablo Picasso facing left, with left hand to mouth) (installation view) 1935-1936 Gelatin silver photographs National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Self-portrait at the window (installation view) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print Private collection, Melbourne Promised gift Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Dawn (installation view) 1935 Reproduced in Minotaure No. 8, 1936 Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text Shaw Research Library Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The framing of Dora Maar’s Self-portrait at the window, Paris, c. 1935, is mired in this portrait taken by Maar of her friend Jacqueline Lamba, published in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in June 1936. As art historian and theorist
Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes, ‘Lambda might be viewed as contained or imprisoned by the stone wall behind which she stands … Alternately, the photograph might be seen as the space of domesticity, overcome by time and brambles’. For Solomon-Godeau, it is also, importantly, an ‘exchange between two women artists’.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Dora Maar’s Pablo Picasso (1938, below); Pablo Picasso standing under reed screening. Mougins, summer, 1937 (1937, top of posting) and Aperitif in the garden of the Hotel Vaste Horizon with Andre Breton, Jacqueline lamb, Paul and Nusch Eluard. Mougins, 1936-1937 (1936-1937) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Pablo Picasso (installation view) 1938 Gelatin silver print 11.9 x 17.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Pablo Picasso standing under reed screening, Mougins, summer, 1937 (Pablo Picasso debout sous les cannisses, Mougins, été, 1937) (installation view) 1937 22.0 x 17.2cm (image) 23.1 x 18.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Berenice Abbott Eugène Atget (1927, printed c. 1970-1978) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Janet Flanner 1927 Gelatin silver photograph Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
While living in Paris in the 1920s, Berenice Abbott produced an extraordinary body of images featuring the artists, writers and performers in her social circle, such as Eugène Atget, Jean Cocteau and James Joyce. This portrait of American writer Janet Flanner was also captured by Abbott during this time. A journalist who wrote under the pen name ‘Genêt’, Flanner was a long-term contributor to The New Yorker and a prominent member of the expatriate community living in Paris during the interwar period. In this portrait, Flanner is photographed wearing a suit with striped pants and a top hat, upon which are stacked two masks, adding a Surrealist edge to the image.
Wall text from the exhibition
Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) Leonora Carrington (installation view) 1957 Gelatin silver photograph 24.2 x 18.2cm (image) 25.3 x 20.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, Kati Horna was forced to leave Europe following the rise of Nazism. She belonged to the circle of Surrealist expatriate artists in Mexico producing experimental images. In this photocollage, Horna has superimposed an image of British-born painter and writer Leonora Carrington – a close friend of hers – onto a reproduction of Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1518 painting Portrait of an unknown young man. Created on the occasion of Carrington’s birthday, the humorous merging of the photograph with the painted reproduction, coupled with the clash of genders and time periods, gives the scene a Surrealist tone.
Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993) No title (Remedios Varo) (installation view) c. 1950 Gelatin silver photograph 23.4 x 18.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lola Álvarez Bravo was one of the first artists to produce photomontages in Mexico. At the forefront of artistic experimentation, Álvarez Bravo created this image by layering multiple negatives. The subject is believed to be Remedios Varo, a Spanish Surrealist artist who arrived in Mexico in 1941. Alongside Álvarez Bravo, Kati Horna and Leonora Carrington, Varo was part of a community of expatriate artists and intellectuals active in Mexico during the mid twentieth century. Drawing inspiration from the Surrealist movement, Álvarez Bravo overlaid the portrait with an image of rippling water, creating a tranquil scene in which the subject appears to be floating.
Wall text from the exhibition
Unlike in many other countries, in Mexico artists had opportunities to work as long as they did not threaten the locals’ career prospects. Thus, many Spanish-speaking immigrants started teaching in universities, raising a new generation of Mexican creatives and academics. Apart from their jobs, the majority of Europeans did not interact closely with the locals, preferring to keep the company of their fellow refugees. The reason was not the rejection of local customs but the shared experience of war, tragedy, and dramatic flight across ravaged Europe.
The house of the artist Remedios Varo was the central meeting point for the whole community. Anyone in need could find company, shelter, and money raised by all group members. Varo hosted dinners and parties. She also sent party invitations to random addresses taken from a phone book.
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1854) and Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1872) Disavowals, or Cancelled Confessions (Aveux non avenus) (installation views) 1930 Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris Illustrated book: photogravure, letterpress text, 237 pages, 10 heliographs, paper cover, stitched binding Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery library Endowment, 2017 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Born Lucy Schwob, Claude Cahun was a celebrated French artist associated with the Surrealist movement. Aveux non avenus, loosely translated as Cancelled Confessions or Disavowals, is the second book Cajun created with her stepsister, lifelong partner and artistic collaborator, graphic artist Marcel Moore. This subversive semi-autobiographical work couples poems, recollections and aphorisms with dreamlike photomontages. The photomontages include many of Cahun’s performative self-portraits, images that challenge established notions of gender identity.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right in the bottom image, Francesca Woodman Untitled (Providence, Rhode Island) (c. 1975-1978 printed after 1981, below); Ellen Auerbach R. Schottelius in New York (1953 printed 1992, below); Barbara Morgan Martha Graham – Letter to the world (1940, below); Lotti Jacobi Dancer #16, Pauline Koner, New York (c. 1937, printed 1992); and two Photogenic drawing (c. 1940 and c. 1950) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) Untitled (Providence, Rhode Island) (installation view) c. 1975-1978, printed after 1981 Gelatin silver photograph 13.7 x 13.8cm (image) 25.3 x 20.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2025 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Francesca Woodman is known for her intimate black-and-white self-portraits and photographs featuring other women sitters. The bodies are often blurred, with faces hidden and appearing to blend into the background. In this self-portrait, Woodman crouches down in the corner of a decrepit room, her patterned gown somehow reflecting – or merging with – the floral wallpaper that peels down in rough remnants behind her. The photograph was created while Woodman was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she studied from 1975 to 1978 and which produced the majority of her extant photographs following her untimely death in 1981.
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Ellen Auerbach (German 1906-2004) R. Schottelius in New York (installation view) 1953, printed 1992 Gelatin silver photograph 23.2 x 18.5cm (image) 25.0 x 27.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A constant innovator throughout her life, Ellen Auerbach received her first camera in 1928 as a tool to aid her studies in sculpture. The following year, she met her professional and romantic partner Grete Stern in Berlin, where they formed studio ringl+pit. After escaping fascist Germany, Auerbach eventually relocated to the United States and continued her photographic practice, settling among New York’s avant-garde. In this rooftop scene, she captures German dancer Renate Schottelius leaping into the air. In contrast with the surrounding static, imposing skyscrapers, the liberated body in joyous motion serves as a symbol for freedom.
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Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Martha Graham – Letter to the world (installation view) 1940 Gelatin silver photograph 38.9 x 48.2cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Barbara Morgan met the pioneering American choreographer and dancer Martha Graham in 1935, and their working relationship lasted over six decades. Graham later reflected in 1980: “It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture. In Barbara Morgan I found that person. In looking at these photographs today, I feel, as I felt when I first saw them, privileged to have been a part of this collaboration. For to me, Barbara Morgan through her art reveals the inner landscape that is a dancer’s world.”
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bodies, Rhythm and Movement
From the very beginnings of photography, the female nude genre remained primarily the domain of the male photographer. However, twentieth-century women artists, particularly those working within the avant-garde scene of the interwar period, reclaimed the male gaze, creatively experimenting with the representation of women’s bodies.
Artists such as Laure Albin Guillot and Germaine Krull produced nudes ranging from the intimate and sensual to the contained and stark. Such experimental compositions were also a vital aspect of the work of Florence Henri, whose images allowed for new readings of the body. In the 1970s artists such as Sue Ford continued this legacy of experimentation, combining depictions of women’s bodies with scenes from nature.
Representations of women’s bodies in motion were another means of artistic and physical liberation. The collaborations between dancers and artists, for example Barbara Morgan and Martha Graham, and Ellen Auerbach and Renate Schottelius, allowed for experimentation and dynamic image-making. These creative partnerships were shaped by movement and a shared response between artist and subject.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Germaine Krull Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (c. 1925, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Germaine Krull Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (c. 1925, below); Florence Henri Nude composition (c. 1930, below); Florence Henri Line Viala (Nude study), Paris (1934); and Laure Albin Guillot Nude Study (1943) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985) Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (installation view) c. 1925 Gelatin silver photograph 19.7 x 11.7cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2020 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This intimate portrait shows the German dancer Dorothea Albu elegantly draped in a feather boa – possibly a reference to her life in show business. The soft focus of the image, along with Albu’s gently closed eyes, creates a serene scene. The work is believed to be from a series of female nudes that Germaine Krull photographed in her Berlin studio between 1922 and 1925.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Florence Henri Nude composition (c. 1930, below) and Florence Henri Line Viala (Nude study), Paris (1934, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Florence Henri (European born USA, 1893-1982) Nude composition (Nu composition) (installation view) c. 1930 Gelatin silver photograph 22.9 x 17.0cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Florence Henri (European born USA, 1893-1982) Line Viala (Nude study), Paris (installation view) 1934 Gelatin silver photograph 22.9 x 17.2cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the 1930s Florence Henri made numerous photographs of female nudes. These works often feature modern women who appear bold, confident and at ease in their own skin and sexuality. In this photograph, Henri uses dramatic lighting to create deep shadows that contour and highlight the form of actress Line Viala’s body. Henri’s use of a blank canvas as a plain backdrop further accentuates the model as the sole focus of the image. Perhaps Henri’s choice of a blank canvas backdrop is also a subtle reference to the traditionally male-dominated realm of nude female painting.
Another vital aspect of her practice was her nude female compositions, such as Nude composition (Nu composition), 1930. Created in the year after establishing her studio in Paris, it employs her characteristically unique, elevated vantage point and raking lighting to disrupt a sense of visual order and perspective. Henri constructs a scene in which the upper half of a woman’s naked body (her chest, breasts, arms, head and hair) creates an asymmetrical focal point at the top of the photograph. Lying next to the woman, and, seemingly, the subject of her gaze, is a large shell, while plants at the base of the image echo the woman’s flowing hair. While appearing to be set on a bed of sand, on closer inspection the textured base is revealed as a coarse sheet.
The dreamlike image, confident and controlled, which merges the female body with the symbolic shell and forms from nature, creates a scene of sensuousness and self-empowerment that is erotic and modern. Henri’s nude compositions, along with those of peers working in France such as Dora Maar and Nora Dumas, claimed the female body as a subject of their own – a trend that emerged among a number of female photographers, in the interwar period.
Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) Nude study (Étude de nu) (installation view) 1943 Gelatin silver photograph 29.5 x 17.9cm (image) 29.5 x 23.1cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Spanning fashion and portraiture to advertising and landscapes, Laure Albin Guillot’s images were published regularly in magazines and featured in the first independent Salon of Photography in Paris in 1928. Albin Guillot collaborated with French poet Paul Valéry in the 1930s to create male nude images to accompany his poem ‘La Cantate du Narcisse’ (‘The Song of Narcissus’). She continued to produce numerous nude studies of women throughout the 1930s–40s, such as this closely cropped portrait that enhances the angular lines and features of the sitter’s body.
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Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Laure Albin Guillot Nude study (Étude de nu) (1943, above); Anne Brigman Quest (1931); Olive Cotton Max after surfing (1939, printed 1998); and Louise Dahl-Wolfe Nude in water (1941) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Germaine Krull Nude studies (Études de nu) (1930) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
One of the most experimental artists of the 1920s and 30s, Germaine Krull photographed a diverse range of subjects, and her images were published widely in magazines and journals. With publications such Nude Studies, created two years after Metal,she is recognised as a pioneer in the single-author photobook format. Nude Studies consists of twenty-four photogravures of female nudes, published with an accompanying introductory text by the artist Jean Cocteau. Created in Krull’s Paris studio, the intimate studies, in which the faces of the women are often obscured, emphasise the sculptural forms of their bodies.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania (1975, below); Ilse Bing Self-portrait (1931 printed c. 1993, below); and two Sue Ford photographs, No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path) (c. 1970, below) and No title (Nude montage) (1960s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015) Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania (installation view) 1975 From the Artists and photographs folio 1975 Gelatin silver photographs 24.0 x 33.9cm (image and sheet) 40.7 x 49.6cm (support) ed. 9/60 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In 1959 married artists Bernd and Hilla Becher started photographing industrial architecture, a practice that would continue for over four decades. While predominantly documenting structures throughout Germany’s Ruhr region, they occasionally worked overseas – this work was made on their first trip to the United States. The Bechers created a system for comparing structures: photographing them from a consistent angle, under virtually identical lighting conditions, printing images at the same size and often displaying them in grids. According to Hilla Becher, their archive allows for narratives to naturally emerge: “Structural patterns and their transformations … can be proved to exist in the case of such relatively exhaustive comparative series.”
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Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Self-portrait (Autoportrait) (installation view) 1931, printed 1993 Gelatin silver photograph 26.7 x 29.4cm (image) 27.9 x 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ilse Bing began making photographs in the late 1920s, when she purchased one of the first 35 mm cameras produced by the German company Leica. She made use of the camera’s portability, capturing motion, dizzying angles and contrasts of light, shade and shadow – compositional elements that characterised the New Photography movement. Inspired by Florence Henri, Bing used her camera to disrupt the picture plane. In this famed self-portrait, Bing uses mirrors as a fracturing tool. The self-portrait shows Bing’s reflection holding a camera, accompanied by her side profile in another angled mirror. She controls the various gazes: her own, the viewer’s, the camera’s.
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Time and Mirrors
Photography has long been associated with mirrors and time – as a way of remembering, reflecting and retrieving information. As early as 1859, American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr described photography, specifically the daguerreotype, as ‘the mirror with a memory’.
Many artists use the camera to explore identity through portraits and self-portraits. In Ilse Bing’s 1931 self-portrait, captured with her Leica camera, a mirror disrupts the image, disorienting the viewer. Four decades later, Joan Jonas extended this idea, using a video monitor as a mirror to explore reflection, perception and the self.
By the 1970s, repetition and seriality became central to photographic practice. Through sequences of images, artists such as Eve Sonneman, Sue Ford and Bernd and Hilla Becher explored how photography could record and interpret change – both immediate and long-term. Their images reveal the camera’s dual role as an objective instrument and a conceptual recorder of the world.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, two Sue Ford photographs, No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path) (c. 1970, below) and No title (Nude montage) (1960s, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path) (installation view) c. 1970 Gelatin silver photograph 27.6 x 34.7cm irreg. (image and sheet) 38.5 x 44.8cm (support) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gerstl Bequest, 2000 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Sue Ford created several bodies of highly experimental work. These works involved complex montages, photograms and layered negatives, revealing hours of darkroom experimentation in her Eltham studio in Melbourne’s north-east. Such experiments coincided with Ford’s burgeoning interest in left-wing politics, and her exposure via the media to world events such as the NASA moon landings and the Vietnam War. Ford incorporated imagery and ideas relating to these events, as well as her interest in environmentalism, into these abstracted, Surrealism-inspired works.
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Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) No title (Nude montage) (installation view) 1960s Gelatin silver photograph 25.6 x 19.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gerstl Bequest, 2000 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Real Time is composed of paired photographs taken seconds apart, separated by a black-line border. The ordered presentation allows the viewer to consider the relationship between the images, and the small changes and passing of time between them. Eve Sonneman first showed the photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before publishing them as a book. In 1976 she saw an advertisement in Artforum from newly established press Printed Matter, which was seeking artists’ books to publish. “So I sent [my photographs] in and that work became my first published book, Real Time,” Sonneman recalled. “I was as thrilled as could be!”
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Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Ross, 1964; Ross, 1974 (installation view) 1964-1974, printed 1974 From the Time series (1962-1974) Gelatin silver photograph 11.1 × 20.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund, 1974 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Jim, 1964; Jim, 1974 (installation view) 1964-1974, printed 1974 From the Time series (1962-1974) Gelatin silver photograph 11.1 × 20.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund, 1974 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“For some time I have been thinking about the camera itself. Trying to explore its particular UNIQUENESS, coming to terms with the fact that I had been trying to ignore for some years, that the camera is actually a MACHINE. … In “Time Series” I tried to use the camera as objectively as possible. It was a time machine. For me it was an amazing experience. It wasn’t until I placed the photograph of the younger face beside the recent photograph that I could fully appreciate the change. The camera showed me with absolute clarity, something I could only just perceive with my naked eye.”
~ Sue Ford, Time Series: An Exhibition of Photographs, Melbourne, 1974
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Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image a video still of Imogen Cunningham Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image from left to right three photographs by Alice Mills, Hilaire Syme dressed for the Kismit Ball (1912-1915, below); Hilaire Syme (c. 1910, below); and Joan Margaret Syme (c. 1918, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
People and Place
Depictions of children, mothers and acts of caregiving have traditionally been recurring subjects in photographs taken by women. According to art historian Naomi Rosenblum, in the early 1900s the photographing of children, particularly children with their mothers, was deemed by commentators at the time to be ‘an especially appropriate assignment for women’.
While stereotyping and gender bias remained significant obstacles for women photographers in the early twentieth century, many still innovated through their image-making, while studio work provided women artists with the opportunity for financial independence. Subjects were portrayed in intensely intimate portraits, making visible the people in domestic settings who were often overlooked in photographs and society more broadly.
In Australia, artists such as Olive Cotton produced landscape photography in the dominant Pictorialist style of nostalgic, softly focused images. Everyday, non-professional photography, or vernacular photography, was also widely produced by women photographers of the period. As shown by Inez McPhee’s photo albums depicting the outdoor adventures of the Melbourne Walking Club and Edna Walling’s albums filled with pictures of friends, animals and plants, photography became an increasingly popular way of documenting daily life.
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Hilaire Syme dressed for the Kismit Ball 1912-1915 gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes 70.5 x 43.3cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Dr Veronica Condon, 2005 Public domain
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Broothorn Studios, Melbourne Hilaire Syme c. 1910 Gelatin silver photograph, watercolour 185.5 x 74.4cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Dr Veronica Condon, Geoffrey Haggard and Jennifer Smyth, descendants of Sir Geoffrey Syme K.B.E., Managing Editor of the Age newspaper (1908-1942), 2004
An almost opaque layer of paint has been applied to this portrait. The paint obscures some of the details while enhancing others, such as the child’s shiny shoes and the satin sash of her dress. Alice Mills’s portrait of the subject’s younger sister, Joan, has a more conventional treatment in the application of translucent pigments. It remains unclear whether Mills did the hand-colouring. However, having trained in the studio of leading Melbourne photographer Johnstone O’Shaughnessy, she would almost certainly have known about the technique of applying oil-based pigments to photographs to create the illusion of naturalistic colour.
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Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Broothorn Studios, Melbourne Joan Margaret Syme (installation view) c. 1918 Gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes 243.85 x 91.45cm (approx) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Michael Hayne, 2005 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Broothorn Studios, Melbourne Joan Margaret Syme c. 1918 Gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes 243.85 x 91.45cm (approx) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Michael Hayne, 2005 Public domain
Alice Mills, with help from her husband, Tom Humphreys, set up her first photography studio in 1900. Soon after that she was working under her own name in the Centreway Arcade at 259-263 Collins Street, Melbourne. Mills’s portraits were often published in magazines and newspapers, which brought her to the attention of a large audience of prospective clients. Around 1915 she produced a number of large-scale portraits of Hilaire and Joan Syme, the daughters of then managing editor and co-owner of The Age newspaper Geoffrey Syme. The photographs were made in conjunction with Broothorn Studios, which art historians suggest made the extreme enlargements.
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Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right in the bottom image two Imogen Cunningham photographs, My mother peeling apples (1910, printed 1979) and My father (1906, printed 1979) and six 1920s photographs by the Australian photographer Ruth Hollick (1883-1977): No title (Seated girl looking over shoulder) (c. 1926); No title (Little girl holding small book) (1920s); No title (Young girl holding a doll) (1920s); No title (Laughing child) (c. 1926); Miss Pamela Ann McKewan (c. 1929); and No title (Laughing girl in cap) (1920s) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left four photographs by Ruth Hollick: Bobby (1927); No title (Baby in striped dress) (1920s); No title (Three children seated on grass) (1920s); and No title (Mother and two children) (1920s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing four photographs by Ruth Hollick: Bobby (1927); No title (Baby in striped dress) (1920s); No title (Three children seated on grass) (1920s); and No title (Mother and two children) (1920s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) Bobby 1927 Gelatin silver photograph 18.8 x 21.4cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992 Public domain
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) No title (Mother and two children) 1920s Gelatin silver photograph 19.0 x 23.9cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right three photographs by Ruth Hollick: No title (Young woman in plaid shawl) (1920s); No title (Mother and child) (c. 1926); and Janet Armstrong, Woodbury Estate, Deniliquin, New South Wales (c. 1939) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) No title (Young girl holding a doll) 1920s Gelatin silver photograph 23.9 x 14.6cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing clippings, press releases, brochures, reviews, invitations and other ephemeral material relating to Ruth Hollick and the Ruth Hollick studio Photos: Marcus Bunyan
In 1928 Ruth Hollick and her partner, fellow photographer Dorothy Izard, held an exhibition at their Collins Street studio of more than 150 portraits of children. Lady Eleanor Mary Latham, wife of then attorney-general Sir John Greig Latham, opened the exhibition, encouraging the audience to consider the possibility of career for women, with Hollick as a role model: ‘Everyone has a right to try and make a living for herself in any profession she likes to take up.’ The period in which Hollick and Izard operated the studio in Collins Street was extremely productive and successful. In 1929 Hollick was the only woman to participate in the Melbourne Exhibition of Pictorial Photography.
Ruth Hollick was widely recognised for her skill in photographing children. In an interview published in 1927, Hollick said: ‘I have always found the work well within a woman’s intellectual grasp, and not too hard a strain from the physical point of view. Although one does not, at this period of women’s freedom, talk of any particular work as being her sphere, there is no doubt but that feminine intuition with children may be particularly helpful … After all the big thing is to catch the real child – show him as he is – no wonderful massing of shadow, no illuminating light is worth a lot if it does not reveal the real Pat or Mollie.’ These materials were collected by Hollick and gifted to the NGV’s Shaw Research Library by her niece Lucy Crosbie Morrison.
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Inez McPhee (Australian, 1908-1999) No title (Inez McPhee’s album of ADA river trip) (installation view) 1936 28.1 x 22.4cm (page) 28.5 x 23.0 x 3.1cm (closed) 28.5 x 46.0 x 1.5cm (open) Album: gelatin silver photographs, newspaper, pencil and pen and ink, 62 pages, cardboard and leather cover, stitched binding Presented through the NGV Foundation by John McPhee, Member and Ann Luck, 2004 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Inez McPhee (Australian, 1908-1999) No title (Inez McPhee’s album of a trip to New Zealand) (installation view) 1953 Album: gelatin silver photographs, collage, pencil, 40 pages, cardboard cover, stitched binding 31.0 x 24.1cm (page) 31.1 x 24.8 x 1.4cm (closed) 31.1 x 49.0 x 1.0cm (open) Presented through the NGV Foundation by John McPhee, Member and Ann Luck, 2004 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Inez McPhee was an active member of the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club, founded in 1922. McPhee took her camera on bushwalks with the group and, typical of amateur photographers of the period, compiled albums of the prints. Her albums are filled with images of women engaging in outdoor activities.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left three photographs by Edna Walling: Doris Oak-Rhind, Edna’s Walling’s sister (1920s); Estelle Thompson (1950s-1960s); and No title (Young woman preparing picnic) (1940s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left to right, three photographs by Edna Walling (Australian born England, 1895-1973) Doris Oak-Rhind, Edna’s Walling’s sister (1920s); Estelle Thompson (1950s-1960s); and No title (Young woman preparing picnic) (1940s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Edna Walling (Australian born England, 1895-1973) Estelle Thompson (installation view) 1950s-1960s Gelatin silver photograph 25.4 x 20.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Many-sided Indeed: Women In Business
“There is more, much more in the photo question than the mere ability to make a technically perfect photo or picture,” wrote New Zealand photographer May Moore in a 1916 essay. “And when it comes to successfully managing a studio of one’s own, one wants to be many-sided indeed … The woman who is to succeed … must make up her mind to equip on all points just as the men do.”
Women-run photography studios emerged as early as the 1850s in places such as England, Japan, Germany and the United States. However, women faced many barriers to operating their own studios well into the twentieth century, and many had to rely on family support. Photographers such as Ruth Hollick, Karimeh Abbud and Hedda Morrison persevered to successfully manage or independently run photography studios in the 1920s-40s. They produced a wide range of images, from those made for commercial and tourist purposes to documentary, artistic and personal photographs.
Edna Walling (Australian born England, 1895-1973) No title (Album) (installation view) 1950s-1960s Album: gelatin silver photographs, 48 pages, cardboard, leather and colour photo-lithograph cover, metal screw binding 24.6 x 32.0cm (page) 25.6 x 34.8 x 3.6cm (closed) 25.6 x 62.8cm (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Landscape designer Edna Walling kept a personal photo album to capture the creative effervescence of the community at her property at Bickleigh Vale Village in Mooroolbark, Victoria. Nicknamed ‘Trouser Lane’, the property was designed by Walling to be a ‘community of connected gardens and cottages. Many people, including many women, shared in Walling’s unique vision for the space, visiting and residing at Trouser lane over the years. Walling’s album features, among others, images of writer Estelle Thompson, landscape designer Daphne Pearson, builder Esme Johnson, violinist Perry Hart and ballet dancers Harcourt Algernoff and Graham Smith. Also interspersed throughout the album are photographic flower studies.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Edna Walling (Australian born United Kingdom, 1895-1973) No title (Album) 1950s-1960s Album; gelatin silver photographs, 48 pages, cardboard, leather and colour photo-lithograph cover, metal screw binding 24.6 x 32.0cm (page) 25.6 x 34.8 x 3.6cm (closed) 25.6 x 62.8cm (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the display cases in the lower two images, photographs by Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing three photographs by Dorothy Izard (Australian born England, 1882-1972): Ti-trees (1920s); No title (Dappled tree) (1920s); and No title (Tree in paddock) (1920s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dorothy Izard (Australian born England, 1882-1972) Ti-trees 1920s Gelatin silver photograph 22.8 × 18.4cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
Dorothy Izard met fellow photographer Ruth Hollick when they were students at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, and they formed both a romantic and a professional partnership. They travelled extensively around regional Victoria in the 1920s and 1930s. Izard was a landscape photographer and, at Hollick’s home studio, was responsible for printing the orders for Hollick’s photographs.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Ruth Hollick’s artist book Australian flowers (1950s, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) Australian wildflowers 1950s Artist’s book: hand-coloured gelatin silver photographs on buff paper on brown paper mounts, pen and ink, pencil, (other materials), [5] leaves, brown paper cover, cotton cord binding 33.2 x 25.5cm (page) 34.3 x 26.3 x 1.0cm irreg. (closed) 34.3 x 53.1 x 1.1cm irreg. (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Pamela Jane Green, 2021 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, four photographs by Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991): No title (Hua Shan mountain face) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (The Chessboard Pavilion) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Step ladder to the nothingness peak ) (1935, printed 1970s); and No title (Lone pine against sunlit cliff face) (1935 printed 1970s, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) No title (Lone pine against sunlit cliff face) (installation view) 1935 Gelatin silver photograph 22.8 x 30.3cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
These photographs were taken in 1935, when Morrison journeyed by train to the Hua Shan mountains in eastern China. She photographed the deep chasms and textures of the mountain ranges, and the Taoist monasteries and monks who assisted the travellers on their journeys.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing photographs by Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, six photographs by Hedda Morrison: No title (Morning clouds) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Fairy palm cliff) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (The stone balustrade) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Three gnarled pines) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Two Taoist priests below the fiery palm cliff) (1935, printed 1970s); and No title (Pine tree above the Yellow River plain) (1935, printed 1970s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) No title (Pine tree above the Yellow River plain) (installation view) 1935, printed 1970s Gelatin silver photograph 30.3 x 22.7cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, three photographs by Hedda Morrison: No title (Taoist priest) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Taoist novice) (1935, printed 1970s); and No title (Taoist priest) (1935, printed 1970s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Girls in shawls 1924-1929 Gelatin silver photograph 13.2 x 16.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Tina Modotti is known for her socially and politically charged photographs documenting Mexican working life. For Modotti, art, life and politics were inextricably linked. Her photographs show the artist’s commitment to documenting the lives of women and working people. This image is believed to be from a project exploring the popular arts of Mexico, specifically the shawl-like rebozo, and exemplifies Modotti’s humanist style of documentary photography. It is one of the photographs anthropologist Frances Toor commissioned from Modotti and Edward Weston for the magazine Mexican Folkways, published between 1925 and 1937.
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Dora Maar (French 1907-1997) Vendors laughing behind their charcuterie stall, Barcelona (Vendeuses et vendeur riant derrière leur étal de charcuterie, Barcelone) 1933 Gelatin silver photograph 27.2 x 24.0cm (image) 30.3 x 24.0cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021 Public domain
In 1933 Dora Maar travelled to Spain, where she documented the extreme poverty of the country’s cities through people she met on the streets. Aligning with her left-wing politics and opposition to fascism, her photographs honour working-class citizens rather than buildings or monuments. Maar was fascinated by the characters she encountered in La Boqueria, the market in the heart of Barcelona. In this image, she captures a joyful moment as the women vendors playfully turn away from her, hiding their gaze, while a man smiles directly into Maar’s lens.
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The Document
The primary aim of social documentary photography is to draw attention to social issues, often to promote social or political change. This style of photography blossomed during the tumultuous period of the 1930s, when photographers were commissioned by the United States government to document the effects of the Great Depression. The increased popularity of illustrated mass media such as newspapers and magazines also allowed for the broad dissemination of social documentary images and texts.
The ability of social documentary photography to present a purely objective representation of people or places continues to be fertile ground for debate today.
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Farm Security Administration photographs by Dorothea Lange Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing clockwise from bottom left, four photographs by Dorothea Lange: Drought-stricken farmers on the shady side of town street while their crops burn up in the fields, Sallisaw, Oklahoma (1936 printed c. 1975, below); Drought refugees from Oklahoma, Blythe, California (1936, printed c. 1975); Real Estate sign along highway, Riverside County, California (1937, printed c. 1975); and Child living in Oklahoma City, Shacktown (1936 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Drought-stricken farmers on the shady side of town street while their crops burn up in the fields, Sallisaw, Oklahoma 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.4 x 25.4cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Child living in Oklahoma City, Shacktown 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.9 x 25.5cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
During the Great Depression, many migrants travelling in search of economic opportunity were forced to create temporary camps along roadsides. For Dorothea Lange, who photographed many such experiences over several years, images like this one were part of a greater project to spark public awareness of the difficulties people were facing. As Lange later said, ‘I had begun to talk to the people I photographed … In the migrant camps, there were always talkers. It gave us a chance to meet on common ground.’
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In Focus: Farm Security Administration Project
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was established in 1937 as part of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic reforms, which provided relief to farmers left impoverished by the hardships of the Great Depression. Led by Roy Stryker, the FSA’s photography program was to be one of the most influential social documentary projects ever developed. Many images were reproduced in newspapers and periodicals to show the harsh realities of life for those living in poverty, with the aim of encouraging public support for the government’s economic policies.
The program ran as part of several government agencies, including the Resettlement Administration (1935-37), then the Farm Security Administration (1937-42) and the Office of War Information (1942-44). Stryker hired a range of photographers for the project and, despite their being given comparable briefs, the unique eye of each photographer is apparent in the over 175,000 pictures produced by the project.
As well as forming a comprehensive pictorial record of American life from 1935 to 1944, the FSA photography program generated some of the most recognisable documentary photographs of the twentieth century, including images by women such as Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and Marjory Collins.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Woman of the high plains, near Childress, Texas (installation view) 1938, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 49.4 x 39.3cm (image) 50.5 x 40.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Woman of the high plains, near Childress, Texas 1938, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 49.4 x 39.3cm (image) 50.5 x 40.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
‘We’ve had no work since March. The worst thing we did was when we sold the car, but we had to sell it to eat, and now we can’t get away from here … This county’s a hard county. They won’t help bury you here. If you die, you’re dead, that’s all.’
~ The subject of this photograph, Nettie Featherston, to Dorothea Lange
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Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Towards Los Angeles, California 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 39.6 x 39.1cm (image) 40.8 x 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
During the Great Depression, the Great Plains of North America became known as the Dust Bowl. A severe drought turned the soil to dust, leading to the migration of thousands of small-scale farmers who could no longer work the land. Dorothea Lange made many road trips to document the plight of migrants heading west in search of work and opportunities. Many of Lange’s photographs, such as this one, show workers travelling in difficult conditions, on foot and by car. This photograph was also used as the basis for a scene in the 1939 film Of Mice and Men, based on John Steinbeck’s story of two migrant ranch workers.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from top to bottom, two photographs by Dorothea Lange: Plantation Overseer, Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi (1936, printed c. 1975) and Born a slave, resettled after the Civil War, Carrizo Springs, Texas (1936 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Born a slave, resettled after the Civil War, Carrizo Springs, Texas 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.5 x 25.4cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Dorothea Lange witnessed racial segregation in the Southern states and often photographed individuals affected by the resulting social and economic inequalities. This work is also known by an alternate title: ‘Bob Lemmons, Carrizo Springs, Texas. Born a slave about 1850, south of San Antonio. Came to Carrizo Springs during the Civil War with white cattlemen seeking new range. In 1865, with his master was one of the first settlers. Knew Billy the Kid, King Fisher, and other noted bad men of the border.’
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Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Shenandoah Valley, Virginia (installation view) 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.6 x 34.1cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Shenandoah Valley, Virginia 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.6 x 34.1cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) One of the judges at the horse races, Warrenton, Virginia (installation view) 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 39.6 x 39.1cm (image) 40.8 x 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Transportation for hep cats Louisville, Kentucky (installation view) 1940, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.7 x 34.1cm (image) 36.1 x 44.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Transportation for hep cats Louisville, Kentucky 1940, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.7 x 34.1cm (image) 36.1 x 44.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from third left to right, three photographs by Marion Post Wolcott: Near Wadesboro, North Carolina (1938 printed c. 1975, below); Baptismal service, Morehead, Kentucky (1940 printed c. 1975, below); and Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday night, Clarksdale, Mississippi (1939 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Near Wadesboro, North Carolina (installation view) 1938, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.4 × 26.5cm (image) 28.0 × 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The people in this photograph are the children of tenant farmers. The older child holds the hand of the younger, whose legs are bowed likely due to rickets, a medical condition caused by malnourishment. This is a vivid image that captures both the intimacy between children and the effects of environmental and economic devastation.
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Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Haircutting in front of plantation store after being paid off on Saturday, Mileston Plantation, Mississippi Delta (installation view) 1939, printed c. 1939 Gelatin silver photograph 27.0 x 34.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Haircutting in front of plantation store after being paid off on Saturday, Mileston Plantation, Mississippi Delta 1939, printed c. 1939 Gelatin silver photograph 27.0 x 34.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Baptismal service, Morehead, Kentucky 1940, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 36.3 X 49.3cm (image) 40.7 X 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday night, Clarksdale, Mississippi 1939, printed c. 1975 gelatin silver photograph 36.7 x 49.3cm (image) 40.7 x 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
Marion Post Wolcott had a keen sense of social justice, having lived in Austria in the early 1930s, where she witnessed firsthand the rise of Nazism. On her return home to New York in 1933, she was determined to use her photography to raise awareness of social inequalities. While working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the segregated American South, Wolcott witnessed the bleak economic situation endured by African Americans, which was exacerbated by the Great Depression. With an ‘open eye’, Wolcott captured both the positive effects of the FSA and the difficult realities of daily life. Her candid images of African American communities in the South – such as this joyful shot of people dancing – countered the dominant images of Black lives as they were commonly represented in mainstream media.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing three photographs by Heather George (Australia, 1907-1983): Rawhide bed, Wave Hill Station (1952, printed 1978); Stockyards, Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952, printed 1978); and Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952, printed 1978) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Heather George (Australia, 1907-1983) Stockyards, Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory 1952, printed 1978 From The Northern Territory series (1952) Gelatin silver photograph 24.0 x 28.8cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980 Public domain
In the 1950s and 1960s Heather George worked as a freelance photographer and photojournalist. In 1952 Walkabout magazine published a series of photographs George made in the Northern Territory outback, including images of Wave Hill Station, a vast pastoral lease on the lands of the Gurindji people. Fourteen years later, it was to go down in history as the location of a turning point in the recognition of land rights for Australia’s First Nations peoples.
Consuelo Kanaga worked at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1915, later joining the California Camera Club, where she met photographers Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston. Kanaga’s image-making was informed by her involvement in liberal politics and the nascent civil rights movement. In 1950 she stayed in an artists’ colony in Maitland, Florida, and documented the lives of Black field workers living there. This refined portrait of a mother with her children became well known around the world after its inclusion in the touring exhibition The Family of Man, curated by pioneering photographer Edward Steichen.
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Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985) American girl in Italy, Florence (installation view) 1951, printed 1980 Gelatin silver photograph 30.2 x 46.9cm (image) 40.3 x 50.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In 1950 freelance photographer Ruth Orkin was included in the Young Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 1951 Life magazine sent her on assignment to Israel. Before returning to America, she spent time in Italy, where she met a young American painter, Jinx Allen. The women collaborated on a series of photographs commissioned from Orkin by Cosmopolitan magazine for an article titled ‘Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone’. Standing in a Florence intersection, Orkin captured her friend as she manoeuvred through a crowd of men. The resulting image is reminiscent of a movie still – Orkin would go on to co-direct two feature films with her husband in the 1950s.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Maggie Diaz 3AW mobile studio, Elwood Beach (1960s printed 2014, below); Maggie Diaz Ladies at the bar, Tavern Club, Chicago (1957, printed 2014); three photographs by Diane Arbus: Girl with a cigar in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. (1965, printed later); Blaze Starr in her living room, Baltimore, Md. (1964, printed later); A Couple at a Dance, N.Y.C. (1960, printed later); and Lisette Model Woman with veil, San Francisco (1949, printed c. 1960) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Maggie Diaz (American, 1925-2016, Australia 1961-2016) 3AW mobile studio, Elwood Beach (installation view) 1960s, printed 2014 Pigment print 27.9 x 30.0cm (image) 48.2 x 33.0cm (sheet) ed. 2/25 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2015 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Moving to Australia in 1961, American photographer Maggie Diaz established her Melbourne studio specialising in advertising, portraiture and social documentary photography. Among her commercial clients was the local radio station 3AW, which displayed her photographs in its new CBD studio. A 1964 article in Melbourne newspaper The Age described the headquarters, noting with apparent surprise that the commissioned photographs are ‘the work of a woman’.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
BOTH
Mikki Ferrill (American, b. 1937) Untitled (installation view) 1970s Gelatin silver photograph 20.7 x 13.6cm (image) 25.5 x 20.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Valeria ‘Mikki’ Ferrill is an African American photographer known for her documentation of the Black community in Chicago’s South Side during the 1960s and 70s. Ferrill studied advertising design and illustration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She eventually became a photojournalist, joining a group of Black photographers from the area who shot for local periodicals and newspapers. Ferrill worked on assignments in Mexico in the late 1960s, returning to Chicago in 1970.
Throughout
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Collaboration and Change
Many postwar street photographers captured their subjects in the ‘instant’. By embracing close-looking, artists relied on chance to create spontaneous compositions, capturing candid, everyday moments. Photographers such as Diane Arbus worked on the streets of New York City, creating vivid portraits of contemporary American life. Arbus often collaborated with her subjects, producing striking images in the moment or curating compositions for magazine commissions.
Fashion photography was on the rise in the period, with American publications such as Harper’s Bazaar playing a pivotal role in amplifying the art form. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lillian Bassman and Toni Frissell were regular contributors to the magazine. Their photographs depicted the idealistic and aspirational modern woman.
Yamazawa Eiko and Tokiwa Toyoko were trailblazing women photographers working in Japan at the same time. Their works reflect the social changes of postwar Japan, expressed through the medium of the photobook.
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, three photographs by the photographer Lillian Bassman (American, 1917-2012): Black – with one white glove, Barbara Mullen, Christian Dior, Harper’s Bazaar, New York, 1958 (1958, printed (1994); Toreador and Barbara Mullen (for Harper’s Bazaar) (1950, printed 2006); and More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York (1956, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, three photographs by the photographer Lillian Bassman (American, 1917-2012): Black – with one white glove, Barbara Mullen, Christian Dior, Harper’s Bazaar, New York, 1958 (1958, printed (1994); Toreador and Barbara Mullen (for Harper’s Bazaar) (1950, printed 2006); and More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York (1956, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lillian Bassman began her career as a painting assistant at the Works Progress Administration, and studied fashion illustration and textile design at Pratt Institute in the late 1930s. In 1940 the famed art director of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, Alexey Brodovitch, offered her a scholarship to study under him. This led to her role as art director of the magazine’s spinoff Junior Bazaar. There she worked with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Robert Frank, and in 1947 began working as a freelance photographer in fashion and advertising.
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New Ways Of Seeing: Portraits, Intimacy, Liberation
The 1960s and 1970s saw extraordinary social change around the world. Political activism was on the rise, stemming from the anti-Vietnam War movement. There was an increased consciousness around racial equality, feminism and LGBTQ rights. Photographers also documented the popularisation of alternative ways of living, such as shared housing and collective lifestyles, with images that sometimes appeared in counterculture publications.
Australian women photographers working during this period were among the first to gain access to tertiary photography education. Among the key ideas that emerged through the work of these artists was a focus on community, personal relationships and everyday life.
This exhibition culminates in 1975, a watershed year. It marked the first International Women’s Year, inaugurated through the first UN World Conference on Women, and the height of second-wave feminism. That year the NGV staged the exhibition Six Australian Women Photographers, sometimes referenced as Wimmin, featuring work by Marion Marrison, Melanie Nunn, Fiona Hall, Melanie Le Guay, Ingeborg Tyssen and Jacqueline Mitelman. Fifty years on, many of the images from that exhibition are included here, presented alongside work from the artists’ peers.
Text from the NGV website
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, six photographs by Christine Godden (Australian, b. 1947) Untitled 1973/1974 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, six photographs by Christine Godden (Australian, b. 1947) Untitled 1973/1974 (above); and four photographs by Marion Marrison (Australian, b. 1951) including at right No title (Lady) (1973) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, four 1974 photographs by Fiona Hall (Australian, b. 1953) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Fiona Hall began focusing on photography in the mid 1970s, following her time as an assistant to British landscape photographer Fay Godwin. Taken with a large-format camera, Hall’s early photographs were influenced by late modernism and formalism, the study of art focusing on the visual aspects of a work. In this image, Hall plays with forms and lines, capturing the elements of the room as if they have been layered, and she positions herself so that her reflection appears as though it is hovering in space. Curator and art historian Helen Ennis writes that while we often expect self-portraiture to reveal the artist, Hall’s photograph seems to conceal her.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, four 1974 photographs by Fiona Hall (Australian, b. 1953); and at right, four photographs by Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Sue Ford Carmel and Trish (1962, printed 1988) and Sue Ford Sue Pike (1963, printed 1988) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Carmel and Trish (1962, printed 1988) was taken early in Sue Ford’s artistic career, and features her friends Carmel and Trish posing in a paddock. Although Ford approached her photography seriously, her sense of humour comes through in this image, which has been described as both an experiment and a playful critique of photography. Throughout her career, Ford often turned the camera on herself, as well as on her family, friends and acquaintances, using the medium to explore social and political issues. Her work is aligned with the important wave of Australian feminist photographers active during the 1970s
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing pages from Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) and Virginia Fraser (Australian, 1947-2021) A book about Australian Women Melbourne, Outback Press, 1974 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) and Virginia Fraser (Australian, 1947-2021) A book about Australian Women Melbourne, Outback Press, 1974 Shaw Research Library
This book features 131 photographs by the Melbourne-based photographer Carol Jerrems, interspersed with interviews and texts edited by Virginia Fraser. Published in 1974, the year before International Women’s Year, it captures a moment in time when many Australian women were deeply engaged in global feminist ideas. Described as a ‘collective portrait’, A Book About Australian Women has become an iconic reference in Australian feminist history. It highlights a diverse group of women involved in cultural life across Australia. Some of those featured include writer Anne Summers, painter Grace Cossington Smith, film director Jennie Boddington and the Wiradjuri tennis champion Evonne Goolagong Cawley.
Carol Jerrems studied photography at Prahran College in Melbourne, winning several student awards before first exhibiting her work in the early 1970s. Jerrems collaborated with Australian artist Virginia Fraser on the 1974 publication A Book About Australian Women, a suite of portraits featuring a diverse range of subjects. This portrait was taken as part of that project, and an edition is included in the book. The work features Oodgeroo Noonuccal, previously known as Kath Walker, who was an Aboriginal rights activist, poet, WWII veteran, environmentalist and educator. Noonuccal is photographed with her pen poised at the learning centre she established on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island, Queensland) to teach visitors to the island about Aboriginal culture and Country.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, two photographs by Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946): No title (Helen at Falconer Street) (c. 1975 printed 2018); and No title (In the backyard at Falconer Street) (c. 1975 printed 2018) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ponch Hawkes began to photograph while working as a journalist for the counterculture magazine The Digger in 1972. In 1973 she moved into a communal house in Melbourne with fellow Digger contributor Helen Garner. Together they produced stories for the broadsheet, documenting new ways of living emerging in inner-city Melbourne in the early 1970s.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, Ponch Hawkes No title (Summer night in the backyard at Falconer Street) (c. 1975 printed 2018, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image, top to bottom left to right, six photographs by Ponch Hawkes: No title (Women holding hands in front of graffiti, ‘Lesbians are lovely’) (1973, printed 2018); No title (Graffiti) (1975, printed 2018); No title (Women’s Theatre Group, performing outdoors beneath a Women’s Liberation banner in the City Square) (1975, printed 2018); No title (Two women embracing, ‘Glad to be gay’) (1973, printed 2018); No title (Fitzroy graffiti) (1973, printed 2018); No title (Graffiti, ‘Braddock… not mild, but sexist’) (1973, printed 2018) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ponch Hawkes captured powerful images of lesbian love and friendship during Melbourne’s early 1970s gay liberation movement. Hawkes worked for the counterculture magazine The Digger alongside Australian writer Helen Garner. The two often collaborated on projects, producing impassioned essays and imagery that platformed communities often excluded from mainstream media. The pride and solidarity shown in these images stand in stark contrast to the extreme discrimination queer people faced during the time.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Ann Newmarch We must risk unlearning (1975, below) and at second left, Ann Newmarch Two versions (1975, below) with at right, photographs by Ponch Hawkes Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Ann Newmarch We must risk unlearning (1975) and Ann Newmarch Two versions (1975) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the 1970s and 1980s, Bremen professor Muhlis Kenter photographed Turkish workers, then known as guest workers.
Only a little text tonight as I’m battling chronic depression and the little grey cells are not firing on all cylinders.
Absence, longing, loneliness, hard work, isolation, family, home.
Social inequality, sexism, racism and life in exile.
As noted by Annabelle Steffes-Halmer in her article “Migrants’ stories for a new home” (2021) on another exhibition on the same theme, In Situ: Photo Stories on Migration (Museum Ludwig, June – October 2021), photographs of this type are “a story of emancipation. [They] tell tales of people who came to a foreign country, which they discovered for themselves and which ultimately became their home. It is not only a (photo) history of migration, but also the history of Germany.”
Have a great Easter everyone.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“They Used To Call Us Guest Workers”: Extending the Photography and the New Media Collection
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) is expanding its collection with key works by the photographers Muhlis Kenter, Nuri Musluoğlu, Asimina Paradissa and Mehmet Ünal. After coming to Germany from Turkey and Greece in the 1960s and 70s, the four documented life, work and their political engagement there from a migrant perspective. The exhibition “They Used to Call Us Guest Workers” presents around 80 photographs and collages that depict the everyday lives of people with and without a migration background in the Federal Republic of Germany while addressing the themes of social inequality, sexism, racism and life in exile. Viewers have the opportunity to discover here an often-overlooked perspective on socio-political issues that are still highly topical today.
With a shared interest in society and politics, each of the four amateur photographers developed a unique approach and yet they all took up the tradition of the workers’ photography movement. Like its historical role model in the interwar period, this movement was dedicated to the battle against class barriers and social inequality. The aim was for workers to pick up a camera themselves to raise awareness of the realities of their lives and help shape the public debate with their images.
Workers’ Photography
John Heartfield and his contributions to the illustrated magazine “Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung” (AIZ) in the 1930s were an important source of inspiration for the workers’ photography movement. Founded in Hamburg in 1973, the magazine “Arbeiterfotografie” saw itself as a successor to the AIZ. The main figures in the workers’ photography movement all engaged with developments in society and politics but each developed a different approach. Their common goal was to use their cameras in the battle against social inequality. Workers were encouraged to pick up a camera in order to raise their own awareness for the realities of their lives and enable them to intervene in the public debate.
Between 1975 and 1990, the theme of migration played a central role in workers’ photography. The reports provide an in-depth look at those living in exile, at living and working conditions and women’s work, and at the peace movement and unequal educational opportunities for immigrants. The articles in the magazine were often published anonymously. The images were supplied by the 30 or so local working groups, who often took the photos together.
Muhlis Kenter
Bremen-based amateur photographer Muhlis Kenter (b. 1952 in Istanbul, Turkey) depicts work and everyday life in Germany. He documents Turkish workers in mining, the metal industry and a textile factory, and accompanies educational projects for Turkish children and young people with a migration background. In his expressive portraits, Kenter spotlights personal stories. His photographs spotlight people navigating between the sense of being foreign in an unfamiliar country and finding their place in Germany. But Muhlis Kenter also observes German society with his camera, focusing on pigeon breeding, fishing and gardening, which he sees as typical German hobbies.
Muhlis Kenter provides behind-the-scenes glimpses of factory work. He for example photographed workers of Turkish origin in a textile factory where people from different backgrounds work side by side in production. The photos were taken as part of a photo story for the magazine “Arbeiterfotografie”. Kenter often focuses on individuals and personal histories, resulting in expressive portraits. For his reportages, he creates complex compositions that highlight in an arresting way the interplay between people and technology at the companies he visits. In one series, he turned the tables, looking not at the lives of immigrants of Turkish origin but rather at “white German” society and what he regards as typical hobbies: pigeon breeding, fishing and gardening.
Muhlis Kenter was born in 1952 in Istanbul, Turkey. In 1972 he took up mechanical engineering studies in Aachen, where he joined a “workers’ photography” group. Alongside his studies, he acted as a support teacher for Turkish-speaking classes. Kenter later worked as a professor of mechanical engineering at the City University of Applied Sciences in Bremen, and he continues to avidly pursue photography.
Nuri Musluoğlu
Nuri Musluoğlu (b. 1951 in Istanbul, Turkey) photographs public life. The images he produced between 1975 and 1988 show mainly demonstrations, peace marches, strikes and protest actions, especially those taking place in his hometown of Heilbronn. Supplemented by footage of sporting events, street festivals and celebrations, as well as photos of his own family, a dense panorama emerges of German-Turkish coexistence as a collective experience. Musluoğlu’s photos document particularly vividly the protest culture during the years in question – including the peace movement and European Peace Marches, the trade union struggles and the anti-nuclear movements, and the resistance of Turks living in Germany against the military dictatorship in Turkey. He also lifts the veil on xenophobia in public spaces and the living conditions in asylum shelters.
Nuri Musluoğlu is a photographer and political activist. His camera accompanies him to demonstrations, such as the strike for a 35-hour week and protests by the peace movement, or the blockade of the US missile base in Mutlangen in 1983. He not only captures protest posters and scenes but also documents moments of solidarity – such as workers with and without a migration background dancing. Musluoğlu’s photographs chronicle political struggles as well as everyday moments in German-Turkish life, such as family celebrations and trips home. He examines in detail protest posters that touch on migration issues and in another image shows a worker of Turkish origin playing the saz.
Born in Istanbul in 1951, Musluoğlu came to Germany in 1965, trained as a toolmaker, and later became a social worker for the “Arbeiterwohlfahrt” (Workers’ Welfare Association). He is active in trade unions (IG Metall, ver.di) and the peace movement. Since 1985, his photos have appeared under a pseudonym in the weekly newspaper “Türkiye Postası”, which is aimed at workers and people seeking political protection.
Asimina Paradissa
Asimina Paradissa (b. 1945 in Vrastama, Greece) occupies a special position in amateur photography as one of the few migrant women behind a camera. She documented her own life in Germany from 1968 onwards, showing everyday life in a hostel for unmarried female workers in Wilhelmshaven as well as scenes of factory work captured from the workers’ point of view. Paradissa’s many self-portraits deal with questions of self-image and what it feels like to live in a certain place. Although her photographs are private, they are at the same time significant testimonies to contemporary history: By giving the women portrayed names and voices, they draw attention to the stories of female migrants and thus add a rare female perspective to the way in which we view migrant labour.
Asimina Paradissa gazes directly out at us from her pictures. Perched on her bicycle, she laughs openly into the camera, while in another picture she looks us earnestly in the eye as she sits on her bunk bed in a dormitory for unwed workers run by the Olympia typewriter works and caringly embraces her friend Evangelia Manolakaki. Even though others usually press the shutter, these images can still be described as self-portraits. Starting in 1966, Paradissa took photos on a regular basis as a way of reassuring herself about her new life in Germany. Among the “guest workers” who came to West Germany in the 1960s, one in three were women who lead lives largely hidden from the public eye. Paradissa is one of the few women of this generation to document her self-determined life in Germany with her camera. Her pictures are at once private remembrances and documents of the times.
Asimina Paradissa was born in 1945 in Vrastama, Greece. She came to Wilhelmshaven with her brother in 1966 as part of the recruitment agreements concluded between West Germany and Greece, among other countries. In 1972 she settled in Wuppertal. Alongside her job, she began to make photography and write poetry.
Mehmet Ünal
Mehmet Ünal’s (b. 1951 in Çanakkale, Turkey) photographic practice includes political image-text collages that emerge from actions and protests. In addition to individual images and series, he also produces posters that incorporate writing and found objects – often from public authorities and agencies – and thus comment on the particular experiences of migrants when dealing with bureaucracy. With their thematic acuity and compositional density, these posters are independent artworks that relentlessly expose exclusion and marginalisation.
Mehmat Ünal’s collages combine written, photographic and found objects from the world of German bureaucracy that reflect experiences of racism. Ünal expresses himself through satire and exaggeration; for example, he created a fake Deutsche Bahn advertising campaign offering a “foreigner’s pass” promoting the return transport of people to Turkey. He compares the application for a work permit to a “TÜV certificate for humans”. In his text-image combinations (circa 1982), Ünal criticizes Germany’s official policies towards immigrants and the degrading treatment of those who were once invited to the country as “guests”. After the recruitment of foreign workers was discontinued in the wake of the economic crisis of the early 1980s, Ünal observed a growing atmosphere of hostility towards those regarded as “foreigners”. The first arson attack on a refugee shelter took place in 1980 in Hamburg-Billbrook. Works that Ünal produced against the backdrop of political street protests were published in the magazine “Arbeiterfotografie” in 1984. In several collages, he draws on the legacy of John Heartfield, whose political montages in the mid-1920s brought him recognition as the founder of this genre.
Mehmet Ünal was born in Çanakkale, Turkey, in 1951. In 1976, he moved to Mannheim, where the former actor works as a photographer and journalist.
Text from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G)
Asimina Paradissa was 20 years old when she moved to Wilhelmshaven in northern Germany. In the photo, the Greek woman poses in front of the dormitory at the Olympia company. Back then, she took pictures of weddings, parties and visits to the zoo for her colleagues and friends. The 76-year-old is still a passionate photographer.
life alone and free like a tree and brotherly like a forest is our longing
Mehmed Nâzım Ran (17 January 1902 – 3 June 1963), commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet, was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the “lyrical flow of his statements”. Described as a “romantic communist” and a “romantic revolutionary”, he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than 50 languages.
The Brooklyn Museum continues to orchestrate (now that’s an appropriate word) wonderful exhibitions that select, organise, and interpret items in “interpretive exhibitions”- curating and contextualising these items in order to establish their meaning, history, and cultural significance. In this regard the magnificent exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens is no exception.
In the exhibition Keïta’s direct, honest, and incisive black and white photographs – often taken outdoors on bare earth in natural light with mud walls, hanging textiles and blankets as backdrops – are contextualised with regard to West African history, placed in context “in a period defined by a rapidly expanding modern world and a new sense of Bamakois identity.” (Press release)
In the Brooklyn show Keïta’s photographs from the African environment are surrounded by cultural artefacts that reflect a new sense of nationhood as Mali moved toward independence post-French colonialism – “clothing, hand-fashioned dresses … pagnes (wrappers), wall hangings, and commemorative cloths that span the rich history of Malian textile design and trade”, gold, jewellery, lace, marabaka (a Czech-style hat that became a widespread symbol of Pan-African solidarity), traditional and modern textiles, blankets, family heirlooms, family photographs and a trove of film negatives – all combining to create a rich mosaic of references, an intertextuality (where things refer to, influence, or interrelate with one another) of identity, place and space.
What is particularly interesting about the presentation at the Brooklyn Museum is the mixture of vintage and modern prints, where the viewer can compare the scale and tonalities of old and new, where small jewel-like gold toned and hand-coloured prints of great presence and intensity can be compared to larger, contrast laden modern prints (for which the artist has become famous) which reveal hidden details in the negative.
Also of interest is the exhibition design itself in which the different colour of the walls, the spaces between them, the symmetrical layout, together with the clothing, textiles and wall hangings … all add a terrific spatial dimension to the whole. Witness the entrance to the exhibition where Keïta’s vintage photograph Untitled (1954, above) is placed in communion with a larger modern print, allowing the viewer to compare and contrast both old and new, one of the major pictorial themes of the exhibition. Then – and this is to me the essence of good exhibition design – you look at the line of sight of that entrance and in the space between the walls hanging in the distance, hovering above the photographs, is a colourful textile banner with face and garment which the viewer can visually correlate to the garments of the three women standing in front of the car in the modern print below. Just a small thing but inspiring exhibition design nonetheless, which reflects the holism of the exhibition.
Along with the work of other African photographers such as Malike Sidibé (Malian, 1935-2016), James Barnor (Ghanian, b. 1929) and Sanlé Sory (West African, b. 1943), Keïta’s photographs help touch, in African light, that most wonderful sense of the spirit and culture of a nascent independent nation, evidenced in his images through an intimate interconnection between people and place.
What is undeniable is that there is nothing like a photograph to remind you of difference, to challenge your perceptions on how you view and interact with the world around you, to open up new ways of seeing (Professor Stuart Hall). Thus the photographs in this exhibition may allow us a deeper insight into not only the conditions of our own becoming (while human beings have agency, the circumstances under which they act and develop their humanity are largely shaped by existing material, social, and historical conditions that they did not choose) but the conditions of other people’s becoming.
Hopefully these insights in turn promote a greater understanding and acceptance of difference in others in opposition to learnt bigotry and racism.
Just the joy of picturing, and being, and living, human.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition ‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing Keïta’s self-portrait Untitled, 1956
Dressed in a crisp white shirt, holding a flower gently to his chin, Keïta turns the camera on himself with the same control and precision he granted his subjects. As French Soudan faced political uncertainty and turmoil in the lead-up to independence, Keïta’s studio, whether indoors or on the street, offered sitters a place to create a self of one’s own.
Installation views of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom two images, Keïta’s photograph Untitled 1954 (above)
The smaller, vintage print and the larger, modern one of Keïta’s 1954 photograph highlight the material and historical distinctions between the types of prints on view in the exhibition. Often made by Keïta himself, the vintage prints were produced around the time the photograph was taken. Such works feature a particular range of tonalities – the result of earlier technologies, less environmental control in the darkroom, and the paper’s age. The modern prints were made later in Keïta’s life, some of them posthumously. These works are larger, in part, to accentuate the details of the image, such as Keïta’s own reflection on the car’s surface. Following his landmark New York and Paris exhibitions in the 1990s, Keïta came to be known for the distinctive black-and-white tonalities of these modern prints.
Reflecting on his work in 1997, Keïta revealed he had always hoped to make large-format prints (30 x 40 in., 40 x 50 in., and 50 x 60 in.) but seldom had the chance. Sitters rarely requested them due to cost. Together, both vintage and modern prints demonstrate the range and impact of Keïta’s artistry. They also inspire questions about photography’s nature as both artwork and heirloom objects imbued with social and ritual meaning as they pass from hand to hand.
Encounter an artist who changed the face of portrait photography. Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens is the most expansive North American exhibition of the legendary Malian photographer’s work to date. More than 280 works include iconic prints, never-before-seen portraits, textiles, and Keïta’s personal artifacts, all brought to life with unique insights from his family.
Organised by the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition brings us to Bamako from the late 1940s to early 1960s, an era of profound political and social transformation. Collaborating closely with his sitters, Keïta recorded Mali’s evolution through their choices of backdrops, accessories, and apparel, from traditional finery to European suits. These bold yet sensitive photographs began to circulate in West Africa nearly 80 years ago. In the early 1990s, they reached Western viewers, rocking the art world and cementing Keïta as the premier studio photographer of 20th-century Africa – a peer of August Sander, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon.
Witness the power of photography through these richly layered images, which reveal not only Malians’ emotional landscapes but also the textures of life in a rapidly changing country.
A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, offering new insights into the photographer, his work, and Malian material culture. The publication features a biography by Catherine E. McKinley based on extensive interviews with Keïta’s heirs, as well as essays by prominent scholars and curators including Drew Sawyer, Howard W. French, Duncan Clarke, Awa Konate, Sana Ginwalla, and Jennifer Bajorek.
Text from the Brooklyn Museum website
Installation views of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing at left in the bottom image, Keïta’s photograph Untitled 1949-1951 (below)
The exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens honors the artistry and legacy of Seydou Keïta (Malian, c. 1921-2001), who documented a critical chapter in West African history – one of immense hope, politically and socially – in a period defined by a rapidly expanding modern world and a new sense of Bamakois identity. The show features over 280 works, including renowned portraits, rare images, and never-before- seen negatives as well as textiles, jewellery, dresses, and personal items that fully immerse visitors in Keïta’s rich photographic landscape. Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens is organised by guest curator Catherine E. McKinley with Imani Williford, Curatorial Assistant, Photography, Fashion, and Material Culture, Brooklyn Museum.
Keïta was born around 1921 to a Malinke family in Bamako-Coura, or New Bamako, a growing colonial commercial center within the historic Malian city. His childhood saw emerging liberation struggles across the continent and growing expressions of modernism as Bamako served as the capital of French Soudan and subsequently the newly independent Mali in 1960.
Keïta documented Malian society in the late 1940s to early 1960s, an era of transformation and aspirations for independent statehood. A master at lighting and composition, Keïta has a unique ability to capture the tactile qualities of his sitters – from their fashion and choice of accessories to the personality and self-presentation they put forward. In collaboration with his subjects, he sculpted their poses, clothing, and style, forming monuments to their selfhood. When they first reached Western viewers in the early 1990s, his images drew unprecedented attention in the worlds of art, music, fashion, design, and popular media, forever changing the global cultural landscape. Today, these bold and engaging portraits continue to invite viewers into direct dialogue with Keita’s sitters.
Largely self-taught, Keïta first received a camera as a gift from his uncle at age 14. In 1935, he became an apprentice to his mentor, Mountaga Dembélé (1919-2004), Mali’s first professional photographer to earn a living with his studio. From there, Keïta opened his own studio in 1948 in front of his family home in Bamako-Coura, becoming Mali’s second photographer. The studio became a destination for people from all levels of Malian society, welcoming not just the elite citizens of Bamako but also remote villagers, international travelers, and those passing through on the Dakar-Niger railroad. Keïta’s work is notable for capturing how the people in his studio saw themselves, allowing for a playful self-expression backgrounded by increasing political tensions and rapid evolutions in the government. His studio offered props, including European and Malian clothing, motorbikes, Western watches, and novelties. Through the years, Keïta developed his very own style of portrait photography and a new type of modernist expression.
This period lasted until 1963, when Keïta was enlisted to work for the newly independent Socialist Republic of Mali. Forced to relinquish his studio, he documented state affairs and performed forensics for increasingly punitive governments until 1968 when he retired to work in camera and automotive repairs. In May 1991, the exhibition Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African Arts opened at the Center for African Arts in New York, where Keïta first debuted to Western audiences. In 1994, the Fondation Cartier in Paris presented Keïta’s first solo exhibition, which rocked the art and photography world, cementing him as the premiere African studio photographer of the twentieth century. The exhibition positioned Keïta as a peer of noted photographers such as Irving Penn, August Sander, and Richard Avedon, his contemporaries in portrait photography, and created enormous interest in Keïta’s work.
“Thirty-four years since Keïta was first introduced to American audiences we have an opportunity to view new discoveries in his work and understand just how singular he was, practicing at one of the most pivotal moments in African and world history. He had an extraordinary artist’s ability to render the tactile. We can visually ‘finger the grain’ of the sitter’s lives and better understand them beyond just their relationship to studio photography or documentary,” says Catherine E. McKinley, guest curator, author of The African Lookbook, and director of The McKinley Collection.
“It is very exciting and deeply moving to rediscover Keïta’s work and to feel the presence of his sitters – some of whom we meet here for the very first time – thanks to Catherine E. McKinley’s thoughtful research,” says Pauline Vermare, Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography. “We hope visitors feel the wonder and possibility that Keïta’s studio represented for so many people.”
A Tactile Lens brings together a remarkable range of Keïta’s photographs, which demonstrate the breadth of his oeuvre and the splendour of his artistry. Thanks to a generous loan from the Keïta family, an extraordinary group of never-before-published works has been preserved and imaged by the Museum on the occasion of the exhibition. A selection of the portraits will be displayed – on lightboxes and as a projection – for the first time. In addition, an array of vintage prints, many made by Keïta himself, and some of which are hand-painted, offer renewed emphasis on the photographic object itself. Rounding out the selection are larger prints made later in Keïta’s life, or posthumously, which feature the distinctive black-and-white tonalities that Keïta came to be known for. Joining the photographs is an immersive installation of personal belongings, textiles, garments, and jewellery that can be seen in Keïta’s portraits.
Together, these objects highlight the self-invention, search for identity, and syncretism of Mali that Keïta’s sitters sought in the mid-twentieth century.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring a new biographical essay by Catherine E. McKinley based on extensive interviews with his heirs and from leading art professionals and historians such as Jennifer Bajorek, Duncan Clarke, Howard W. French, Sana Ginwalla, Awa Konaté, and Drew Sawyer, offering new insights into the photographer, his work, and Malian material culture.
Press release from the Brooklyn Museum
Installation views of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing at third left in the bottom image, Keïta’s photograph Untitled 1952-1955 (below); and at right, Untitled 1956-1957 (below)
Looking over her shoulder, her back to the camera, this woman flaunts the French coins – called Louis d’or – hanging at her temples. Gold held decorative and talismanic properties: the shine of the metal was believed to ward off the evil eye and protect the head and soul of the wearer.
When Seydou Keïta opened his photography studio in 1948 in Bamako, Mali (then part of French Soudan), the region was on the cusp of dramatic transformation. After more than seventy years of French colonial rule, the country would soon gain independence as the Republic of Mali in 1960. With extraordinary sensitivity, Keïta documented a profoundly pluralistic society at a crossroads. Mali at this time faced intense ideological clashes over its future, emerging concepts of statehood, and how to reconcile Malian and European visions of modernity with indigenous systems.
As a photographer, Keïta possessed a singular ability to convey a tactile presence, finding the exquisite in details that communicate the inner lives of his subjects. They gaze into the camera with self-assurance and poise, presenting themselves in an array of fashions and posing with studio props or treasured personal possessions. With nuance and care, Keïta chronicled the elegance and sophistication of his sitters’ self-expression during a pivotal moment of nation-building.
Organised thematically, this exhibition highlights the breadth of Keïta’s vibrant oeuvre, spanning iconic portraits and rarely seen photographs to never-before-shown film negatives. A selection of textiles, garments, and jewellery, in turn, illuminates the layered social and cultural exchanges reflected in his portraits. This presentation is also informed and enriched by contributions from the Keïta family. Their oral histories and loan of personal heirlooms and negatives, uncovered in the family archive, helpshed new light on his studio practice and enduring legacy. Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens invites visitors to connect with Keïta and his subjects’ intimate pursuit of identity, selfhood, and community.
Self-portraiture
Seydou Keïta’s photography business expanded and deepened the relationships between the artist, his family, and his art. His younger siblings and children were active participants in his studio. They arranged and held up backdrops as he shot, assisted with equipment, and performed the tea rituals that were at the centre of social exchanges. Family members often waited late into the evening for the final sitters to leave before coming to sleep in the studio – one of the few places in Bamako with electricity – while Keïta worked well into the night in his darkroom.
Keïta often used the final frames on a roll of film to photograph himself and his family – intimate and striking images that became part of his oeuvre. These portraits reflect his deeply felt responsibility as a Malinke patriarch, able to provide for his large extended family a life of modern comfort due to an unusual and enviable talent that would reach a world stage. His brothers describe Keïta’s “immaculate” presentation of a social self – a man who valued social reserve and Malinke tenets of modesty and stern leadership. In these portraits, we also see him as a self-styled bon vivant, carefree in his European sportswear and playfully connected to those around him.
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing at left text for the section “Self-portraiture” and then Keïta’s Untitled, 1956, printed 2018
Dressed in a crisp white shirt, holding a flower gently to his chin, Keïta turns the camera on himself with the same control and precision he granted his subjects. As French Soudan faced political uncertainty and turmoil in the lead-up to independence, Keïta’s studio, whether indoors or on the street, offered sitters a place to create a self of one’s own .
Being Bamakois
In 1960 Mali achieved independence, becoming one of seventeen African countries to end colonial rule. “The Year of Africa,” as 1960 became known, intensified vital questions about self-determination, national identity, and the shape of a post-independence future. Even as many Malians embraced the prospect of a free and modern nation-state, debates grew over the roles that religion, the military, and traditional societal structures would play in governance and civil life.
Bamako’s population doubled in the mid-twentieth century, driven by increased colonial settlement since the 1930s and labor migration from rural areas. Long a cosmopolitan city, post-independence Bamako became a site of new social tensions. The rigid strictures of the systems of French class and indigenous caste, which had coexisted uneasily in the colonial era, were increasingly at odds as Mali became entrenched as a socialist Islamic state.
In Seydou Keïta’s portraits, Bamako’s citizens sought to express a vision of self and society that mirrored the promises of the growing city. Questions around status, decolonisation, and the ever-evolving definition of what it means to be both Bamakois and modern play out in the symbolic choices behind the making of each photograph.
Installation views of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image at bottom second left, Keïta’s photograph Untitled 1957 (below)
Posing with aplomb on a Vespa – likely Keïta’s – these women have become the subjects of one of his most iconic photographs, seen here as a vintage print. They present themselves as aspirational members of the Bamako Vespa Club, whose membership was reserved for men. Expensive and rare, Vespas were costly symbols of affluence that were inaccessible to most Bamakois in the French colonial economy. Keïta, one of the club’s founders, purchased his own using earnings from his photography.
The Pretenders
In the 1950s, Bamakois began favouring Western novelties – wristwatches, handbags, bicycles, and other imported goods, many of which appear in Seydou Keïta’s portraits – as expressions of their modern dreams and discontents. Expensive and inaccessible to many, imported goods became markers of status, replacing traditional adornment, heirlooms, and protective talismans. This generation would later be dubbed “The Pretenders” by their children, who viewed with scorn their parents’ embrace of French aesthetics and colonial-era fashion. Yet their critique often overlooked the ways their parents had simply transferred the social and spiritual meanings once imbued in gold and other materials to new subjects.
Ironically, the next generation, who came of age in a newly independent Mali, expressed their own dreams and discontents in the 1960s and 1970s using Western cultural symbols. By embracing American, particularly African American, and British popular culture – dancing to the music of James Brown and The Beatles, wearing afros, dressing in bell bottoms and miniskirts – they pushed back against an increasingly restrictive Islamic socialist regime that promoted particular ideals of Africanity, tradition, and modesty. Their confidence and spirit of rebellion would be captured by the next generation of Malian photographers who followed in Keïta’s footsteps.
Coming of Age
Young men and women often arrived at Seydou Keïta’s studio dressed in their best clothing and adorned with jewellery that hinted at the worth of future dowries or the scale of family ambitions. They posed for portraits that became cherished mementos. Such small-format photographs were exchanged as offerings of friendship, used in matchmaking and marriage proposals, and commemorated births and weddings. They also served as keepsakes of religious holidays such as Eid and Tabaski (Eid al-Adha). Together, the works on view celebrate the beauty of youth and the significance of coming of age – moments of transformation, growth, and entry into adulthood.
The Elegants
Seydou Keïta’s subjects radiate elegance in every photograph, resplendent in tailor-made ensembles that reflect the wearer’s ingenuity and creativity. Many of the outfits seen in Keïta’s portraits blend handwoven West African textiles with Islamic fabrics and imported European cloth, often in inventive ways. Whether made from velvet, Dutch wax print, or eyelet lace, a gown could always be paired with a traditional pagne (wrapper) showing at the hem, adding the requisite touch of beauty. The men, women, and youths on view present themselves as mirrors to the cultural syncretism and self-invention of mid-twentieth-century Bamako.
As the Islamic socialist regime rose to power in the 1960s and 1970s, it began imposing increased restrictions on dress, enacting punishments and “re-education” for the wearing of Western or secular clothing. Keïta’s portraits capture a brief window just before these strictures took hold – a moment when his sitters fashioned an expression entirely their own. He helped document, in the words of Nigerian art critic Okwui Enwezor, fashion’s power to offer people a means of “resistance to confining oneself.”
Delicately presenting a plastic flower, this man exudes elegance and poise in his double-breasted suit, silk handkerchief and fountain pen tucked neatly in his breast pocket. He meets the camera’s gaze with inviting eyes that exude a quiet openness. His confident, relaxed presence speaks to Keïta’s gift for making his subjects feel at ease – enabling them to fully express themselves in front of the camera.
The Loungers
The figure of the languid, reclining odalisque, or female attendant, is seen by many American and European viewers as an exoticizing colonial trope. However, in Seydou Keïta’s portraits, the lounger appears as a modern Bamakois – worldly, confident, adorned with the enduring garments, jewellery, and symbols of her heritage. In these portraits, each woman asserts her power, status, wealth, and values. The self-fashioned, richly layered settings re-create the intimate interiors of domestic life. The beds, textiles, and Islamic tea ceremonies shown here reflect the subject’s mastery of hospitality – an essential trait for the model Soudanaise woman – as well as her standing in family and society.
With slender, henna-stained hands and feet, modest dress, and composed bearing, these women affirm traditional social values even as they shape a modern visual identity. These photographs are an ode – to the women, their world, and the form of the lounger herself.
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing at second right bottom, Keïta’s photograph Untitled 1953-1957 (below)
“Keïta La” offers a glimpse into the world of Seydou Keïta’s studio – and into his family’s efforts to steward and preserve his legacy. Together, the objects on view pose important questions about conservation and personal and artistic archives.
In the mid-twentieth century, near the elegant colonial centre of Bamako-Coura, Keïta La, the family compound, sat on a wide avenue that buzzed with traffic and was lined with a canopy of trees, casting dappled shadows that lent a lazy air. Just outside the compound’s walls was the artist’s studio. As a photographer, Keïta moved seamlessly between the compound yard, the avenue, the nearby walls of sites, and the studio and darkroom where he made prints late into the night. Keïta ran the studio until 1963, when he was forced to dedicate himself exclusively to government service. He turned the business over to his brother and sons, who had become familiar with cameras as children. Upon his retirement, he returned to Keïta La – but not to his studio. Instead, he embraced his second love: the repair of cameras and cars.
Today, the Keïta family have been vital collaborators in the conceptualisation of this exhibition, their oral histories enriching our understanding of the man behind the camera. In addition, their loan of the photographer’s few remaining family heirlooms and a trove of film negatives imbues this section with Keïta’s personal presence. These negatives, which have been preserved and imaged by the Brooklyn Museum on the occasion of this exhibition, expand our knowledge of Keïta’s oeuvre. A selection of these portraits is presented here – on lightboxes and as a projection – for the first time.
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing text for the section “Keïta La” on the left hand wall, as well as the photograph Undated family portrait taken in Seydou Keïta’s studio (below)
Undated family portrait taken in Seydou Keïta’s studio Seated left of centre is Keïta’s uncle Tièmòkò Keïta (wearing eyeglasses), with Hamed Lamine “Papa” Keïta behind him at left and Cheickine Keïta at far right (holding child). Today, Papa and Cheickine serve as the principal stewards of the Keïta estate Courtesy the Seydou Keïta Family
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Keïta’s photograph Untitled late 1940s to mid-1970s (below); and at right, text for the section “Keïta La” together with the photograph Undated family portrait taken in Seydou Keïta’s studio (above)
Fashioning A New Nation
Photography studios are spaces of performance, an invitation to try on new styles, personas, and identities. Costly and newly available beginning in the 1930s, studio photography offered Seydou Keïta’s subjects a rare chance to see themselves not in a mirror or a small I.D. photo, but as others might. As French Soudan approached independence, fashion increasingly became a site of negotiation – blending ethnic and religious aesthetics, Pan-African identity, and even Hollywood glamour.
This gallery brings together prestige clothing, hand-fashioned dresses – some with the exquisite detailing of couture – pagnes (wrappers), wall hangings, and commemorative cloths that span the rich history of Malian textile design and trade. It also pays homage to the boubou, the marker of West African elegance, that became a quiet symbol of anti-colonial resistance in the postwar years. While European imported cloth had been highly coveted in West Africa since the seventeenth century, colonial trade restrictions and the economic impact of World War II made such materials harder to access, sparking new forms of creativity. Bright synthetic dyes, hybrid silhouettes, and inventive combinations of tradition and modernity emerged in response.
The works on view reflect both this history of innovation and the distinctly Malian patterning that serves as a through line for textile designs from as early as the eleventh century. Trending styles of 1940s-60s Bamako are juxtaposed with the early 1980s sartorial legacy of post-independence Mali. Some are nearly identical to the garments and backdrops featured in Keïta’s photographs; others represent the diverse cultural, ethnic, and regional affiliations of his sitters. Grouped by theme, this section invites a closer look at pattern, colour, weave, and technique to give further dimension – and colour – to the fashions worn by Keïta’s subjects.
Installation views of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing text from the section “Fashioning A New Nation”
Handheld
“Fly dirt,” pen marks, dog-eared corners, red Sahelian dust, humidity, and traces of touch infuse Keïta’s vintage prints with a particular life and beauty. Each print is indelibly marked by the photographer, the printer, and the many hands through which it has passed – as tokens, gifts, souvenirs, expressions of love, ritual displays, or precious heirlooms.
Since Keïta first became known in Europe and the United States in the 1990s, vintage prints of his photographs have made their way into private collections and institutional archives. Despite consisting of the same images, they were often considered secondary to the modern prints that were produced, exhibited, and stored as fine art pieces. Only recently has this value system been upended, reflecting shifts in the art market and in the field of art history. As African studio photography continues to gain recognition, artists and arts professionals of the African diaspora have called for such images to be valued not by colonial or market standards but by their material history and significance as loved, cherished objects.
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing a vitrine with text from the section “Handheld”
The Self That Travels
Over time, African studio photography by Keïta and other artists became part of a global circulation of images. A photographic print could be sent from Bamako to a relative stationed during the war years in France, or Indonesia, or Russia. Portraits were exchanged locally, regionally, and farther afield through a web of relations in matchmaking attempts between families. A private image may have been usurped by a colonial publisher for use on a postcard. Perhaps a collector on eBay, fifty years later, was delighted by the image or recognised Keïta’s stamp and had it shipped to the United States from Belarus. All told, vintage prints are part of an economy that reveals complex histories of commerce and human desire.
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing a vitrine with text from the section “The Self That Travels”
A Golden Touch
After printing, photographs could be tinted by hand to heighten the subject’s beauty and status – and to imbue the photograph with the protections afforded by gold. Chekna Touré was a picture framer who hand-coloured photographs for many of Keïta’s clients, often highlighting the subject’s gold jewellery, accessories, and cosmetics. As a marker of wealth, beauty, and identity, gold was essential to Malian women’s dress.
Mali’s vast gold reserves are some of the world’s oldest and a source of national pride. Its lustrous qualities carried talismanic powers, yet the metal also inspired fear. Believed to be a living organism, gold was said to have its own soul and powers. Goldsmiths would thus meld the element with other metals to help shield the wearer from its full force.
The vintage prints in this case feature colorisation. While Touré colourised many of Keïta’s photographs, the differing skill levels seen here suggest other people also performed this work, perhaps doing so at home.
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing gold and carnelian jewellery
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing text from the section “A Golden Touch” with at bottom centre, Keïta’s photograph Untitled c. 1948-1963 (below)
The Keïta family’s generous loan of film negatives from the estate’s remaining archive presents a rare opportunity to reflect on the practical, ethical, and technical questions involved in the preservation of African photography. Conservation of African photographic archives from the continent faces distinct challenges, ranging from climate-related degradation and limited access to preservation materials and technologies to an overall lack of institutional infrastructure and support for artists and their legacies.
Too fragile to survive extensive handling or prolonged light exposure, Keïta’s negatives could not be cleaned or scanned without risking damage. Instead, each was photographed under controlled conditions at a conservation lab and reproduced for the exhibition.
Lace
Lace features prominently in Keïta’s photographs – appearing as trim on dress sleeves, integrated into garments made from wax print and other fabrics, worn as full lace dresses or as sheer boubous layered over other clothing. European lace was highly coveted, expensive, and difficult to obtain. In response, Soudanaise women created their own lace by hand, layering two pieces of white cotton percale and cutting intricate patterns using stencils. These garments, now rare heirlooms, were once considered second to colonial imports. Today, they are recognized for their exceptional beauty and craftsmanship, emblems of pride in Soudanaise women’s creativity and cultural identity.
Carnelian Beads
Carnelian beads have been traded for centuries, from the Cambay region of India through Mecca to the Middle East and Africa. By the mid-nineteenth century, the German town of Idar-Oberstein began sourcing carnelian from Brazil and producing beads in local factories for export to these same markets.
Valued for both their beauty and protection, carnelian necklaces were worn as amulets – believed to hold protective powers through their colour and surface – and were often included as part of a woman’s dowry. Multi-strand necklaces of small carnelian beads appear on many of Keïta’s sitters and were especially fashionable among the Lebu, Tuareg, and Fulani.
Marabaka
During the independence era, anticolonial leader Amílcar Lopes Cabral popularised the marabaka, a Czech-style hat that became a widespread symbol of Pan-African solidarity. First imported from Czechia, the hat, known as zmijovka in Czech, derives its zigzag pattern from that observed on the skin of a viper (zmije in Czech).
In West Africa, the hat’s black-and-white design is reminiscent of Islamic aesthetics seen on indigenous textiles such as Dogon and Bamana resist cloths and weaving. The snake motif also speaks to the region’s affinity for the culturally significant serpent and water snake.
Commemorative Cloths
In the post-independence era, political leaders often commissioned commemorative cloths bearing their own images to bolster support and cultivate loyalty – and even foster cults of personality. Citizens wore such cloths regardless of political affiliation, at times out of fear of reprisal. Advances in textile printing and the development of more affordable “fancy print” cloths in the 1940s made many commemorative cloths inexpensive to produce. The examples on view span a range of iconography, from wax-print cloths honouring African soldiers who served in World War II and Mali’s first post-independence president, Modibo Keïta, to a fancy print featuring French President Charles de Gaulle .
Pagne
A woman’s pagne is the foundation of her wardrobe. Typically woven or cut to a length of about two yards, the pagne functions as a wrap that conceals the waist, thighs, and buttocks. Beyond their function, pagnes also symbolize lineage, protection, and a woman’s evolving identity.
Finely woven and dyed pagnes are presented at birth and during key life rituals such as dowry exchanges, marriage celebrations, and pregnancies. Women rarely part with their pagnes. Above all, they are talismans – protective layers passed down from generation to generation. A woman selects which ones to give to her children and which, ultimately, will accompany her to the grave.
Dutch Legacies
Known in the postwar era as “the Chanel of Africa,” the Dutch textile company Vlisco has been the foremost purveyor of African wax-print textiles since the late nineteenth century. The company industrialised the Indonesian batik process, in which patterns are drawn in wax on cotton fabric that is then dyed. When the wax is removed, the design is revealed, protected from the dye by the wax resist.
Though Vlisco did not actively market its products in the Sahel region in the 1940s to 1970s, wax prints spread through African trade networks and became widely popular, including among many of Keïta’s sitters. While the patterns were created by Dutch designers, they were named by Ghanaian and Togolese female fabric traders and their female clients, who interpreted the patterns’ meanings through a local, social, or spiritual lens .
The colour, design, and pattern names of wax prints thus carry personal and communal meanings – much like Keïta’s photographs.
Widely associated with coming-of-age rituals, wax prints have long marked key life events such as birth, puberty, and marriage. As independence movements gained momentum across the continent, wax-print textiles came to symbolise cosmopolitanism and a growing sense of Pan-African identity.
The Studio Backdrop
In Keïta’s photographs, traditional and modern textiles appear as studio backdrops or layered on European-style beds, their bold patterns often echoed in the sitters’ garments. Featuring examples of such textiles, this installation highlights the evolution of Malian weaving traditions during the independence era. The 1950s and early post-independence years saw rapid innovations in textile design, particularly in the use of colour. In contrast with traditional indigo and earth tones produced using natural dyes, these modern fabrics feature vivid hues made from synthetic dyes and incorporate more elaborate, figurative motifs that reflect the period’s shifting social concerns and aspirations.
These blankets served multiple functions. In everyday use, they provided protection from mosquitoes, cold temperatures, and sandstorms in the Sahel. When folded and draped over the shoulder of a well-dressed man, they signaled status. They were also important in systems of exchange – traded, gifted, and ceremonially displayed, most notably during dowry presentations and marriage celebrations.
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026
Installation views of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing vitrines with facsimile cellulose acetate negatives and positive reproductions from digitised negatives c. 1950-1959
Installation view of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026
Installation views of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026 showing Keïta’s medium format cameras and his photograph, Untitled late 1940s to mid-1970s (below)
Seydou Keïta (Malian, c. 1921-2001) Untitled late 1940s to mid-1970s Positive reproduction from digitised negative Courtesy of the Seydou Keïta Family
Seydou Keïta (Malian, c. 1921-2001) Untitled late 1940s to mid-1970s Positive reproduction from digitised negative Courtesy of the Seydou Keïta Family
With one hand on the handlebars of a bicycle and the other tucked in his pocket, this child meets the camera with a stern expression. Here, the boy’s French beret, shoes, and bicycle – imported goods reserved for the elite – speak to the deep-rooted impact of French colonialism across generations, even as the country moved toward independence.
Installation views of the exhibition Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, October 2025 – May 2026
Brooklyn Museum 200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052 Phone: (718) 638-5000
Opening hours: Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm Closed Mondays and Tuesdays Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day
In the nearly eighteen year history of constructing this archive there has never been a posting on the American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925-1972) which tells you a/ how rare exhibitions of his work are today and b/ how under appreciated his art is in recent times when compared to his white, male contemporaries such as Harry Callahan, Minor White and Aaron Siskind. Thus it is a great pleasure to promote this exhibition on Art Blart. I just wish I had more photographs to show you!
His work is polarising. People either hate it or love it. I’m in the latter camp. I admire Meatyard’s disturbing? challenging photographs where youth and innocence meld into a dystopian old age of special beauty, where other worlds of which we know very little are brought close to our imagination.
I admire them for their unconventionality, for their spectral aspect … that fluid dichotomy between reality and fantasy, dreams and nightmares, where the mask comes to stand for another state of being of its subject1 – shadowy, other-worldy phantoms brought into our presence through romantic-surrealist, abstract realisms – un/earthly in/corporealities, bodies and people who are both grounded in the present and transmogrifying in a tumult of magic realism (a literary and artistic genre that seamlessly blends fantastical or mythical elements into otherwise realistic, mundane settings, treating the supernatural as normal).
This unexplained magic, fluid time contains a social critique of childhood, family and adulthood and (most importantly) mortality, merging real-world settings with unbelievable elements.
Meatyards’s staged scenes – often using exposure, shadow (in Jung referencing the unconscious, hidden part of the personality), depth of field, or motion blur – suggest “an absurd fantasy set in the dilapidated houses and banal suburban environs near his home in Lexington, Kentucky … [which] reveal Meatyard’s search for inner truths amid the ordinary.” (Text from the High Museum of Art)
His photographs contain elements of his imagination in segments of the actuality around him, an interface of emotion and feeling about the world which is reflected back to us through his experimental, fantastical images. His subjects simply exist in youth and old age and resonate (that musical influence) “within the infinite possibilities of this fictional world.” Thus, in this fictional world, the masks serve “… to equalise his subjects and shift focus elsewhere – to the poignant juxtaposition of otherworldly faces on human bodies, to the ambiguous and unknowable in human nature.”2
The unknowable in human nature. The phenomenal (appearances) and the noumenal (the harsh reality of things-in-themselves).3 Interstitial. Interspatial. The space between…
Dreams and realities, masks and identities, emotions and fluidities. Gestures on what it is to be human.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ “The word “persona” originally refers to a theatrical mask worn by actors to depict the roles played by them…
The ego refers to our centre of consciousness which is responsible for our continuing sense of identity throughout our life and the persona is the social mask that we put on. We all embody different masks in different settings, as it is our way to adapt to the demands of society, playing an important part in shaping our social role and in how we deal with other people.”
3/ The phenomenal world is the reality we experience through senses and mental structures (space/time), while the noumenal is the unknowable, objective reality existing independently of perception, such as God or the true nature of objects.
Many thankx to the High 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.
“I seek to create a picture that has implications which may be explored for a new concept of thinking – a picture seen largely from the subjective viewpoint. The man of ideas and ideals will search for and find elements of his imagination in segments of the actuality around him. My pictures are an extension of myself and invite the viewers to participate in my thinking about the object pictured.”
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lexington Camera Club, Creative Photography – 1956 catalogue statement
“I adhere to the techniques of the earliest and most sincere workers of the camera – straight, unmanipulated pictures. That which I present is that which I see. However, I work a great deal in romantic-surrealist as well as abstract for I feel that ‘more real than real’ is the special province of the serious photographer.”
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, quoted in Beaumont Newhall, “New Talent in Photography USA,” Art in America 49, No. 1, 1961
Installation view of the exhibition The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
As an optician by profession, Meatyard’s photography training was largely self-taught. He grew up in Normal, Illinois, and eventually moved to Lexington to take a job at the Tinder-Knaus-Tinder optical shop. Through his occupation, he became fascinated by visual perception, but he did not pick up a camera until the early 1950s when his first son, Michael, was born. He began experimenting with photography and joined the Lexington Camera Club, a group of serious amateur photographers that met regularly to share their work. Meatyard made this self-portrait outside a warehouse in downtown Lexington. The composition, with the artist standing next to the word yard, is a playful visual take on his unusual surname.
A largely self-taught photographer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925–1972) was a pioneering and inventive artist who created some of the most original images of the mid-twentieth century. His work defies easy categorization as he experimented across various genres and subjects, and throughout his career, he maintained the ethos of an amateur, approaching photography with a sense of affection, discovery, and surprise. He is best known for his staged scenes that suggest an absurd fantasy set in the dilapidated houses and banal suburban environs near his home in Lexington, Kentucky. These scenes, often featuring his family as actors and using props such as masks and dolls, reveal Meatyard’s search for inner truths amid the ordinary.
This exhibition, coinciding with the artist’s centenary, features the thirty-six prints that comprise the artist’s first monograph (Gnomon Press, 1970) – one of only two books he published in his lifetime – which Meatyard intended to stand as his definitive artistic statement. All thirty-six prints were recently acquired by the High for the Museum’s permanent collection. Through his idiosyncratic selection of images, this exhibition explores how Meatyard’s singular approach and voracious curiosity expanded photography’s expressive and conceptual potential.
Since his untimely death in 1972, American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard has come to be regarded among the most pioneering and inventive artists of the medium, and his expressive, surreal photographs are widely celebrated today. This winter, the High Museum of Art presents “The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard” (Dec. 12, 2025 – May 10, 2026), an exhibition featuring 36 photographs that Meatyard considered his best work, created for one of only two monographs published by the artist in his lifetime. The High recently acquired the prints from his estate, making the museum one of the leading repositories of his photographs in the world.
“Ralph Eugene Meatyard created some of the most original photographs of the mid-20th century, and the prints in this exhibition are exquisite examples of his innovation and creativity,” said the High’s Director Rand Suffolk. “We are grateful to his estate for the opportunity to acquire and present these works and to celebrate his unorthodox yet remarkably generative practice with this exhibition.”
Born in Illinois in 1925, Meatyard eventually settled in Lexington, Kentucky. Because of his professional training as an optician, he was fascinated by visual perception, but he did not pick up a camera until the early 1950s. He began experimenting with photography and joined the Lexington Camera Club, immersing himself in the city’s creative community, which included artists and writers Van Deren Coke, Jonathan Williams, Wendell Berry and Thomas Merton.
Over the next 15 years, Meatyard maintained the ethos of an amateur, approaching the medium with a sense of affection, discovery and surprise. He experimented across various genres and subjects, including portraiture, abstraction, landscape and gothic narrative, constantly seeking to distort proper vision through photographic processes and the unconventional narrative structures that would make him an innovator of the medium.
He is best known for his staged scenes that suggest absurd fantasies, played out in the dilapidated houses and banal suburban environs of Lexington. Often featuring his family as actors and including props such as masks and dolls, the scenes reveal his search for inner truths among the ordinary. Though he wasn’t unknown in his lifetime – he exhibited, lectured and showed his work regularly throughout the 1960s – he worked both geographically and conceptually outside of the mainstream of photographic modernism, and it wasn’t until after his death that his reputation began to grow steadily.
More than a dozen books of Meatyard’s photographs have been released to date, but he only published two monographs in his lifetime. “Ralph Eugene Meatyard” (Gnomon Press, 1970), edited while he was dying of cancer, is a survey of what he considered his best work. He hoped the book would stand as his definitive artistic statement, offering his own perspective on his distinctive photographs.
This exhibition features rare prints the artist made of the 36 photographs in the book. These include signature photographs from Meatyard’s “Romance” series, which depict his family in fantastical scenarios, staged in abandoned buildings and bucolic landscapes. The series subverts the traditional family snapshot with a sense of the uncanny, combining youthful innocence with a sense of mortality. Meatyard often referred to these pictures as “romantic-surrealist,” and their fictional aspects were motivated by his desire to make photographs that weren’t bound by reality but were still grounded in the world as we see it. The exhibition also includes a selection of Meatyard’s portraits of writers, poets and artists from his circle, including Merton, Williams, Berry and Guy Davenport, among others. Collectively, the photographs create an unconventional family album by one of the most distinctive artists of the post-war period. The exhibition delves into Meatyard’s personal perceptions of his photographs and his process as a maker and will underscore the important influence of his artistic and intellectual contemporaries in Lexington, all of whom greatly affected his work. It also explores how Meatyard’s singular approach and voracious curiosity expanded photography’s expressive and conceptual potential.
“A family album is a relatable practice of memory, storytelling, aspiration and fabrication familiar to almost everyone,” said Gregory Harris, the High’s Donald and Marilyn Keough Family curator of photography. “While these works echo that nostalgic format, they also offer plenty of surprises and an extraordinary window into Meatyard’s life and creative process. We’re thrilled to share them with our audience.”
“The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard” is presented in the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Gallery for Photography on the lower level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion.
Meatyard suffered a heart attack in 1961. After this brush with mortality, he gave himself ten years to master photography. A sense of anxiety runs through many of his photographs. This image of a vacant masked face with hands pressed against its cheeks and a shard of broken mirror floating above embodies the persistent sense of pressure and tenuousness motivated by the finiteness of time.
Meatyard began editing the Gnomon Press book soon after he was diagnosed with cancer in 1970, and the looming reality of his fragility no doubt informed his selection of images. Arnold Gassan echoed the need to confront death in the longer, unpublished version of his essay for the book.
The 36 photographs include a number of signature portraits from Meatyard’s series Romance, and portray his family members, sometimes masked, inhabiting abandoned southern landscapes. Meatyard challenges the idea of traditional family portraits. In some images, children play in deserted rooms, maintaining their innocence in disconcerting environments. They are not afraid or amused – they simply exist within the infinite possibilities of this fictional world. In one image, an unrecognisable figure jumps out of a window into a yard where a little boy awaits. The movement of the jumping figure makes it resemble a spirit appearing to the boy in a dream. In creating this series, Meatyard was inspired by Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “romance” in “The Devil’s Dictionary” – defined as “fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They are.”
Victoria Gonzalez. “The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard,” on the Musee website December 15, 2025 [Online] Cited 15/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
As an adult, Meatyard lived in the South but grew up in Normal, Illinois – an apt birthplace for this man who led a very normal life. (“Meatyard” is an arcane 17th century English surname, but its surrealistic sound is an apt byline for the photographer. Meatyard himself collected strange names that he noted in a loose-leaf binder.) He did not consider himself a Southerner, although he has often been associated with Southern photography.
Although Meatyard counted himself as an amateur and hobbyist, he exhibited his work nationally with fine art photographers such as Minor White (who introduced him to Zen Buddhism), Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Emmet Gowin. His national reputation had grown enough that his 1972 passing garnered a New York Times obituary that described Meatyard as living (somewhat disparagingly) in a backwater. Yet, it was living outside major centers of art and photography that allowed him the freedom to pursue his idiosyncratic creative strategies.
The photographs of his friends are more straightforward but equally poetic and surrealistic. An example is his portrait of close friend and fellow Lexington Camera Club member Cranston Ritchie (1923-1961). Like Meatyard, Ritchie received an untimely terminal cancer diagnosis, resulting in multiple amputations of his arm. Facing forward, Cranston stands with an armless mannequin and mirror, a humorous but tragic take on fate and mortality.
Cranston Ritchie was a photographer in the Lexington Camera Club and friend of fellow club member, Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Ritchie died young at the age of 38 from cancer. James Rhem in his essay, Gene’s Friend – Cranston Ritchie, writes, “A little knot the size of a grape and sore to the touch appeared on his right hand. It turned out to be a malignancy. Doctors then thought if the arm were removed above the elbow, the cancer might be stopped from continuing to his lungs. It wasn’t. After five surgeries, each an effort to stop the cancer’s spread, Ritchie died the day after Christmas in 1961.” Rhem quotes Meatyard’s 1971 recollection of Ritchie, “He will certainly be recognised in years to come as an outstanding individual photographer as many of the 19th century men are being recognised today.”
While Meatyard regularly photographed his family, his pictures are rarely conventional portraits and are not necessarily indicative of his relationships. Even when he wasn’t including masks, he often obscured his sitters’ identities by skilfully deploying exposure, shadow, depth of field, or motion blur. In this silhouetted image, his wife, Madelyn, and their daughter, Melissa, become the archetypal mother and daughter, their fused forms expressing intimacy and connection. The title of the piece, Madonna, and Meatyard’s use of the arched window as a framing device indicate his desire to place his work within an art historical lineage.
The High Museum of Art 1280 Peachtree St NE Atlanta, GA 30309
![August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Inventor and Dadaist [Raoul Hausmann]' 1929, printed c. 1990-1999](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/august-sander-inventor-and-dadaist-raoul-hausmann.jpg "August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Inventor and Dadaist [Raoul Hausmann]' 1929, printed c. 1990-1999")
![August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Mother and Daughter [Helene Abelen with Daughter Josepha]' c. 1926, printed c. 1990-1999](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/august-sander-mother-and-daughter-helene-abelen-with-daughter-josepha.jpg "August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Mother and Daughter [Helene Abelen with Daughter Josepha]' c. 1926, printed c. 1990-1999")
![August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'My Wife in Joy and Sorrow [Anna Sander with twins, Sigrid and Helmut Sander]' 1911, printed c. 1990-1999](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/august-sander-my-wife-in-joy-and-sorrow.jpg "August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'My Wife in Joy and Sorrow [Anna Sander with twins, Sigrid and Helmut Sander]' 1911, printed c. 1990-1999")
![Installation view of the exhibition 'Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography' at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 - June 2026 showing from top left to right, top to bottom, Unknown photographer Harry 'Belafonte and Joan Fontaine' 1957; Gene Lester (American, 1910-1994) 'Dean and Jeannne Martin' 1958; Bob Beerman (American) 'Rock Hudson' c. 1953; Unknown photographer 'Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in "This Earth is Mine"]' 1959; Unknown photographer 'Jean Simmons [in "The Big Country"]' 1958; Unknown photographer 'Elizabeth Threatt and Dewey Martin [in "The Big Sky"]' 1952; Unknown photographer 'Dorothy Malone and Anthony Quinn' 1957; Unknown photographer 'André De Toth and Veronica Lake' 1944; Unknown photographer 'Edmund O'Brien and Tom D'Andrea [in "Fighter Squadron"]' 1948; Unknown photographer 'Ward Bond and Ida Lupino [in "On Dangerous Ground"]' 1951; Unknown photographer 'Aldo Ray and Katharine Hepburn [in "Pat and Mike"]' 1952](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/face-value-installation-q.jpg "Installation view of the exhibition 'Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography' at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, June 2025 - June 2026 showing from top left to right, top to bottom, Unknown photographer Harry 'Belafonte and Joan Fontaine' 1957; Gene Lester (American, 1910-1994) 'Dean and Jeannne Martin' 1958; Bob Beerman (American) 'Rock Hudson' c. 1953; Unknown photographer 'Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in \"This Earth is Mine\"]' 1959; Unknown photographer 'Jean Simmons [in \"The Big Country\"]' 1958; Unknown photographer 'Elizabeth Threatt and Dewey Martin [in \"The Big Sky\"]' 1952; Unknown photographer 'Dorothy Malone and Anthony Quinn' 1957; Unknown photographer 'André De Toth and Veronica Lake' 1944; Unknown photographer 'Edmund O'Brien and Tom D'Andrea [in \"Fighter Squadron\"]' 1948; Unknown photographer 'Ward Bond and Ida Lupino [in \"On Dangerous Ground\"]' 1951; Unknown photographer 'Aldo Ray and Katharine Hepburn [in \"Pat and Mike\"]' 1952")
![Unknown photographer. 'Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine [in "Island in the Sun"]' 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/unknown-photographer-harry-belafonte-and-joan-fontaine.jpg "Unknown photographer. 'Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine [in \"Island in the Sun\"]' 1957")
![Unknown photographer. 'Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in "This Earth is Mine"]' 1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/jean-simmons-and-rock-hudson.jpg "Unknown photographer. 'Jean Simmons, Rock Hudson [in \"This Earth is Mine\"]' 1959")
![Ray Jones (American, 1901-1947) 'Anna May Wong [in "Limehouse Blues"]' 1934](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ray-jones-anna-may-wong.jpg "Ray Jones (American, 1901-1947) 'Anna May Wong [in \"Limehouse Blues\"]' 1934")
![Unknown photographer. 'Myrna Loy [in "Across the Pacific"]' 1926](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/unknown-photographer-myrna-loy.jpg "Unknown photographer. 'Myrna Loy [in \"Across the Pacific\"]' 1926")
![John Miehle (American, 1902-1952) 'Dolores del Rio and Edmund Lowe [in "The Bad One"]' 1930](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/john-miehle-dolores-del-rio-and-edmund-lowe-1.jpg "John Miehle (American, 1902-1952) 'Dolores del Rio and Edmund Lowe [in \"The Bad One\"]' 1930")
![Robert Coburn (American, 1900-1990) 'Vera Zorina [in "The Goldywyn Follies"]' c. 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/robert-coburn-vera-zorina.jpg "Robert Coburn (American, 1900-1990) 'Vera Zorina [in \"The Goldywyn Follies\"]' c. 1937")
![James Manatt (American, 1896-1989) 'Joan Crawford [in "Letty Lynton"]' 1932](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/james-manatt-joan-crawford.jpg "James Manatt (American, 1896-1989) 'Joan Crawford [in \"Letty Lynton\"]' 1932")
![Elmer Fryer (American, 1898-1944) 'Lili Damita [in "The Match King"]' c. 1932](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/elmer-fryer-lili-damita.jpg "Elmer Fryer (American, 1898-1944) 'Lili Damita [in \"The Match King\"]' c. 1932")
![Bert Longworth (American, 1893-1964) 'Amelia Earhart with Helen Hayes [on set of "A Farewell to Arms"]' 1932](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/bert-longworth-amelia-earhart-and-helen-hayes.jpg "Bert Longworth (American, 1893-1964) 'Amelia Earhart with Helen Hayes [on set of \"A Farewell to Arms\"]' 1932")
![Unknown photographer. 'Elsa Lanchester [in "The Bride of Frankenstein"]' 1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/elsa-lanchester.jpg "Unknown photographer. 'Elsa Lanchester [in \"The Bride of Frankenstein\"]' 1935")
![Unknown photographer. 'Louis Armstrong [in "Cabin in the Sky"]' 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/louis-armstrong.jpg "Unknown photographer. 'Louis Armstrong [in \"Cabin in the Sky\"]' 1943")
!['Elvis Presley [Fans' Star Library magazine, No. 13]' 1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/elvis-presley.jpg "'Elvis Presley [Fans' Star Library magazine, No. 13]' 1959")
![Ray Wilson. 'Mia Farrow [in "Rosemary's Baby"]' c. 1967](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ray-wilson-mia-farrow.jpg "Ray Wilson. 'Mia Farrow [in \"Rosemary's Baby\"]' c. 1967")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Shadow Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France]' 1927 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans. Now and Then' at Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, February - May, 2026](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/walker-evans-shadow-self-portrait-juan-les-pins-france.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Shadow Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France]' 1927 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans. Now and Then' at Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, February - May, 2026")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
'[Subway Passengers, New York]' 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/3428-018-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Subway Passengers, New York]' 1938")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Boarded-up House, Stonington, Connecticut]' 1974](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/walker-evans-boarded-up-house-stonington-connecticut.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Boarded-up House, Stonington, Connecticut]' 1974")
![Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910–1990) '[Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi]' 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/wolcott-haircutting.jpg "Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910–1990) '[Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi]' 1939")
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