Tag: Berenice Abbott

Exhibition: ‘Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light’ at NGV International, Melbourne, Part 1

Exhibition dates: 28th November, 2025 – 3rd May, 2026

Curator: Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography at the NGV

Mina Moore (New Zealand, 1882-1957)
Nellie Stewart
c. 1913-1916
Gelatin silver photograph
18.6 x 12.7cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of the Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, 1992

Sisters May and Mina Moore operated their photography studio from 1913 in the newly completed Auditorium Building at 167 Collins Street, Melbourne. This building also housed a concert hall, where recitals, operas and music performances were presented. The location was particularly advantageous for the photographers as it provided a steady stream of performers and productions in need of promotional portraits.

Wall text from the exhibition

Nellie Stewart, born Eleanor Stewart Towzey (1858-1931) was an Australian actress and singer, known as “Our Nell” and “Sweet Nell”. Born into a theatrical family, Stewart began acting as a child. As a young woman, she built a career playing in operetta and Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

It’s great to have a record of this extensive photography exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

In this first part of the exhibition, Part 1 of a huge two-part posting on Art Blart (posting proceeds as in a walk through of the exhibition), highlights for me included:

~ Two photographs by the under appreciated Bahaus artist and self taught photographer Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000) whose portraits of friends, still-lifes, and performative self-portrait images are rarely seen

~ Six small, intense, jewel-like photographs by Bauhaus student Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) of “new women” and street corners in Ginza, Japan which were a revelation for their beauty, pictorial composition, tonality, spatiality and physical presence of the image

~ The groundbreaking portfolio Métal by Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985) which was magnificently laid out so that you could “appreciate its unique design as an object” and the “vitality of the photography”, allowing the viewer to begin to understand the complex relationships between images one to another and the flow of the whole folio. A joy to behold!

More comment to follow in Part 2 of the posting.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Entrance to the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Mina and May Moore’s Murial Starr (c. 1913-1916, below); at second left, May Moore’s Janina Korolewicz-Wayda (c. 1910-1920); at at third right, Mina Moore’s Nellie Stewart (c. 1913-1916, above)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria

Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing May and Mina Moore’s Murial Starr (c. 1913-1916, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

May and Mina Moore (New Zealand, 1881-1931 and 1882-1957)
Murial Starr
c. 1913-1916
Gelatin silver photograph
19.6 x 12.5cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of the Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, 1992

Sisters May and Mina Moore established their Wellington studio-portraiture business in around 1907. May, originally trained as a painter, learned to operate the camera while Mina, a schoolteacher, gained skills in printing. Expanding their business to Australia, May established a Sydney studio in 1911 while, two years later, Mina set up a Melbourne studio, which was later taken over by photographer Ruth Hollick. The pair became known for their studio portraits of actors, artists and musicians. Using only natural light, they created dramatic images marked by a striking chiaroscuro effect (a technique involving strong contrasts of light and shade) on the faces of their subjects.

Wall text from the exhibition

Muriel Starr (1888-1950) was a Canadian stage actress. She was particularly popular in Australia in the 1910s and 1920s. She appeared in one film, Within the Law (1916), an adaptation of her stage success. She was also known for the plays East of Suez, Birds of Paradise and Madame X.

Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing May and Mina Moore’s No title (Woman) (c. 1914)
Photos: 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

Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Isabel Seymour (England, 1882-1963) The Seymour Album (c. 1907-1911). Recent acquisition
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

The suffragette Isabel Seymour was employed by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in London in 1906. Fluent in English and German, she facilitated international speaking tours for the organisation. Assembled by Seymour for the WSPU, this personal scrapbook includes photographs, postcards, advertisements and newspaper articles detailing suffragette activities. The album provides a historical snapshot of the activities and people involved in the suffragette movement, through one of its key organisations.

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, Woman’s Social and Political Union (distributor) Toye & Co. (manufacturer) Medal for Valour, awarded to Selina Martin, with original box (1909); Selina Martin (England, 1882-1972) No title (Photographic album containing images and handwritten text relating to Selina Martin) (c. 1910); Lizzie Casual Smith (England, 1870-1956) Miss Christabel Pankhurst (c. 1900s)
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, Woman’s Social and Political Union (distributor) Toye & Co. (manufacturer) Medal for Valour, awarded to Selina Martin, with original box (1909) and at right, Selina Martin (England, 1882-1972) No title (Photographic album containing images and handwritten text relating to Selina Martin) (c. 1910)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

New acquisition

The suffragette Selina Martin joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1908. She was imprisoned on several occasions due to her activism and was awarded a Hunger Strike Medal for valour by the WSPU. This album is Martin’s personal compilation of photographs, postcards and writings, many of which relate to the suffragette cause. It includes writing from notable acquaintances such as political activist and suffragette Mary Leigh, and human rights activist and feminist Ethel Snowden.

Vitrine text from the exhibition

Selina Martin (English, 1882-1972) was a member of the suffragette movement in the early 20th century. She was arrested several times. Her Hunger Strike Medal given ‘for Valour’ by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was sold at auction in Nottingham in 2019.

Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Gertrude Kasebier The gargoyle (c. 1900, below); at third right, Ruth Hollick No title (Young woman in hunting costume, model Lucy Crosbie Morrison) (c. 1920, below); at second right, Ruth Hollick Thought (1921, below); and at right, Madame d’Ora Untitled (1931, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Image-Makers: Women in Photography

By the start of the twentieth century, photography was becoming increasingly accessible to the public in many cities around the world. Previously, the medium was practised by an affluent minority of amateur artists and commercial studios. However, the production of lower-cost cameras gradually opened up photography to the broader public, particularly the expanding middle class. At the same time, women began to participate in photography as both creators and consumers. For many women, photography offered a means of income, a way to document daily life, and a powerful tool for communication and activism.

In England, suffragettes actively used photography to create and share images that were integral to their campaign for women’s right to vote. The suffragettes constructed their images in photographic studios and in the streets, merging style and fashionable dress with politics and self-assuredness. These photographs became crucial in shaping the public image of the suffrage movement.

In Australia, May and Mina Moore ran a successful photographic business. Known for their dramatically lit portraits of stage performers, they responded to the appetite for stylised portraiture as popularised by the suffragettes. At a time of shifting gender roles, May Moore also advocated publicly for women to work in photography.

Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Gertrude Kasebier The gargoyle (c. 1900, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Gertrude Kasebier (American, 1852-1934) 'Gargoyle' 1901

Gertrude Kasebier (American, 1852-1934)
The gargoyle
c. 1900
Platinum photograph
20.6 x 13.5 cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979

In the early twentieth century, leading Pictorialist photographer Gertrude Käsebier played a key role in establishing photography as a form of fine art. As a member of the Photo-Secession group alongside Alfred Stieglitz, Käsebier was dedicated to Pictorialism, a style that emphasised artistic expression over documentary accuracy. This photograph, taken in Paris, highlights the painterly, emotional qualities inherent in Pictorialism. Käsebier has created an evocative image using composition and light to transform the scene. After leaving the Photo-Secession group in 1912, Käsebier became a founder and active member of the Pictorial Photographers of America.

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 at left, Ruth Hollick No title (Young woman in hunting costume, model Lucy Crosbie Morrison) (c. 1920, below); at second left, Ruth Hollick Thought (1921, below); and at right, Madame d’Ora Untitled (1931, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977)
No title (Young woman in hunting costume, model Lucy Crosbie Morrison)
c. 1920
Gelatin silver photograph
20.0 x 14.6cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993
Public domain

Ruth Hollick attended the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1902 to 1906 and began to photograph commercially around 1908. In 1918, along with her life and professional partner, fellow photographer Dorothy Izard, she took over the studio of May and Mina Moore at 167 Collins Street, Melbourne. Eventually Hollick expanded her studio into the newly completed Chartres House building next door at 165 Collins Street. From 1920 her photographs were regularly included in magazines as well as Australian and British Pictorialist exhibitions and salons. Hollick closed her city studio in the early 1930s but continued working from her home in the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds into the 1960s.

Wall text from the exhibition

Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977)
Thought
1921
Gelatin silver photograph
37.4 x 25.3cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993
Public domain

This sensitive portrait depicts the artist’s niece Lucy Crosbie Morrison. The pose of the subject, combined with the title, reveals the photographer’s careful direction and artistic ambition. The subject’s outfit, adorned with appliqué gum leaves and a gumnut belt, references native Australian plants. The work aligns with the style of Pictorialism, a popular international photographic trend at the time. Thought was recognised at the 1921 Colonial Exhibition in London, highlighting both its local significance and broader artistic appeal.

Wall text from the exhibition

Dora Kallmus (Madame d'Ora) (Austrian, 1881–1963) 'Untitled' 1931 (installation view)

Dora Kallmus (Madame d’Ora) (Austrian, 1881–1963)
Untitled (installation view)
1931
Gelatin silver photograph
22.4 x 16.4cm (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

Dora Kallmus, known professionally as Madame d’Ora, photographed high-profile figures associated with art, fashion and politics, including Josephine Baker and Coco Chanel. In 1907 Madame d’Ora opened her first studio in Vienna, Atelier d’Ora, one of the first photography studios in Vienna to be operated by a woman. She later moved to Paris, where her career flourished well into the 1930s – Atelier d’Ora was renowned for its glamorous, softly focused portraits – until she was forced to close her studio due to Nazi occupation.

Wall text from the exhibition

Dora Kallmus (1881-1963), better known as Madame d’Ora, was an unusual woman for her time with a spectacular career as one of the leading photographic portraitists of the early twentieth century. This exhibition, the largest museum retrospective on the Austrian photographer to date in the United States, presents the different periods of her life, from her early upbringing as the daughter of Jewish intellectuals in Vienna, to her days as a premier society photographer, through her survival during the Holocaust. Forging a path in a field that was dominated by men, d’Ora enjoyed an illustrious 50-year career, from 1907 until 1957. The show includes more than 100 examples of her work, which is distinguished for its extreme elegance, and utter depth and darkness.

Born into a privileged background and coming of age amidst the creative and intellectual atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Kallmus was extremely well cultured. At age 23 while on a trip to the Côte d’Azur, she purchased her first camera, a Kodak box camera. She was the first woman photographer in Vienna to open her own studio and in May 1906, she was listed in the commercial register as a photographer for the first time. Self-styled simply as d’Ora, she initially took portraits of friends and members from her social circle. In the autumn of 1909, an exhibition of her work received a lively response from the press. Critics both praised the artistic style of her portraits and emphasized the prominent individuals who streamed in to view the show.

Over the course of her lifetime, d’Ora turned her lens on many artists, including Josephine Baker, Colette, Gustav Klimt, Tamara de Lempicka, and Pablo Picasso, among others. Alongside these commissions, she also photographed members of the Habsburg family and Viennese aristocracy, the Rothschild family, and other prominent cultural figures and politicians. D’Ora had close ties to avant-garde artistic circles and captured members of the Expressionist dance movement with her lens, including Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste. Fashion and glamor subjects were another important mainstay of her business. She regularly photographed Wiener Werkstätte fashion models and the designer Emilie Flöge of the Schwestern Flöge salon wearing artistic reform dresses. When d’Ora moved to Paris in 1925, she shifted her focus to fashion, covering the couture scene and leading lights of the period until 1940. She befriended key figures, such as the French milliner Madame Agnès and the Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, as well as the top fashion magazine editors of the day. She also helped create and sustain glamorous images for a variety of celebrities, including Cecil Beaton, Maurice Chevalier, and Colette.

When the Nazis seized control of Paris in 1940, she was forced to close her studio and flee. She spent the war years in a semi-underground existence living in Ardèche in the southeast of France. Her sister Anna Kallmus, along with other family and friends, died in the Chełmno concentration camp. After World War II, d’Ora returned to Paris, profoundly affected by personal losses. While she lacked an elegant studio in Paris, d’Ora’s lasting connections to wealthy clients remained and many of them returned to her. While she accepted portrait commissions, mostly for financial stability, she also pushed into new, sometimes darker directions. Around 1948, she embarked on an astonishing series of photographs in displaced persons or refugee camps, which was commissioned by the United Nations. From around 1949 to 1958, d’Ora worked on a project, which she called “my big final work.” She visited numerous slaughterhouses in Paris, and amid the pools of blood and deathly screams, she stood in an elegant suit and a hat photographing the butchered animals hundreds of times.

Anonymous. “Madame d’Ora,” on the Neue Galerie website Nd [Online] Cited 30/03/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Madame D’Ora The Dolly Sisters (c. 1928, below); at second right, Trude Fleischmann The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna (c. 1926, below); and at right, Trude Fleischmann View of Michaelerplatz, Vienna (1929, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Dora Kallmus (Madame d'Ora) (Austrian, 1881–1963) 'The Dolly sisters' c. 1928 (installation view)

Dora Kallmus (Madame d’Ora) (Austrian, 1881–1963)
The Dolly sisters (installation views)
c. 1928
Gelatin silver photograph
18.0 x 21.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Around 1928 Madame d’Ora photographed the Dolly Sisters, who were celebrated for their glamorous performances in the 1920s. Jenny and Rosie Dolly, Hungarian-American identical twins, were vaudeville and cabaret dancers adored in Britain, the United States and across Europe for their beauty and erotically charged performances. In d’Ora’s photograph they embody the ideal of the modern woman, with bobbed hair and short skirts, dressed in glittering couture costumes and adorned with pearls.

Wall text from the exhibition

Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990) 'The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna' c. 1926 (installation view)

Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990)
The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna
c. 1926
Gelatin silver photograph
21.9 x 16.2cm (image)
22.9 x 17.1cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Trude Fleischmann studied photography in Paris and, after graduating from the Viennese visual arts college die Graphische, apprenticed in the studio of photographer Madame d’Ora. In 1920 Fleischmann opened her own studio, specialising in female nudes, celebrity and socialite portraits, and glamorous photographs of actors. In 1938 she fled Austria, eventually settling in New York, where she re-established her studio and continued to focus on portraits of high-profile figures. This portrait depicts the Viennese actress Sibylle Binder, who performed throughout Germany and Austria in the 1920s. Binder is photographed in glamorous dress and with the classic short, androgynous hairstyle of the New Woman.

Wall text from the exhibition

Sybille Binder (Austrian, 1895-1962)

Sybille Binder (5 January 1895 – 30 June 1962) was an Austrian actress of Jewish descent whose career of over 40 years was based variously in her home country, Germany and Britain, where she found success in films during the 1940s.

Career

Binder began her stage career in Berlin in 1915, then in 1918 moved to Munich, where she enjoyed success in classical drama. Between 1916 and 1918 she also appeared in a handful of silent films. In 1922, she returned to Berlin and received acclaim for her performance in Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit. Over the next few years she performed regularly in Germany and Austria then, in the mid-1930s as war approached and conditions in Germany became difficult, she made the decision to move to England.

Between 1942 and 1950 Binder featured in 13 British films, including several of superior quality. Her first screen appearance in Britain came auspiciously in the highly acclaimed supernatural drama Thunder Rock, playing opposite dramatic heavyweights including Michael Redgrave, James Mason and Frederick Valk. Other notable films in which Binder appeared were war drama Candlelight in Algeria (1944), hugely popular period melodrama Blanche Fury, espionage thriller Against the Wind and amnesia-themed romance Portrait from Life (all 1948).

Binder returned to Germany in 1950, settling in Düsseldorf, where she successfully picked up her stage career but did not attempt to break into the German film industry. She died on 30 June 1962, aged 67.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990) 'View of Michaelerplatz, Vienna' (Blick zum Michaelerplatz Wien) 1929 (installation view)

Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990)
View of Michaelerplatz, Vienna (Blick zum Michaelerplatz Wien)
1929
Gelatin silver photograph
18.4 x 16.6cm (image)
19.0 x 17.3cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
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 at third left, Kitty Hoffmann Posing dance group (Tanzgruppe Trude Goodwin) (1930, below); at third right, Lotte Jacobi Head of a dancer (1929, below); at second right, Gertrud Arndt Mask self-portrait No. 11 (1930, below); and at right, Gertrud Arndt Wera Waldek (1930, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

New Women, New Visions

Photography studios flourished in the early twentieth century. In Vienna, Austria, numerous prominent women photographers ran successful businesses, including Madame d’Ora and later Trude Fleischmann and Kitty Hoffmann. While Madame d’Ora’s glamorous portraits retained the soft focus characteristic of turn-of-the-century photography, the women in Fleischmann’s and Hoffmann’s images of the 1920s and 1930s matched the mood of the modern city. With their chic dress and bobbed haircuts, they represented the famed ‘New Woman’, or Neue Frau, an archetype that came to symbolise female empowerment and the shift away from traditional gender roles.

Opening in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, the Bauhaus art school experienced an influx of women students due to changes in the country’s constitution that guaranteed women the right to vote and study. Photography, while not officially taught at the Bauhaus for some years, flourished: it was seen to be an essential means of expression appropriate for the modern age. Lucia Moholy and her husband, Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, promoted the idea of ‘New Vision’ at the school. The camera was seen as the ultimate mirror of the everyday, while the camera-less images they produced allowed for great experimentation and abstraction.

Kitty Hoffmann (Austrian, 1900-1968) 'Posing dance group' (Tanzgruppe Trude Goodwin) 1930 (installation view)

Kitty Hoffmann (Austrian, 1900-1968)
Posing dance group (Tanzgruppe Trude Goodwin) (installation view)
1930
Gelatin silver photograph
15.9 x 19.8cm (image)
16.8 x 20.7cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Kitty Hoffmann (Austrian, 1900-1968)
Posing dance group (Tanzgruppe Trude Goodwin)
1930
Gelatin silver photograph
15.9 x 19.8cm (image) 16.8 x 20.7cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024

Kitty Hoffmann worked and studied at Vienna’s die Graphische visual arts college from 1922 to 1924. Three years later, upon completing her studies, she opened a photographic studio in the city, specialising in fashion and society portraiture. Hoffmann’s photographs were regularly published in popular lifestyle and theatre magazines of the time, including Die Dame von Heute (The Lady of Today) and Die Bühne (The Stage). This photograph depicts dancers from the Trude Goodwin dance group. The dancers form a graphic shape that echoes the oval stage-set behind them, encapsulating the Ausdruckstanz, or ‘expressive dance’ movement, which reached peak popularity in Vienna during the 1920s.

Wall text from the exhibition

Lotte Jacobi (German-American, 1896-1990)
Head of a dancer
1929, printed c. 1970
Gelatin silver photograph
26.4 x 33.2cm (image)
27.7 x 35.3cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
Public domain

Lotte Jacobi’s father and grandfather were also photographers, and her great-grandfather studied with Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype. This modernist portrait features Russian dancer Niuta Norskaya. The dancer’s pale, oval-shaped face is encompassed by her wide-brimmed black hat, resulting in a striking study of modern beauty.

Wall text from the exhibition

Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000) 'Mask self-portrait no. 11' (Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 11) 1930 (installation view)

Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000)
Mask self-portrait no. 11 (Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 11) (installation views)
1930
Gelatin silver photograph
22.9 x 14.7cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Gertrud Arndt (born Gertrud Hantschk in Upper Silicia) set out to become an architect, beginning a three-year apprenticeship in 1919 at the architecture firm of Karl Meinhardt in Erfurt, where her family lived at the time. While there, she began teaching herself photography by taking pictures of buildings in town. She also attended courses in typography, drawing, and art history at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of design). Encouraged by Meinhardt, a friend of Walter Gropius, Arndt was awarded a scholarship to continue her studies at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Enrolled from 1923 to 1927, Arndt took the Vorkurs (foundation course) from László Moholy-Nagy, who was a chief proponent of the value of experimentation with photography. After her Vorkurs, Georg Muche, leader of the weaving workshop, persuaded her to join his course, which then became the formal focus of her studies. Upon graduation, in March 1927, she married fellow Bauhaus graduate and architect Alfred Arndt. The couple moved to Probstzella in Eastern Germany, where Arndt photographed buildings for her husband’s architecture firm.

In 1929, Hannes Meyer invited Alfred Arndt to teach at the Bauhaus, where Arndt focused her energy on photography, entering her period of greatest activity, featuring portraits of friends, still-lifes, and a series of performative self-portraits, as well as At the Masters’ Houses, which shows the influence of her studies with Moholy-Nagy as well as her keen eye for architecture. After the Bauhaus closed, in 1932, the couple left Dessau and moved back to Probstzella. Three years after the end of World War II the family moved to Darmstadt; Arndt almost completely stopped making photographs.

Mitra Abbaspour, Associate Curator, Department of Photography “Gertrud Arndt,” on the MoMA website 2014 [Online] Cited 31/03/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000) 'Wera Waldek' 1930, printed 1984 (installation view)

Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000)
Wera Waldek
1930, printed 1984
From the Bauhaus portfolio I (1919-1933) 1984
Gelatin silver photograph
(19.0 x 22.5cm) irreg. (image)
27.0 x 35.3cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Galerie Kicken Berlin in memory of Rudolf Kicken (1947-2014), 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Originally wanting to study architecture, Gertrud Arndt enrolled at the Bauhaus school in 1923-1924, ultimately specialising in weaving. A self-taught photographer, she informally developed her skills while apprenticing at an architect’s office in Erfurt prior to her studies, later photographing buildings for her husband’s architecture firm. Printing this picture in its negative state, rather than turning it into a positive image, Arndt creates a striking dreamlike effect. The portrait depicts fellow Bauhaus architecture student Wera Waldek, who made designs for children’s play furniture and housing interiors. The image forms part of the Bauhaus Portfolio I 1919-1933, published by Rudolf Kicken Galerie in 1984.

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 in the bottom image, Florence Henri Still life (Nature morte) (1931 printed 1975, below); Elsa Thiemann (German, 1910-1981) Design for wallpaper (1930-1931); 1930s photographs by Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) see below; and two 1920s photographs by Lucia Moholy of the Bauhaus, Dessau, see below
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Elsa Thiemann trained in painting, graphic design and photography at the Bauhaus school. While there, she responded to an advertisement from school director Hannes Meyer for wallpaper designs to be considered for the new Bauhaus collection, planned for production by the wallpaper manufacturer Gebrüder Rasch. Thiemann’s designs used photograms of flowers and hand-coloured swirling patterns, which were meticulously cut, organised and pasted into repetitious symmetrical layouts. While her designs were not manufactured, likely due to their contrast with the brighter patterns ultimately selected for production, they remain as standalone works indicative of the experimental design being practised at the Bauhaus.

New acquisition. Wall text from the exhibition

Florence Henri (European, 1893-1982)
Still life (Nature morte)
1931, printed 1975
Gelatin silver photograph
35.9 x 47.9cm (image and sheet)
ed. 6/9
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022
© Florence Henri / Licensed by the Copyright Agency, Australia

After studying music and painting, Florence Henri was introduced to photography in 1927 while attending the Bauhaus school. There, she met László Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy, whose influence (especially Moholy’s) led Henri to focus solely on photography. In 1929 she established a studio in Paris, where she became renowned for her avant-garde and experimental practice. In addition to portraits of women, her work often features still-life compositions that combine everyday objects like envelopes and sheets of paper with natural elements such as flowers and leaves. Henri also frequently used mirrors as a means of fragmenting the pictorial space.

Wall text from the exhibition. New acquisition

Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing photographs by Yamawaki Michiko, top to bottom, left to right: Ginza (Street corner) (1932, below); Ginza (Women in matching kimonos and white parasols) (1932); Ginza (Woman walking with 1930s style dress, white, with white hat) (1932, below); Ginza (Two women crossing street, one with white hat) (1932, below); Ginza (Ginza Palace) (1932, below); Ginza (Pumps and sandals walking on sidewalk) (1932). New acquisitions
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Yamawaki Michiko and her husband spent two years studying at the Bauhaus art school in Dessau, Germany from 1930, returning to Japan in 1932. Taken in the summer of 1933, Yamawaki’s Tokyo street scenes show the influence of the Bauhaus vision, while highlighting the differing roles of women at a time of great social change. We see mothers carrying children, women in kimono holding parasols, and moga (modern girls) wearing knee-length dresses and Western-inspired clothes. Yamawaki used details from twenty-one of these photographs to create her bustling modernist photomontage Melted Tokyo, published in Asahi Camera magazine in 1933.

Wall text from the exhibition

Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) 'Ginza (Street corner)' 1932 (installation view)

Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932)
Ginza (Street corner) (installation view)
1932
Gelatin silver photograph
11.0 x 8.2 cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) 'Ginza (Woman walking with 1930s style dress, white, with white hat)' 1932 (installation view)

Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932)
Ginza (Woman walking with 1930s style dress, white, with white hat) (installation view)
1932
Gelatin silver photograph
11.2 x 8.3cm (image)
12.6 x 10.0cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) 'Ginza (Two women crossing street, one with white hat)' 1932 (installation view)

Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932)
Ginza (Two women crossing street, one with white hat) (installation view)
1932
Gelatin silver photograph
11.2 x 8.2cm (image)
12.6 x 10.0cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932)
Ginza (Ginza Palace) (installation view)
1932
Gelatin silver photograph
11.2 x 8.3cm (image)
12.5 x 10.0cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
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 top, Lucia Moholy Bauhaus residences Dessau, kitchen – sideboard (1926, below); and at bottom, Lucia Moholy Berlin Architecture Exhibition (1928, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989) 'Bauhaus residences Dessau, kitchen – sideboard' (Bauhaussiedlung Dessau, küche – anrichte) 1926 (installation view)

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Bauhaus residences Dessau, kitchen – sideboard (Bauhaussiedlung Dessau, küche – anrichte)
1926
Gelatin silver photograph
11.9 x 16.8cm (image)
13.0 x 17.9cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lucia Moholy is best known for documenting the architecture, people and creative outputs of the Bauhaus school. Her work was often incorrectly attributed to famous men of the school, such as its founder, Walter Gropius, and Moholy’s then husband, László Moholy-Nagy. In this photograph, Moholy captures Gropius’s kitchen in the Masters’ House. The building and the design schools nearby, built between 1925 and 1926, are exemplars of European modern architecture and design. Sharp lines and dynamic angles emphasise the modular design, displaying the modernist principles of photography that Moholy applied to her images of architectural spaces.

Wall text from the exhibition

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Bauhaus residences Dessau, kitchen – sideboard (Bauhaussiedlung Dessau, küche – anrichte)
1926
Gelatin silver photograph
11.9 x 16.8cm (image) 13.0 x 17.9cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023
© 2023 Lucia Moholy Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

“I suggest that Walter Gropius was most likely not interested in the ‘design’ of kitchens. These function rooms he would have not visited often nor did he cook. Gropius had a maid while in the Bauhaus as well as in later life. The kitchen at the Bauhaus was functional according to the times and the needs as seen by the employers of the maids who worked in them. Whereas the Frankfurt Kitchens were a result of attention to design as well as function and efficiency. …

Lucia had not enjoyed small town Dessau and intense campus life at the Bauhaus. She worked in Berlin but at in 1933 Moholy had to flee in fear of arrest for her communist association, leaving all her possessions behind including her negatives.

After time on Prague and Paris, Lucia Moholy settled In England in 1934 where she worked as a portrait photographer and teacher. …

After seeing her images as uncredited illustrations in the catalogue of a 1938 exhibition on the Bauhaus at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and many later publications, Lucia Moholy became aware that her negatives had survived. She found they had come into the possession of Walter Gropius who took them to his new teaching post America in 1937. He could easily have found Lucia post war. For years Lucia Moholy asked Gropius to give the plates back but he would not until her lawyers were able to force the return about half the original number in 1957. She complained that Gropius enjoyed the use and income from the photographs while she lived in want.”

Gael Newton AM. “Lucia Moholy: The Kitchen,” on the Photo-web website, March 2026 [Online] Cited 02/04/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

The question remains: what happened to the remaining negatives not returned by Walter Gropius to Lucia Moholy in the 1957 settlement? According to Moholy’s own card catalogue, which she used to keep track of her works, 330 negatives remained missing from her collection by the time of her death in 1989. Lost, damaged or stolen … the reputation of Gropius is forever sullied by his unseemly, grasping, patriarchal actions. MB

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989) 'Berlin Architecture Exhibition' (Exposition d'Architecture à Berlin en 1928) 1928 (installation view)

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Berlin Architecture Exhibition (Exposition d’Architecture à Berlin en 1928)
1928
Gelatin silver photograph
16.3 x 22.4cm (image)
16.9 x 22.9 cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1928 Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy left Dessau for a new life in Berlin. This image documents an innovative housing exhibition showcasing modern living. The display, designed by architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, featured new housing concepts in Zehlendorf, a Berlin neighbourhood. The graphic lettering on the building translates to ‘Live in a green environment, ideal case: Zehlendorf’. Moholy-Nagy designed the interiors, and Moholy’s images, with their signature focus on starkly contrasting vertical and horizontal lines, highlight their modernist design principles.

Wall text from the exhibition

Like many women of her time, Lucia Moholy often found herself in the shadow cast by her more conspicuous male peers – one of whom happened to be her husband, the photographer László Moholy-Nagy. After marrying in 1921, the couple moved to Weimar, Germany, so that he could begin a professorship at the Bauhaus, the influential German school of architecture, design, and applied arts. While László taught, Lucia undertook photography training, serving as an apprentice in Otto Eckner’s Bauhaus photography studio. By 1926 she had mastered a wide range of techniques, installed a darkroom in their home, and begun collaborating with her husband on experimental forms of cameraless photography.

As part of her photographic practice, Lucia began documenting the people and architectural spaces of the Bauhaus. Many of her images focus on the women who either supported or participated in the school’s activities. Edith Tschichold (1926), for instance, depicts the wife of German typographer and frequent Bauhaus collaborator Jan Tschichold. Meanwhile, Florence Henri (1927) portrays the notable Surrealist artist at the outset of her career, when she came to the Bauhaus in 1927 as a visiting photography student. Both portraits are tightly cropped around the women’s faces, revealing expressions of wistfulness or self-assurance that pull viewers into a shared emotional space.

One of Lucia’s more iconic portraits is an untitled photograph of her husband, who, sporting a machinist’s coveralls over his shirt and tie, humorously attempts to block the camera lens with his hand. The candid shot hints at the playful nature of the couple’s working relationship; once circulated, it also helped to shape László’s persona as an artist-constructor. Despite happy appearances, their relationship began to deteriorate as László declined to credit Lucia for many of their collaborations, including the celebrated 1925 book Malerei, Photografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film).

This was not the only – or even the most significant – erasure of Lucia’s career. Forced to flee Germany in 1933 due to the rise of the Nazi Party, she made the difficult decision to leave behind her collection of 560 glass-plate negatives, which she described as “my only tangible asset.”

Following World War II, in the midst of a revival of interest in the Bauhaus, she tried desperately to locate them with no success. It wasn’t until 1954 that Walter Gropius, founder and former head of the Bauhaus, acknowledged that the negatives were in his possession, that he had been reproducing them, and that he had no intention of returning them to her. Lucia Moholy’s precise visual records of the school’s architecture – such as Bauhaus Workshop Building from Below. Oblique View (1926) – had been circulated without attribution for years in order to promote Bauhaus aesthetics. In fact, 49 of her prints appeared uncredited in the catalogue accompanying MoMA’s exhibition Bauhaus, 1919–1928, which was mounted in 1938 with Gropius’s input.

As part of her legal efforts to reclaim the negatives, Lucia wrote, “Everybody, except myself, have used, and admit to having used my photographs […] and often also without mentioning my name. Everyone – except myself – have derived advantages from using my photographs, either directly, or indirectly, in a number of ways, be it in cash or prestige, or both.”

Her claim was ultimately successful, leading to the return of 230 extant negatives in 1957. However, the acknowledgement of her influence – both as a collaborator in László Moholy-Nagy’s photographic experiments, and as an agent in the construction of Bauhaus visual identity – remains an ongoing project.

Dana Ostrander, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography “Lucia Moholy,” on the MoMA website 2020 [Online] Cited 31/03/2026

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, Olive Cotton Girl with mirror (1938, below); Teacup ballet (1935 printed 1992, below); Shasta daisies (1937 printed 1992, below); at second right, Dora Maar Fashion study (c. 1936, below); and at right, Untitled (Study of Beauty (1936, 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, Olive Cotton’s Girl with mirror (1938, below); Teacup ballet (1935 printed 1992, below); Shasta daisies (1937 printed 1992, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) 'Girl with mirror' 1938 (installation view)

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Girl with mirror (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver photograph
31.8 x 29.9cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Olive Cotton created this image while assisting her colleague and then partner Max Dupain on location at beaches around Sydney. According to Cotton, when Dupain was shooting fashion photographs, she had the freedom to create her own images while the model was ‘waiting her turn to be photographed by Max’. Dupain’s camera tripod cast ‘long slanting lines of shadow’ against the sand. While its creation was incidental, this photograph demonstrates Cotton’s eye for composition and her mastery of light and shade, emphasising the graphic elements of the scene.

Wall text from the exhibition

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Girl with mirror
1938
Gelatin silver photograph
31.8 x 29.9cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
© The estate of Olive Cotton

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) 'Teacup ballet' 1935, printed 1992 (installation view)

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Teacup ballet (installation view)
1935, printed 1992
Gelatin silver photograph
36.0 x 29.2cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Upon purchasing a set of inexpensive cups and saucers to replace the mugs in photographer Max Dupain’s Sydney studio, where she was a studio assistant, Olive Cotton recognised the potential for a dynamic composition. Later describing the handles of the cups as ‘arms akimbo’, Cotton, in her efforts ‘to express a dance theme’, used a spotlight to accentuate shadows, resulting in a ‘ballet-like composition’. Through her deft use of lighting and arrangement of objects, the teacups appear transformed, as if they are ballerinas performing onstage. The image was immediately successful both in Australia and abroad, being included in the London Salon of Photography from September 1935.

Wall text from the exhibition

Olive Cotton (Australia 1911-2003) 'Teacup ballet' 1935, printed 1992

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Teacup ballet
1935, printed 1992
Gelatin silver photograph
36.0 x 29.2cm (image)
ed. 21/50
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
© The estate of Olive Cotton

Olive Cotton (Australia 1911-2003) 'Shasta daisies' 1937, printed 1992 (installation view)

Olive Cotton (Australia 1911-2003)
Shasta daisies
1937, printed 1992
Gelatin silver photograph
38.2 x 28.1cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

‘The camera can do more than merely record an unchanging picture of a subject … The lighting, the relation of the various objects to the shape of picture and many other factors can be changed by the individual, and this is where discernment and personality come into the picture as it were.’

~ Olive Cotton

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Shasta daisies
1937, printed 1992
Gelatin silver photograph
38.2 x 28.1cm (image)
ed. 8/25
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
© The estate of Olive Cotton

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) 'Fashion study' c. 1936 (installation view)

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Fashion study (installation view)
c. 1936
Gelatin silver photograph
Proposed acquisition

Dora Maar (French 1907-1997) 'Untitled (Study of beauty)' 1936 (installation view)

Dora Maar (French 1907-1997)
Untitled (Study of beauty) (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver photograph
33.0 x 24.1cm
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021

Dora Maar (French 1907-1997)
Untitled (Study of beauty)
1936
Gelatin silver photograph
33.0 x 24.1cm
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
© Dora Maar / Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia

Dora Maar, a French photographer, poet and painter, established her commercial studio in Paris in 1932, quickly gaining recognition as a portrait and fashion photographer. While known as one of Pablo Picasso’s muses and the inspiration for his Weeping woman paintings, Maar was an influential artist in her own right, painting well into her eighties. As a photographer, Maar developed an elegant and experimental style, drawing on her knowledge of avant-garde photography and the ideas underpinning Surrealism. In this work, an advertising commission for the haircare brand Dolfar, Maar explores the ideal of beauty, creating an image in which the subject appears like a classical statue come to life.

Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Featuring some of the most iconic images from the twentieth century by the likes of Diane Arbus, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Dorothea Lange, Olive Cotton and many more, Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light celebrates the images, lives and stories of more than 70 influential artists working between 1900 to 1975. Opening 28 November 2025 at NGV International, the exhibition features more than 300 rare and innovative photographs, prints, postcards, photobooks and magazines from the NGV Collection – with 170+ recently acquired and 130+ on display for the very first time.

Featuring portraiture, photojournalism, landscape photography, fashion photography, experimental avant-garde imagery and more, Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light explores the work of the artists against the backdrop of significant social, political and cultural events – from Melbourne to Tokyo, Paris to Buenos Aires. From historic images of the suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, through to the women’s liberation movement and beyond, the exhibition reveals how these artists have used key photographic styles to capture, reflect and challenge the world around them. This exhibition highlights the rich networks of exchange of information, ideas and support between many of these women across the world.

The exhibition showcases the work of prominent and leading figures of photography, as well as drawing attention to lesser-known artists. Featured artists include 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, Tokiwa Toyoko, Francesca Woodman, Yamazawa Eiko, among many others.

The exhibition reflects a recent strategic collecting focus on celebrating the contributions of women artists of the early twentieth century in the NGV Photography collection. Many of the new works on display – including by artists previously unrepresented in the NGV Collection – have been acquired with the generous support of the Bowness Family Foundation, who have been involved with the NGV for almost 25 years and who also generously contributed to the publication. There have also been significant works joining the NGV Collection with the generous support of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, as well as Professor Wang Gungwu, and Joy Anderson.

Highlight works include an outstanding selection of photographs by Dora Maar, including fashion photographs, social documentary images and portraiture. Dora Maar was a sophisticated artist and image-maker and deeply connected within the avant-garde community. In 1935-36, she created these studio images of Pablo Picasso, with whom she was romantically involved. In these portraits, on display in the exhibition, Maar turns the gaze of her camera onto Picasso, offering the viewer a candid insight into their private domestic lives.

A further highlight is Dorothea Lange’s instantly recognisable work, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936, commissioned as part of a campaign by the US government Farm Security Administration to bring recognition to the impacts of the Great Depression on working class families. Lange created several photographs of the woman, Florence Owens Thompson, and her children. This image, focussed on Thompson’s seemingly anxious face, became a poignant symbol of the times.

In the 1930s German-born Ilse Bing became known as the ‘Queen of Leica’ for her use of the small, hand-held camera which allowed her the flexibility to shoot from dizzying angles, create contrasts of light, shade and shadows, and dynamic perspectives. The exhibition will feature Bing’s iconic modernist image, Self-portrait 1931, showing the artist’s reflection, of herself and her camera, accompanied by her side profile in another angled mirror demonstrating the significance of the camera in her image-making.

Inner-city Melbourne of the 1970s is brought to life in the photographs of Ponch Hawkes, offering audiences a first-hand glimpse into the changing social dynamics and sense of activism of the period. Photographs on display include her documentation of life in communal houses, of urban graffiti calling for childcare and social housing, of celebrations for Gay Pride Week, and documentation of the Women’s Theatre Group, performing outdoors beneath a Women’s Liberation banner.

Also on display is Olive Cotton’s iconic Teacup ballet, 1935, a wonderful study of light, shadows and forms. Cotton had purchased an inexpensive set of cups and saucers to replace the mugs in the Sydney studio of photographer Max Dupain, where she was studio assistant. Realising their potential for a dynamic arrangement, she photographed the teacups with elongated shadows, creating a striking composition of shadow play that Cotton described as “ballet-like”.

American artist Lee Miller moved to Paris in 1929, where she became Man Ray’s photographic student, then colleague, model and lover – all the while creating her own extraordinary photographs. On display in the exhibition is Miller’s portrait of Man Ray, taken in 1931 in Miller’s Paris apartment depicting her subject framed tightly, his gaze diverted.

Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, better known by their adopted alliterative pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, were an artist duo who radically questioned the constraints of gender in their artwork and lives. The pair are represented in this exhibition with the artist’s book Aveux non Avenus, 1930. In this highly experimental book, featuring ‘essay-poems’ and collaborative photomontages, which feature self-portraits of Cahun with a shaved head and androgynous appearance and dress, Cahun and Moore raise powerful questions about identity, sexuality and self-expression.

Las Lavanderas (The Washerwomen) c. 1940, also on display, is one of several photographs created by Mexican artist Lolo Álvarez Bravo of women washing their clothes at a waterfront. The sun casts long shadows from a nearby structure, transforming the scene of everyday labour into one of dynamic angles and forms. Bravo is known for her passionate documentation of the peoples and cultures of Mexico, through such dynamic and vivid compositions.

Parliamentary Secretary for Creative Industries, Katie Hall, said: “This exhibition will celebrate the work of women photographers who documented the world around them from vastly different places and perspectives. The NGV continues to present exhibitions that show us life through different lenses and introduce us to creative trailblazers from around the world.”

Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV, said: “Like all collecting institutions globally, the NGV has been actively looking at historically underrepresented areas of our collection, including gender. Though this is a long and ongoing process, this exhibition offers an opportunity to celebrate and share the more than 300 works by women photographers, many of which we’ve collected since 2020. We hope this exhibition gives audiences the chance to discover the work of lesser-known photographers or deepen their appreciation of familiar ones.”

Professor Simon Tormey, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin, said: “This important exhibition foregrounds the often-overlooked contributions of women to the evolution of photography across the twentieth century. At Deakin, where we teach and research across Creative Arts and Photography, we are proud to support initiatives that celebrate artistic innovation and also challenge historical silences. This collaboration with the NGV exemplifies our commitment to the transformative power of the arts.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a beautifully illustrated publication exploring the images, lives and stories of women photographers from the pivotal period of 1900-1975. The publication will feature new essays from NGV Curators and international contributors including leading American art historian, critic and curator Abigail Solomon-Godeau; Emeritus Professor at the ANU School of Art & Design Helen Ennis; World Press Photo lead curator Amanda Maddox; photographer and writer Carla Williams, and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum curator Yamada Yuri. Women Photographers 1900–1975 will be co-published with Hatje Cantz in Berlin.

This exhibition coincides with the fifty-year anniversary of the first International Women’s Year in 1975, as declared by the United Nations.

Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria

Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Ilse Bing Salut de Schiaparelli (1934, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Salut de Schiaparelli 1934 (installation view)

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
Salut de Schiaparelli (installation view)
1934
Gelatin silver photograph
49.5 x 39.7cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998, United States 1941-1998) 'Salut de Schiaparelli' 1934

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
Salut de Schiaparelli
1934
Gelatin silver photograph
49.5 x 39.7cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022

Upon moving from Frankfurt to Paris in 1930, Ilse Bing established a studio known for producing innovative portraits and fashion photography. This photograph was commissioned by fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli for a new
perfume called Salut. Bing placed a scattered bouquet of lilies in the composition to represent the perfume’s scent. The image’s dreamlike quality is enhanced by Bing’s experimental use of the solarisation technique, which reverses the tones in a photograph.

Wall text from the exhibition

At Play: The Studio, Light and Shadows

In the 1920s, amid the aftermath of the First World War, many European avant-garde artists experimented with photography to actively ‘see’ the world anew. So-called New Photography emerged during this period, with images characterised by the play of light and shadow, extreme vantage points and the use of sharp focus. These techniques aimed to disorient the viewer – familiar scenes were made to feel unfamiliar.

Artists embracing these styles predominantly worked in studios, creating experimental images that explored the principles of New Photography. Some images were made purely as artistic exercises, while others demonstrate the use of experimental techniques for commercial purposes. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a great demand for modern photography in advertising, newspapers, catalogues and picture magazines. With the wide dissemination of these media, the influence of New Photography travelled far beyond Europe, and can be seen in works by Olive Cotton in Sydney, Lola Álvarez Bravo in Mexico City and Annemarie Heinrich in Buenos Aires.

Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at second left, Ilse Bing Salut de Schiaparelli (1934, above); at second right, Annemarie Heinrich (Argentinian born Germany, 1912-2005) Eva’s apple (La manzana de Eva) 1953; and at right, ringl+pit (German, active 1930-1933, Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern) Komol (1931 printed 1984, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

ringl+pit, Berlin Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Ellen Auerbach (American born Germany, 1906-2004) 'Komol' 1931, printed 1984 (installation view)

ringl+pit, Berlin
Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999)
Ellen Auerbach (American born Germany, 1906-2004)
Komol
1931, printed 1984
Gelatin silver photograph
34.4 x 23.3cm (image)
35.2 x 24.0cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Named after the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (Ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (Pit), photography studio ringl+pit was sought after for its highly innovative and experimental work. The studio’s work broke free from feminine ideals and expectations. Komol, an unconventional advertisement for hair dye, is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the shallow nature of commercialised femininity. ringl+pit’s playful productions speak to the safety of the artists’ shared space, described by art historian Elizabeth Otto as ‘a haven of humour and honesty for the photographers in contrast to the outside world that does not understand them’.

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 at left in the bottom image, Grace Lock The fly (c. 1960s); Ruth Bernhard Two Leaves (1952); and at right, Imogen Cunningham Agave design I (1920s, printed 1979)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Agave Design I
1920s, printed 1979
Gelatin silver photograph
32.6 x 25.6cm (image and sheet)
49.6 x 39.8cm (support)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979

Image from the Art Blart archive

Following the birth of her three sons, Imogen Cunningham had to close her portrait studio in Seattle. However, she found a way to continue taking pictures at home. According to Cunningham, she would spend the afternoons while her children napped photographing her plants, ‘because I couldn’t get out anywhere, and I had a garden’. In this close-up image of an agave, Cunningham focuses on the plant’s sharp lines and the play of light. The image is recognised as one of the most iconic abstracted avant-garde images of the early twentieth century. Soon after its creation, the image was included in the 1929 contemporary exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart, Germany.

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 two photographs by Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993) with at second right, Tribute to Salvador Toscano (1949 printed 1960s, below) New acquisition; and at right, The washerwomen (Las Lavanderas) (c. 1950, below) New acquisition
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, Lola Álvarez Bravo Tribute to Salvador Toscano (1949, printed 1960s) New acquisition; and at right, Lola Álvarez Bravo The washerwomen (Las Lavanderas) (c. 1950, below) New acquisition
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

New acquisitions

Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993) 'The washerwomen (Las Lavanderas) c. 1950 (installation view)

Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993)
The washerwomen (Las Lavanderas)
c. 1950
Gelatin silver photograph on cardboard
18.9 × 22.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

New acquisition

Throughout her career, Lola Álvarez Bravo took several photographs of women washing their clothes at the waterfront. In this image, a large shadow from a nearby structure is cast over a group of women, children and dogs. The shadow appears to symbolise Mexico’s industrial growth and post-revolution transformation. Álvarez Bravo implemented modernist photography techniques such as high contrasts and extreme viewpoints to transform scenes of everyday labour into graphic compositions of dynamic angles and forms.

Wall text from the exhibition

Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993)
The washerwomen (Las Lavanderas)
c. 1950
Gelatin silver photograph on cardboard
18.9 x 22.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

New acquisition

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 at left, Barbara Morgan (United States, 1900-1992) Hearst over the people (c. 1938-1939, below) New acquisition; at second left, Barbara Morgan City shell (1938, printed 1972); at second right, Margaret Bourke-White Campbell’s Soup No. 6 (1935, below) New acquisition; and at right, Margaret Bourke-White Beach accident, Coney Island (1952, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) 'Hearst over the people' c. 1938-1939 (installation view)

Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
Hearst over the people (installation view)
c. 1938-1939
Gelatin silver photograph
26.3 x 32.4cm (image)
26.8 x 33.0cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

New acquisition

After moving to New York in 1930 with her photojournalist husband, Barbara Morgan turned to photography after a decade devoted to painting and printmaking. While her children were sleeping, she would experiment with avant-garde photographic techniques. In this photomontage, the artist set out to ‘visually distort the consummate distorter’: media mogul William Randolph Hearst, notorious for his sensationalist news empire. Hearst’s grinning face is stretched into a sinister omniscient octopus, its tentacles writhing into crowds of workers on the street. First published in the influential left-wing magazine New Masses, this is a compelling depiction of psychological infiltration. It also, perhaps, proposes Hearst as an effigy of authority for agitators to protest.

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 at left, Berenice Abbott New York at Night (1932); at second left, Berenice Abbott Old Post Office, Broadway and Park Row, Manhattan, May 25 (1938, below); and at right, Berenice Abbott Park Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, Manhattan, October 8 (1936)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Cities, Industries, Technologies

The early decades of the twentieth century came to be known as the Machine Age due to rapidly increasing automation, technological change and mass production. As cities industrialised, photographers responded by capturing buildings, workers and crowds.

Germaine Krull’s photographs from the 1920s and 1930s exemplify her dynamic, modern vision. Reflecting on the inspiration she gained from photographing cranes and bridges in Europe, which eventually led to the production of her famed 1928 photobook Métal, she said: “These steel giants revealed something to me that made me love photography again. From this moment onward, I began to SEE things as the eye sees them, and it is at this moment that photography was born for me.”

Machine Age artists were also experimenting with photomontage, a method that offered radical new perspectives and challenged conventional ways of seeing. Photomontage emerged in direct response to industrial development, as cities expanded and everyday life transformed. Barbara Morgan’s images reflect on the tension between the natural and the constructed. In contrast, Varvara Stepanova and Aleksandr Rodchenko embraced the tools of mass production, combining design, image-making and progressive printing techniques to create graphic publications that promoted the Soviet Union’s industrial power to a wide audience.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Old Post Office, Broadway and Park Row, Manhattan, May 25' 1938 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Old Post Office, Broadway and Park Row, Manhattan, May 25 (installation view0
1938
Gelatin silver photograph
23.9 x 19.3cm (image)
25.3 x 20.3cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

New acquisition

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Old Post Office, Broadway and Park Row, Manhattan, May 25
1938
Gelatin silver photograph
23.9 x 19.3cm (image)
25.3 x 20.3cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021

New acquisition

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Park Avenue and 39th Street, New York' 1936

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, Manhattan, October 8
1936
Gelatin silver photograph
19.3 x 24.3cm (image) (irreg)
20.2 x 25.2cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021

Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Margaret Bourke-White Campbell’s Soup No. 6 (1935, below); Margaret Bourke-White Beach accident, Coney Island (1952, below); and at right, Berenice Abbott New York at night (1932 printed c. 1975, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) 'Campbell's Soup #6' 1935 (installation view)

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Campbell’s Soup #6 (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
17.3 × 24.1cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
© Public Domain
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

New acquisition

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Campbell’s Soup #6
1935
Gelatin silver print
17.3 × 24.1cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Public Domain

New acquisition

Margaret Bourke-White became widely known for her documentation of workers and scenes of modern industry. Her photography was used on the cover of the first issue of Fortune magazine in 1930, and on the first photographically illustrated cover of Life in 1936. Bourke-White often documented aspects of the Machine Age, contrasting machines and human labourers. Taken in a factory owned by Campbell’s, a major American canned-food company established in 1869, this photograph captures part of the canning process. Bourke-White’s framing, which does not show the worker’s face, amplifies the dominance of the machine. The image first featured as a commission for a local food magazine alongside the caption ‘tangled and tricky, spaghetti defeats the mechanic’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Beach accident, Coney Island
1952
Gelatin silver photograph
35.2 x 27.9cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1973
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'New York at night' 1932, printed c. 1975 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York at night
1932, printed c. 1975
Gelatin silver photograph
34.1 x 26.1cm (image and sheet)
49.8 x 40.0cm (support)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Rosa Zerfas (1896-1983), 1985
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This photograph of the illuminated buildings of New York is the result of a fifteen-minute exposure taken from high up in the Empire State Building. The idea of documenting a changing metropolis recalls the project of pioneering French photographer Eugène Atget, who recorded Paris as it transitioned from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Berenice Abbott had befriended Atget through fellow American émigré artist Man Ray, for whom she worked as a darkroom assistant after moving to Paris in 1921. Atget’s influence on Abbott was profound: on her return to New York in 1929 she focused on documenting the city’s civic spaces and architecture.

Wall text from the exhibition

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York at Night
1932
Gelatin silver print
12 7/8 x 10 9/16″ (32.7 x 26.9cm)

Photograph from the Art Blart archive

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Changing New York' 1939 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Changing New York
1939
Artist’s book: half-tone and letterpress text, blue cloth cover, photographic dust jacket
1st edition
Purchased NGV Foundation 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

New acquisition

In her funding proposal for the photobook Changing New York, Berenice Abbott described her desire to capture the ‘spirit’ of the city, driven by the realisation that ‘the tempo of the metropolis is not of eternity, or even time, but of the vanishing instant’. The images in the photobook are accompanied by texts written by Abbott’s partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland. However, recent research has revealed that Abbott and McCausland’s original intentions for the book were significantly different to what was ultimately published, included alternate texts and a more innovative interplay between words and images.

Vitrine text from the exhibition

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) 'Fort Peck Dam, Montana' Front cover, 'Life' magazine, first issue, November 1936 (left); Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) 'Fort Peck Dam, Montana' Front cover, 'Life' magazine, first issue, November 1936, 'Salesman's edition' (second left); Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) 'Fort Peck Dam, Montana' reproduced on front cover, Life magazine, tenth anniversary issue, 25 November 1946 (right)

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Fort Peck Dam, Montana
Front cover, Life magazine, first issue, November 1936
Published by Time Inc.
Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text
Shaw research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Fort Peck Dam, Montana
Front cover, Life magazine, first issue, November 1936, ‘Salesman’s edition’
Published by Time Inc.
Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text
Shaw research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Fort Peck Dam, Montana
Reproduced on front cover, Life magazine, tenth anniversary issue, 25 November 1946
Published by Time Inc.
Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text
Shaw research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

New acquisitions

When the American publication Life was purchased by Henry Luce in 1936, it was transformed into a photographic news magazine. Its aim was to let its readers ‘see’ the world. Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White had preciously worked with Luce at Fortune magazine, and a year later he sent Bourke-White to the Soviet Union as the first official foreign photographer allowed to create images of Soviet industry. Later, she was the first accredited woman photographer assigned to photograph the effects of the Second World War.

In 1936 Life magazine gave Margaret Bourke-White the brief of seeking out something ‘grand’ and aspirational at the chain of dams being built at the Columbia River basin. The dams were being built to stimulate the economy as the United States grappled with the devastating effects of the Great Depression. The resulting photograph was selected for the first cover of the relaunched Life magazine. An image of modern industry, the composition emphasises the graphic forms and patterns created by the bases of the elevated spillway. The pillars seem to repeat endlessly, overshadowing two workers dwarfed by the enormous construction. Bourke-White’s image is considered an iconic representation of the Machine Age.

Vitrine text from the exhibition

New acquisitions

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) 'Fort Peck Dam, Montana'
Front cover, 'Life' magazine, first issue, November 1936

Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) Hammer in bloom 1940s New acquisition; at second left, Germaine Krull The Eiffel Tower (c. 1928, below); at third left, Germaine Krull At the Galeries Lafayette c. 1930 New acquisition; at centre, Bea Maddock Square (1972, below); at third right, Ilse Bing Champs de Mars (1931 printed 1994, below) New acquisition; at second right, Heather George The last wall of Melbourne’s Old Eastern Markets comes down for the Southern Cross (c. 1966 printed 1978, below); and at right, Olive Cotton Radio telescope, Parkes (1964)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Germaine Krull (Dutch born Germany, 1897-1985) 'The Eiffel Tower' c. 1928 (installation view)

Germaine Krull (Dutch born Germany, 1897-1985)
The Eiffel Tower (installation view)
c. 1928
Gelatin silver photograph
17.0 x 24.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

New acquisition

Germaine Krull (Dutch born Germany, 1897-1985)
The Eiffel Tower
c. 1928
Gelatin silver photograph
17.0 x 24.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022

New acquisition

Germaine Krull photographed industrial forms, political upheaval and modern life. Trained in Munich, she opened a portrait studio in 1919, relocating to Paris in 1926. Three years later, Krull’s photographs were included in the renowned 1929 exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart, Germany, the first international exhibition of modernist photography. During the 1920s the Eiffel Tower became a symbol of modernity for many artists, including Krull. In this image, she reimagines the visual language of the man-made structure, highlighting both
the beauty and functionality of the famous landmark. Krull led a peripatetic life across four continents, focusing on photojournalism in South-East Asia after the Second World War and later living among Tibetan monks.

Wall text from the exhibition

Bea Maddock (Australian, 1934-2016)
'Square' 1972 (installation view)

Bea Maddock (Australian, 1934-2016)
Square
1972
Photo-etching and etching
46.2 × 36.7cm (image) 49.0 × 39.4cm (plate) 76.0 × 56.8cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1973
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

In the 1970s, Australian artist Bea Maddock embraced the photo-etching process, which incorporates pen and ink. She regularly used found images as the basis for these works. In Square, Maddock overlaid an image of people in a crowd, taken from ‘a book on movement of people in cities’, with a grid structure. As she said, “The actual grid comes from the windows in the National Gallery School, Victorian College of the Arts … the windows had little grills on them … and so they got drawn in because that’s how I saw the world – through those windows.”

Wall text from the exhibition

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) 'Champs de Mars' 1931, printed 1994 (installation view)

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
Champs de Mars (installation view)
1931, printed 1994
Gelatin silver photograph
21.9 x 33.1cm (image) 27.6 x 35.3cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
Champs de Mars
1931, printed 1994
Gelatin silver photograph
21.9 x 33.1cm (image) 27.6 x 35.3cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022

Taken atop the Eiffel Tower, this image sees Ilse Bing turn her lightweight 35 mm Leica camera downwards, photographing the people and bustling city below. The distance created by this dizzying viewpoint reduces the scene to a pattern of shapes and forms. Images such as these were characteristic of a ‘new way of seeing’ that was adopted by avant-garde photographers during the interwar period.

Wall text from the exhibition

Heather George (Australian, 1907-1983)
The last wall of Melbourne’s Old Eastern Markets comes down for the Southern Cross
c. 1966, printed 1978
From the Melbourne, old buildings and new projects series (c. 1966)
Gelatin silver photograph
24.0 × 29.1cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1980
Public domain

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 at left, Germaine Krull At the Galeries Lafayette c. 1930 New acquisition; at second left, Bea Maddock Square (1972, above); at third left, Ilse Bing Champs de Mars (1931 printed 1994, above) New acquisition; at second right, Heather George The last wall of Melbourne’s Old Eastern Markets comes down for the Southern Cross (c. 1966 printed 1978, above); and at right, Olive Cotton Radio telescope, Parkes (1964)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) and Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958) 'USSR in construction, no.12 (Parachute issue)' 1935 (installation view)

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) and Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958)
USSR in construction, no.12 (Parachute issue) (installation views)
1935
Illustrated journal: colour rotogravure, 22 pages with fold-out inserts, lithographic cover
42.3 x 60.3 x 1.2cm (open)
42.3 x 30.3 x 0.4cm (closed)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, NGV Supporters of Prints and Drawings, 2019
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Varvara Stepanova and her husband, fellow artist and designer Aleksandr Rodchenko, were founder-members of the First Working Group of Constructivists. This is a French-language edition of USSR in Construction, a journal that aimed to reflect, through photography, the modernisation of the Soviet Union and to promote its industrial power. The journal employed cutting-edge artistic and printing developments, and this issue was designed by Stepanova and Rodchenko using original ideas around photomontage and page design. Dedicated to the ‘brave Soviet paratroopers’, the so-called ‘Parachute’ issue draws upon the circular form of the opened parachute.

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 collotypes from Germaine Krull’s portfolio Métal 1928
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

One of the most significant modernist photobooks of the 1920s, Germaine Krull’s Métal portfolio comprises sixty-four images printed on individual sheets, a title page and a three-page preface by the French writer and journalist Florent Fels. Krull photographed iron structures such as cranes and transport bridges in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Marseille and Saint-Malo, as well as the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Krull showcases the beauty and innovation of the structures, conveying the sense of awe that accompanied the rapid industrialisation of the time. The presentation of the photographs – loose, to be arranged however the viewer chooses – is also radical, allowing for endless interpretations.

Wall text from the exhibition

Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985) 'Métal' 1928

Germaine Krull (photographer) Cover design by M. Tchimoukow. 'MÉTAL' cover 1928

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio 'MÉTAL' 1928

Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985)
Métal
1928
64 black and white collotype plates, letterpress on paper, black cloth-backed paper-covered board portfolio with ribbons
30.5 x 23.5 x 2.5cm (overall)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023

Photographs from the Art Blart posting Germaine Krull Métal 1928, December 2018. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Germaine Krull’s 1928 publication Métal is often described as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Métal is not a book in a conventional sense, of sequential pages bound together with a narrative to guide the structure. Rather, when looking through this new acquisition to the NGV Collection you can immediately appreciate its unique design as an object. This dynamic format which, along with the vitality of the photography, has continued to inspire graphic designers, book publishers and artists since its publication almost a century ago.

Métal consists of a folded board cover, with ribbons attached, that acts as a folder for the pages within. The cover, designed by artist Lou Tchimoukow, reproduces one of Krull’s photographs of a detail of machinery on Paris’s Eiffel Tower. This image is overlaid with bold, vertically arranged letters spelling out ‘KRULL’ in a staggered pattern that mimics the lines of the structure beneath. Within the folder are sixty-four unbound plates. Each plate reproduces a photograph by Germaine Krull of industrial forms (and on one occasion, two images to a page) printed as collotypes, as well as the words ‘Krull, Métal’ at the top left, the plate number at the top right, and the publisher’s information ‘A. Calavas, Paris’ at the base. There is also an insert of eight pages (two sheets folded) that includes texts by journalist Florent Fels, and words from Krull herself. …

For Métal, Krull brought together a selection of recent photographs which, as she wrote in the introductory text, were from sites that included the Eiffel Tower, as well as the cranes and transport bridges of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Marseille and Saint-Malo. Apart from the Eiffel Tower, they are emblematic of new industries and engineering emerging in these European cities in the decade after the end of the First World War and could, at first glance, be read as a tribute to modernity as seen through this rapid industrial development.

The presentation of the photographs, however, disrupts the opportunity for any clear narrative, or interpretation. While they are numbered, Krull’s images are printed without any captions (a radical technique in a photobook for the period). The audience is encouraged to actively engage: they are able to construct their own sequences and visual associations. And the composition of the images is highly varied – some close up and cropped, showing the cogs, bolts and mechanics; some reveal dizzying angles and perspectives; some show clear lines, some are abstracted; the majority are taken outside, some are within a factory; some are printed on the vertical, some on the horizontal; some are the result of multiple exposures, as if to emphasise a sense of movement or energy.

Art historian Professor Kim Sichel writes that Krull constructs an ‘activist narrative’ in Métal: ‘Through narrative techniques that are part taxonomy, part lyrical poem, part vertiginous montage, part Industrial-Age adulation, and by making the whole volume uncomfortable and strange to read, she brings her machine parts to life as they oscillate uneasily throughout the album’.2

The photographs in Métal can be linked to contemporary art movements circulating within Europe, such as the visual language of the ‘New Vision’ styles of photography emerging out of the Bauhaus in Germany, or the clean lines of the ‘New Objectivity’ as demonstrated by photographers, such as Albert Renger-Patzsch. Krull’s photographic vision, however, remains dynamic and unique – it does not follow one clear aesthetic or technical path. Métal is an innovative publication: it is open-ended and allows for endless interpretations.

2/ Kim Sichel, “Montage: Germaine Krull’s Métal,” in Sichel, Kim, Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France, Yale University Press, Connecticut, 2020, pp. 33–4.

Maggie Finch. “Germaine Krull Métal portfolio 1928,” on the NGV website 22 Oct 25 [Online] Cited 24/12/2025. This article first appeared in the January–February 2024 edition of NGV Magazine. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

NGV International
180 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Open daily, 10am – 5pm

Exhibition: ’31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim’ at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid

“What did it mean for these women artists, at what level was it a recognition of their undoubted skill as artists, when so many largely vanished without trace?” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 19th September, 2024 – 5th January, 2025

Curator: Patricia Mayayo

Artists: Djuna Barnes / Xenia Cage / Leonora Carrington / Leonor Fini / Suzy Frelinghuysen / Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven / Meraud Guinness Guevara / Anne Harvey / Valentine Hugo / Buffie Johnson / Frida Kahlo / Jacqueline Lamba / Eyre de Lanux / Gypsy Rose Lee / Hazel McKinley / Aline Meyer Liebman / Louise Nevelson / Meret Oppenheim / Milena Pavlovic-Barilli / Barbara Poe-Levee Reis / Irene Rice Pereira / Kay Sage / Gretchen Schoeninger / Sonja Sekula / Esphyr Slobodkina / Hedda Sterne / Sophie Taeuber-Arp / Dorothea Tanning / Julia Thecla / Pegeen Vail Guggenheim / Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Aline Meyer Liebman (American, 1879-1966) 'Gray Day (Sand Dunes)' c. 1929 from the exhibition '31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim' at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, Sept 2024 - Jan 2025

Aline Meyer Liebman (American, 1879-1966)
Gray Day (Sand Dunes)
c. 1929
Gouache on board
35.5 x 48cm
The 31 Women Collection
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

Short biography: Aline Meyer Liebman (1879-1966). Born in Los Angeles, Aline Meyer Liebman studied at the Art Students League in New York and received the support of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. By the 1930s she had already become a consolidated artist and was the subject of a solo show at Walker Galleries in 1936. Meyer Liebman was also known for her work as a collector of art and photography. She acquired works by O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Max Ernst, among others. Liebman kept a broad circle of relationships with key people in the New York art world, such as Peggy Guggenheim, who included her work Painted Dream (1935) in Exhibition by 31 Women. Other notable facets include her political and philanthropic work: aside from supporting President Roosevelt, she became a member of the New York League of Women Voters and designed a poster for the organization in 1944.

While it is fantastic to see this “recreation” (many of the original art works are unknown or missing and others have been substituted by the same artist in their place) of Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 Exhibition by 31 Women “organised in her New York gallery ‘Art of This Century’, one of the first exhibitions in the United States to showcase works exclusively by European and American women,” I am conflicted by this exhibition. Conflicted, conflicted, conflicted.

Wealthy white women uses influence and money to promote women artists when no one else would, a patron reinforcing female participation introducing “well-established figures within the artistic landscape as well as emerging talent.” But I have a feeling that this group of female artists was part of an elite cohort – a privileged, internalist, internationalist, undoubtedly incestuous (in terms of knowing each other) clique of humans that knew the right people, especially through their connections with male artists.

As ever with the art world, it’s not what you know it’s who you know. Which artist has the ear of which curator; which artist is “fashionable” at the moment; and which artist is supported by which patron and gallery. It’s all about connections, and these women, whether emerging or established, had those connections. They were part of an educated elite that was at one and the same time, both exclusive and excluding (no Black American or Asian artists here… think of the times!)

And while the relationship between art and bourgeois life central to an earlier ideal of culture (the artist and their patron) has changed since the Second World War and the playing field has become much more egalitarian, my cynicism and socialism still rails at those with power and how they withhold their largesse. You only have to look at the photograph of Peggy Guggenheim in the entrance hall of her eighteenth century Venetian palace or the naming of so many galleries in art museums after wealthy patrons to understand what I mean.

What did it mean for these women artists, at what level was it a recognition of their undoubted skill as artists, when so many largely vanished without trace?

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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.

The idea of the artist as central member of a spiritual elite embodying an alternative to Philistine commercialism, or even pointing the way to humankind’s salvation, has powered a variety of movements as different as Aestheticism, Realism, Dada, De Stijl, and Russian Constructivism. This was the conception of culture that crystallized in the notion of the avant-garde, whose “function” – in Clement Greenberg’s classic formulation of 1939 – was “to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence.”[1]

Greenberg’s text touchingly reveals the double sense of the idea of culture, as both redeeming force of the existing system and as a sort of critique by enactment of an alternative set of values. In this conception, the essence of art, incarnated in the avant-garde, is its alienation from the norms of bourgeois society (hence, in the case of modernist abstraction, its abandonment of going systems of representation). On the other hand, Greenberg acknowledged that “No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income” and even that “in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real.”[2]

This paradox is nothing but the place of culture in capitalist society, in its most concentrated form. Given the distinctive social character of art objects, as handmade luxury goods in a world dominated by mechanized mass production, they offer both their producers and their consumers an experience outside the “everyday life” of the market. Expressive, in its very freedom from monetary considerations, of the power of money and of the access to free time made possible by money, art is a token and a perk of social distinction for those who own and even for those who merely appreciate it. The artist, as producer of this token, shares in the distinction, though (for the most part) not in the wealth that supports the social practice of art as a whole. It was the very separation of the world of cultural production from the norm of capitalist investment and production that made it potentially so valuable. By means of critique, culture cleanses modern society of the sin of commercialism, allowing its dominating classes to see themselves as worthy inheritors of the position of the aristocracy they displaced.

The picture I have sketched here, hardly a novel one, evidently owes a great deal to Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of what he calls “the field of cultural production.” That analysis reveals in particular the close relation between, on the one hand, the social antagonism between the producers of culture and the upper-class consumers from whom they are separated by style of life and self-conception as well as degree of social power, and, on the other, the fact that “the cult of art and the artist… is one of the necessary components of the bourgeois ‘art of living,’ to which it brings a ‘supplément d’âme,’ its spiritualistic point of honor.”[3] This cultural system, evolved during the nineteenth century, survived until well into the twentieth. But the last twenty years have seen the acceleration of a process of change, whose origin is traceable to the end of the Second World War.[4] What changed was not the centrality of the “cult of art” to the bourgeois “art of living” but the felt antipathy between art and bourgeois life central to the earlier ideal of culture.

Paul Mattick. “After the Gold Rush,” on the American Society for Aesthetics website 2010 [Online] Cited 12/12/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

1/ C. Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” in idem, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 5.
2/ Ibid., p. 8
3/ P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 44.
4/ For an in-depth discussion, see Katy Siegel, Since ’45: American Art in the Age of Extremes (London: Reaktion, 2016)

Installation view of the exhibition 31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim at Fundación MAPFRE showing at left, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli’s Juno and Vulcan (1936, below); at second left, Leonora Carrington’s The Horses of Lord Candlestick (1938, below); and at right, Buffie Johnson’s The Middle Way / The Great Mother Rules the Sky (Astor Mural) (1949-1959, below)

In 1943, the renowned art collector Peggy Guggenheim organised in her New York gallery ‘Art of This Century’, one of the first exhibitions in the United States to showcase works exclusively by European and American women, titled Exhibition by 31 Women. The show was conceived by Guggenheim in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, and the artists were selected by a jury whose members included André Breton, Max Ernst and Duchamp himself. Guggenheim, as the sole woman on the jury, was in a privileged position to provide a female perspective in the selection process.

These women, many of whom were associated with Surrealism or abstraction, maintained an ambiguous position within both trends. Often, they employed these styles to reformulate and challenge them, preserving their independence and shedding light on the patriarchal assumptions underlying these artistic movements.

31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim presents a curated selection and reinterpretation of that initiative, including all the artists featured in the original show. With this exhibition, the Foundation aims not only to honor Peggy Guggenheim’s significant role as one of the foremost patrons and collectors of the 20th century, but also shift the narrative away from viewing these women primarily through their connections with male artists. Instead, it highlights the networks of collaboration, solidarity, and friendship they established among themselves.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Sonja Sekula (American, 1918-1963) 'Waiting for Foam' 1944 from the exhibition '31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim' at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, Sept 2024 - Jan 2025

Sonja Sekula (American, 1918-1963)
Waiting for Foam
1944
Oil on canvas
40.3 x 49.8cm
The 31 Women Collection
© Estate of Sonja Sekula
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

Short biography: Sonja Sekula (1918-1963). Born in Lucerne from a Hungarian father and a Swiss mother, Sonja Sekula emigrated to New York in 1936, where her father had moved their family business. In 1938 she attempted suicide for the first time and from that point onward began suffering from mental health issues. Through her well-connected family, Sekula was able to meet André Breton and other European Surrealists in the early 1940s. In mid-decade, she travelled to Mexico and came into contact with Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington. Later, she traversed the northeastern United States, discovering the imagery of Native American people. The primitivist symbols in her canvases are interwoven with decorative patterns, intense colours, and a juxtaposition of viewpoints. At the time, Sekula’s work was well received by critics, some suggesting that there was a hidden symbolism related to her homosexuality. Aside from including her painting Composition at Exhibition by 31 Women, Peggy Guggenheim dedicated a solo exhibition to Sekula’s work in 1946. Two years later Sonja Sekula joined the Betty Parsons Gallery, which would host five solo exhibitions between 1948 and 1957. In 1951, a day after the opening of her third exhibition, she suffered a nervous breakdown. The artist spent the following years coming in and out of mental health clinics in the United States and Switzerland. In 1963 she committed suicide in her Zurich studio.

Louise Nevelson (American, 1899-1988) 'Untitled' 1933 from the exhibition '31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim' at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, Sept 2024 - Jan 2025

Louise Nevelson (American, 1899-1988)
Untitled
1933
Black painted terracotta
The 31 Women Collection
© Louise Nevelson, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

Short biography: Louise Nevelson (1899-1988). Born in Ukraine, Louise Nevelson emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of six. After studying in Germany under Hans Hofmann, she settled in New York, where she met Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Nevelson collaborated on one of Rivera’s murals while receiving lessons from George Grosz and Chaim Gross. Her first terracotta works – painted in black and often subject to the application of a form of engraving – reveal the influence of Central American art that she had come to know through Kahlo and Rivera. Furthermore, Louise Nevelson participated in the association American Abstract Artists (AAA) and was often in the company of Frederick Kiesler and Peggy Guggenheim, who selected her work Column for Exhibition by 31 Women. In the 1950s she began to accumulate a large collection of wooden fragments, which would give rise to her most characteristic working method. First, she painted each piece black, white, or gold. Later, she piled and stored the fragments. Finally, she assembled the pieces in large abstract constructions. In 1956 she began to use milk cartons and wood to produce small embedded reliefs, combining them to create increasingly large ensembles. Her work received much critical acclaim after her participation in the Moon Garden Plus exhibition in New York, in 1958.

Highlight

Fundación MAPFRE presents 31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim, featuring works by thirty-one artists who participated in Exhibition by 31 Women, a show organised in 1943 by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of This Century gallery in New York. Most of these creators, who came from Europe and the United States, were linked to the Surrealist movement or to abstraction, and included both well-established figures within the artistic landscape as well as emerging talent.

The exhibition highlights Peggy Guggenheim’s important role as a patron, addressing the context in which the artists she became associated with at her New York gallery developed their work, as well as the networks of collaboration that were established between them.

KEYS

Art Also Belongs to Women

In her famous article of 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists”, Linda Nochlin stated: “In the field of art history, the white Western male viewpoint, has been unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian.” This text finally advocated the role played by many women who had been dismissed on the basis of their gender throughout the history of art and have only recently begun to occupy the place they deserve – along with writers, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. The artists featured in 31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim, such as Frida Kahlo, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Valentine Hugo, and Dorothea Taning, could easily figure in Nochlin’s list, which included figures such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffmann, Safo, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Emily Dickinson.

Surrealism

Surrealism, a term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, refers to the movement led by André Breton, who defined it as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought.” Rooted in Dadaism and Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, Surrealists expressed themselves through writing, photography, performance, painting, collage, and music. Although Surrealism in principle advocated gender equality and supported the work of women artists, in practice women were considered almost as objects, rather than creative subjects.

Peggy Guggenheim

Patron and art lover, Peggy Guggenheim (New York, 1898 – Padova, 1979) was one of the most important collectors and promoters of avant-garde art of the 20th century. The daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman, and niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, founder of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, she decided to move to Europe in 1921. In Paris she established relationships with Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and Djuna Barnes, among others. Later, she settled in London, where she opened her first gallery in 1938. Under the name Guggenheim Jeune, the gallery featured works by Vasili Kandinsky and Yves Tanguy. Prior to the Nazi occupation of France, Guggenheim returned to Paris and acquired some of the most important works in her collection, which she managed to take with her when she fled to the United States.

In 1942, once she had settled in New York, Guggenheim opened the Art of This Century Gallery on West 57th street. Aside from displaying her own collection, the space became a platform for young artists, among which were the women who took part in Exhibition by 31 Women.

THE EXHIBITION

In 1943 the renowned collector Peggy Guggenheim organised one of the first exhibitions dedicated exclusively to the work of European and North American women artists at her New York gallery Art of This Century. Titled Exhibition by 31 Women, the show was conceived by Guggenheim in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp. The selection of artists was carried out by a jury whose members included André Breton, Max Ernst, and Duchamp himself. As the only woman in the jury, Guggenheim was able to contribute a female perspective to the process. In the press release, the gallerist herself presented the exhibition as a “testimony to the fact that the creative ability of women is by no means restricted to the decorative vein, as could be deduced from the history of art by women throughout the ages.” Her objective was to present the work of these creators as independent artists, distancing them from the traditional roles they had been given as muses or models.

The list of works published for the exhibition did not contain photographs, only titles, which were often quite unspecific, such as “still life” or “composition”. With the exception of a few cases, it is difficult to ascertain which works were on display at 31 Women.

31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim presents a selection and a reinterpretation of The 31 Women Collection repository; a collection created by the North American producer and collector Jenna Segal in 2020, featuring works by the same artists who participated in the historic exhibition of 1943.

Through this exhibition, Fundación MAPFRE aims to disseminate the work and vision conceived by Peggy Guggenheim at her New York Gallery, further breaking with the narrative that has often valued the contributions of women artists in terms of their relationships with male artists, while focusing more specifically on the networks of collaboration, solidarity, and friendship that were established between them. Associated mostly with Surrealism or abstraction, these women used said languages in an effort to reformulate and question them, maintaining their independence and highlighting the patriarchal precepts such movements were based on.

All of the works on display – close to forty – belong to The 31 Women Collection. Likewise, the exhibition also features photographs, publications, and other pieces; contextualising and complementing the show’s approximation to the scene of North American women artists of the time. Along with the exceptional loan from The 31 Women Collection, the exhibition is also supported by the Vitra Design Museum, the Lafuente Archive, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Documentation Center.

The exhibition discourse is articulated in different sections, the first of which introduces the viewer to the work carried out by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of This Century gallery, and in particular her support of women artists of the time. The following sections pose an approximation to some of the main thematic axes and strategies explored by the creators featured in Exhibition by 31 Women, who sought to assert their independence and avoid clichés associated with the label “female artist” that were commonplace in the world of art at the time.

Art of This Century

In 1942 Peggy Guggenheim opened the Art of This Century gallery on the top floor of a building on West 57th Street in New York. Determined to create a space that would generate expectation, she hired the Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, who designed custom furniture – one piece being featured in this exhibition – and projected a groundbreaking exhibition device to stimulate interactions between viewers and artworks.

The space had a profound impact on the artistic scene through a program of solo exhibitions that Guggenheim dedicated to numerous artists who would later become some of the most renowned creators of their time. The gallery also became an essential meeting point for European and North American avant-gardes. Among the most important initiatives developed by Guggenheim at her gallery were her support and promotion of the work of women artists, not only through group exhibitions, such as Exhibition by 31 Women and later The Women (1945), but also through the solo shows dedicated to some of the participants in said exhibitions, such as Sonja Sekula or Irene Rice Pereira.

The “Self” as Art

The role played by self-representation in the work of these artists was fundamental in their claim for independence and in their efforts to assert their identity versus traditional art historiography, in which women – when mentioned – appeared as secondary figures relegated to the roles of muses, wives, or companions of their male counterparts. Furthermore, in order to construct identities that were different to those assigned to them and escape from the gender roles imposed by the patriarchal society of the time, they adopted a number of languages that included autobiographical components, costumes, performances, and self-portraiture. This can be observed in works such as Woman in Armor I, by Leonor Fini, or Untitled (Self-Portrait), by Dorothea Tanning, for example.

In their quest to escape from social expectations and gender roles, self-representation became one of the creative strategies most widely adopted by women artists in the first half of the 20th century. Through elaborate costumes and extravagant make-up, which they wore in their daily lives or during improvised performances, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Leonor Fini constructed alternate identities that allowed them to elude the rigid female behavioral models determined by bourgeois ideology. Likewise, Hedda Sterne, Dorothea Tanning, and Meret Oppenheim spoke of their interest in blurring the boundaries of conventionally constructed identities through doubling, masquerades, and the confusion of reality against its reflection, which can be observed in their self-portraits. Similarly, Gypsy Rose Lee reinvented the genre of striptease – traditionally linked to popular culture – by challenging the contemporary understanding of the pose and of female nudes.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Leonora Carrington completed their self-creation work with the writing of their autobiographies, which seamlessly combined reality and invention. Writing novels about themselves allowed these artists to reflect on aspects of their past that might have been considered lurid – for instance, becoming the victim of rape by a group of men in Madrid as Carrington recounted in Down Below – or imagining alternative narratives of their lives. In similar fashion, Leonor Fini frequently took photographs of herself posing in black feather wigs and other props through which she fabricated imaginary personalities. Both Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Gypsy Rose Lee, who had worked as dancers and strippers in burlesque shows and as professional models in art schools, were very aware of the need to take control of their own image, subverting the passive role that muses and female models still played within the avant-garde.

Gypsy Rose Lee (American, 1911-1970) 'Gypsy Rose Lee images for Tru-Vue stereoscope film: Striptease Stereoview #1306 Burlesque' 1933 (detail)

Gypsy Rose Lee (American, 1911-1970)
Gypsy Rose Lee images for Tru-Vue stereoscope film: Striptease Stereoview #1306 Burlesque (detail)
1933
Vintage Tru-Vue 16 pictures in film (13 of Gypsy Rose Lee)
The 31 Women Collection

Gypsy Rose Lee began performing as a stripper in burlesque shows and went on to appear in Broadway theaters. Her stripteases were greatly successful, allowing her to transform the genre. The fact that she talked while striping was truly groundbreaking and enabled her to draw attention away from the mere act of stripping, while presenting herself as a modern and entertaining woman. Likewise, her enunciation was unlike street slang: she recited with an outlandish high-class accent and incorporated phrases in French.

Short biography: Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970). Born under the name Rose Luise Hovick into a working-class family that performed in vaudeville theaters in Seattle, Washington, Gypsy Rose Lee began to work as a stripper in burlesque shows at the age of sixteen and went on to perform at important Broadway theaters. Her acts were enormously popular at the time, granting the genre respect and transforming it into something beyond the act of stripping. She began to collect works of art in the 1940s. Among such purchases were works by Max Ernst. This opened the doors to meetings with Peggy Guggenheim, who at that time was married to the German painter and would host the encounters at her house. In Exhibition by 31 Women, she exhibited a collage titled Self-Portrait. In 1957 Gypsy Rose Lee published her autobiography, culminating the life-long self-promotion and self-invention work that drove her entire career.

Dorothea Tanning (American, 1910-2012)
Untitled (Self-Portrait)
c. 1940
Watercolour, ink and crayon on paper
36.5 x 29.2cm
The 31 Women Collection
© The estate of Dorothea Tanning, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

In this self-portrait from the early 1940s, Dorothea Tanning experimented with the limits of reality and representation. In a style akin to fashion figurines that often appeared in women’s magazines of the time, the artist portrayed herself in a room full of empty canvases. Her naked legs are reflected onto a framed glass that is pointed at the viewer, creating an impossible interplay of mirrors and altering the relationship between reality and reflection; inside and out.

Short biography: Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012). Born in a small town in Illinois, where she lived a solitary childhood, Dorothea Tanning developed an interest in dreams and fantasy since she was a child. After visiting Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936) at MoMA, she felt attracted to Surrealism and travelled to Paris three years later with the objective of coming into contact with said group. Although she was forced to cut her stay short due to the outbreak of the war, the paintings she created upon her return to New York are proof of her strong Surrealist bias. In 1942, following the advice of gallerist Julien Levy, Max Ernst visited her studio and selected the works Birthday and Children’s Game for Exhibition by 31 Women. The visit also signified the beginning of a relationship between Tanning and Ernst, who separated from Peggy Guggenheim and married the artist in 1946. From the 1930s to the late 90s Tanning developed a prolific career. Her paintings, ballet designs, soft sculptures, and literary works reflect some of her recurring obsessions: the subversion of the bourgeoise domestic space, metamorphosis, the power of imagination, the gothic novel, and non-conventional images of girls and feminine figures.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (German, 1874-1927)
Forggtten Like This Parapluie Am I By You – Faithless Bernice!
1923-1924
Gouache on foil
13 x 12cm
The 31 Women Collection
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

The autobiographical component of this work has been linked to the closed umbrella, which lies uselessly at the center of the image and represents the loneliness felt by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven at a point when she had been abandoned by those who supported her both emotionally and financially. The treading foot that appears on the left of the composition symbolizes the passing of the years. The title of the work also expands on this notion, which is a direct interpellation to her friend and patron Berenice Abbott. On the other hand, the silhouette of the urinal alludes to the famous readymade by Marcel Duchamp, a work that a number of recent studies have attributed to Freytag-Loringhoven.

Short biography: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927). Born in Germany under the name Else Plötz, she became known as Else Endell, Else Greve, and finally Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven through her numerous marriages over the course of several decades; evidence of her early interest in constructing herself as a character. At the age of eighteen she settled in Berlin, where she began to study art and worked as a variety artist and model. In 1913 she emigrated to New York and joined the Dadaist circle that gathered around the collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg. Elsa von Freytag’s work spanned several genres: poetry, autobiography, art, and artistic self-representation. Aside from producing sculptures with found elements, she used materials rescued from the streets and objects stolen from department stores to create costumes that she wore at Greenwich Village balls and during her walks through New York, combining them with striking make-up, extravagant hairdos, and other decorations. One of the objects she created with fragments from plumbing materials was on display at Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1923 she returned to Berlin and shortly after settled in Paris, where she scraped a living with the help of friends like Berenice Abbott and Djuna Barnes. She died under uncertain circumstances in 1927. Very few of her performances where documented and her work remained invisible to a great extent until the early 21st century. Some research suggests that she was the author of the famous readymade Fountain, considered one of Marcel Duchamp’s key works.

Strangely Familiar

In 1919 Freud coined the term unheimlich – which roughly translates into English as “ominous” or “uncanny”, and into French as “unsettling strangeness”. This aesthetic category, which is verging on beautiful, was adopted by the Surrealist movement and generally alludes to things that are familiar and attractive, but simultaneously produce a sense of unease and rejection. This is the underlying feeling in Gray Day (Sand Dunes), by Aline Meyer Liebman, or in the still lives by Meraud Guinness Guevara and Meret Oppenheim, which portray decontextualised familiar objects, provoking a sense of unease that is hard to explain. This sensation is accentuated in Spanish Customs by Dorothea Tanning and in Kay Sage’s The Fourteen Daggers, in which two mysterious figures covered in fabric seem to ascend a staircase to the sky.

Hence, Aline Meyer Liebman’s yellowish dunes are striking for their anthropomorphic forms, the Connecticut night sky appears as a fantastic explosion of flowers and stars in Jacqueline Lamba’s painting, and the viewer is unsettled by the incongruent characters and scenes that disrupt the peacefulness in Hazel McKinley and Pegeen Vail’s colourful landscapes. Furthermore, familiar objects seem to have lost their usual meaning in the puzzling dreamlike still lives by Meraud Guinness Guevara, Anne Harvey, Meret Oppenheim, and Gypsy Rose Lee, while Eyre de Lanux and Evelyn Wild’s rug designs combine primitivist and avant-garde elements that question the ideals of purity associated with modern domestic interiors. Kay Sage and Dorothea Tanning’s paintings are particularly unnerving as they transform the bourgeois house into a strange territory inhabited by ghostly figures and elongated shadows.

Dorothea Tanning (American, 1910-2012)
Spanish Customs
1943
Oil on canvas
25.4 x 20.3cm
The 31 Women Collection
© The estate of Dorothéa Tanning, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

Meret Oppenheim (Swiss born Germany, 1913-1985)
Souvenir of the Lunch in fur
1936 / 1972
Fabric, paper, artificial fur and artificial flowers encased under glass
16.7 × 19.8cm
The 31 Women Collection
© Meret Oppenheim / VEGAP, Madrid, 2024
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

Produced in 1972, this piece is a reinterpretation of one of Meret Oppenheim’s most renowned works, Déjeuner en Fourrure, which was on display for the first time in 1936 – the year it was produced – at an exhibition dedicated to Surrealist objects. The work garnered much recognition and was selected by Peggy Guggenheim for Exhibition by 31 Women. Dipleased by always seeing her name associated with this work, the artist wanted to make an ironic version of her infamous mug, recreating it with cheap materials: a perfect kitsch souvenir of the iconic work.

Short biography: Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985). Born in Berlin into a family of the liberal bourgeoisie, Meret Oppenheim studied at Rudolf Steiner’s school in Basel. Between 1932 and 1937 she spent much of her time in Paris, where she became close to the Surrealist movement. The photographs in which she posed for Man Ray and the enormous success of her objects – in particular Déjeuner en Fourrure [Breakfast with Furs] from 1936, acquired by MoMA and also on display at Exhibition by 31 Women – make her a Surrealist muse of sorts. Later, she expressed her irritation at seeing her name associated solely to that work and to Surrealism. In 1937 Oppenheim returned to Basel, where she battled depression and produced very little until 1954, when she resumed her artistic work with great impetus. Myths, dreams, literary sources, Jung’s psychoanalysis, gender roles, and social stereotyping were interwoven within her work, which also incorporated magical objects, poems, photographs, theatre costumes, and textile designs.

Jacqueline Lamba (French, 1910-1993)
Roxbury, stars
1946
Oil on canvas
The 31 Women Collection
© Jacqueline Lamba, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

In the mid-1940s, Jacqueline Lamba and the North American Surrealist artist David Hare took a trip together through the western United States, where they came into contact with the cosmology and art of the indigenous peoples of North America. The typical brown colours of Amerindian fabrics dominate the palette of this canvas, in which Lamba portrayed the surroundings of her house in Roxbury and captured the unexpected reality that lies hidden behind a seemingly mundane landscape.

Short biography: Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993). Born in France, Jacqueline Lamba spent her early years in Egypt, where her father – an engineer – passed away in a car accident in 1914. She returned to Paris with her mother and attended the École de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs. After the passing of her mother in 1927 Lamba survived with the meager wages she earned from her design work. Fascinated by André Breton’s Communicating Vessels, she began an intense and difficult romantic relationship with him. The couple married shortly after and had a daughter named Aube. Jacqueline Lamba always lamented being more recognised as Breton’s muse than for her collages, cadavre exquis, objects, and paintings, which would soon be on display at Surrealist exhibitions. In 1938 she travelled to Mexico with her husband. The couple was hosted by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, whom she established a profound relationship with. Thanks to the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim, Lamba and Breton settled in New York in 1941 as they fled from the Nazis. Lamba exhibited her work at the inaugural show of the Art of This Century Gallery and participated in Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1944 she divorced Breton and began a relationship with David Hare. They settled in Connecticut in 1948 and had a son. Lamba lost interest in Surrealism and veered toward abstraction, focusing on the mythologies of indigenous populations from Mexico and the United Sates. In 1954, after separating from Hare, she returned to Paris and destroyed much of her prior work. She later confessed that she had first tried to please Breton and then Hare with her paintings, ensuring that she would only paint to please herself from that point onward. In 1967 the most comprehensive exhibition dedicated to her work in her lifetime was hosted at the Musée Picasso in Antibes.

Kay Sage (American, 1898-1963)
The Fourteen Daggers
1942
Oil on canvas
40.6 × 33.3cm
The 31 Women Collection
© 2024 Estate of Kay Sage / VEGAP
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

The conversion of domestic space into unusual territory reached its pinnacle in works such as this one. Sage imagined a bizarre interior space that opens up to a door behind which lies a staircase leading to the sky. The scene is inhabited by two ghostly figures covered in fabric that cast elongated shadows on the ground and accentuate the air of mystery. The motif of the open door reappears in Dorothea Tanning’s oil painting Spanish Customs, also on display in this room.

Short biography: Kay Sage (1898-1963). Born under the name Katherine Linn Sage into a wealth family from Albany, Kay Sage spent most of her childhood travelling through Europe with her mother, who had divorced her father in 1908. Although she never received a formal education, she went on to study at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D. C. and at the British Academy in Rome, where she settled in 1920. Aside from coming into contact with the local artistic scene, Sage met Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, whom she married in 1925. During their ten years as a married couple, Sage dedicated little time to art. In 1937 she moved to Paris, where she came into contact with the members of the Surrealist group and began a romantic relationship with the painter Yves Tanguy, whom she married in 1941. With the outbreak of World War II, the couple migrated to Connecticut, where they would reside for the following years. During that period Sage developed her own style: uninhabited landscapes intersected by austere architectural forms, shadows, and floating fabrics that are simultaneously recognisable and enigmatic. Peggy Guggenheim selected her painting from 1942 At the Appointed Time – today preserved at the Newark Museum of Art – for Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1955 Tanguy died suddenly. This event led Sage into depression. Coupled with eyesight problems, she drifted away from painting. In the late 1950s she began to produce collages and write poetry. However, in January of 1963 Sage took her own life.

Bestiaries

Many of the artists featured in this exhibition – particularly those whose works are more closely linked with Surrealism – experimented with multiple personalities, which led them to identify themselves with animals that became their alter egos. As noted by Patricia Mayayo, curator of the show, “the animals embodied the search for other mythical or imaginary worlds where they could finally be free”. Hence, the female body is transformed into an eagle, a crow, or a deer in the works of Barbara Poe-Levee Reis, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli, Julia Thecla, and Frida Kahlo, while in Leonora Carrington’s The Horses of Lord Candlestick, the horse simultaneously embodies the dreaded paternal figure and the artist herself.

Women artists close to Surrealism granted particular importance to the representation of animals. Such is the case with works by Barbara Poe-Levee Reis and Milena Pavlovic-Barilli, in which animals often inhabited fictional landscapes or mythical worlds where women could imagine themselves freed from patriarchal norms. Likewise, in works by Julia Thecla, Frida Kahlo, and Leonor Fini, the depiction of women’s bodies being transformed into crows, deer, and cats refers to an alternate reality in which humans and animals are hybridized. Djuna Barnes imagined a collection of grotesque women with animal-like traits that challenged normative understandings of the feminine in an illustrated book of poems published in 1915. Valentine Hugo was inspired by the animals of the zodiac when designing costumes for a theatrical performance that took place at the Théâtre Champs-Elysées in Paris. Lastly, in Leonora Carrington’s painting, the horse appears as a more ambivalent figure that simultaneously embodies patriarchal authority and the liberation of women.

Since the 1930s, women had a growing presence in Surrealist initiatives. For example, in 1936 Leonor Fini, Valentine Hugo, Meret Oppenheim, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp participated in the exhibition Art, Dada, Surrealism hosted at MoMA. Six years later, Leonora Carrington and Kay Sage exhibited their work at First Papers of Surrealism, organised by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp in New York . Women also collaborated on the movement’s publications, either as authors or as illustrators; an example of which includes the series of eighteen drawings that Hugo produced in 1951 for Paul Éluard’s book of poems Le Phénix. Peggy Guggenheim’s work as a patron undoubtedly helped to reinforce female participation. Many of the artists included in the exhibition of 1943 had attended the meetings between North Americans and exiled Europeans organised by the collector at her house in New York. Some of the works on display at 31 Women were reproduced in the double issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV in 1943; an acknowledgement that most likely contributed to the show’s repercussion.

Valentine Hugo (French, 1887-1968)
Fish. Costume project for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris
1950
Pastel sobre papel negro
28.5 × 16cm
The 31 Women Collection
© Valentine Hugo, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

Short biography: Valentine Hugo (1887-1968). Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer under the name Valentine Gross, Valentine Hugo possessed a natural talent for drawing since her childhood. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, produced illustrations for fashion magazines, and frequently attended Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Inspired by the subject of dance, her drawings and paintings were on display at the Thèatre des Champs-Elysées in 1913. A friend of Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau, she also collaborated she also collaborated on thaeatrical sets and designs with Jean Hugo, her husband at the time. In 1926 she met André Breton – whom she would establish a short-lived romantic relationship with – and joined the circle of Surrealists. She participated in the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (MoMA, 1936), in the development of numerous cadavre exquis, and the illustration of Surrealist books. The influence of Surrealism can be perceived in her constructions, which are based on the unexpected encounter with objects and materials, as well as in the importance she grants to motifs such as dreams, night-time atmospheres, the marvelous, and ghostly apparitions. The drawing that was featured at Exhibition by 31 Women – which has since been lost – was poignantly titled Dream of 17/1/34. Hugo remained in France during the war, after which she focused on illustration, writing books of poems, and the production of theater costumes and sets.

Leonor Fini (Argentine-Italian, 1907-1996)
Woman in Armor I
1938
Oil on canvas
37 x 27cm
The 31 Women Collection
© Leonor Fini, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

Short biography: Leonor Fini (1907-1996). Born in Argentina into a family marked by a dominant father, Leonor Fini fled with her mother to Trieste, Italy, when she was still a young girl. Fini taught herself art. At the age of seventeen she left the family home and moved to Milan and later to Paris, where her interest in the world of dreams and the unconscious led her to come into contact with the Surrealists. Although she was not officially part of the group, she participated in important Surrealist exhibitions such as Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MoMA in 1936. Hybrid figures such as the sphynx dominate her paintings, a motif she also explored through costumes and self-representation. The painting that was on display at Exhibition by 31 Women was in fact titled The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes. During the war she remained in Europe. Between 1944 and 1972, aside from continuing to paint, she focused intensely on the design of theatrical costumes and sets.

Milena Pavlovic-Barilli (Serbian, 1909-1945)
Juno and Vulcan
1936
Oil on canvas
95.3 × 64.8cm
The 31 Women Collection
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

The painting by Pavlovic draws from various sources: Mannerist art from the 16th century, Magical Realism, and Surrealism. It also incorporates motifs and mythical figures from classical antiquity, such as the Roman goddess Juno and her son Vulcan, protagonists of this canvas. The use of diluted colours, the impression that the characters are floating in space, and the apparently incongruent combination of a wide range of elements (the eagle, the piano, the wheel, the drapery, the bouquet of flowers, and the mirror) grant this painting a dreamlike and mysterious atmosphere.

Short biography: Milena Pavlovic-Barilli (1909-1945). Born in Serbia into a family with artistic inclinations, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli studied art in Munich between 1926 and 1928. There she was introduced to painting, fashion illustration, and drawing, creating an iconography based on stylised figures and wavy lines in which the influence of Art Nouveau is combined with echoes of orient. In 1931 she settled in Paris, where she came into contact with figures of Surrealism, such as André Breton, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Valéry. Regardless, her work drifted into a style that critics considered closer to Magical Realism. Everyday life was fused with fantasy in her paintings, while space was filled with enigmatic symbols: ancient columns that levitate, veiled faces of women, winged youths painted in pale hues, all of which grants her work a supernatural feel. She lived in New York between 1939 and 1945, where she focused on fashion illustration and costume and set designs for the theater. Her paintings, populated with elongated figures in architectural environments that seem rooted in the Renaissance, reflect her admiration for Mannerism. In 1940 she exhibited her work at the Julien Levy Gallery and established ties with the group of Surrealist immigrants. Her work Insomnia (1942) – which has since been lost – was on display at Exhibition by 31 Women. Her premature death in an accident in 1945 cut her career shot. In 1962 the Milena Pavlovic-Barilli Museum opened its doors at the house where she was born. The museum includes a broad selection of her paintings, drawings, letters, and personal objects.

Leonora Carrington (Mexican born United Kingdom, 1917-2011)
The Horses of Lord Candlestick
1938
Oil on canvas
35.5 ×46cm
The 31 Women Collection
© 2024 Estate of Leonora Carrington / VEGAP
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

Short biography: Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Born into a wealthy English family, Leonora Carrington was fascinated by fairy tales and fantasy literature since she was a young girl. She studied art in Florence, Paris, and London under the guidance of Amédée Ozenfant. Her first works recreate legendary worlds populated by hybrid animal species and powerful female figures. In 1936 she discovered Surrealism during a visit to the International Surrealist Exhibition. Two years later she settled in the south of France with Max Ernst – whom she had established a relationship with – in an old house that the couple transformed into a work of total art. Carrington began to publish her first books containing short stories. In 1940, after the outbreak of the war and the arrest of Max Ernst, she fled to Madrid, where she became the victim of rape and was subsequently admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Santander; she would recount this experience in her book Down Below. After managing to migrate to New York in 1941 she participated in a number of initiatives promoted by exiled Surrealists, such as the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism and the magazine VVV. Peggy Guggenheim included two of her works The Horses of Lord Candlestick (1938, above) and the Joy of Skating (1941, below) in Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1943 Carrington settled in Mexico, where she would live until her death. She integrated into the community of exiled artists along with Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, and Benjamin Péret. Her paintings re-elaborated old themes and she delved into new ones: fantasy literature, female divinities, alchemy, magic, and Mexican mythologies.

Leonora Carrington (Mexican born United Kingdom, 1917-2011)
Joy of Skating
1941
Oil on canvas
© 2024 Estate of Leonora Carrington / VEGAP

Djuna Barnes (American, 1892-1982)
The Book of Repulsive Women, 4th image in the 1st edition
1915
The 31 Women Collection

In the modern age of Taylorism and Fordism, women played a vital role in the functioning of the American system by efficiently arranging domestic life with a precision similar to that of the nation’s industry. In contrast with this mechanical monotony, Barnes imagined the “repulsive women” that appear in her poems and drawings as the antithesis of the model housewife. Some of these figures, such as the woman with donkey ears and animal-like features that can be observed in one of her illustrations, manage to question the very the boundaries of humanity.

Short biography: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982). Born in a colony of artists north of New York, Djuna Barnes studied art at the Pratt Institute and at the Art Students League. In 1915 she settled in the bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, where she began her career as an artist and a writer. That same year she published The Book of Repulsive Women, a collection of poems that included her own illustrations, and began to work as a journalist. Best known for her experimental novel from 1936, Nightwood, Barnes cultivated all genres: narrative, poetry, theater, and journalism. In 1921 she moved to Paris, where she began a romantic relationship with the sculptor Thelma Wood and began to frequent the avant-garde circles of the Rive Gauche, establishing friendships with Gertrude Stein, Berenice Abbott, Natalie Clifford Barney, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Peggy Guggenheim herself. With the outbreak of World War II, she moved back to New York, where her work Portrait of Alice was put on display at Exhibition by 31 Women.

The Middle Way: Languages of Abstraction

Although many of the artists who participated in 31 Women fell within the sphere of influence of Surrealism, some of them were more inclined toward abstract languages. In the 1930s the North American art scene was dominated by social realism and regionalism. In an effort to promote abstraction, the association American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded, an association which included members such as Suzy Frelinghuysen, Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. Abstraction began to progressively dominate the artistic landscape of North America and was configured in a way that highlighted the ideal of masculinity, whose epitome was Jackson Pollock. In the face of a discourse that hailed the language of expressionism as a reflection of the North American male, many of these artists opted to explore a “middle way” that could account for all of the possibilities afforded by abstraction. A great example of this can be found in The Middle Way / The Great Mother Rules the Sky (Astor Mural) by Buffie Johnson.

The association American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded in 1936 with the objective of fostering the development of abstraction in the United States. It included members such as Suzy Frelinghuysen, Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. It is no coincidence that Slobodkina was one of the artists included by Ad Reinhardt in his vignette “How to Look at Modern Art in America” (1946), in which he traced the family tree of North American modern art. Other creators participated in key initiatives for the renovation of abstract practice in the United States, such as Gretchen Schoeninger, who attended the experimental art school New Bauhaus, founded by László Moholy-Nagy – a former professor at the historic German Bauhaus – in Chicago in 1947. Regardless, few artists who took part in 31 Women occupy an important place in the dominant narratives of North American abstract art. As Xenia Cage jokingly suggested in a collage produced from one of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, perhaps the value of these artist’s works is compromised by the strong exaltation of masculinity, which at the time was characteristic of discourse. Buffie Johnson became aware of the marginalisation suffered by women in Abstract Expressionist circles early on. In the 1940s, determined to give value to female legacies, she undertook a research project on the imagery of the goddess mothers of antiquity, culminating in a book published in 1988.

The exhibition concludes with a relationship map detailing the connections established between the thirty-one artists who participated in the exhibition and Peggy Guggenheim. By highlighting the network of professional and personal links they constructed, the chart depicts the important role these artists played as agents in the art scene of the time beyond traditional conceptions of women artists as supporting characters.

Suzy Frelinghuysen (American, 1911-1988)
Untitled (Brahms Abstract)
1945
Oil and collage on Masonite

Suzy Frelinghuysen was part of the group of artists known as The Park Avenue Cubists, who proposed a reinterpretation of European Cubist heritage from a North American perspective. In her works, Frelinghuysen combined the influence of Synthetic Cubism, which she expanded on through the use of blue, lavender, and rusty hues, with constant references to the world of music; a field in which the artist also excelled as an opera singer.

Short biography: Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911-1988). Born into a wealthy family from Newark, New Jersey, Suzy Frelinghuysen was part of the group of artists knowns as The Park Avenue Cubists, along with Albert Eugene Gallatin, Charles G. Shaw, and George L. K. Morris – whom she married in 1935 – who advocated for a reinterpretation of European Cubist heritage from a North American perspective. In 1937 Frelinghuysen joined the association American Abstract Artists (AAA), founded in an effort to promote the development of abstract art in the United States, whose members included Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. After the war she temporarily quit art to focus on music, becoming a renowned opera singer. In her work, which was included in important group shows such as Exhibition by 31 Women, the influence of Synthetic Cubism was combined with constant references to the world of music.

Esphyr Slobodkina (American born Russia, 1908-2002)
Peacock Garden
1938
Oil on board

From the late 1930s, Slobodkina developed a style of her own based on the poetic combination of curved forms painted in lyrical hues. Along with the influence of Cubism and the technique of collage, the artist also demonstrated her interest in sewing and working with scraps, which she learned from her mother, a professional seamstress. One of the defining traits of her work was its interdisciplinary nature: aside from painting, Slobodkina created assemblages, produced murals, illustrated children’s books, and designed costumes and jewellery.

Short biography: Esphyr Slobodkina (1908-2002). Originally from Siberia, Esphyr Slobodkina moved to Manchuria with her family in order to escape from the Soviet Revolution. Since she was a child, she studied in the fields of art and music. In 1928 she moved to New York on her own, where she continued her studies at the National Academy of Design. From the late 1930s she developed her own style based on a combination of wavy forms in lyrical tones that, along with the influence of Cubism and collage, reflect her interest in the tradition of decorative arts from her native country. Her work stands out for its interdisciplinary nature: aside from painting, Slobodkina focused on assemblage, murals, the illustration of children’s books, and on jewelry and costume design. As one of the founders of the association American Abstract Artists (AAA), which she presided – also acting as treasurer and secretary – Slobodkina played an important role in the promotion of abstraction in the United States. Alfred H. Barr, director of MoMA, recommended her work to Peggy Guggenheim, who decided to include Memories (1942) – which has since been lost – in Exhibition by 31 Women.

Buffie Johnson (American, 1912-2006)
The Middle Way / The Great Mother Rules the Sky (Astor Mural)
1949-1959
Oil on canvas
124.5 × 152.4cm
The 31 Women Collection
© Estate of Buffie Johnson

Between 1949 and 1959, Buffie Johnson produced what is considered one of her most important works: a great mural intended to decorate the Astor Theater in New York. This project was a true challenge for all those who negated women’s ability to create large format paintings. Thanks to the recovery of the mural by part of the Women’s Caucus prior to the theater’s demolition in 1982, some fragments, such as the one on display in this exhibition, are today part of public and private collections.

Short biography: Buffie Johnson (1912-2006). Born in New York, Buffie Johnson studied art at the University of Los Angeles. She later spent two years in Paris, where she established a friendship with Sonia Delaunay and other painters of the Parisian avant-garde. After completing her studies at the Académie Julian, she settled in New York in 1939. Johnson began to frequent several artistic circles, such as Peggy Guggenheim’s, who invited her to participate in Exhibition by 31 Women with the painting Déjeuner sur mer (1942). Outraged by the response of a Time Magazine critic who refused to review the exhibition arguing that he had never heard of outstanding women creators, Johnson attempted to publish an article on women artists that was rejected by several art magazines. This experience entailed the first awakening of her feminist consciousness. During the 1950s her work pivoted toward Abstract Expressionism. In parallel to her artistic career, she received a grant to study the imagery of the goddess mothers of antiquity, a work she would publish in 1988. Johnson’s early interest in the matriarchal tradition, which would also be reflected in many of her paintings, was embraced by second wave feminism in the late 1960s; a movement the artist would be actively involved in.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Swiss, 1889-1943) and Jean (Hans) Arp (German-French, 1886-1966)
Vertical-Horizontal Composition [Conceived by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and executed in relief by Jean Arp]
1927-1928 / 1943-1956
Oil on wood relief mounted on pavatex
The 31 Women Collection
© Arp Jean / Hans Arp, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024
© 2022-2024 JPS Artworks LLC

Sophie Taeuber-Arp produced works that were marked by the dissolution of artistic hierarchies and were very much her own. She experimented with painting, dance, sculpture, tapestry design, and puppet making. Vertical-Horizontal Composition might be related to the designs that the artist produced for the Café Aubette in Strasbourg. Taeuber-Arp’s protagonism in this work of total art, conceived on the basis of a dialogue between different artistic disciplines, has nevertheless been overshadowed by Jean Arp and Theo Van Doesburg’s participation in the project.

Short biography: Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943). Born in the Alpine city of Davos, Sophie Taeuber-Arp studied in Munich and Hamburg, where she absorbed the ideals of artistic fusion from the Arts and Crafts movement. She moved to Zurich during the outbreak of World War I and became involved in the Dada movement along with her future husband Hans Arp. She taught arts and crafts at the Zurich School of Commerce – a job that would support the couple for the following years – while attending expressive dance classes under Rudolf von Laban. She developed a style of work very much of her own, marked by the dissolution of artistic hierarchies. Taeuber-Arp experimented with painting, dance, furniture design, tapestries, interior design, and the construction of puppets and assemblages. In 1929 she quit teaching and moved to a house on the outskirts of Paris with her husband. Like other creators linked to non-objective art, she reacted to the push of Surrealism by becoming involved in associations such as Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. In 1941 the couple left Paris fleeing from the arrival of the Nazis. They stayed at Peggy Guggenheim’s house in Veyrier for a few days before heading to the south of France. They decided not to leave Europe and sought refuge in Zurich. In 1943 Taeuber-Arp died in Zurich due to accidental poisoning from a heater.

Catalogue

Along with the reproduction of works on display and other materials within the exhibition, the catalogue includes an essay by Patricia Mayayo, curator of the show and professor of Art History at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, and a text by Lekha Hileman Waitoller, curator at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The publication also includes a succinct biography of each artist and a relationship map depicting the connections between Peggy Guggenheim and the artists featured in Exhibition by 31 Women.

Meret Oppenheim (Swiss born Germany, 1913-1985)
Untitled (Helene Mayer)
1936
The 31 Women Collection

Helene Julie Mayer (1910-1953) was a German-born fencer who won the gold medal at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, and the silver medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. She competed for Nazi Germany in Berlin, despite having been forced to leave Germany in 1935 and resettle in the United States because she was of Jewish descent.

Hedda Sterne (American born Romania, 1910-2011)
Self Portrait
1936-1939
The 31 Women Collection

Short biography: Hedda Sterne (1910-2011). Born in Bucharest, Romania, under the name Hedwig Lindenberg, Hedda Sterne came into contact with her city’s Dada and Constructivist scenes from a young age. In 1928 she moved to Vienna and later to Paris, where she continued her studies attending the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the studios of Fernand Léger and André Lhote. The following year she began to study philosophy and art history at the University of Bucharest. In 1932 she married her classmate Frederick Stern, whom she separated from a few years later. She came into contact with Parisian Surrealism through Romanian Surrealist Victor Brauner, which would greatly influence her early work. Thanks to recommendations by Brauner and Jean Arp, Peggy Guggenheim included several of Sterne’s collages in a group exhibition at her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London. In 1941 she settled in New York, in an apartment close to Guggenheim’s mansion, who invited her to participate in her meetings of “exiled Surrealists” and included her work in Exhibition by 31 Women and The Women. Sterne also participated in important Surrealist exhibitions such as First Papers of Surrealism (1942). After the war she joined the Betty Parsons gallery, taking part in the circles of Abstract Expressionism. She was the only woman present in the famous image of the North American abstraction group “The Irascibles”, published in Life Magazine in 1951. Sterne would later express her discomfort in being more famous for her presence in said photograph than for her extensive career.

Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) in the entrance hall of her eighteenth century Venetian palace. Hanging from the ceiling is a 1941 Alexander Calder mobile and behind her is a 1937 painting by Picasso titled On The Beach.
The 31 Women Collection
Photo: Keystone Features/Getty Images

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Peggy Guggenheim
1926
Gelatin Silver Print
The 31 Women Collection
© 2024 Estate of Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [attributed to]
Peggy Guggenheim poses at her Art of This Century Gallery in New York, October 22, 1942
© AP Photo / Tom Fitzsimmons
© 2024 Estate of Berenice Abbott

Fundación MAPFRE
Recoletos Exhibition Hall
Paseo Recoletos 23, 28004 Madrid

Opening hours:
Mondays (except holidays): 2pm – 8pm
Tuesday to Saturday: 11am – 8pm
Sunday and holidays: 11am – 7pm

Fundación MAPFRE website

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía website

Exhibition: ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999’ at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Exhibition dates: 23rd February – 7th June 2024

Curators: Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images
Design: Ayumi Higuchi
Photography: Jeff Gutterman

A mid-week posting!

I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I had missed this important exhibition about an interesting subject, the “underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999.”

So I thought I would squeeze it into the posting schedule which stretches a couple of months into the future…

Other than the group photographs of the book covers and installation photographs of the exhibition (below), there were no individual book covers nor details about some of the books in the media images, so I have added a few were it has been possible along with accompanying text.

I have also included photographs from what I think is one of the most iconic photobooks, even though I am not sure it is in the exhibition: Marion Palfi’s There is No More Time: An American Tragedy (1949).

So many important photobooks by so many glorious photographers.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images (detail)
Design: Ayumi Higuchi
Photography: Jeff Gutterman

What They Saw project, a touring exhibition accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. The present show is organised in collaboration with 10×10 Photobooks, a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding.

In seeking out the omissions in photobook history, the standard definition of the photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher or a commercial publisher, needed to be expanded to incorporate those who do not call themselves photographers or artists but who nevertheless put together a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others: individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, mock-ups, fanzines and artists’ books to be more inclusive.

This iteration of the What They Saw exhibition includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are from the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. From the pioneers, such as Anna Atkins, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook, or Isabel Agnes Cowper, who used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books, to the independent and self-published photobooks of the 1990s, including Colored People: A Collaborative Book Project by Adrian Piper or Twinspotting by Ketaki Seth, this selection allows for greater inclusion of previously marginalised photographic communities, including women, queer communities, people of colour and artists from outside Europe and North America.

Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past anthologies documenting photobook history, and those included are already quite well known. This exhibition of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks is a necessary step in unwriting the current photobook history and rewriting an updated photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive.

Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía website

Anna Atkins, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843

Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) (French, 1894-1954) 'Aveux non avenus' (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) 1930

Claude Cahun (1894-1954) 'Aveux Non Avenus' Paris- Éditions du Carrefour, 1930

Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) (French, 1894-1954) Aveux non avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) 1930

In her 1930 publication, Aveux non Avenus, Claude Cahun used the relationship between her inwardly focused poetic writing and symbolic photomontages to construct a unique reality for self-expression. This article focuses on three chapters and respective photographic images from the publication to relate Cahun’s, and by association her partner Marcel Moore’s, discussion on sexuality and gender expression. The utopian dreamscape created investigates issues of narcissism and otherness, female homosexuality, dandyism and going beyond gender, individual and social critique, mocking the antiquated views of art and writing, accepting and breaking taboos, while allowing for other departures from the accepted norm. Through analysis of the publication and supporting evidence from early influences, it can be seen that Cahun created a world in Aveux non Avenus where she could exist in a space between the established feminine–masculine binary of 20th-century Europe.

Abstract from Erin F. Pustarfi. “Constructed Realities: Claude Cahun’s Created World in Aveux Non Avenus,” in Journal of Homosexuality, 67(5), pp. 697-711. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Germaine Krull (photographer) Cover design by M. Tchimoukow. MÉTAL cover 1928

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928, p. 33

I did not have a special intention or design when I took the Iron photographs. I wanted to show what I see, exactly as the eye sees it. ‘MÉTAL’ is a collection of photographs from the time. ‘MÉTAL’ initiated a new visual era and open the way or a new concept of photography. ‘MÉTAL’ was the starting point which allowed photography to become an artisanal trade and which made an artist of the photographer, because it was part of this new movement, of this new era which touched all art.

Germaine Krull. Extract from the Preface to the 1976 edition of ‘MÉTAL’

See my writing on Germaine Krull’s portfolio MÉTAL.

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928 p. 37

Eyes on Russia by Margaret Bourke-White. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931

In 1951, Westbrook Pegler wrote numerous articles attacking Margaret Bourke-White for her associations with leftist politics in the 1930s. It is probably for this reason that in her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, written about ten years later, Bourke-White didn’t mention her first book, Eyes on Russia, published in 1931. And yet, this book is of extraordinary interest, not only as a landmark in Bourke-White’s career but also as a source, both visual and narrative, on the Soviet Union during its first Five Year Plan. With letters of recommendation from influential people, including the Russian film maker, Sergei Eisenstein, Bourke-White arrived in Moscow in the fall of 1930, where she obtained the official endorsement of A.B. Khalatoff, chief of the Soviet publishing house (he was later liquidated in the 1937 purges). Khalatoff supplied her with a thick roll of rubles and a guide. Bourke-White then toured some of the most important industrial and other sites and came back with stellar images of Russia under construction, which she complemented by a spritely and charming narrative of her experiences as the first foreign photographer to photograph in the Soviet Union with official permission. On her trip, she made 800 negatives, of which 40 were published in Eyes on Russia in a sepia tone. This book, along with at least eight related illustrated articles in Fortune, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and other periodicals, significantly enhanced Bourke-White’s reputation (and commercial business). They also helped initiate relationships she established both with Soviet officials and Americans sympathetic to the U.S.S.R. She returned to Russia in 1931 and 1932 for additional photography, but Eyes on Russia, a fascinating book for a variety of reasons, remains the largest single published collection of her work in that country. It was very well received in numerous book reviews when it appeared. For a more detailed review, see my article, Gary D. Saretzky “Margaret Bourke-White: Eyes on Russia,” The Photo Review, 22: 3-4 (Summer & Fall 1999)

Text from a comment on the Amazon website

Roll, Jordan, Roll by Julia Peterkin (text) and Doris Ulmann (photographs) New York: Robert O. Ballo, 1933

Doris Ulmann’s photographic collaboration with Julia Peterkin focuses on the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. Peterkin, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne in today’s Calhoun County, SC, one of the state’s richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll. Ulmann’s soft-focus photos-rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here-straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory.

Text from the Amazon website

Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937)

Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937) pp. 220-221

Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939

“The camera alone can catch
the swift surfaces of the
cities today and speaks a
language intelligible to all.”

~ Berenice Abbott

Abbott’s landmark work on New York, illustrated with 97 halftone plates that display “the historical importance of the documentary model its power as a medium of personal expression” (Parr & Badger).

In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, Abbott boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she was struck by the rapid transformation of the built landscape and saw the city as ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. “Old New York is fast disappearing,” Abbott observed. “At almost any point on Manhattan Island, the sweep of one’s vision can take in the dramatic contrasts of the old and the new and the bold foreshadowing of the future. This dynamic quality should be caught and recorded immediately in a documentary interpretation of New York City. The city is in the making and unless this transition is crystallised now in permanent form, it will be forever lost…. The camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all.”

On the eve of the Great Depression, she began a series of documentary photographs of the city that, with the support of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939, debuted in 1939 as the traveling exhibition and publication Changing New York.

With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “tiny photographic notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale.

From 1935 to 1965, Berenice Abbott and art critic Elizabeth McCausland (1899-1965) lived and worked in two flats they shared on the fourth floor of the loft building at 50 Commerce Street.

Lannyl Stephens. “Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York,” on the Village Preservation website July 17, 2023 [Online] Cited 26/05/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939

An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Photographs by Dorothea Lange; text by Paul Taylor. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939

“We need to be reminded these days about what women have been, and can be. It’s a question of their really deep and fundamental place in society. I have a feeling that women need to be reminded of it. They are needed.”

~ Dorothea Lange

First published in 1939, An American Exodus is one of the masterpieces of the documentary genre. Produced by incomparable documentary photographer Dorothea Lange with text by her husband, Paul Taylor, An American Exodus was taken in the early 1930s while the couple were working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) The book documents the rural poverty of the depression-era exodus that brought over 300,000 migrants to California in search of farm work, a westward mass migration driven by economic deprivation as opposed to the Manifest Destiny of 19th century pioneers.

Text from the Google Books website

In 1938, Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Taylor began sorting through the stacks of photographs she had made documenting migrant farmworkers and homeless drought refugees. Their goal was to create a book that would reveal the human dimension of the crisis to the American people and, hopefully, prompt government relief. One of several books released in the late 1930s that made use of the Farm Security Administration photo archive, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion was innovative in several ways. Rather than tell the story from their own perspective, Lange and Taylor used direct quotes from the migrants themselves, which Lange had painstakingly collected in the field. Released as war tensions were building in Europe and Asia, An American Exodus was largely overlooked at the time. In the years since its publication, the book has gained power, presenting an iconic image of the Dust Bowl era that has shaped the way we think of those difficult years.

Text from the Dorothea Lange Digital Archive, Oakland Museum of California website

Eslanda Goode Robeson. African Journey. New York: John Day Company, 1945

Eslanda Robeson’s 1936 African journal with her own photographs. Africa seen through the eyes of an African American. She went to South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Congo, and visited African kings and British governors, villages, gold mines, plantations, herdswomen, and modern African leaders.

Eslanda Goode Robeson (1895-1965) was an American anthropologist, author, actress, and civil rights activist. She was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Columbia University in 1917 with a degree in chemistry, and in 1921 married the singer and actor Paul Robeson. In 1936, she received her degree in anthropology from the London School of Economics, and in 1946, the year following the publication of African Journal, earned her anthropology Ph.D. from Hartford Seminary where she specialised in African studies and race relations.

Text from the Boyd Books website

Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945)

During the Second World War Lee Miller was the official war photographer for Vogue magazine. The images contained in Wrens in Camera were commissioned by the Admiralty and show the female navy officers and workers fulfilling their war duties. There are signallers, technicians, trainers, housekeepers and transport crews. The whole is an important document of women’s roles in war-time Britain.

Text from the Beaux Books website

Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945) p. 47

Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978)
Untitled (Black woman with a white child)
1949
From the book There Is No More Time: An American Tragedy
Marion Palfi/Center for Creative Photography
© All Rights Reserved

Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978)
Untitled (Portrait of Mrs. Caleb Hill, widow of a lynching victim)
1949
From the book There Is No More Time: An American Tragedy
Marion Palfi/Center for Creative Photography
© All Rights Reserved

“As a photographer, she was as interested in the discriminator as in the victims of discrimination. Long before what we tend to think of as the crux of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, Palfi went to Georgia at a particularly dangerous time. In 1949, she was drawn to do an in-depth portrait of Irwinton, a small community where a young black man had been torn out of jail and shot by a lynch mob. The tremendous public outcry over this barbaric incident included front-page coverage and editorials by the New York Times. Obviously, the presence of a photographer in such a community would attract unwanted attention and might have endangered her life. But by a happy stroke of luck, the Vice-President of the Georgia Power Company was interested in her work. Warning her that she must “photograph the South as it really is, not as the North slanders it,” he wanted her to get to meet the “right” people. As it happened, the “right” people turned out to be the very discriminators she wanted to photograph. Left in the protection of the local postmistress, she proceeded to take terms, objective pictures of overseers and white-suited politicians.

Even if the press had not indicted Irwinton for its racism, the extreme conservatism and tension were evident in the faces of its citizens. She found a white supremacist group, “The Columbians,” whose insignia was a thunderbolt, the symbol of Hitler’s elite guard. “Mein Kampf was their bible,” she believed. Meanwhile, the wife of the lunch victim said, simply, “Caleb was a good man … he believed in his rights and therefore he died.”

Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock. “Marion Palfi: An Appreciation,” in The Archive Research Series Number 19, September 1983, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, pp. 7-8. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978)
Untitled (A woman explained: “If a white man buys something…”)
1949
From the book There Is No More Time: An American Tragedy
Marion Palfi/Center for Creative Photography
© All Rights Reserved

Acapulco en el sueño by Francisco Tario (text) with photographs by Lola Alvarez Bravo, 1951

“If my photographs have any meaning, it’s that they stand for a Mexico that once existed.”

~ Lola Alvarez Bravo

Dare Wright. The Lonely Doll. New York: Doubleday & Co, 1957

Once there was a little doll. Her name was Edith. She lived in a nice house and had everything she needed except someone to play with. She was lonely! Then one morning Edith looked into the garden and there stood two bears! Since it was first published in 1957, The Lonely Doll has established itself as a unique children’s classic. Through innovative photography Dare Wright brings the world of dolls to life and entertains us with much more than just a story. Edith, the star of the show, is a doll from Wright’s childhood, and Wright selected the bear family with the help of her brother. With simple poses and wonderful expressions, the cast of characters is vividly brought to life to tell a story of friendship.

Text from the Amazon website

Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964

Le Clercq is the wife of choreographer George Balanchine; she wrote this book after Mourka became famous because of the photograph of Martha Swope in Life magazine, where George Balanchine assists Mourka in his grand jeté. Mourka writes about his exercises in dance and his aspirations to travel in outer space.

Text from the Cats in Books albums Facebook page

Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964

A Way of Seeing, 1965. Photographs by Helen Levitt

Dublin: A Portrait by V.S. Pritchett (text) and Evelyn Hofer (photographs). New York: Harper & Row, 1967

The starting point for this book is Evelin Hofer’s Dublin: A Portrait, which features an in-depth essay by V. S. Pritchett and photos by Hofer, and enjoyed great popularity upon its original publication in 1967. Dublin: A Portrait is an example of Hofer’s perhaps most important body of work, her city portraits: books that present comprehensive prose texts by renowned authors alongside her self-contained visual essays with their own narratives. Dublin: A Portrait was the last book published in this renowned series. …

In Dublin Hofer repeatedly turned her camera to sights of the city, but mainly to the people who constituted its essence. She made numerous portraits – be they of writers and public figures or unknown people in the streets. Her portraits give evidence of an intense, respectful engagement with her subjects, who participate as equal partners in the process of photographing.

Text from The Eye of Photography Magazine website

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, 1972

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence-even something of a legend-among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972 – along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art – offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented.

The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in making the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Diane Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages and remains the foundation of her international reputation.

Nearly half of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus’s photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it.

Text from the Fraenkel Gallery Shop website

Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975

A photographic documentation of the Beatty-Cole Circus, recording and portraying the customs, activities, animals, and singular personalities of an endangered way of life.

Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948) 'Carnival Strippers' book cover 1975

Susan Meiselas. Carnival Strippers book cover 1975

From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing women who performed striptease for small-town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. As she followed the shows from town to town, she captured the dancers on stage and off, their public performances as well as their private lives, creating a portrait both documentary and empathetic: “The recognition of this world is not the invention of it. I wanted to present an account of the girl show that portrayed what I saw and revealed how the people involved felt about what they were doing.” Meiselas also taped candid interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers and paying customers, which form a crucial part of the book.

Meiselas’ frank description of these women brought a hidden world to public attention, and explored the complex role the carnival played in their lives: mobility, money and liberation, but also undeniable objectification and exploitation. Produced during the early years of the women’s movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterised a complex era of change.

Text from the Booktopia website [Online] Cited 22/04/2022

Claudia Andujar, Amazônia, 1978

Since the early 1970s, Claudia Andujar has been committed to the cause of the Yanomami Indians living in the heart of the Amazon rainforest and is the author of the most important photographic work dedicated to them to date. A founding member of the Brazilian NGO Comissão Pró Yanomami (CCPY), the photographer has played a fundamental role in the recognition of their territory by the Brazilian government. …

Claudia Andujar first met the Yanomami in 1971 while working on an article about the Amazon for Realidade magazine. Fascinated by the culture of this isolated community, she decided to embark on an in-depth photographic essay on their daily life after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship to support the project. From the very beginning, her approach differed greatly from the straightforward documentary style of her contemporaries. The photographs she made during this period show how she experimented with a variety of photographic techniques in an attempt to visually translate the shamanic culture of the Yanomami. Applying Vaseline to the lens of her camera, using flash devices, oil lamps and infrared film, she created visual distortions, streaks of light and saturated colors, thus imbuing her images with a feeling of the otherworldly.

Text from the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain website

Cover image of Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979). Photographs by JEB (Joan E. Biren)

In 1979, JEB (Joan E. Biren) self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. Revolutionary at that time, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives-working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by testimonials from the women pictured in the book, as well as writings from icons including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and a foreword from Joan Nestle. Eye to Eye signalled a radical new way of seeing – moving lesbian lives from the margins to the centre, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years and featuring new essays from photographer Lola Flash and former soccer player Lori Lindsey, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that continues to resonate in the queer community and beyond.

Text from the Amazon website

Jo Spence. Putting Myself In The Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographic Autobiography. London: Camden Press Ltd, 1986

Photographer Jo Spence challenges the assumptions of conventional photography in this groundbreaking visual autobiography, which traces her journey from self-censorship to self-healing.

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986

Cristina García Rodero. España Oculta. 1989

When Spanish photographer Cristina Garcia Rodero went to study art in Italy, in 1973, she fully understood the importance of home. Yet her time abroad formented a deeper interest in was happening in her own country and, as a result, at the age of 23, Garcia Rodero returned to Spain and started a project that she hoped would capture the essence of the myriad Spanish traditions, religious practices and rites that were already fading away. What started as a five-year project ended up lasting 15 years and came to be the book España Oculta (Hidden Spain) published in 1989. At 39 years old, Garcia Rodero had managed to compile a kind of anthropological encyclopedia of her country. The work also captured a key moment in Spain’s history – with Spanish dictator Franco dying in 1975, and the country commencing a period of transition – something that would come to have a huge effect on the way the nation’s cultural traditions and rites were experienced and performed from then on.

Text from the Google Books website

Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. The MIT Press & The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999

This is the most comprehensive publication ever produced on the work of American artist Barbara Kruger. Kruger, one of the most influential artists of the last three decades, uses pictures and words through a wide variety of media and sites to raise issues of power, sexuality, and representation. Her works include photographic prints on paper and vinyl, etched metal plates, sculpture, video, installations, billboards, posters, magazine and book covers, T-shirts, shopping bags, postcards, and newspaper op-ed pieces.

This book serves as the catalog for the first major one-person exhibition of Kruger’s work to be mounted in the United States. The book, designed by Lorraine Wild in collaboration with the artist, contains texts by Rosalyn Deutsche, Katherine Dieckmann, Ann Goldstein, Steven Heller, Gary Indiana, Carol Squiers, and Lynne Tillman on subjects associated with Kruger’s work, including photography, graphic design, public space, power, and representation, as well as an extensive exhibition history, bibliography, and checklist of the exhibition. The cover features a new piece by Kruger, entitled Thinking of You, created especially for the catalog.

Text from the Amazon website

Graciela Iturbide. Juchitán de las Mujeres. Mexico: Ediciones Toledo, 1991

In 1979 Graciela Iturbide took a series of photographs of the Zapotec culture, published as Juchitán de la mujeres. This is certainly the best known of all her works. It is the result of ten years of work, numerous trips to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and a prolonged experience of living among its inhabitants. None of the subjects of these photographs was captured candidly; all were carefully posed.

Photobook history is a relatively recent area of study, with one of the first “book-on-books” anthologies published in 1999 with the release of Fotografía Pública / Photography in Print 1919-1939, a catalogue associated with an exhibition of the same title at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Over the past two decades, a virtual cottage industry of books-on-photobooks has emerged, documenting photographically illustrated books based on geography or around a theme. Photobooks by women are in short supply in most of these anthologies, which is why 10×10 Photobooks launched the How We See: Photobooks by Women touring reading room and associated publication in 2018. Focusing on contemporary photobooks by women from 2000 to 2018, the project was the first step in 10×10 Photobooks’ ongoing interest in reassessing photobook history as it relates to women. Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past photobook anthologies, and those included are already quite well known.

As a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding, the 10×10 Photobooks team frequently discusses how photobook history was – and continues to be – written from a skewed perspective and that a “new” history needs to emerge. Early in our discussions, we recognised photobook history as needing to be “rewritten,” but this implied we accepted the partial history already in existence, which we did not. Instead, we concluded that photobook history needs to be “unwritten,” as the existing history is riddled with omissions. What is left out is not by mistake – it indicates bias and incomplete research by the current gatekeepers. To present a more inclusive and diverse vision, we must collectively address these omissions.

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999, a touring reading room accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in some of the underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. We say “some photobooks” because we are keenly aware that much work is still required, and we have only opened the door a crack. In several cases, particularly for books done before 1900 in regions other than North America and Europe or by women of colour, we heard about an artist who may have produced a photographically illustrated book or album, but we were unable to find any further documentation other than a brief mention before the trail went cold. Other impediments emerged among the cohort of women who collaborated with their husbands. Many of their collaborative books are credited only with their husbands’ names, and their contributions, if mentioned at all, are included as footnotes. In some cases, women authors marked their works with a gender-neutral signature that used only their studio name or first initial and last name. In addition, our initial research was impeded by the standard definition of a photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher, or a trade publisher.

We found that we had to widen the frame to include individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, maquettes, zines, and artists’ books in order to be more inclusive. This wider frame necessitated redefining a photobook author to incorporate those who may not call themselves a photographer or artist but who nonetheless assembled a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others. Funding was another limitation. Many women photographers who actively exhibited their work either lacked the personal resources to produce a book or could not find anyone willing to underwrite such a venture.

This iteration of the What They Saw reading room includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are kept in the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. We begin with Anna Atkins, a British botanist, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook. Her simple desire to share images of her algae specimens ushered in a new art form that presents photography in the book format. In the following years, women such as Isabel Agnes Cowper, the Official Museum Photographer at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books. Until recently, her name was forgotten, as none of the South Kensington Museum publications credit her as the photographer.

In the early twentieth-century, women authors of photobooks gained some visibility. Fine-art photographer Germaine Krull published numerous books that approached photography from a creative and inventive perspective. Margaret Bourke-White emerged as a well-regarded photojournalist who traveled worldwide photographing for Fortune and Life magazines and producing countless books. In the 1930s, in Russia, Varvara Stepanova collaborated with her husband, Aleksandr Rodchenko, to create books filled with experimental photomontages. As the century progressed, women in other parts of the world also found their voices in photobooks. African American anthropologist Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson traveled to Uganda and South Africa and published African Journey in 1945, one of the earliest books written on Africa by a female scholar of color. In Mexico in 1951, Lola Álvarez Bravo contributed photographs to Acapulco en el sueño, a bold publication created to attract tourism to Acapulco. A few years later, Fina Gómez Revenga, a Venezuelan photographer, worked in Paris with the famed French printing house Draeger Frères to illustrate the poems of Surrealist poet Lise Deharme.

With the arrival of the 1960s, women emerged from the sidelines and began to produce widely distributed, often socially focused, photobooks. A New York City street photographer, Helen Levitt, published A Way of Seeing in 1965, while Carla Cerati collaborated on Morire di classe in 1969, a visually compelling commentary on the appalling conditions in Italian psychiatric hospitals. With the women’s movement finding its full voice in the 1970s, women photographers took center stage in the last three decades of the twentieth-century, releasing a steady flow of photobooks. A year after her death in 1971, Aperture published Diane Arbus’s monograph, a photobook that continues to influence generations of photographers. Barbara Brändli, a Swiss immigrant to Venezuela, documents the energy and rapid transformations of Caracas, while activist-photographer JEB (Joan E. Biren) toured the United States, capturing lesbian pride events. In South Africa, Lesley Lawson, a member of the Afrapix photo agency, combined interviews and her photographs to reveal the working conditions of Black women in Johannesburg. Cameroonian Angèle Etoundi Essamba shares the beauty and spirit of Black women in Passion (1989), while American Donna Ferrato unflinchingly explores domestic violence in Living with the Enemy (1991), and Nan Goldin exposes violent love and loss in her personal narrative, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). In books centered on cultural explorations, Wang Hsin photographs the fading traditions of Lanyu (Orchid Island) off the coast of Taiwan, Cristina García Rodero records religious festivals and rituals in her native Spain, and Ketaki Sheth documents twins and triplets in the Indian Gujarati community.

In reaching out to the far corners of the world, we uncovered numerous forgotten books, but many remain undiscovered. For example, we learned about a nineteenth-century woman in Iran who kept her husband’s diary and most probably added her photographs to the volume, but no visual documentation of this diary could be found. We also discovered several books that featured the participation of women in collaboration with male photographers where the women’s contributions were ambiguous. There were several “leads” of this nature, and we decided that leaving them out would be a missed opportunity. Therefore, in the associated anthology, we have included a “timeline” that presents several historically significant publishing, magazine, small press, photography, and feminist events that may or may not have produced a photobook, but have undoubtedly influenced its history. To support further exploration of these unresolved “leads,” 10×10 Photobooks has launched a research grant program to encourage scholarship on underexplored topics in photobook history.

From its inception, What They Saw has sought to include a diverse group of photographically illustrated publications by women. For photobook history to become more inclusive, it requires everyone (men, women, nonbinary, white, Black, Asian, African, Latinx, Indigenous, Western, Eastern, etc.) to contribute. We see this reading room of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks as a necessary step in the unwriting of the current photobook history and a rewriting of a photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive. We invite future researchers to take the next steps to explore further women and other marginalised people’s historical impact in the realm of photobooks and to expand upon the books we present in this reading room and its associated anthology.

Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Installation view of the exhibition 'What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999' at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Installation views of the exhibition What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Sabatini Building
Santa Isabel, 52
Nouvel Building
Ronda de Atocha (with plaza del Emperador Carlos V)
28012 Madrid
Phone: (34) 91 774 10 00

Opening hours:
Monday 10.00am – 9.00pm
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday – Saturday 10.00am – 9.00pm
Sunday 12.30am – 2.30pm

Review: ‘Photography: Real & Imagined’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne Part 2

Exhibition dates: 13th October, 2023 – 4th February, 2024

Curator: Susan van Wyk, NGV Senior Curator of Photography

Paul Strand (American 1890-1976, France 1951-1976)
Still life, pear and bowls, Twin Lakes, Connecticut
1916, printed 1983
From the Paul Strand: The Formative Years 1914-1917 portfolio photogravure
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1984
Public domain

“I feel that photographs can either document or record reality or they can offer images as an alternative to everyday life: places for the viewer to dream in.”

Francesca Woodman, 1980

Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors…

In many ways the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia can be seen as a summation of all that is good and bad with the photography collection and the photography exhibition program at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Since the sad and unfortunate demise of the small but important dedicated photography gallery, photography exhibitions at the NGV (other than the large Patrick Pound exhibition all those years ago in 2017) have been in a state of deep freeze. I MISS that little third floor gallery… it’s all we had for photography at the NGV on a regular basis and there were some interesting shows there. It’s been gone for years and photography has been lumped in with contemporary art. And then, and now, nothing for years.

Therefore, as a fellow photographic artist observed to me, “It was great to see the NGV finally give photography a large exhibition after so many years of neglect.” Never a truer word said.

Let’s get the good stuff about the exhibition out of the way first. Whoever curated the exhibition (unknown, unnamed) really knew how to pull an installation of photographs together. There was some sophisticated sequencing of the images on the various themes from Australian and International artists, very intelligently and beautifully rendered which I enjoyed tremendously. I also enjoyed seeing the glorious display of photobooks: I was in heaven seeing in one display cabinet Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s book Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (published 1930), Bill Brandt’s book Perspective of Nudes (published 1961), and Germaine Krull’s book Nude studies (Études de nu) (published 1930). What a selection!

And it was finally great to see Australian and international work displayed together on such a large scale, something I can’t remember happening in the 35 years I have being viewing photography exhibitions in Australia. This is something that the NGV should have been promoting for many years, the placement of Australian photography in an international context… even taking this concept overseas, to promote Australian photography internationally. But no, nothing of this kind of forward thinking has ever happened in insular Australia.

Now to the not so good stuff. The most glaring anomaly about the exhibition was its over ambitious structure. While the concept ‘Real & Imagined’ was very strong – an exhibition of photographs picturing a version of reality captured by the camera (for it can never capture reality itself) / photographs created by the imagination of human beings – this robust concept was overwhelmed by too many thematic sections in the exhibition.

These sections included ‘Light’ and ‘Systems and Surface’ and ‘Surreal’ and ‘Narrative’ and ‘Work and Play’ and ‘Movement’ and ‘Studio and Things’ and ‘Display’ and ‘Consumption’ and ‘Self’ and ‘Skin’ and ‘Community and Touch’ and ‘Environment’ and ‘Place and Built’ and ‘Nineteenth-century photography’ and ‘Conflict’ and ‘Death’. I’m exhausted already…

And then, walking around the exhibition, the wall texts used to identify and illuminate these sections became totally irrelevant as through their placement on the wall I had no idea to which area they were referring. It was totally confusing and in the end I just ignored them.

As I observed people wandering around the exhibition, most had no idea of the importance of some of the images on display… why would they? They are not photography aficionados but the viewing public. If I found the exhibition confusing imagine how they viewed it. What the NGV should have done was have a guided tour on the hour, every hour, to talk about the seminal works in the exhibition and about how the exhibition had been structured. Imagine someone explaining the importance of the four photobooks in a display cabinet mentioned earlier in the history of photography and how by putting them together you were creating a sophisticated dialogue over time about identity and gender issues.

As the aforementioned colleague observed to me, “the exhibition felt like a data dump with a tacked on theme that strained (and failed) to resonate.” I wouldn’t go that far for the overall concept was strong and vibrant but like much of what has happened with the photography collection at the NGV, the overall outcome was confused and piecemeal.

This can no better be illustrated than through the comments of the Director of the NGV, Tony Ellwood, when he said in the press release, “This exhibition celebrates the collections and achievements of the NGV’s photography department, which has presented more than 180 exhibitions in its 55-year history. The exhibition is a testament to the strength of the NGV Collection, with so many key examples of the history of photography represented, from the earliest examples from the 19th century, through to contemporary images being produced right now in the twenty-first century.”

I note that when the head of the NGV boasts about the number of photography exhibitions over the last 55 years (180, about 3 a year mainly small exhibitions) and the “strength” of the NGV Photography Collection… you know that he is proselytising.

Most of the large photography exhibitions have been brought in from outside sources in the last 30 years and little research has been done into Australian photography and its relationship to world photography in house. And while the NGV collection has “strength” in certain areas it is woefully lacking in others. Again, the word “piecemeal” springs to mind, like Swiss cheese full of the biggest holes … and this exhibition only serves to reinforce that idea, often displaying the only photograph by an important artist that the collection holds.

Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors!

For example I picked a few photographic artists off the top of my head as I thought of them – and the NGV collection possesses some in reasonable depth:

Edward Steichen 23
Paul Strand 51
Brassai 17
André Kertesz 45
Eugène Atget 143
Frank Hurley 20
Max Dupain 94
Bill Brandt 44
Bill Henson 108
Lee Friedlander 31
David Goldblatt 15
Dorothea Lange 28
August Sander 16

Other important photographers the NGV have nothing or next to nothing at all:

Joseph Sudek 1
Stephen Shore 0
William Eggleston 0
Julia Margaret Cameron 3
Robert Mapplethorpe 1
Ansel Adams 4
Hiroshi Sugimoto 1
Daido Moriyama 0
Raja Deen Dayal 0
Aleksandr Rodchenko 1
Olive Cotton 9
Berenice Abbott 7
Diane Arbus 2
Roger Ballen 1
Bernd and Hiller Becher 1
Thomas Ruff 2
Manuel Álvarez Bravo 0
Edward Weston 6
Henri Cartier-Bresson 2
Robert Frank 11
Garry Winogrand 0
Nan Goldin 3
Gordon Parks 3
Lewis Hine 9
Peter Hujar 0
Imogen Cunningham 6

Not exactly an institution that has “strength” in their photography collection. And over the last 30 years seemingly nothing much has been done to plug these enormous holes in the collection…. instead, for example, buying one work by Jeff Wall for a million dollars.

The NGV needs to improve the photography collection and its photography exhibition program. After too many years of stagnation an injection of new ideas and a new direction for exhibition programming is needed. A couple of focused photography exhibitions per year would be a good start, as would the purchasing of historic photographs to fill huge gaps in the collection rather than the purchasing of contemporary work. Non-vintage prints of the masters can still be bought at affordable prices. And therein lies just one of the problems: money.

Investment in photography at the NGV in terms of people and money is much needed, otherwise the deep freeze and dance of smoke and mirrors will continue well into the future.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

For more information on the early collecting practices for the NGV photography collection please see my research paper Beginnings: The International Photographic Collection at the National Gallery of Victoria (2105)

Many thankx to the NGV for allowing me to publish the media images in the posting. All other installation images are by Marcus Bunyan. See more images and text in Part 1 of the posting.

Photography: Real and Imagined examines two perspectives on photography; photography grounded in the real world, as a record, a document, a reflection of the world around us; and photography as the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion. On occasion, photography operates in both realms of the real and the imagined.

Highlighting major photographic works from the NGV Collection, including recent acquisitions on display for the very first time, Photography: Real and Imagined examines the complex, engaging and sometimes contradictory nature, of all things photographic. The NGV’s largest survey of the photography collection, the exhibition includes more than 300 works by Australian and international photographers and artists working with photo-media from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at rear left, Penelope Davis’ Shelf (2008) and Non-fiction (red) (2008, below); at third right, Anne Ferran’s Scenes on the death of nature, III (1986); at second right, Candida Höfer’s Teylers Museum Haarlem II (2003, below); and at right, Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Penelope Davis’ Shelf (2008) and Non-fiction (red) (2008) from the Fiction-Non-Fiction series 2007-2008
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at middle left, Anne Ferran’s Scenes on the death of nature, III (1986); at centre, Candida Höfer’s Teylers Museum Haarlem II (2003, below); and at middle right, Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The luminous photograph by Thomas Struth shows museum visitors immersed in observing the Telephos frieze within a room of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Struth draws our attention to the fact that viewing a work of art in a public gallery is rarely a private experience. The visit is usually shared by other visitors, museum staff, security guards and tour guides. There is also the omnipresent gaze of security cameras. Struth seems to be emulating the technical innovations of the Telephos frieze in his arrangement of the viewers. Similarities between the poses of the audience members and the poses of the carved relief figures gradually emerge, suggesting an unconscious dialogue between the viewers and the objects they regard.

Wall text from the exhibition

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Teylers Museum Haarlem II
2003
Type C photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2004

This photograph shows the famous Oval Room within Teylers Museum, the oldest public museum in the Netherlands. Candida Höfer photographed the space bathed in a brilliant, even light that illuminates its architecture, objects and famed mineralogical cabinet. The highly structured museological ordering of the objects and the Neoclassical architecture that contains them are exaggerated by the formal, symmetrical composition of the photograph. This image invites reflection of the ways in which cultural institutions direct our engagement with materials. As the artist has said, ‘There are no people there, but you understand that the places were made specially for them. This is very meaningful for me, and it’s exactly what I want to express’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Anne Ferran’s Scenes on the death of nature, III (1986); at centre, Candida Höfer’s Teylers Museum Haarlem II (2003, above); and at right, Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). In the distance can be seen Lotte Jacobi’s Head of a dancer (1929, below); Man Ray’s Head of a dancer (1929, below); and Lee Miller’s Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lotte Jacobi (American, 1896-1990) 'Head of the Dancer' 1929

Lotte Jacobi (German 1896-1990, United States 1935-1990)
Head of a dancer
1929, printed c. 1970
Gelatin silver photograph
26.4 x 33.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
Public domain

Man Ray (1890-1976) 'Kiki with African mask' 1926

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
Kiki with African mask
1926
Gelatin silver photograph
21.1 x 27.6cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Miss Flora MacDonald Anderson and Mrs Ethel Elizabeth Ogilvy Lumsden, Founder Benefactors, 1983
Public domain

Kiki with African mask is one of Man Ray’s most celebrated photographs and an iconic image of the Art Deco period. First published in Vogue in 1926, it is an elegant image, but it also speaks to the impact of European colonialism in Africa. In this pared-back studio photograph all extraneous detail is excluded from the image, focusing our attention on the exquisitely made-up face of Kiki in juxtaposition with the perfectly polished ebony of the mask. This photograph invites us to delight in the physical beauty of Man Ray’s celebrated model but offers nothing about the mask or its maker.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lee Miller’s Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lee Miller (American 1907-1977)
Nimet Eloui Bey (installation view)
c. 1930
Gelatin silver photograph
23.0 x 15.8cm
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

Lee Miller may have been well-known as Man Ray’s colleague, model and lover, but she was also celebrated for her own photographic practice, producing portrait and fashion photographs. When Miller photographed Egyptian model Nimet Eloui Bey the encounter changed both women’s lives. Four years after taking this intimate portrait, Miller would marry Nimet’s then husband, Aziz Eloui Bey. As curator Sophia Cai comments, ‘The personal scandal behind this portrait colours many contemporary interpretations, but also demonstrates the way that the personal lives of artists become interwoven with their artistic identities. This is particularly true in instances of women artists who are relegated to the role of the “muse” or lovers to male artists’.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at centre, Fiona Pardington’s Portrait of a life-cast of Koe, Timor (2010) and Portrait of a life cast of Matoua Tawai, Aotearoa New Zealand (2010); and at right, Linda Judge’s Victoria and Albert Museum 20/4/94 (1994, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Fiona Pardington’s photograph shows a life cast of the tattooed head of a Māori man, Matoua Tawai. The cast, held in a museum collection, is one of many made by Pierre- Marie Alexandre Dumoutier of Māori peoples in the 1830s. Pardington, who is of Māori and Scottish descent, has spoken of her desire to reconsider the complex history of these life casts and find a state of continuum between the past and present, to, as she says, ‘find the faces of the living people presenting and manifesting in the object’. Printing the photograph at larger-than-life scale provokes a physical encounter, an opportunity to look again and reconsider the histories of the person, the object and the image.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Linda Judge's Victoria and Albert Museum 20/4/94 (1994, installation view detail)

Linda Judge (Australian, b. 1964)
Victoria and Albert Museum 20/4/94 (installation view detail)
1994
Type C photographs
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Margaret Stewart Endowment, 1994
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In this image, Linda Judge wittily creates new narratives and resurrects otherwise ‘mummified’ museum objects. Concerned with the open-ended nature of archives and their ability to slip between fiction and reality, Judge presents photographs of historical lace from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Beneath each photograph, Judge has provided a range of both ‘plausible’ captions (’12. collar, cuff, border: Italian, late 17th century, Tape lace with needlepoint fillings and brides’) and fanciful ones (’51. veil: Brussels, end 18th century, needlepoint on bobbin ground. Worn by Madonna, for Like a Virgin in her Brussels tour ’91’). Judge humorously invites the viewer to interrogate the expectations of truth in the presentation of archival content.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Martin Parr’s Pink pig cakes from Common Sense (1995-1999); at fourth left, ringl+pit’s Komol (1931, below); at fifth left, Ilse Bing’s Salut de Schiaparelli (1934, below); and at sixth left, Dora Maar’s Untitled (Study of Beauty) (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing ringl+pit’s Komol (1931, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

ringl+pit (German active 1930-1933)
Grete Stern (German, 1904-1999)
Ellen Auerbach (German 1906-2004)
Komol
1931, printed 1984
Gelatin silver photograph
34.4 x 23.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
© ringl+pit

Dora Maar (French 1907-1997)
Untitled (Study of Beauty)
1936
Gelatin silver photograph
33.0 x 24.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
© Dora Maar. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Martin Parr’s Pink Pig Cakes, Bristol, UK (1995); at third right, Lillian Bassman’s More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York (1956); at second right, and at right, Darren Sylvester’s On Holiday (2010)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Darren Sylvester builds and photographs hyperreal tableaux using the visual language of advertising – beautiful models, perfect lighting and considered ‘product’ placement – to construct a familiar yet illusionary reality. Here Sylvester’s model plays the role of a handsome businessman. ‘Against a sunrise, a business traveller gazes at an unknown destination’, Sylvester once wrote of this image. ‘The composition plays on stereotypes of luxury aspirations and aeroplane advertisements. For example, no-one ever flies into darkness or storms in an ad.’ In this lush, seductive photograph, Sylvester explores the slippery space between reality and illusion, aspiration and irrelevance, as we move on to the next shiny thing.

Wall text from the exhibition

Lillian Bassman (American, 1917-2012)
More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York
1956, printed later
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023

In the late 1930s, Lillian Bassman studied fashion illustration and textile design at the Pratt Institute, New York. In 1940 she began working with Alexey Brodovitch, art director of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, which soon led to her appointment as art director of the subsidiary publication Junior Bazaar. In this capacity she worked with photographers, including Richard Avedon and Robert Frank, and in 1947 began working as a freelance fashion and advertising photographer. In an interview later in her life Bassman played down her directorial role as photographer, stating, ‘It is part of the nature of a woman to be unconsciously graceful … I try to record that natural grace with a camera’.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Athol Shmith’s Fashion illustration, model Ann Chapman (c. 1961)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Alice Mills’ Joan Margaret Syme (c. 1918, below); at second left, works by Edson Chagas from his Tipo Passe series (2014); and at third left, Hassan Hajjaj’s Master Cobra Mansa (2013, below) with at right, Martin Parr’s Pink Pig Cakes, Bristol, UK (1995)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929)
Joan Margaret Syme
c. 1918
Gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through the NGV Foundation by Michael Hayne, 2005
Public domain

Alice Mills set up her first studio in Melbourne in 1900. She was highly regarded as a portrait photographer and in 1907 was invited to exhibit in the Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work. Her portrait of five-year-old Joan Margaret Syme dressed in a leopard-skin robe is an outstanding example of studio portraiture. It shows the skilled application of hand colouring, which was used to transform black-and-white photographs in the era before colour photography, bringing a life-like quality to the portrait. At almost two metres high, this is no only a charming study of a young child, but one of the largest photographs from the early twentieth century in the NGV Collection.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left Alice Mills’ Joan Margaret Syme (c. 1918, above); at centre, works by Edson Chagas from his Tipo Passe series (2014); and at right, Hassan Hajjaj’s Master Cobra Mansa (2013, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Hassan Hajjaj (Moroccan, b. 1961)
Master Cobra Mansa
2013
Metallic inkjet print, timber frame, cans
76.2 x 111.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Orloff Family Charitable Trust, 2019
© Hassan Hajjaj

Multidisciplinary artist Hassan Hajjaj’s portraits show London’s Moroccan diaspora; as a designer he also creates stylish street fashion and playful interiors that are a contemporary take on Moroccan tea houses and riads. Hajjaj came to professional photography by happenstance, taking pictures both for fun and as a tool while working as a stylist on music videos. It soon became a cornerstone of his creative practice. From the outset Hajjaj wanted his photography to show ‘another side of Moroccan culture’, something that, as he says, was not ‘camels, dates and drinking mint tea!’

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Adolphe Braun (French 1811-1877)
No title (Flower study)
c. 1854
Albumen silver photograph
31.0 x 37.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2017
Public domain

Adolphe Braun arrived in Paris in 1828 to study drafting and decorative design and within six years had established a textile design studio. Around 1853 he began to make photographs using the recently invented collodion process. The following year Braun commenced a project to photograph an extensive series of flower studies with the intent of providing documentary source material for artists and designers. He produced 300 of these photographs and in 1854 published his images in a six-volume series titled Fleurs photographiés. When they were exhibited in the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris, Braun was awarded a gold medal for his work’s usefulness to the fabric and decorating industries.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left Julie Rrap’s Persona and shadow: Madonna (1984, below)

Julie Rrap. 'Persona and shadow: Madonna' 1984

Julie Rrap (Australian, b. 1950)
Persona and shadow: Madonna
1984
Cibachrome photograph
194.7 × 104.6cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Michell Endowment, 1984

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Yasumasa Morimura’s An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Flower wreath and tears) (2001, below); Phumzile Khanyile’s Untitled (2016); Zanele Muholi’s Ntozkhe II (Parktown) (2016, below); Ayana V. Jackson’s How sweet the song (2017); Julie Rrap’s Madonna (1984, above); and Siri Hayes Spilling pearls (2012)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951) 'An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Flower wreath and tears)' 2001 (installation view)

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Flower wreath and tears) (installation views)
2001
From the An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo series 1991-2001
Photograph, plastic
213.4cm diameter
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2022
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Ntozkhe II (Parktown)
2016
From the Somnyama Ngonyama series 2015-2016
Gelatin silver photograph
99 x 74cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2017
© Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York

Using found props – in this instance a ‘crown’ of scouring pads – Zanele Muholi has photographed themself to confront racial stereotypes and examine concepts of self-representation while honouring generations of women who have worked domestically. Discussing this work the artist wrote, ‘In some ways, yes: Ntozakhe is based on the Statue of Liberty, representing the idea of freedom – the freedom all women should have – as well as pride: pride in who we are as black, female-bodied beings. But what kind of freedom are we talking about? What is the colour of the Statue of Liberty? What race is the figure monumentalised as Lady Liberty?’

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Julie Rrap’s Madonna (1984, above); at second left, Siri Hayes’ Spilling pearls (2012); at third left, Sarah Lucas’ Self-portrait with fried eggs (1999); at fourth left, William Yang’s William, Father, Mother, Graceville, Brisbane (1974, below) and then his Self Portrait #5 (2008, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

William Yang (Australian, b. 1943) 'William, Father, Mother, Graceville, Brisbane' 1974 (installation view)

William Yang (Australian, b. 1943)
William, Father, Mother, Graceville, Brisbane (installation view)
1974, printed 2014
Inkjet print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2014
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

William Yang’s autobiographical photographs combine photographs and handwritten text to tell the stories of Yang’s family, his childhood, and his experiences of being Chinese in an Australia that was not always welcoming to him. In one of these photographs Yang points to the difficulties he faced as a young man torn between his parents’ aspirations for him and his own wish for a different life. In the other, he describes himself as more content, at ease with himself and the choices he has made in his life. Together they form part of a powerful account of his life and sense of self.

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William Yang (Australian, b. 1943) 'Self Portrait #5' 2008 (installation view)

William Yang (Australian, b. 1943)
Self Portrait #5 (installation view)
2008; printed 2014
From the Self Portrait series
Inkjet print
43 x 65cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2014
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Virginie Grange’s Untitled (1990); George Hoyningen-Huene’s Horst torso (1931, below); František Drtikol’s Nude (1927-1929); Olive Cotton’s Max after surfing (1937, below); Edward Weston’s Nude (1936, below); Eadweard Muybridge’s Plate 227 from Animal Locomotion series 1887; and Helmut Newton’s Big nude I (1980)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, George Hoyningen-Huene’s Horst torso (1931, below); František Drtikol’s Nude (1927-1929); Olive Cotton’s Max after surfing (1937, below); Edward Weston’s Nude (1936, below); Eadweard Muybridge’s Plate 227 from Animal Locomotion series 1887
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The František Drtikol was the first fine art photograph to enter the National Gallery of Victoria collection.

George Hoyningen-Huene (Russian 1900-1968, England 1917-1921, France 1921-1935, United States 1935-1968)
Horst torso
1931, printed 1980s
Gelatin silver photograph
23.1 x 27.9cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2017

Edward Weston (American 1886-1958)
Nude
1936, printed 1976
Gelatin silver photograph
17.8 x 23.8cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Agfa and B. H. P. donation, 1977
Public domain

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) 'Max after surfing' 1939

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Max after surfing
1937, printed 1998
Gelatin silver photograph
26.0 x 19.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Optus Communications Pty Limited, Member, 1998

Photographs of lovers, family and friends are perhaps the most emotionally charged of all images, not because the subject is monumental or dramatic, but because they allow us to see into intimate relationships. When photographs show subjects nude, or even partially naked, the sense of familiarity is heightened. Olive Cotton’s photograph of Max Dupain is an image that reveals intimacy and tenderness. His body is sculpted by raking side lighting and the allusion to Classical sculpture is apparent, but this photograph also carries an erotic charge – Dupain is shown as being tanned and muscular, movie-star handsome and the object of Cotton’s desire.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Francesca Woodman’s Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 (1976, below); E. J. Bellocq’s Woman reclining with mask (c. 1912, below); Florence Henri’s Nude composition (c. 1930, below); an anonymous American photographer’s image Kaloma (1914); and Germaine Krull’s Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (c. 1925)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Francesca Woodman. From 'Space2', Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
1976, printed c. 2000
Gelatin silver photograph
16.3 x 16.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Ruth Margaret Frances Houghton Bequest, 2021

Francesca Woodman once stated, ‘I want my pictures to have a certain timeless, personal but allegorical quality like they do in many Ingres history paintings, but I like the rough edge that photography gives a nude’. Woodman was only twenty-three when she died, her work has had a profound impact on other artists, including Cindy Sherman, who wrote, ‘[Woodman] had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure … Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what’s right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they’re going to do’.

Wall text from the exhibition

E. J. Bellocq (American, 1873-1949)
No title (Woman reclining with mask)
c. 1912, printed c. 1981
From the Storyville Portraits series c. 1911-1913
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1981
Public domain

Florence Henri (American, 1893-1982)
Nude composition (Nu composition)
c. 1930
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021
Public domain

This photograph is a beautiful example of the way in which Florence Henri combined the elements of New Objectivity in photography, including sharp focus and unexpected vantage points, with her exploration of identity and sexuality. The presentation of the woman is unashamedly erotic: her naked form is presented for the pleasure of the viewer, but she does not conform to conventional modes of softcore pornography. The woman’s gaze excludes the viewer; she reclines on a coarse cloth backdrop, crumpled to suggest a beach as she looks at a perfect conch shell symbolising female fertility and an eloquently beautiful indicator of the artist’s object of desire.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Sophie Calle’s The giraffe (2012); and centre right, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin’s Al Hammadi Desert Saqar #1 and #3; and at right, Sarah Waiswa’s Finding solace (2016)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Sarah Waiswa (Ugandan, b. 1980) 'Finding solace' 2016 (installation view)

Sarah Waiswa (Ugandan, b. 1980)
Finding solace (installation view)
2016
From the Stranger in a Familiar Land series 2016
Inkjet print
79.5 × 79.5cm
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2017
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Sarah Waiswa has described her series Stranger in a Familiar Land as an exploration of life outside the security and boundaries of community. Discussing her work, she wrote, ‘People fear what they do not understand … The concept of Stranger in a Familiar Land groups together various portraits of an albino woman set against the backdrop of the Kibera slums, which are a metaphor for my turbulent vision of the outside world. The series also explores how the sense of non-belonging has led her to wander and exist in a dreamlike state. People notice Kisombe, but at the same time, they don’t’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin’s Al Hammadi Desert Saqar #1 and #3
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Jan Groover’s Untitled (1981); August Sander’s Bohemians (Willi Bongard and Gottfried Brockman) (1922-1925, below); Julia Margaret Cameron’s Mrs Herbert Duckworth, her son George, Florence Fisher and H. A. L. Fisher (c. 1871, below); Harry Callahan’s Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago (1954); Gordon Parks’ Big Mama and boy, 1961 (1961); Micky Allan’s Man holding his daughter (1982, below); Brenda L. Croft’s In my mother’s garden (1998); and Angela Lynkushka’s Zühre Yildirim from Turkey with grand-daughter Nurahan Gundogdu, born in Australia. De Carle Street, Brunswick (1982)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Bohemians (Willi Bongard and Gottfried Brockman)
1922-1925, printed 1973
From the People of the Twentieth Century project 1920s-1964
Gelatin silver photograph
23.3 x 30.5cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1974

Gottfried Waldemar Brockmann (1903-1983) was a German artist, educator, publisher, and served as a cultural advisor for the city of Kiel, Germany. He taught at Muthesius Academy of Art in Kiel.

Julia Margaret Cameron (English, 1815-1879, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 1875-1879)
Mrs Herbert Duckworth, her son George, Florence Fisher and H. A. L. Fisher
c. 1871
Albumen silver photograph
31.0 x 22.7cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979
Public domain

In this portrait, Julia Duckworth sits for her aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the nineteenth century’s most esteemed photographers. As curator Elisa deCourcy notes, ‘Julia Duckworth’s lackadaisical pose and her flailing hand cast her as somewhat of a Pre-Raphaelite heroine, very much in the style of Cameron’s broader oeuvre’. DeCourcy adds it is perhaps also a depiction of the experience of maternal exhaustion: ‘Julia’s distant gaze and slouched form makes it hard for us not to read this photograph as depicting fatigued motherhood. Through touch, the children seem to demonstrate a sentimental connection to Julia while also laying claim to her attention and energy’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Eleanor and Barbara
1954, printed 1970s
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979

Harry Callahan began photographing his wife Eleanor shortly after they married in 1936 and continued to do so for almost fifty years. Discussing their relationship as artist and muse in a 1983 film, Callahan said, ‘I felt very natural photographing Eleanor. I didn’t feel like there were any obstacles of any kind’. Following the birth of their daughter Barbara in 1950 he began to photograph mother and child and, as can be seen in this image, often captured moments of family life in pictures of great intimacy.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Micky Allan’s Man holding his daughter (1982) from the People of Elizabeth series 1982-1983
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The application of hand-colouring to photographs was generally the work of women in photography studios until the 1950s. In the 1970s and 80s these superseded processes experienced a revival as some feminist photographers applied the historic treatment to their images of contemporary life. As art historian Elisa deCourcy observes, ‘Micky Allan’s vibrant hand-colouring radically alters the topography of this otherwise monochrome photographic portrait of a young father and daughter from the 1980s … The application of colour to the father’s and daughter’s faces and the “retouching” of their hair, eyes and lips with colour offers an illuminated realism to each subject’.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right Gilbert & George’s FORWARD (2008, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gilbert & George (active 1967- )
Gilbert Proesch (Italian, b. 1943
George Passmore (English, b. 1942)
FORWARD
2008
From the Jack Freak series
Inkjet print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Professor AGL Shaw AO Bequest, 2021

Writer Michael Bracewell described the Jack Freak series as being ‘among the most iconic, philosophically astute and visually violent works that Gilbert & George have ever created’. In this picture the Union Jack, an internationally familiar flag and politically charged symbol whose significance spans the cultural spectrum from contemporary fashion to aggressive national pride, forms the backdrop to monumental portraits of the artists. In contrast to this visual cacophony the artists appear as rather low-key, neatly dressed, senior statesmen maintaining their central relevance in a community that too often disregards the elderly.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Ellen José’s Basket Weaver, Lake Tyers (1988); Roman Vishniac’s Grandfather and granddaughter, Warsaw (c. 1935-1938, below); Wolfgang Tillmans’ Lars in tube (1993); Ruth Maddison’s Molly O’Sullivan, 82 (1990); Naomi Hobson’s The God Father (2021); Donna Bailey’s Lush (2002); Carol Jerrems Sharpies (1976, below); and Nan Goldin’s Misty in Sheridan Square, NYC (1991, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Roman Vishniac. 'Grandfather and granddaugther' Lublin, 1937

Roman Vishniac (Russian, 1897-1990, United States 1940-1990)
Grandfather and granddaughter, Warsaw
c. 1935-1938, printed 1977
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1978

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Carol Jerrems’ Sharpies (1976)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Misty in Sheridan Square, NYC
1991; 2015 {printed}
Cibachrome photograph
76 x 102cm (sheet)
ed. 20/25
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2015
© Nan Goldin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Huang Yan’s Chinese landscape – Tattoo (Number 1) (1999); four photographs by Hedda Morrison (1935, below); and Mervyn Bishop’s Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory (1975, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Huang Yan (Chinese, b. 1966)
Chinese landscape – Tattoo (Number 1)
1999, printed 2004
Type C photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2004

In this photograph Huang Yan uses the human body as a canvas for the traditional shānshuǐ style of Chinese landscape painting. Discussing this image, curator and writer Isobel Crombie observed, ‘The title of the work, Tattoo, implies that landscape traditions are written permanently into the Chinese body, making them alive and active. However, ironically, the scenes painted onto the artist’s torso are clearly fugitive, alerting us to both the fragility of the natural environment and the transience of the body’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Hedda Morrison (German 1908-1991, China 1933-1946, Australia 1967-1991)
No title (Fairy Palm Cliff)
1935
Gelatin silver photograph
25.3 x 22.8cm
Purchased, 1976
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1976
Public domain

Hedda Morrison (German 1908-1991, China 1933-1946, Australia 1967-1991)
No title (Three gnarled pines)
1935
Gelatin silver photograph
30.6 × 19cm
Purchased, 1976
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1976
Public domain

Hedda Morrison (German 1908-1991, China 1933-1946, Australia 1967-1991)
No title (Lone pine against clouds)
1935; printed 1976
Gelatin silver photograph
25.3 x 22.8cm
Purchased, 1976
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1976
Public domain

Hedda Morrison (German 1908-1991, China 1933-1946, Australia 1967-1991)
No title (Morning clouds)
1935; printed 1970s
Gelatin silver photograph
25.3 x 22.8cm
Purchased, 1976
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1976
Public domain

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory
1975, printed 1990
Cibachrome photograph
35.5 x 35.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, NGV Foundation and NGV Supporters of Photography, 2021
© Mervyn Bishop / Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

In August 1975 Mervyn Bishop travelled to Daguragu, formerly known as Wattie Creek, in the Northern Territory. As a press photographer he captured the moment when then prime minister Gough Whitlam placed a handful of soil into the palm of Gurindji elder and activist Vincent Lingiari. This photograph is an iconic image of the ongoing battle for self-determination for Australia’s traditional owners; however, the photograph is not as straightforward as it appears: the moment was re-staged outside so Bishop could take advantage of better lighting.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Robert Macpherson’s Rome (c. 1860); Louis-Emile Durandelle and Clémence Delmaet’s The new Paris Opera, ornamental sculpture (c. 1870, below); Edouard Baldus’ Notre Dame, Paris (c. 1852-1853, below); and Véronique Ellena’s Santi Luca e Martina, Rome (2011)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In Véronique Ellena’s photograph we see a shrouded figure, draped in a blanket or canvas cloth, lying on the steps of a Baroque church in central Rome. Initially seducing us with the formal beauty of the city and its architecture, the photograph then jolts us as we recognise the harsh reality of the scene. This was a calculated strategy on Ellena’s part, as she acknowledges: ‘At first, we could only perceive the sublime beauty of architecture. But this work tells us something else: the place of some people in this world, who are there but whom we do not see – or not anymore’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Louis-Emile Durandelle (French, 1839-1917)
Clémence Delmaet (French, 1838-1917)
The new Paris Opera, ornamental sculpture
c. 1870
Albumen silver photograph
38.1 x 28.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the Lunn Gallery, Washington D.C, USA, 1982
Public domain

Edouard Baldus (Prussian 1813-1989, France c. 1848 – c. 1869)
Notre Dame, Paris
c. 1852-1853, printed 1880s
Platinum photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1995
Public domain

By the middle of the nineteenth century many of the great historic buildings of Paris, including Notre Dame Cathedral, were in a state of disrepair due to decades of neglect. Under the auspices of the Commission des Monuments Historiques, significant historic buildings underwent extensive restoration. This committee recognised the invaluable role photography could play in documenting the changes occurring to the architectural heritage of Paris. Official Second Empire photographer, Édouard Baldus, captured the splendour of newly commissioned and lavishly restored architectural icons as cultural highlights of the Second Empire.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Véronique Ellena’s Santi Luca e Martina, Rome (2011); at second right, work from Girma Berta’s Moving shadows series (2017); and at right, Pieter Hugo’s Green Point Common, Cape Town (2013)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at centre, Girma Berta’s Untitled IV, VI and XII (2017) at right, Pieter Hugo’s Green Point Common, Cape Town (2013)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Girma Berta (Ethiopian, b. 1990)
Untitled IV
2017
From the Moving shadows series 2017
Inkjet print, ed. 4/4
89.8 x 90.0cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2018
© Girma Berta

Girma Berta has been photographing people on the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, since around 2014. His earlier photographs were documentary in style, but over time his work has become more refined and stylised.

The five photographs from his Moving Shadows series 2017 … are from an ongoing body of work in which all background detail has been removed. These photographs show isolated figures, and their shadows, on immersive, coloured backgrounds. The works feature individuals photographed on the streets of Addis Ababa going about the daily lives. Using the camera in his phone, Berta is able to work discretely and capture his subjects without them being aware of his presence.

In all his street-based work, Berta is interested in presenting a ‘portrait’ of the people of Addis Ababa. Working in his studio, he has developed a method to extract aspects of the scenes he photographs from the city’s busy streetscapes. Berta explains further: ‘Through my work on Instagram, I wish the world (would) stare into the eyes of a face of Addis Ababa; the city where I was born and where I grew up. The beautiful, the ugly and all that is in between.’

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at second left, Girma Berta’s Untitled IV, VI and XII (2017, above); and at right, Dacre Stubbs’ St. George’s Road flats (1953, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing from left to right, Gertrude Kasebier’s Gargoyle (1901, top); Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Art d’eglise in Achen (1930s, bottom); Werner Mantz’s Industrial Landscape (1937, top); Max Dupain’s Silos through windscreen (1935, bottom); Edward Steichen’s The maypole (1932); Barbara Morgan’s City shell (1938, top); Berenice Abbott’s Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, Manhattan, October 8 (1936, bottom) and Dacre Stubbs’ St. George’s Road flats (1953)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

For modernist architects in the 1930s there was a natural synergy between their own vision of the constructed environment in the machine age and the work of photographers. In architecture this was manifested in structural clarity and precision, and the use of modern building materials such as steel, glass and unadorned concrete. In photography the use of sharp focus, unexpected vantage points, radical cropping of images and unusual perspectives formed part of the lexicon of the so-called New Objectivity. Photographers like Werner Mantz show a world in which compressed space and unexpected vantages confound our expectations of how buildings should be photographed.

Wall text from the exhibition

Gertrude Kasebier (American, 1852-1934)
Gargoyle
1901
Platinum photograph
20.6 x 13.5cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979
Public domain

Werner Mantz (German 1901-1983)
Industrial landscape
1937
Gelatin silver photograph
38.6 x 29.2cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1983
Public domain

Max Dupain. 'Max Dupain. 'Silos through windscreen' 1935' 1935

Max Dupain (Australian 1911-1992)
Silos through windscreen
1935, printed c. 1985
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1986
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Edward Steichen’s The maypole (1932)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
City shell
1938, printed 1972
Gelatin silver photograph
34.4 x 25.1cm (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
Public domain

Barbara Morgan moved to New York in 1930 and began experimenting with the avant-garde photographic techniques of photograms and photomontage. City shell is an outstanding example of Morgan’s innovative photography from the 1930s. In this image she combined a view from her studio window of the Empire State Building with a shell gifted to her by a friend. The monumental skyscraper is shown tilted on an extreme angle while the shell appears upright in the centre of the photograph – a visual metaphor, according to the artist, for the transient nature of built structures in comparison to those of the natural world.

Wall text from the exhibition

Berenice Abbott (American 1898-1991, France 1921-1929)
Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, Manhattan, October 8
1936
Gelatin silver photograph
19.3 x 24.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
Public domain

In 1929, after living in Paris for eight years, Berenice Abbott returned to New York and, having noted the rapid change taking place across the city, commenced a project to document New York in photographs. Abbott’s project was funded by the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939, which culminated in the 1939 book and exhibition, Changing New York. Discussing her project, Abbott wrote of desiring to capture the ‘spirit’ of the city, driven by the urgent realisation that ‘the tempo of the metropolis is not of eternity, or even time, but of the vanishing instant’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Dacre Stubbs’ St George’s Road flats (1953, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Dacre Stubbs (English 1910-2001, Australia 1948-2001)
St George’s Road flats
1953
Gelatin silver photograph
47.6 x 38.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1993
Public domain

More photographs from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing William Henry Fox Talbot’s Portrait of a man (c. 1844, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
No title (Portrait of a man)
c. 1844
Salted paper photograph
7.6 x 6.6cm irreg.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of David Syme & Co. Limited, Fellow, 1982
Public domain

Maxime Du Camp (French 1822-1894)
Peristyle of the Palace of Rameses III, Medinet Habu, Thebes
1849-1851, printed 1852
Salted paper photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1983
Public domain

Gaspard-Felix Tournachon Nadar (French, 1820-1910)
Alexander Dumas (père)
1855
Salted paper photograph
24.4 x 18.6cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1995
Public domain

Alexander Gardner (American 1821-1882)
Home of a Rebel sharpshooter, Gettysburg
1863; printed 1865-1866
Plate no. 41 from Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, vol. I and II, 1865-1866
Albumen silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979
Public domain

Around 620,000 soldiers are believed to have died during the American Civil War, which was fought from 1861 to 1865. Discussing the war, this photograph, and the work of Alexander Gardner, author and art historian Helen Ennis wrote, ‘The extensive coverage of the war that Gardner and his colleagues achieved – including its often graphic, confronting imagery – is lauded in the history of photography for its pioneering documentary photography and photojournalism. However, war photography has its own disturbing history, one in which photographing the dead has become routine. In Gardner’s photograph the corpse (and his rifle) may have been specially positioned for the photograph, a further reminder that in war death has no dignity’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Julia Margaret Cameron’s Julia Jackson (1864, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julia Margaret Cameron (English, 1815-1879)
Julia Jackson
1864
Albumen silver photograph
24.0 x 19.1cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald and Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979
Public domain

Giorgio Sommer (German 1834-1914)
Human imprint, Pompeii (Impronte umare. Pompei)
1873
Albumen silver photograph
19.8 x 25.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through the NGV Foundation by Janice Hinderaker, Member, 2003
Public domain

Charles Rudd (Australian 1872-1900)
Statuary Gallery, Melbourne Public Library
1886-1887
From the C. Rudd’s New Views of Melbourne series 1886-1887
Albumen silver photograph
13.6 x 19.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Terence Lane, 1990
Public domain

F. B. Mendelssohn & Co., Melbourne (Australian, active 1889-1900)
No title (Young woman, full length, seated at plush covered table)
1889
Cabinet print
Albumen silver photograph
14 x 10cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of C. Stuart Tompkins, 1972
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Diane Jones’ Woman in black Dress (2009)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Writing about historical and contemporary studio photography, curator Sophia Cai explored connections between the work of contemporary artist Dianne Jones and historical vernacular portraits, noting that ‘Jones is a contemporary Balardung artist who works in photo media to critically re-examine historical and contemporary depictions of Indigenous peoples in popular imagery. Jones’s work sees the artist insert herself into familiar, iconic scenes from Australian art and photography to challenge myths of cultural nationhood and identity. This act of insertion is both a comedic and political action, as it not only highlights the homogeneity common to these scenes, but also addresses the lack of Indigenous representation in our histories and stories’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Unknown photographer. 'No title (Woman with umbrella)' 1880s

Unknown photographer (Japanese active 1880s)
No title (Woman with umbrella)
1880s
Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes
24.2 x 19.4cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Public domain

In the nineteenth century a distinctive style of photography developed in Japan in which the aesthetics of traditional woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) were translated into photographic practice. The resulting photographs included carefully composed genre images featuring traditional aspects of the life and work of the Japanese middle classes. Typical life scenes, such as this one showing a woman walking through a rainstorm, were recreated in the studio with remarkable attention to detail, as seen in the subject’s ‘windblown’ kimono. As these images were staged for the European market, however, they often diverted from reality in favour of focusing on customs that would have appeared ‘exotic’ to their Western viewers.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Frank Hurley’s A turreted berg (1913, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Frank Hurley (Australian, 1890-1962)
No title (A turreted berg)
1913
Carbon print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1999
Public domain

The photographs produced by Frank Hurley during his time as the official photographer for the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914), and his subsequent texts, dramatically convey the awe-inspiring gargantuan icebergs encountered in the region. ‘No grander sight have I ever witnessed among the wonders of Antarctica’, Hurley wrote of the icebergs in the area where this photograph was taken. ‘We threaded a way down lanes of vivid blue with shimmering walls of mammoth bergs rising like castles of jade on either side.’ This photograph is, at first appearance, a sublimely ‘true’ representation of an iceberg. On closer inspection, however, subtle alterations become apparent. More real than real, Hurley’s constructed image was celebrated at the time and continues to be.

Wall text from the exhibition

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Chez Mondrian, Paris
1926; c. 1972 {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
24.7 x 18.5 cm (image) 25.3 x 20.4 cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1973
Public domain

Trude Fleischmann (Austrian 1895-1990, United States 1938-1990)
The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna
c. 1926
Gelatin silver photograph
21.9 x 16.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Public domain

Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990)

Trude Fleischmann (22 December 1895 – 21 January 1990) was an Austrian-born American photographer. After becoming a notable society photographer in Vienna in the 1920s, she re-established her business in New York in 1940. …

In 1920, at the age of 25, Fleischmann opened her own studio close to Vienna’s city hall. Her glass plates benefitted from her careful use of diffuse artificial light. Photographing music and theatre celebrities, her work was published in journals such as Die Bühne, Moderne Welt, ‘Welt und Mode and Uhu. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal). In addition to portraits of Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos, in 1925 she took a nude series of the dancer Claire Bauroff which the police confiscated when the images were displayed at a Berlin theatre, bringing her international fame. Fleischmann also did much to encourage other women to become professional photographers.

With the Anschluss in 1938, Fleischmann was forced to leave the country. She moved first to Paris, then to London and finally, together with her former student and companion Helen Post, in April 1939 to New York. In 1940, she opened a studio on West 56th Street next to Carnegie Hall which she ran with Frank Elmer who had also emigrated from Vienna. In addition to scenes of New York City, she photographed celebrities and notable immigrants including Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Oskar Kokoschka, Lotte Lehmann, Otto von Habsburg, Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi and Arturo Toscanini. She also worked as a fashion photographer, contributing to magazines such as Vogue. She established a close friendship with the photographer Lisette Model.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Sybille Binder (Austrian, 1895-1962)

Sybille Binder (5 January 1895 – 30 June 1962) was an Austrian actress of Jewish descent whose career of over 40 years was based variously in her home country, Germany and Britain, where she found success in films during the 1940s.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Walker Evans (United States of America 1903 - 1975) 'Graveyard and steel mill, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania' 1935

Walker Evans (American 1903-1975)
Graveyard, houses and steel mill, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
1935, printed c. 1975
Gelatin silver photograph
39.5 x 49.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975
Public domain

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Near Wadesboro, North Carolina
1938; c. 1975 {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
26.4 x 26.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975

Joe Rosenthal (1911-2006)
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
1945; printed (c. 1948)
Gelatin silver photograph
11.5 x 8.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Francis Reiss, 2014
Public domain

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
The unmade bed
1957
Gelatin silver photograph
24.4 x 32.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023

In 1957, while teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, Imogen Cunningham overheard her colleague Dorothea Lange set a task for her students to photograph an ordinary object that they used every day. Cunningham is said to have set the same task for herself. The resulting photograph, The unmade bed, is an image constructed with familiar objects, including discarded hairpins and a crumpled bedsheet. In this quiet and unassuming photograph, Cunningham has created both an elegant still life and an unexpectedly tender portrait of a woman recently risen from her sleep.

Wall text from the exhibition

George Bell (Australian 1878-1966, England 1907-1920)
Pain
1966, printed 1991
Gelatin silver photograph
28.2 × 35.6cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1991
Public domain

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949) 'Berlin' 1982 (installation view)

Ulrich Wüst (German, b. 1949)
Berlin (installation view)
1982
From the Cityscapes (Stadtbilder) series 1979-1984
Inkjet print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976)
Amelia falling
2014
Photographic print, mirror and glass
166 x 135cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2017
© Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Hank Willis Thomas’s photographs printed on mirrors are sometimes difficult to look at, but with the viewer’s reflection integrated into the work they are also impossible to ignore. In this work we bear witness to the shockingly violent incursions into what was intended to have been a peaceful civil rights protest in Selma, Alabama. Willis Thomas’s work and its source image, a photograph taken in 1965 by Spider Martin, show civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson being carried by fellow marchers after being gassed and beaten. Through his use of archival images Willis Thomas draws connections between historical moments and contemporary life, leaving little comfortable space to be a dispassionate observer.

Wall text from the exhibition

Malala Andrialavidrazana (Madagascar, b. 1971)
Figures 1850, various empires, kingdoms, states and republics
2015
Inkjet print
110.0 x 138.5cm
ed. 1/5
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Ruth Margaret Frances Houghton Bequest, 2021
© Malala Andrialavidrazana. Courtesy of the artist and AFRONOVA Gallery

Malala Andrialavidrazana’s series Figures are digital photomontages created using images sourced from archival collections of nineteenth-century maps of the African continent, as well as bank notes and stamps. The historical maps are overlaid with portraits of various heads of state and depictions of colonial developments and decorative details showing people, places, plants and animals from across Africa. These photomontages reveal the complex political and cultural histories of maps, cartography and archives, and the changing understanding of the greater African continent by European colonial powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Wall text from the exhibition

Section wall texts from the exhibition

Light wall text from the exhibition

Systems and Surface wall text from the exhibition

Surreal wall text from the exhibition

Narrative wall text from the exhibition

Work and Play wall text from the exhibition

Movement wall text from the exhibition

Studio and Things wall text from the exhibition

Display wall text from the exhibition

Consumption wall text from the exhibition

SELF wall text from the exhibition (missing)

Skin wall text from the exhibition

Community and Touch wall text from the exhibition

ENVIRONMENT wall text from the exhibition (missing)

Place and Built wall text from the exhibition

NINETEETH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY wall text from the exhibition (missing)

Conflict wall text from the exhibition

DEATH wall text from the exhibition (missing)

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

Exhibition: ‘Photography: Real & Imagined’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne Part 1

Exhibition dates: 13th October 2023 – 4th February 2024

Curator: Susan van Wyk, Senior Curator of Photography at the NGV

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

O. G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) No title (The Virgin in prayer) c. 1858-1860 from the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, October 2023 - February 2024

O. G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
No title (The Virgin in prayer)
c. 1858-1860
Albumen silver photograph
20.2 x 15.4cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2002
Public domain

This is an ambitious, complex but flawed exhibition of photographic works from the NGV Collection. Further comment in Part 2 of the posting…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the NGV for allowing me to publish the media images in the posting. Other photographs in the posting are public domain. All installation images are by Marcus Bunyan.

Text from the NGV website

Installation view of the entrance to the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne with introduction wall text to the right
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Introduction

Photography was once described by writer and critic Lucy Lippard as having ‘a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude’. Photographs, Lippard posits, may be a close – rather than exact – reflection of truth. This proposition raises a raft of questions. Is reality so uncomfortable that we only engage with it partially, or out of necessity? Can a photograph show the truth, and if it does, whose truth is it showing – the photographer’s, the subject’s or the viewer’s? If truth is the end game, what does this mean for creative practice and other types of photography? The suggestion that photography is only partially, and somewhat uncomfortably, engaged with the notion of truth highlights the complexity encountered when trying to nearly encapsulate any selection of photographs.

Through works from the NGV Collection, Photography: Real and Imagined teases out connections between iconic and lesser known photographs, putting them in a dialogue with one another that both explores and transcends the time in which they were made. It dos not set out to be a history of photography, but historical context does inform the content, leading to nuanced discussions of past and present, real and imagined.

Introductory wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Mike and Doug Starn’s Invictus (1992); and at left works by John Kauffmann, Norman Deck and Edward Steichen (see below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The sun was the light source that enabled the earliest photographs to be made in the 1830s. More than 150 years later the sun is the subject of this photographic sculpture by Mike and Doug Starn that embraces the possibilities of light and its potential effects on photography, in terms of both producing an image and as a force contributing to its irreparable damage. In the centre of their installation, the circular form of a sun seems to pulse and leach out of the layers of exposed orthographic film, which is stretched and layered across steel beams and held with pipe clamps and tape.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, John Kauffmann’s The Cloud (c. 1905, below); at bottom left, Kauffmann’s The grey veil c. 1919; at top right, Norman Deck’s Sunset, Parramatta River (1909); and a bottom right, Edward Steichen’s Moonrise (1904)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864-1942)
The cloud
c. 1905
Gelatin silver photograph
28.2 x 37.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mr John Bilney, 1976
Public domain

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864–1942) 'The grey veil' c. 1919 from the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, October 2023 - February 2024

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864-1942)
The grey veil
c. 1919
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1990
Public domain

The Yarra River, the Princes Bridge and the Melbourne city skyline beyond shimmer in this photograph by John Kauffmann. And yet, they are not the image’s subject. Using a highly refined Pictorialist treatment, a reduced tonal range and luminous mid tones, the artist has manipulated light to the extent that the feeling and atmospheric qualities become the focus of the image – it is the impression that is paramount. With the choice of title, too, the photograph moves away from a specific documentation of place or time.

Wall text from the exhibition

Norman Deck (Australian 1882-1980)
Sunset, Parramatta River
1909
Gelatin silver photograph
30.5 x 24.9cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Joyce Evans, 1993
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at centre, David Thomas’ The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London) (2010-2011), with at right works by David Noonan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, László Moholy-Nagy and Susan Fereday (see below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Thomas (British, b. 1951, Australia 1958- ) 'The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London)' 2010-2011 (installation view)

David Thomas (British, b. 1951, Australia 1958- )
The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London) (installation view)
2010-2011
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of an anonymous donor through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2015
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

“It was made during a residency at the Centre for Drawing Research at Wimbledon School of Art University of the Arts London… and plays on Paul Klee’s definition of drawing as taking a line for a walk on a page… this is taking a monochrome for a walk in the world where the monochrome becomes a key for seeing other colours… an interval in the world. It also suggests the ideas of movement in time and feelings of impermanence.”

~ David Thomas

Installation view of the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing works by David Noonan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Susan Fereday

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top right, David Noonan’s Untitled (1992); at bottom left, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Winnetka Drive-In, Paramount (1993); at top right, László Moholy-Nagy’s Fotogram, 1925 (1925); and at bottom right, Susan Fereday’s Untitled (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Light and time are both the means and subject of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Drive-In Theaters series. To produce the images, the artist directs his camera at the movie screen. Once the film starts, Sugimoto opens the lens shutter of his large-format camera and shuts it the moment the movie ends. The result is a visual condensation of the moving images and projected light of the film for its duration into a vivid, hovering rectangle of virtually pulsating light and, in the case of this drive-in cinema, the surrounding human-made and astronomical light, too.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Noonan’s Untitled (1992)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian 1895-1946, Germany 1920-1934, England 1935-1937, United States 1937-1946)
Fotogram, 1925
1925
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Society of Victoria, 1985
Public domain

From 1922 to 1943 László Moholy-Nagy experimented extensively with the photogram process – he was passionate about the optical effects and inherent properties of these camera-less images freed from a purely representational mode. In this work a pale shape, an organic swathe, streams across a page while curved shapes dance at the base. A halo above emits small geometric patterns. The work is a celebration of abstraction of the image – of the effects of playing with light, objects and photographic paper in a darkroom.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Barbara Kasten’s Composition 8T (2018, below); and at right, Lydia Wegner’s Purple square (2017, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936)
Composition 8T
2018
Digital type C print
160.0 x 121.9cm (image and sheet)
ed. 1/1
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
© Barbara Kasten, courtesy Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf

This photograph from Barbara Kasten’s Collisions/Compositions series continues her practice of creating architectural spaces in the studio using a range of materials, such as plexiglas and mirrors, which she lights and photographs at close range. Influenced by Constructivism and the teachings of the Bauhaus, specifically the work of László Moholy-Nagy, Kasten has experimented with the parameters of abstract photography for around five decades. She has written of her ongoing fascination with light in the creation and conceptual development of her photographs, saying, ‘The interdependency of shadow and light is the essence of photographic exploration and an inescapable part of the photographic process’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lydia Wegner’s Purple square (2017)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Todd McMillan’s Equivalent VIII (2014); and at right, Sue Pedley’s Sound of lotus 1 (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait (V. Liebermann D) (1999); and at back second left, Ruff’s Portrait (A. Koschkarow) (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait (V. Liebermann D) (1999); and at right, Ruff’s Portrait (A. Koschkarow) (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The earnest gazes of the man and woman in these two monumental photographs by Thomas Ruff are so calm and serene that they bely the intense experience of viewing their enlarged faces. Applying a standardised approach – similar to a generic passport photograph – these portraits have a timeless quality that invites you to attempt to ‘read’ their faces and to search for clues as to the inner state of the person. Ruff, however, lets nothing slip. The faces are known to the artist but remain anonymous to the viewer.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Robert Rooney’s AM-PM: 2 Dec 1973-28 Feb 1974 (1973-1974) (detail)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Featuring some of the most iconic photographs ever created alongside contemporary approaches to the photographic medium, Photography: Real & Imagined is the largest survey of the NGV’s Photography collection in the institution’s history and features more than 270 photographs by Australian and international practitioners.

Four years in the making, this landmark exhibition features photographs from across the 200-year period since the invention of photography in the 19th century, including work by leading international photographers including Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gilbert & George and Nan Goldin, alongside Australian photographers Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Mervyn Bishop, Polly Borland, Destiny Deacon and Darren Sylvester.

Through twenty-one thematic sections, this large-scale exhibition explores the proposition that a photograph can be grounded in the real world, recording, documenting and reflecting the world around us; or be the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion; and on occasion operate in both realms. The thematic sections explore subject matter such as light, place and environment, consumption, conflict, community, and death.

Exhibition highlights include Mervyn Bishop’s important photograph of former Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, pouring sand into the open palm of Gurindji Elder Vincent Lingiari. The 1975 image captures the historic meeting between these two figures where Lingiari received the crown lease of his ancestral lands. Also on display is Joe Rosenthal’s World War II photograph Raising the flag on Iwo Jima, 1945, in which American marines raise their country’s flag over the Japanese Island. Both Bishop and Rosenthal’s photographs were staged, or re-constructed for better pictorial effect, illustrating the fluid space between the real and imagined.

The exhibition also presents fashion and advertising photography, including key examples by Lilian Bassman, Athol Smith, Horst P. Horst and Dora Maar. These images showcase a world of designer fashion and high-end products, which set a standard in advertising that continues today. Ilse Bing’s Surrealist inspired photograph commissioned by Elsa Schiaparelli to launch her new perfume Salut in 1934 is a highlight of the exhibition.

Highlighting an area of focused collecting for the NGV, the exhibition recognises the work of women practicing in the early 20th century, including Barbara Morgan whose acclaimed photo montage City shell, 1938, shows an unexpected view of the then recently completed Empire State Building.

Through to the current day, Photography: Real & Imagined presents contemporary photographers of the 21st century including Zanele Muholi, Richard Mosse and Alex Prager. Highlights include Cindy Sherman’s celebrated self-portrait in the guise of Renaissance aristocrat. Also on display will be the oldest photographic work in the NGV Collection, an early 19th century portrait by Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of the medium, as well as examples of daguerreotypes, unique images on silver plated copper sheets that are amongst the earliest forms of photography.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication – the most ambitious book published on the NGV Photography Collection, generously supported by the Bowness Family Foundation. The publication comprises essays from NGV Senior Curator of Photography, Susan van Wyk, Susan Bright and David Campany; alongside texts by Curator of Photography, Maggie Finch and external authors from Australia, Europe, North America and Southeast Asia.

Regular introductory talks for students are held on weekdays during term times, and free drop-by guided tours each Thursday and Sunday at 10.30am during the exhibition period.

Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV, said: ‘This exhibition celebrates the collections and achievements of the NGV’s photography department, which has presented more than 180 exhibitions in its 55-year history. The exhibition is a testament to the strength of the NGV Collection, with so many key examples of the history of photography represented, from the earliest examples from the 19th century, through to contemporary images being produced right now in the twenty-first century. We are grateful for the support of the many donors and philanthropists, such as the Bowness Family Foundation, who have helped to grow and strengthen the NGV’s photography collection.’

Press release from the NGV

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne at top left, O. G. Rejlander’s The Virgin in prayer (c. 1858-1860, below); at bottom left, Henry Peach Robinson’s Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot (1859); at centre, Ruth Hollick’s Thought (1921); and at right Cindy Sherman’s Untitled (1988) from the History Portraits series 1988-1990
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Describing the complex conundrum presented by Cindy Sherman in this photograph, photographer and curator Patrick Pound once wrote: ‘Fake chested and with a face like a mask, here Cindy Sherman is costumed to the max. She stares out like a disapproving Renaissance figure who has just walked off set from a Peter Greenaway extravaganza. Here we have a photographer looking like a painting that walked out of a film. Sherman’s photographs speak of the fragilities of the visage in an image-saturated world where information and construction slip into foreplay. In Sherman’s photographic world gender and identity is a compilation album. There is a toughness to the excess that is all her own’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing O. G. Rejlander’s The Virgin in prayer (c. 1858-1860, above)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830-1901)
Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot
1859
Albumen silver photograph
24.3 x 19.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1988
Public domain

In the 1850s Henry Peach Robinson was renowned for producing elaborately staged narrative images based on scenes from popular literary sources. He was particularly interested in Arthurian legends and drew upon these stories as inspiration for some of his most admired photographs. Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot is based on Alfred Tennyson’s version of the story of Lancelot and Elaine. Peach Robinson has recreated the scene in which the lovelorn Elaine gazes dreamily at the shield of Lancelot. She is shown as a woman who has shunned reason and propriety and abandoned herself to the intensity of her emotions, making this photograph both a tragic love story and a cautionary narrative.

Wall text from the exhibition

Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977)
Thought
1921
Gelatin silver photograph
37.4 25.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania 1975 from the Artists and Photographs folio 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1959, German-born artists Bernd and Hilla Becher began travelling throughout Europe to create photographic typologies of vanishing industrial architecture (a practice they continued for more than four decades). While predominantly documenting German structures and landscapes, they occasionally worked overseas. This image, four views of a coal tipple, was taken on their first trip to North America in the mid 1970s. The Bechers constructed a system for comparing structures: photographed from a consistent angle, with virtually identical lighting conditions, printed at the same size and often displayed in grids.

Wall text from the exhibition

Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937) 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations' 1963, published 1967 (installation view)

Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Twentysix Gasoline Stations (installation view)
1963, published 1967
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 48 pages, printed cover, glued binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Robert Rooney through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

With the first publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and his subsequent artist books, Edward Ruscha’s work was influential in initiating the widespread interest in photographic book publishing that continues today. Ruscha’s use of photographs as a means of recording – a seemingly unemotional, detached cataloguing of the world – and simply as a ‘device to complete the idea’ influenced the interest in serial imaging adopted by many conceptual artists. Ruscha’s use of the book format was also crucial, providing a transportable way of presenting art in varied contexts that existed as a type of ‘map’ to be read and interpreted, with the subject matter becoming less important than the documentation as a whole.

Wall text from the exhibition

John Baldessari (American 1931-2020) ‘Fable: A Sentence of Thirteen Parts (with Twelve Alternate Verbs) Ending in a Fable’ 1977 (installation view)

John Baldessari (American 1931-2020)
Fable: A Sentence of Thirteen Parts (with Twelve Alternate Verbs) Ending in a Fable (installation views)
1977
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithography on concertina fold-out in cross formation, folded paper cover
9.8 x 14.0 x 1.8cm (closed) 70.0 x 126.5cm approx. (overall, opened)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Friends of the Gallery Library, 2017
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Conceptual artist John Baldessari, is renowned for his often-playful investigations into ideas of language, image and authenticity, once said: ‘I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? … And then I also had a parallel interest in photography … I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both’. Taking art off the walls and requiring someone to unfold and activate it is a central idea of this artist’s book. A visual puzzle, it invites an interaction between looking and reading, creating your own fables as you jump from image to word to image again.

Wall text from the exhibition

Eve Sonneman (American, b. 1946)
Real time (installation view)
1968-1974, published 1976
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 46 folios, printed paper cover, glued binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Supporters of Photography, 2021
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Eve Sonneman’s photobook Real time includes paired photographs, each separated by a black line border. The diptychs allow for the occurrence of movement and gestures and changes between the artist’s camera clicks. The ordered presentation, however, takes the images away from a straight documentary reading and to a consideration of their ‘objectness’. After first showing the photographs at MoMA, New York, then photography curator, John Szarkowski, set up a mentorship for Sonneman with the photographer Diane Arbus. As Sonneman recalled: ‘[Arbus] loved my pictures and we got along great. For two years she helped me edit’. Sonneman then published the images through the newly established Printed Matter in New York in 1976.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Carol Jerrems and Virginia Fraser’s book A Book About Australian Women (published 1974); at top centre, Nan Goldin’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (published 1986); and at bottom left, Tracey Emin’s Exploration of the Soul (published 1994)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at bottom left, Harold Cazneaux’s book The Bridge Book (published 1930); and at top right, Lee Friedlander’s book The American Monument (published 1976)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) 'The American Monument' Published by The Eakins Press Foundation, New York, 1976 (installation view)

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
The American Monument (installation view)
Published by The Eakins Press Foundation, New York, 1976
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American 1898-1991, worked in France 1921-1929) 'Changing New York' Published by E. P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1939 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American 1898-1991, worked in France 1921-1929)
Changing New York (installation view)
Published by E. P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1939
Half-tone plate and letterpress text
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934); at bottom left, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s book Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (published 1930); at top right, Bill Brandt’s book Perspective of Nudes (published 1961); and at bottom right, Germaine Krull’s book Nude studies (Études de nu) (published 1930)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Photographs today are often viewed in galleries in frames, hung on walls. Many photographs, however, were originally created for display in combination with text and graphic design; to be laid out on a page and reproduced in different formats; to be held, worn on the body, published, and shared.

With recognition of these expanded histories of photography, and the contemporary resurgence in publishing, this exhibition includes artist books, magazines and photobooks that use the photographic image in print, publishing and design. These two cases include examples that show the influence of Surrealism, the New Objectivity and Constructivist graphic design in dynamic modern publications.

Artist and author Martin Parr has described the photobook as the ‘supreme platform’ for photographers to share the work with a broad audience. The 1920s to the 1970s were arguably the most important period for the publication of photobooks. These two cases include examples that show the influence of modernist, humanist and documentary photography traditions in innovative publications from this time. These include exhibition catalogues, examples of first edition books, publications published in larger un-editioned print runs and coveted collectable limited-edition books and portfolios.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934) with at right, Man Ray’s Anatomies (1930, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
Anatomies
1930
Gelatin silver photograph

Please note: this photograph is not in the exhibition

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) 'Aveux non Avenus' (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, 1930 (installation view)

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972)
Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (installation view)
Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, 1930
Illustrated book: photogravure, letterpress text, 237 pages, 10 leaves of plates, paper cover, stitched binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Aveux non Avenus, by the celebrated poet, writer, sculptor and photographer Claude Cahun, was published in 1930 by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, in an edition of five hundred. The book comprises a series of texts in French: poems, literary aphorisms, recollections of dream sequences and philosophical thoughts, ideas and meanderings. Pierre Mac Orlan, a French novelist who wrote the preface to the book, described Mademoiselle Claude Cahun’s text as ‘de poèmes-essais et d’essais-poèmes’, or ‘poem-essays and essay-poems’, and said that overall ‘the book is virtually entirely dedicated to the word adventure’

The alliterative title presents a conundrum for English translation – ‘aveux’ meaning ‘avowals’ or ‘confessions’, and ‘non avenus’ meaning ‘voided’ – and is variously translated as Disavowals, Denials, and Unavowed confessions, among other things. Curator Jennifer Mundy has written that the title suggests ‘an affirmative expression immediately followed by some form of negation or retraction’.

Ambiguities around the title aside, there is a strong visual aspect to the book too. The texts are each demarcated with a complex and fantastical photogravure created by Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore. These photogravure (where an image from the negative of a photograph is etched into a metal plate, similar to printmaking) are collages made up of photographic images of, and by, Cahun. Throughout the book, graphic devices of stars, eyes and lips are also used to separate sections of text. Aveux non Avenus, which has been described as an anti-realist or surrealist-autobiography of the multi-disciplinary Cahun, exists as a potential critique of the autobiography format altogether, is wonderfully irreducible.

Maggie Finch and Isobel Crombie. “Claude Cahun,” in the 2019 July/August edition of NGV Magazine on the NGV website 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 28/01/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972)
Untitled
1930
In Aveux non avenus 1930
Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris
Illustrated book: heliographs
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017

Germaine Krull (German, 1897-1985) 'Nude Studies' (Études de Nu) Published by Librarie des arts décoratifs, Paris, 1930 (installation view)

Germaine Krull (German, 1897-1985)
Nude Studies (Études de Nu) (installation view)
Published by Librarie des arts décoratifs, Paris, 1930
24 photogravures, letterpress on paper, white cloth-backed orange paper-covered board portfolio with ribbons
National Gallery of Victoria
Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Bill Brandt (English born Germany, 1904-1983) 'Perspective of Nudes' Published Bodley Head, London, 1961 (installation view)

Bill Brandt (English born Germany, 1904-1983)
Perspective of Nudes (installation view)
Published Bodley Head, London, 1961
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Art Forms in Nature: Examples from the Plant World Photographed Direct from Nature' Published by A. Zwemmer, London, 1929 (installation view)

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Art Forms in Nature: Examples from the Plant World Photographed Direct from Nature (installation view)
Published by A. Zwemmer, London, 1929
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Karel Teige typographer (Czechoslovakia 1900-1951) Karel Paspa photographer (Czechoslovakia 1862-1936) 'ABECEDA (Alphabet)' Published by J. Otto, Prague, 1926 (installation view)

Karel Teige typographer (Czechoslovakia 1900-1951)
Karel Paspa photographer (Czechoslovakia 1862-1936)
ABECEDA (Alphabet) (installation view)
Published by J. Otto, Prague, 1926
Photomontage
National Gallery of Victoria
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1958) Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958) 'USSR in Construction, no. 12 (Parachute issue)' (URSS en Construction) 1935

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1958) and Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958)
USSR in Construction, no. 12 (Parachute issue) (URSS en Construction) (installation view)
1935
Illustrated journal: colour rotogravure, 22 pages with fold-out inserts, lithographic cover
National Gallery of Victoria
Purchased, NGV Supporters of Prints and Drawings, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Eliza Hutchinson’s No. 9 (2010); at bottom left, Ewa Narkiewicz’s Copper flax #4 (1999); at centre top, Harry Nankin’s The first wave: fragment 2 (1996); at centre bottom, Peter Peryer’s Seeing (1989); and at right, Aaron Siskind’s New York (1950)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In much the same way that tactile writing systems such as braille are impenetrable to those with vision, a photograph printed in two dimensions can be incomprehensible for people with vision impairment. Each system presents a conversion – of letters, texts and illustration – into raised dots on a page; of visible wavelengths of light into an image on a light-sensitive surface. Each relies on an irreversible alteration of the surface. Seeing, the title of this Peter Peryer photograph, infers an action – seeing something. Yet the conversion into a photographic image draws attention to the impenetrability of both acts.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (1999) from the Twilight series (1998-2002); at centre, Malerie Marder’s Untitled (2001); and at right, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled' 1999 (installation view)

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled (installation view)
1999
From the Twilight series 1998-2002
Type C photograph
121.9 x 152.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Kaiser Bequest, 2000
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957) 'Sunday, 2:09pm' 1995, printed 2019 (installation view)

Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957)
Sunday, 2:09pm
1995, printed 2019
From the Open House series 1995
Colour cibachrome transparency, light box
121.7 x 161.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Polly Borland’s Untitled (2018); and at right, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at rear from left to right, Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (1999) from the Twilight series (1998-2002); at second left, Malerie Marder’s Untitled (2001); and centre, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995); and at right, Alex Prager’s Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street) (2013, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Alex Prager’s Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street) (2013, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alex Prager (American, b. 1979)
Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street)
2013
Inkjet print
149.7 x 142.0cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Contemporary Photography, 2014

Alex Prager’s staged photographs openly reference the aesthetics of mid-twentieth century American cinema, fashion photography and the photographs of Cindy Sherman. Her images resemble film stills and are packed with emotion and human melodrama. Working with actors, directing their placement and interaction to create a hyperreal dramatisation of crowd behaviour, Prager’s narrative tableaux pair the banal and fantastic, the everyday and the theatrical, real life and cinematic representation. In this image we have a bird’s eye view of a mass of people crossing the road. We can see the patterns of movement, contact and avoidance and a suggestion of the narrative possibilities of the interacting crowd.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at second right, Pat Brassington’s Rosa (2014); and at right, Yvonne Todd’s Werta (2005)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989) 'Fonteyn' 2012 (installation view)

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Fonteyn (installation view)
2012
Digital type C print
102.8 x 99.9cm
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2013
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Loretta Lux’s The Drummer (2004, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Loretta Lux (German, b. 1969)
The drummer
2004
Cibachrome photograph
45.0 x 37.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2006
© Loretta Lux. VG Bild-Kunst/Copyright Agency, 2023

Loretta Lux is known for her eerie, hyperreal photographs of children. The luminous pallor of the boy’s skin and the subtle tonal range throughout the photograph is achieved through Lux’s delicate use of digital manipulation to reduce the palette in her image. Lux’s history as a painter informs photographs such as this, which seem to owe as much of a debt to Old Master paintings as modern technology. Her skilful combination of photographic reality and painterly effect gives the image a profoundly disconcerting quality that is reminiscent of the fantastical (and disturbing) character of Oskar, the little drummer boy, in the Günter Grass novel The Tin Drum (1959).

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at bottom left, Raoul Ubac’s Penthésilée (c. 1938, below); at top centre, André Kertész’s Satiric Dancer, Paris (1926, below); and at right, Max Dupain’s Impassioned clay (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Raoul Ubac (Belgian, 1909-1985)
Penthésilée
c. 1938
Gelatin silver photograph
31.0 x 41.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013

From the mid 1930s onwards Surrealist photographer Raoul Ubac experimented with collage, photomontage and solarisation. These processes disrupted the surface of his photographs, enabling him to create new and fantastic realities and introducing an element of chance into his image making. Penthésilée is from his most important series of photographs. The image is based on the story of Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, who was killed by Achilles while fighting alongside the Trojans. To represent this mythic battle Ubac created this complex photomontage by cutting up, collaging, rephotographing and solarising photographs of nude female figures. The resulting image has an uncanny sense of movement suggesting the height of battle.

Wall text from the exhibition

André Kertész (Hungarian 1894-1985, France 1925-1936, United States 1936-1985)
Satiric Dancer, Paris
1926, printed c. 1972
Gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1973

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Max Dupain’s Impassioned clay (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Max Dupain (Australian 1911-1992)
Impassioned clay
1936
Gelatin silver photograph
50.4 x 36.7cm irreg.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
William Kimpton Bequest, 2016
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Pat Brassington’s Rosa (2014); and at right, Yvonne Todd’s Werta (2005)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Yvonne Todd selects her subjects, most often young women, from ‘call outs’ seeking certain types, people encountered on the street, or modelling agencies where she invariably chooses those with little or no industry experience. In her studio Todd uses costumes, heavy make-up and wigs to style her models. Costuming is an important aspect of Todd’s practice; her interest lies in in what she describes as, ‘the way they carry character and narrative connotations’. Todd’s finished photographs are heavily reworked using Photoshop so that they appear obviously artificial. This overt use of artifice shifts her images from simply being nostalgic recreations to being strangely familiar and undeniably creepy.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Robyn Stacey’s Nothing to see here (2019) and at back centre, Polly Borland’s Untitled (2018)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Robyn Stacey (Australian, b. 1952)
Nothing to see here
2019
From the Nothing to See Here series 2019
Lenticular image
155.5 x 119cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2020

This large-scale lenticular photograph shows the face of a woman projected onto a curtain. The curtain suggests a hidden cinema screen; however, Robyn Stacey’s curtains cannot be pulled back. From one viewpoint a beautiful face with eyes softly closed as if in sleep appears, but as you move past the image you can only see the curtain. The curtain becomes what the artist described as ‘a membrane between reality and allegory’ and acts as the screen as the portrait appears and disappears.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Polly Borland's lenticular photograph 'Untitled' (2018)

Installation views of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Polly Borland’s lenticular photograph Untitled (2018) from the MORPH series
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Polly Borland (Australia, b. 1959)
Untitled
2018
From MORPH series 2018
Inkjet print on rice paper on lenticular cardboard
216.0 x 172.7 x 13.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019
© Polly Borland

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000); and at centre right, Selina Ou’s Convenience (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Narelle Autio (Australian, b. 1969) 'Untitled' 2000 (installation view)

Narelle Autio (Australian, b. 1969)
Untitled (installation view)
2000
From The Seventh Wave series 1999-2000
Gelatin silver photograph
90.0 x 134.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2001
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back centre, Selina Ou’s Convenience (2001); and at right, Rosemary Laing’s welcome to Australia (2004)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Ben Shahn’s Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for coloured children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking 1935; and back right, Lewis Hine’s Finishing garments, 10 Hanover Ave., Boston, Massachusetts 1912; and at right in the cabinet, Kusakabe Kimbei’s album (Landscape and portraits) (1880s-1910s)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ben Shahn (Lithuanian 1898-1969, United States c. 1925-1969)
Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for coloured children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking (installation view)
1935, printed c. 1975
Gelatin silver photograph
21.7 x 32.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Finishing garments, 10 Hanover Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
1912
Gelatin silver photograph
11.4 x 16.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1980
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Kusakabe Kimbei’s album (Landscape and portraits) (1880s-1910s)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, John Thomson’s The crawlers (1876-1877, below); at top right, Heather George’s Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952); and at bottom right, Fred Kruger’s Group of Aborigines in hop gardens, Coranderrk (1876, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Thomson’s The crawlers (1876-1877, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

John Thomson (Scottish 1837-1921)
The crawlers
1876-1877
From the Street Life in London series 1877
Woodbury type
11.5 x 8.7cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1977
Public Domain

Heather George (Australian 1907-1983) 'Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory' 1952, printed 1978 (installation view)

Heather George (Australian 1907-1983)
Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (installation view)
1952, printed 1978
From the Northern Territory series 1952
Gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1952 the Australian magazine Walkabout included a series of images made by photojournalist Heather George at Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory. The vast pastoral lease on the lands of the dispossessed Gurindji people would later become famous as a turning point in the recognition of land rights for Australia’s First Nations peoples, but when George visited, it was a place of entrenched, officially sanctioned discrimination. In George’s photograph, the Gurindji stockmen appear overshadowed by the stockyards in the foreground, perhaps reflecting the attitude of pastoralists who, having been granted leases, took advantage of people living on Country, exploiting them as an unpaid workforce.

Wall text from the exhibition

Fred Kruger (German 1831-1888, Australia 1860-1888)
Group of Aborigines in hop gardens, Coranderrk
1876
Albumen silver photograph
13.3 x 20.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs Beryl M. Curl, 1979
Public domain

In 1876 Fred Kruger was commissioned to produce two series of photographs at Coranderrk, a settlement and working farm established to rehouse dispossessed people of the Kulin Nation. One of the many subjects he photographed was the productive farmland and the activities of the community working the land. Kruger’s photograph shows a multigenerational group of people in the lush Arcadian setting of the hop garden, but what it obscures is the reality of exploitation and poverty that afflicted First Nations people in this place. Kruger’s photographs met a brief to promote the so-called ‘civilising’ work of colonial authorities but in doing so represented a largely imagined reality and created an effective form of propaganda.

Wall text from the exhibition

Selina Ou (Australian, b. 1977) 'Convenience' 2001 (installation view)

Selina Ou (Australian, b. 1977)
Convenience (installation view)
2001
From the Serving You Better series 2001
Type C photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Kusakabe Kimbei’s Vegetable peddler (1880s, below); at bottom left, David Wadelton’s Richmond hairdresser (1979, below); at top centre, Rennie Ellis’ Between strips, Kings Cross (1970-1971, below); at bottom centre, Brassai’s Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix (La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet)) (1932, below); and at right, Wolfgang Sievers’ Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne (1949, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)
Vegetable peddler
1880s
Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes
20.6 x 26.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gerstl Bequest, 2000
Public domain

Japanese photographer Kusakabe Kimbei established his studio in 1881, making photographs for the domestic and tourist markets. Most of the photographs in this elaborate album are conventional, staged domestic scenes; picturesque views of popular tourist attractions; and street scenes. This image, however, stands alone in the album as an unusual view of contemporary life. Despite the women weavers wearing traditional dress and working hand-operated looms, the factory in which they are working is lit by electric lights and they are supervised by men wearing European-style dress. Unlike its companion works in Kimbei’s album, this photograph speaks to the industrialisation that was part of the Meiji-era modernisation in Japan.

Wall text from the exhibition

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)

Kusakabe Kimbei (日下部金兵衛; 1841-1934) was a Japanese photographer. He usually went by his given name, Kimbei, because his clientele, mostly non-Japanese-speaking foreign residents and visitors, found it easier to pronounce than his family name

Kusakabe Kimbei worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant. In 1881, Kimbei opened his own workshop in Yokohama, in the Benten-dōri quarter. From 1889, the studio operated in the Honmachi quarter. By 1893, his was one of the leading Japanese studios supplying art to Western customers. Many of the photographs in the studio’s catalogue featured depictions of Japanese women, which were popular with tourists of the time. Kimbei preferred to portray female subjects in a traditional bijinga style, and hired geisha to pose for the photographs. Many of his albums are mounted in accordion fashion.

Around 1885, Kimbei acquired the negatives of Felice Beato and of Stillfried, as well as those of Uchida Kuichi. Kusakabe also acquired some of Ueno Hikoma’s negatives of Nagasaki. Kimbei retired as a photographer in 1914.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Wadelton’s Richmond hairdresser (1979, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955)
Richmond hairdresser
1979
Gelatin silver photograph
13.4 x 20.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of David Wadelton through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015
© David Wadelton

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003)
Between strips, Kings Cross
1970-1971; 2000 {printed}
From the Kings Cross series 1971
Gelatin silver photograph
37.1 x 24.1 cm (image)
40.3 x 30.4 cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2005
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Brassaï’s Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix (La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet)) (1932, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix
(La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet))
1932; printed c. 1979
From The secret of Paris in the 30s series 1931–1935
Gelatin silver photograph
20.5 x 29.2cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1980
Public Domain

In the 1930s Brassaï became well-known for his photographs of the nightlife of Paris, but it was the sex workers, along with other characters of the city’s underbelly, who excited his imagination. Reflecting on this time, he wrote, ‘Rightly or wrongly, I felt at that time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved, from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its remote past’. This photograph presents a matter-of-fact view – there is nothing exotic or erotic about the woman washing herself as her client ties his shoes and prepares to leave.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Wolfgang Sievers’ Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne (1949, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne
1949; printed 1986
Gelatin silver photograph
49.4 x 40.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1986
© National Library of Australia

Wolfgang Sievers arrived in Australia in 1938, bringing photographic equipment, rigorous training in modernist photography, a firmly held belief in the union of art and industry, left-leaning political views, and the self-declared desire to ‘assist this country through my knowledge as thanks for the freedom I can enjoy here’. The human face of industrial Australia is captured in Sievers’s celebrated photograph of the change of shift at a Melbourne engineering works, showing a sea of men and women surging into work. The upturned, smiling faces of the masses speaking to Sievers’s firmly held belief in the dignity of work.

Wall text from the exhibition

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) 'welcome to Australia' 2004 (installation view)

Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024)
welcome to Australia (installation view)
2004
Type C photograph
110.8 × 224.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds from the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This photograph by Rosemary Laing makes an obviously ironic statement, as curator Kyla MacFarlane notes: ‘The title and compositional beauty of this photograph … purposefully jar against its subject matter – the remote Woomera Immigration Detention and Processing Centre in South Australia. Photographing the site while the sun sits low in the sky, Laing observes the Centre’s mechanisms of containment and surveillance – a violent presence on the red dirt and gravel road, and sun-tinged, cloudless sky of its remote location’. The photograph’s formal emptiness reflects the lack of freedom imposed on those seeking asylum and the loss of their civil liberties once detained.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Rosemary Laing’s welcome to Australia (2004, above); and at right, four photographs from Michael Cook’s Civilised series (2012)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Dorothea Lange’s Towards Los Angeles, California (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Dorothea Lange (United States 1895-1965)
Towards Los Angeles, California
1936; c. 1975 {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
39.6 x 39.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975

In this photograph Dorothea Lange has ironically juxtaposed the aspiration of clean, comfortable train travel with the exhausting reality of the unemployed traversing America in search of work in the 1930s. Renowned for making photographs that combine empathy and clear-eyed observation, Lange also believed that photographs and text should be presented together to amplify the messages carried in both mediums. She understood that captions ‘fortified’ her photographs and that they should ‘not only (carry) factual information, but also add clues to attitudes, relationships and meanings’. Although it doesn’t have a caption, the opportunistic combination of image and text in this image highlights the gulf between the haves and have nots.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Alfred Stiegliz’s The steerage (1907, below); at bottom left, David Moore’s Migrants arriving in Sydney (1966, below); at centre, Charles Nettleton’s Hobsons Bay railway pier (1870s, below); at top right, Maggie Diaz’s The Canberra, Port Melbourne (1961-1967); and at bottom right, Paul Haviland’s Passing steamer (1910)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alfred Stiegitz (American, 1864-1946) 'The Steerage' 1907

Alfred Stieglitz (American 1864-1946, Germany 1881-1990)
The steerage
1907, printed 1911
Photogravure
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
Public domain

Alfred Stieglitz was a pioneering photographer, publisher and gallery director. The steerage, arguably his most important photograph, is regarded as his first great modernist work. The composition, with its compressed space, apparent lack of horizon and striking diagonal lines, is suggestive of avant-garde painting of the time. Showing the densely packed lower decks of the of the transatlantic steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II, Stieglitz’s oblique reference to the return movement of unsuccessful immigrants to America offers an insight into the social outcomes and complexities of mass global migration in the early twentieth century.

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David Moore (Australia, 1927-2003)
Migrants arriving in Sydney
1966
Gelatin silver photograph
26.7 x 40.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1991
© Estate of David Moore

David Moore was Australia’s pre-eminent photojournalist of the 1960s. His work was regularly seen in leading local and international magazines. Moore’s Migrants arriving in Sydney, was commissioned and published by National Geographic in 1966. This now iconic image shows the climactic moment when a ship carrying migrants to Australia docks at Sydney harbour. The tightly framed photograph reveals a range of emotions on the faces of a group of people about to disembark and begin a new life. “We must do more than record the sensational, the bizarre, and the tragic. The lens of the camera must probe, with absolute sincerity, deep into the lives of ordinary men and women and show how we work and play.” David Moore, 1953

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website

THIS IS NOT CORRECT NGV!

In 2015, Judy Annear [Head of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales] said of this famous photograph: “It’s great to consider that it’s not actually what it seems.” Years after the photo was published, it emerged that four of the passengers in it were not migrants but Sydneysiders returning home from holiday.

Charles Nettleton (English 1825-1902, Australia 1854-1902)
Hobsons Bay railway pier
1870s
Albumen silver photograph
12.8 × 19.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1992
Public domain

Maggie Diaz (American, 1925-2016, Australia 1961-2016)
The Canberra, Port Melbourne
1961-1967, printed 2014
Pigment print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2015

As a young woman, Maggie Diaz had been fascinated by the work of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Her photographs are a ‘slice of life’ offering similar insights into the everyday experiences of people wherever she encountered them. The ship she photographed at Melbourne’s Station Pier in the 1960s was The Canberra, the largest of the passenger ships sailing between Britain and Australia at that time. Often bringing British migrants on assisted passages, the ship also held personal significance for Diaz: as a migrant from the United States, she travelled one-way from the US to Australia on The Canberra’s maiden voyage in 1961.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing four photographs from Michael Cook’s Civilised series (2012)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Michael Cook (Australian / Bidjara, b. 1968)
Civilised #11
2012
From the Civilised series 2012
Inkjet print
100.0 x 87.5cm
ed. 3/8
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013
© Michael Cook and Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin

Bidjara artist Michael Cook poses a question in his Civilised series: ‘What makes a person civilised?’ In these photographs he represents the ways Europeans – English, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonists – responded to First Nations people when they arrived on these shores. The artist asserts that his Civilised series ‘suggests how different history might have been if those Europeans had realised that the Aborigines were indeed civilised’.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at third left bottom, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the banks of the Marne (1938, below); at fourth left top, Gabriel de Rumine’s Caryatid porch of Erechtheum, Acropolis, Athens (1859, below); at fourth left bottom, Lee Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore (1969, below); at centre top, John Williams’ Clovelly Beach, Sydney (1969, below); at top right, Eugène Atget’s The roller coaster, Invalides funfair (Montagnes russes, fête des Invalides) (1898, below); and at bottom right, Roger Scott’s Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show (1972? 1975? below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Goldblatt’s The playing fields of Tladi, Soweto, Johannesburg, August 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Harold Cazneaux (Australian born New Zealand, 1878-1953)
Fairy Lane steps
1910
Bromoil print
24.8 x 18.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© The Cazneaux family

Harold Cazneaux was one of the most important and influential Australian photographers of the early twentieth century. He had a great love of the natural world but early in his career also found a rich subject in the inner-city streets of Sydney. Cazneaux made photographs that appear lively and spontaneous, although given the limitations of the equipment at the time they are almost certain to have been staged to a degree. His charming studies of children at play in city streets transformed the bleak, impoverished urban environments of inner-city Sydney into a wonderful playground.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Helen Levitt’s New York (Boys fighting on a pediment) c. 1940
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York (Boys fighting on a pediment)
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
31.8 x 21.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Public domain

Francis Bedford (attributed to) (English, 1815-1894)
Fairy Glen, Betws-y-Coed
(Ffos Noddyn, Betws-y-Coed)
c. 1860
From the No title (Stephen Thompson album) (1859 – c. 1868)
Albumen silver photograph
13.7 x 17.8cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1988
Public domain

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Sunday on the banks of the Marne, Juvisy, France
1938; (1990s) {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
29.1 x 43.9 cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2015
© Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

In 1938 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed a group of people picnicking on the banks of the river Marne. It is a celebratory image showing a quintessential aspect of everyday life in France: long Sunday lunches. But it also reveals something of the revolutionary politics of the period and their profound influence on Cartier-Bresson in the 1930s. In 1938 the left-wing Popular Front swept into power in France and the newly elected government mandated two weeks paid leave for all workers. At the time, Cartier-Bresson worked for the Paris-based communist press and was commissioned by Regards magazine to photograph an extended series that looked at the social impact of this initiative.

Wall text from the exhibition

Gabriel de Rumine (European, 1841-1871)
No title (Caryatid porch of Erechtheum, Acropolis, Athens)
1859
Albumen silver photograph
25.7 x 35.8cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1995
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lee Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore (1969, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lee Friedlander (United States, b. 1934)
Mount Rushmore
1969; printed c. 1977
Gelatin silver print
18.3 x 27.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1977
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Installation view of the exhibition 'Photography: Real & Imagined' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Williams' 'Clovelly Beach, Sydney' (1969)

Installation views of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Williams’ Clovelly Beach, Sydney (1969, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

John Williams (1933- 2016) 'Clovelly Beach' 1964

John Williams (Australian, 1933-2016)
Clovelly Beach, Sydney
1969; printed 1988
Gelatin silver photograph
25.6 x 25.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1989
© John Williams

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
The roller coaster, Invalides funfair (Montagnes russes, fête des Invalides)
1898
From the Festivals and Fairs series in the Art in Old Paris series 1898-1927
Albumen silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Patrick Pound through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2020
Public domain

Roger Scott. 'Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show' 1972? 1975?

Roger Scott (Australian, b. 1944)
Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show
1972? 1975?
Gelatin silver print
30.4 x 45.6cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mr James Mollison, 1994
© Roger Scott

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 2nd March – 4th September 2023

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) [Berenice Abbott] 1929-1930 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - Sept 2023

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
[Berenice Abbott]
1929-1930
Gelatin silver print
16.9 x 11.8cm (6 5/8 x 4 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1997
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Abbott appraises the camera with cool assurance in this portrait, made just after her return from Paris to New York. Her gamine-short hair and bare face affect a chic nonchalance that intrigued Evans. Describing her to a friend after their first meeting, he wrote: “You would like Berenice Abbott, with her hair brushed forward and her woozy eyes.” Her work likewise impressed the young photographer, then finding his footing in the field. Evans’s picture betrays admiration for his new acquaintance, whose burgeoning career offered a model for his own.

American visionary

What a wonderful photographer Berenice Abbott developed into and what a debt of gratitude we owe her for saving the archive of French photographer Eugène Atget whose photographs initially influenced her urban(e) style.

“Abbott felt the changing city [New York] needed an equivalent to the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who had documented Paris during a critical period of transition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with what Abbott called “the shock of realism unadorned.””

It is interesting to analyse Abbott’s New York photographs in relation to Atget. In photographs such as the grouping on Album Page 9: Fulton Street Fish Market and Lower East Side, Manhattan (1929, below) there is an almost symbiotic relationship between Atget’s photographs of street Petits Métiers (trades and professions) and those of Abbott. “The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity,” she said of seeing Atget’s photographs in Man Ray’s studio in 1926. Similarly, we can recognise in Abbott’s grouping in Album Page: City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Vicinity, Manhattan (1929, below) and Pingpank Barbershop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan (1938, below) an affinity with Atget’s photographs of architectural details of door handles and the front of shops.

A step away from Atget’s aesthetic are Abbott’s photographs such as Brooklyn Bridge, With Pier 21, Pennsylvania R.R. (1937, below), West Street (1936, below) and Henry Street from Market, Looking West, Manhattan (1935, below) where the foreground of each photograph mimics Atget’s photographs of Old Paris whilst the soaring background of skyscrapers and bridges is all modernist New York, the near / far of the picture plane becoming old / new. Abbott chronicled “the changing aspect of the world’s great metropolis. … Its hurrying tempo, its congested streets, the past jostling the present.”

Still further away from Atget’s aesthetic are Abbott’s photographs grouped in Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan (1929, below) where the artist uses with the chiaroscuro (the treatment of light and shade) within the canyons of skyscraper New York – and modernist almost constructivist photographs such as Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place (1936, below) and Manhattan Bridge, Looking Up (1936, below) where the artist plays with pictorial perspective by pointing her camera skywards.

Finally, there are Abbott’s photographs that bear no relation to those of Atget, where Abbott as an artist has stepped out of the older artist’s shadow and developed her own artistic signature. Those wonderfully abstract and enigmatic photographs at lower left and right in Album Page 5: Pier 17, South Street Seaport, Manhattan push the boundaries of 1930s photographic language. In other glorious photographs such as The El at Columbus and Broadway (1929, below) and The El, 2nd and 3rd Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan (1936, below) Abbott captured the random disorder of urban activity with a focused intensity of vision that produces magical images… and by that I mean, images that transport you into other spaces, other states of being. Her dadaist poet Tristan Tzara put it this way: “We leave with those leaving arrive with those arriving / leave with those arriving arrive when the others leave.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, the American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she found the city transformed and ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “tiny photographic notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale.

Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on thirty-two pages, Abbott’s New York album marks a key turning point in her career – from her portrait work in Paris to the urban documentation that culminated in her federally funded project, Changing New York (1935-1939). Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 presents a selection of unbound pages from this unique album, shedding new light on the creative process of one of the great photographic artists of the twentieth century. For context, the exhibition also features views of Paris by Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927), whose extensive photographic archive Abbott purchased and publicised; views of New York City by her contemporaries Walker Evans, Paul Grotz, and Margaret Bourke-White; and photographs from Changing New York. The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

MAP

This map charts some of the locations across Manhattan that Berenice Abbott photographed in her New York Album (1929). As the album bears almost no notations, identifying the exact sites depicted in the photographs had to be done through visual recognition of streets, buildings, and other urban landmarks.

Some of the iconic places Abbott photographed, such as the main branch of the New York Public Library and Trinity Church on Wall Street, haven’t changed much since 1929. Others, such as the city’s four elevated train lines and Harlem’s famed Lafayette Theater, have vanished completely. Several sites have gone through multiple transformations within the past century. The National Winter Garden Theater on Houston Street and Second Avenue opened in 1912 as a cinema and vaudeville theatre. By the time Abbott photographed it in 1929, it had been converted to a burlesque house; today, it’s a Whole Foods. The map is an invitation to explore Abbott’s photographs beyond the confines of the Museum’s galleries, and, like the artist herself, to cherish New York as a vibrant metropolis that is, and always has been, defined by change.

For their invaluable help with the historical research, The Met is grateful to the Jones Family Research Collective: former Manhattan Borough Historian Celedonia “Cal” Jones; his daughter, Diane Jones Randall; and his son, Kenneth Jones. Explore Abbott’s 1929 images of New York here with images of each album page.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Eugène Atget
1927
Gelatin silver print
4 3/8 × 3 5/16 in. (11.1 × 8.4cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Maria Morris Hambourg, in honour of John Szarkowski, 2020
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Born in Ohio, Berenice Abbott moved to Paris and in 1923 became Man Ray’s darkroom assistant. In 1927 she made this photograph of Atget, the renowned documentarian of the streets of Paris and an unwitting hero of the surrealists; when she returned to his apartment to deliver a print of her portrait, Abbott learned of the elderly artist’s death. The unfortunate circumstance put in motion a process that led to Abbott’s purchase of Atget’s archive of five thousand photographs and one thousand negatives, the first (1930) monograph on Atget (edited by Abbott), and the collection’s eventual acquisition by MoMA in 1968.

In the spring of 1927, Abbott invited Atget to sit for a portrait in her Paris studio. She made only three exposures that day: a standing pose, a frontal view, and this profile view. Unfortunately, Atget never saw the photographs. When Abbott arrived at his apartment a few months later to deliver the proofs, she found that the elderly photographer had died suddenly. This portrait was used as the frontispiece in the first book devoted to his work, Atget, Photographe de Paris (1930), displayed in the case nearby.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'James Joyce' 1926 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - Sept 2023

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
James Joyce
1926
Gelatin silver print
23.3 x 17.4cm (9 3/16 x 6 7/8in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott opened a photographic portrait studio in Paris in 1926 after having worked for three years as an assistant to Man Ray, whom she had met in New York. Although her Paris portraits are indebted stylistically to Man Ray’s, she brought to them a sympathetic eye that was very much her own. Her portraits of women are notable for their empathic understanding of her subjects, but she reached a depth of expression in her photographs of James Joyce (1882-1941). Abbott photographed Joyce on two occasions, the first in 1926 at his home, the second in 1928 at her studio, as was her more customary practice. In spite of Abbott’s annotation on the back of the print, this portrait belongs to the earlier session, when Joyce was photographed both with and without the patch over his eye, worn because of his sadly degenerating sight. For this particular exposure Joyce removed the patch and held it, with his glasses, in his right hand; his forehead still bears the diagonal impression of the ribbon. This intimate portrait, with its softly diffused lighting, suggests the complex, introverted character of Joyce’s imagination. It is with good reason that Abbott’s are considered the definitive portraits of the author of “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake.”

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Djuna Barnes' 1925 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - Sept 2023

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Djuna Barnes
1925
Gelatin silver print
22.6 x 17.1cm (8 7/8 x 6 3/4 in.)
Purchase, Joyce and Robert Menschel Gift, 1987

Abbott lived with the American writer Djuna Barnes when she moved from Ohio to Greenwich Village in 1918, and the two women remained friends, and occasional romantic rivals, throughout their lives. In this portrait, made in Man Ray’s Paris studio, Barnes is elegantly attired and addresses the camera with a smouldering gaze above a slight smile. A decade later, Barnes would publish Nightwood (1936), a classic of lesbian fiction inspired by her tormented affair with the American artist Thelma Wood (1901-1970), who also had a brief relationship with Abbott.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Buddy Gilmore, Paris' 1926-1927 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - Sept 2023

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Buddy Gilmore, Paris
1926-1927
Gelatin silver print
23.1 x 17.2cm (9 1/8 x 6 3/4 in.)
Purchase
Gift of the Polaroid Corporation and matching funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1981

Gilmore was an American jazz drummer known for his acrobatic dexterity and energetic solos. After seeing him perform at Zelli’s, a nightclub in Paris, Abbott invited him to her studio to pose for this action portrait with his drum set. “I was simply crazy about his playing,” she recalled.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8, Manhattan' March 20, 1936 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - Sept 2023

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8
1936
Gelatin silver print
19.2 x 24.4cm (7 9/16 x 9 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

In 1929, after eight years in Paris, Abbott returned to America, bringing with her an immense collection of photographs by Eugène Atget and the ideas of European modernist photographers. Her first pictures of New York show the modernist influence in the sharply angled viewpoints and tendency toward abstraction. By the mid-1930s, however, Atget emerged as the stronger influence, as Abbott’s style became more straightforward and documentary.

In 1935 Abbott embarked on a series documenting New York funded by the Federal Art Project, and during the next four years she made hundreds of images of the city’s monuments and architecture. Ninety-seven of these, including “Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8,” were published in “Changing New York” (1939). The caption for this picture informs us that “No. 8 was once the home of the art collection which formed a part of the original Metropolitan Museum of Art.” It was built in 1856 for John Taylor Johnston, president of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. A leading collector of American art, Johnston was a founder of The Met and was elected its first president in 1870.

The New York Album

Abbott sailed for New York in January 1929, hoping to find an American publisher for a proposed book of Atget’s photographs and to promote her own portrait work. She brought with her a new handheld Curt Bentzin camera, thinking she might make some views of the city to sell to publishers in Europe. Inspired by the towering skyscrapers that had reshaped the American metropolis in the 1920s, Abbott pointed her camera up, down, and at skewed angles, creating dynamic compositions with sharp contrasts of light and shadow. She wandered all over Manhattan, photographing storefronts in Harlem, construction sites in midtown, and street vendors and tenement buildings in Chinatown and on the Lower East Side. She paid special attention to the city’s transportation infrastructure: bridges, elevated train lines, railroad terminals, ships docked on the waterfront.

Without access to a darkroom, Abbott had her negatives processed and printed at local drug stores and commercial labs. She pasted the little prints onto the pages of a standard photo album, creating a kind of sketchbook of subjects and themes. When The Met acquired it between 1978 and 1984, the album had already been disbound. Abbott reconstructed the sequence of the first eleven pages displayed here for a publication in 2013; the order of the remaining pages is unknown.

Changing New York

Abbott’s New York album laid the groundwork for her ambitious documentary project Changing New York (1935-1939). Comprising more than 300 negatives and a wealth of research, the project was funded by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, a government program dedicated to supporting unemployed artists during the Great Depression. Aided by a team of researchers, field assistants, and darkroom technicians, Abbott chronicled “the changing aspect of the world’s great metropolis. … Its hurrying tempo, its congested streets, the past jostling the present.” She returned to many of the locations she visited in 1929, but the new photographs, made with a large-format view camera like the one Atget used, are more straightforward and less influenced by the jazzy, sharp-angled style of European modernism. The project culminated in a book, published in 1939, featuring ninety-seven photographs with captions by Abbott’s companion, the art critic Elizabeth McCausland. The photographs were widely exhibited and complete sets of the final images were distributed to high schools, libraries, and other public institutions throughout the New York area.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: approx. 2 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. (5.7 × 8.2cm), and the reverse
Album Page: 10 × 13 in. (25.4 × 33cm), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1984

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan] 1929 (detail)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan] (detail)
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: approx. 2 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. (5.7 × 8.2cm), and the reverse
Album Page: 10 × 13 in. (25.4 × 33cm), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1984

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Page from New York Album' 1929-1930 (detail)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan] (details)
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: approx. 2 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. (5.7 × 8.2cm), and the reverse
Album Page: 10 × 13 in. (25.4 × 33cm), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1984

If you were an American artist or writer in the 1920s, Paris was where you wanted to be. Springfield, Ohio-born photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) arrived there in 1921 by way of New York, and by early 1929 she had managed to establish herself in the French capital’s flourishing interwar avant-garde scene – first working as an assistant to Man Ray and later taking her own celebrated portraits of luminaries such as James Joyce and Djuna Barnes. She even changed the spelling of her name from “Bernice” to the more Gallic “Berenice.”

Yet somehow this magnet for culturally minded expatriates lost its hold on Abbott the moment she set foot in Lower Manhattan – on a messy January day, no less – at the beginning of what was supposed to be a short trip back to the United States. She had lived in New York once, just eight years before, but in her absence the city had been scaled up: new skyscrapers were rising, the population was exploding, and every block, it seemed, was abuzz with commerce and construction. (The market crash of October 1929 was still many months away). Suddenly, Paris was passe. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush,” she later recalled, “I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life.”

“Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929,” a small but inspiring show at the Metropolitan Museum, channels the exhilaration Abbott felt upon arriving in the city. The exhibition’s focus is a disbound scrapbook with seven to nine photographs per page, all taken over the course of that year, as Abbott paced the streets (and piers, bridges and train platforms) with a hand-held camera and a compulsion to capture New York’s unruly, cutthroat modernity.

With its 32 pages of small contact prints processed at drugstores and commercial labs (or as Abbott called them, “tiny photographic notes”), the album can be seen as a rough draft of her well-known Works Progress Administration project of the 1930s, “Changing New York.” (Several examples from this later series are in the Met show, including a disconcertingly ethereal view of Seventh Avenue taken from the top of a 46-story building in the garment district.) But Abbott’s “New York Album” is a fascinating artwork in its own right, an adrenalized and ambitious alignment of artist and subject.

Abbott felt the changing city needed an equivalent to the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who had documented Paris during a critical period of transition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with what Abbott called “the shock of realism unadorned.” She had come to New York as part of an impassioned effort to promote Atget’s oeuvre, one that included purchasing the photographer’s archive after his death and making her own prints from his glass-plate negatives; in the “New York Album” she goes further, becoming, in effect, his heir.

The Met’s exhibition incorporates several Atget photographs from the museum’s collection, including one that Abbott was known to admire; it shows an early automobile garage in the Fifth Arrondissement, with a Renault parked in a cobblestoned courtyard. A similar appreciation for the collision of the newfangled with the outmoded can be seen throughout Abbott’s “New York Album,” in shots of skyscrapers looming over rows of tenements and, in one more subtle and almost surreal case, an overhead view of an equine statue photographed from the Ninth Avenue El.

Although the album is not strictly organized by location, it has a distinct cartography. Abbott gravitated to certain neighborhoods that, for her, showed the face of the new city emerging. Many of them were in lower Manhattan; multiple pages are devoted to the Lower East Side, where she was drawn to storefronts and their simultaneously poetic and transactional signage, and the Financial District, where she often pointed her camera skyward to exaggerate the intimidating height of new corporate towers.

Unlike peers such as Walker Evans, she did not take much of an interest in the human subject – or, at least, in individuals. To her, the city was a human construction and humanity was implicit in every part of it. “You’re photographing people when you’re photographing a city,” she explained in a documentary film about her life. “You don’t have to have a person in it.”

As Abbott’s biographer has noted, she was influenced by the French literary movement of Unanimism, which emphasized collective consciousness and expression. You can sense this especially in her shots of the city’s elevated train system, which revel in the formal modernism of all that interlaced steel and cast iron without losing sight of its function of moving millions of people.

As an extension of the exhibition, the Met has created a helpful digital map that identifies some of the subjects in Abbott’s album and updates them with present-day photographs (a collaboration between the Met curator of photography who organized the exhibition, Mia Fineman, and the Jones Family Research Collective, led by the Manhattan borough historian emeritus, Celedonia Jones, until his death last April). It reveals, for example, that the site of a burlesque theater on Houston Street photographed by Abbott is now a Whole Foods.

Visitors to the exhibition can spend a lot of time testing their own knowledge of the city’s geography, but the pleasures of the show have more to do with the drive and dynamism behind the pictures. “Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929” takes us back to an invigorating moment in the history of the metropolis, captured on the fly by an emergent modern artist.

During her upbringing in Ohio, Abbott had planned to be a journalist – she attended Ohio State University’s School of Journalism before turning to art – and it’s clear from her photography that she never lost that instinct for wanting to be where the story was. In those early months of 1929 she recognized that New York was the big story; looking at her “New York Album” gives us hope that it could be again.

Karen Rosenberg. “Berenice Abbott Captured Manhattan in the Throes of Heady Change,” on the New York Times website August 16, 2023 [Online] Cited 21/08/2023

Unanimism

Unanimism (French: Unanimisme) is a movement in French literature begun by Jules Romains in the early 1900s, with his first book, La vie unanime, published in 1904. It can be dated to a sudden conception Romains had in October 1903 of a ‘communal spirit’ or joint ‘psychic life’ in groups of people. It is based on ideas of collective consciousness and collective emotion, and on crowd behaviour, where members of a group do or think something simultaneously. Unanimism is about an artistic merger with these group phenomena, which transcend the consciousness of the individual. Harry Bergholz writes that “grossly generalising, one might describe its aim as the art of the psychology of human groups”. Because of this collective emphasis, common themes of unanimist writing include politics and friendship.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page: Madison Square Park, Third Avenue and Ninth Avenue Elevated Train Lines, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: 5.3 x 7.8cm (2 1/16 x 3 1/16 in.)
Sheet: 6.4 x 8.7cm (2 1/2 x 3 7/16 in.)
Album Page: 25.4 x 30.3cm (10 x 11 15/16in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1978

In 1921 Ohio-native Abbott left New York to study in Paris. Returning to the city in 1929, she found it transformed and ripe with photographic potential. Following the model of the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose street views of Paris she admired, Abbott ventured around New York photographing seemingly incidental, but often profound, scenes that captured the city’s changing character. This page of small-scale photographs is one example of many of similar album pages in the Metropolitan’s collection. Assembled by Abbott, the album from which they derive comprised a kind of photographer’s sketchbook for subjects and themes.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page: City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Vicinity, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver print
Album Page: 25.4 x 33.2 cm (10 x 13 1/16 in.), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1981

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 5: Pier 17, South Street Seaport, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: approx. 5.6 x 8.2cm (2 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.), and the reverse
Album Page: 25.3 x 30.5cm (9 15/16 x 12 in.), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1982

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 9: Fulton Street Fish Market and Lower East Side, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver print
Images: approx. 5.6 x 8.2cm (2 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.), and the reverse
Album Page: 25.3 x 30.5 cm (9 15/16 x 12 in.), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1981

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Sumner Healy Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue near 57th Street, Manhattan]
1930s, printed 1936
Gelatin silver print
8 1/8 × 9 15/16 in. (20.6 × 25.2cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

In 1935 Abbott embarked on a series of photographs documenting New York City. Funded by the Federal Art Project, during the next four years she made hundreds of images of the city’s monuments and architecture, including this one of Sumner Healey’s shop. Attracted to the “extraordinary montage of antiques” – anchored by a ten-foot-tall figurehead of Mars from an eighteenth-century battleship – Abbott also captured the owner’s cat, seemingly trapped on either side by the decorative dogs flanking the store’s entrance. Healey died soon after Abbott made this photograph, and the shop closed two years later.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Pingpank Barbershop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan
1938
Gelatin silver print
24.5 × 19.7cm (9 5/8 × 7 3/4 in.)
Twentieth Century Photography Fund, 2013

With its subtle interplay of reflection and interior, this slightly oblique view of a barbershop window reveals the influence of Atget’s photographs of Parisian storefronts. When Abbott made this image, August Pingpank was eighty-seven and was said to be the oldest barber in New York City. He lamented to Federal Art Project researchers that he would soon have to retire due to the invention of the safety razor: “It’s different now with men shaving themselves every morning at home.”

Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 presents selections from a unique unbound album of photographs of New York City created by American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), shedding light on the creative process of one of the great artists of the 20th century. Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on 32 pages, the album is a kind of photographic sketchbook that offers a rare glimpse of an artist’s mind at work. In addition to some 25 framed album pages, the exhibition features photographs from The Met collection of Paris streets by Eugène Atget, whose archive Abbott purchased and promoted; views of New York by her contemporaries Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White; and selections from Abbott’s grand documentary project, Changing New York (1935-1939).

“Berenice Abbott’s groundbreaking work in photography continues to inspire and captivate audiences today, nearly a century after she first began documenting the world around her,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met. “Abbott’s insightful and powerful images provide a window into the New York of the past, while also reminding us of the city’s enduring vitality and resilience.”

Born in Ohio, Abbott moved to New York City in 1918 and to Paris in 1921. She learned photography as a darkroom assistant in Man Ray’s studio and soon established herself as a prominent portraitist of the Parisian avant-garde. Through Man Ray, Abbott met the ageing French photographer Eugène Atget, whose documentation of Paris and its environs struck her as a model of modern photographic art. Following Atget’s sudden death in 1927, she purchased his archive of some 8,000 prints and 1,500 glass negatives and set about promoting his work through exhibitions and publications.

In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, Abbott boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was intended to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she found the city transformed and ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. Inspired by Atget, Abbott traversed the city with a handheld camera, photographing its skyscrapers, storefronts, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale. As the immediate precursor to her 1930s WPA project, Changing New York, Abbott’s New York album marks a key moment of transition in her career: from Europe to America and from studio portraiture to urban documentation. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online feature that identifies, for the first time, the locations of many of the photographs in the album.

Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 is organised by Mia Fineman, Curator in the Department of Photographs, with assistance from Virginia McBride, Research Assistant in the Department of Photographs, both at The Met.

Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
The El at Columbus and Broadway
1929
15.0 x 20.3cm (5 15/16 x 8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Following her eight years of expatriate life in Paris, Abbott saw New York with European eyes. In this view, made shortly after her return, she captured the random disorder of urban activity as handily as her friend the dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, who put it this way: “We leave with those leaving arrive with those arriving / leave with those arriving arrive when the others leave.”

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[The El, 2nd and 3rd Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan]
1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 11/16 × 7 5/8 in. (24.6 × 19.3cm)
Sheet: 9 7/8 × 7 15/16 in. (25.1 × 20.1cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971

Manhattan’s elevated (El) train lines fascinated Abbott when she first photographed the city in 1929. Seven years later, she used her large-format camera to capture this shadowed vista beneath the El in Chinatown. “I was right in the middle of the street on a little island,” she recalled. “This was one of the occasions when it was downright dangerous to document New York, with traffic whizzing by on both sides, but it was very important to get in exactly the right position to make the photograph work.”

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Manhattan Bridge]
1936
Gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

The Brooklyn Bridge was New York’s first and most famous, but Abbott favoured the all-steel Manhattan Bridge, completed in 1909. She made this photograph on the southern pedestrian walkway; the vibrations of the suspension bridge required a fast shutter speed to avoid blur. “I seem to veer toward waterfronts,” she later said. “As Melville wrote in Moby Dick, the heart of a port city is around its waterfront, and by nature I seem to head right there. Perhaps I should have been a sailor – boats and bridges have always fascinated me.”

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Seventh Avenue Looking South from Thirty-fifth Street, New York]
1935
Gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Abbott made this overhead view of skyscrapers in the garment district from atop the forty-six-story Nelson Tower on Seventh Avenue. The roof of the original Pennsylvania Station, demolished in 1962, can be seen in the lower right corner.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place
1936
Gelatin silver print
23.8 x 19.3cm (9 3/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Manhattan Bridge, Looking Up
1936
Gelatin silver print
24.5 x 19.4cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Brooklyn Bridge, With Pier 21, Pennsylvania R.R.
1937
Gelatin silver print
19.4 x 24.4cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
West Street
1936
Gelatin silver print
19.1 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in. )
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Jane and Mark Ciabattari, 2000
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Henry Street from Market, Looking West, Manhattan
1935
Gelatin silver print
19.2 x 24.2cm (7 9/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, 2012
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan
1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19.4 x 24.6cm (7 5/8 x 9 11/16 in.)
Sheet: 22 x 25.3cm (8 11/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, 2011
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

During the Depression, Horn & Hardart’s chain of “waiterless restaurants” served as many as eight hundred thousand freshly prepared meals a day to customers in New York and Philadelphia. With its clean lines, polished chrome details, and mechanical efficiency, the Automat struck Abbott as “an extremely American artefact.” New York’s first Automat opened in Times Square in 1912, but Abbott chose to document the branch at Columbus Circle, popular as a nighttime gathering spot for musicians and cabaret patrons.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Printer: Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Street Musicians
1898-1999, printed 1956
Title page from the portfolio 20 Photographs by Eugène Atget (1856-1927), 1956
Published by Berenice Abbott, New York Gelatin silver print from glass negatives David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1956

In 1956 Abbott produced a portfolio of twenty new prints from Atget’s glass-plate negatives and offered it by subscription to museums, libraries, and private collectors. This photograph of an organ grinder and exuberant female singer belongs to a series of photographs devoted to the rapidly vanishing street trades, or petits métiers, of Paris.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
[Atget’s Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]
c. 1910
Albumen silver print from glass negative
20.9 x 17.3cm (8 1/4 x 6 13/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990

This straightforward study by Atget of his own work room offers a rare glimpse of the inner sanctum of an auteur éditeur, as he described his profession. On the table are the wooden frames the photographer used to contact print his glass negatives; at right are several bins of negatives stacked vertically; below the table are his chemical trays; on the shelves above are stacks of paper albums – a shelf label reads escaliers et grilles (staircases and grills). Atget used these homemade albums to organise his vast picture collection from which he sold views of old Paris to clients.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
15, rue Maître-Albert
1912
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
23.2 x 17.6 cm (9 1/8 x 6 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Rogers Fund, 1991
Creative Commons CC0 1.0

Eloquent testimony to Atget’s keen regard for the expressions of common folk, this photograph was part of a self-assigned survey of storefronts and commercial signs. Atget ennobled the little grocery with its modest façade and rudimentary display (covered for lunch hour against the midday heat) and framed it simply, thus withdrawing it from the predictable realm of the picturesque.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Courtyard, 7 Rue de Valence, 5th arr.' June 1922

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Courtyard, 7 Rue de Valence, 5th arr.
1922
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
Image: 17.2 x 22.7cm (6 3/4 x 8 15/16 in.)
Mount: 36.7 x 28.7cm (14 7/16 x 11 5/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005

Atget found his vocation in photography in 1897, at the age of forty, after having been a merchant seaman, an itinerant actor, and a painter. He became obsessed with making what he termed “documents” of Paris and its environs, and with compiling a visual compendium of the architecture, landscape, and artefacts that distinguish French culture and its history. By the end of his life, Atget had amassed an archive of over 8,000 negatives that he had organised into such categories as Parisian Interiors, Petits Métiers (trades and professions), and Vehicles in Paris.

The subject of this photograph is an early automobile garage occupying a timeworn courtyard near the intersection of rue Mouffetard and rue Monge in the fifth arrondissement. Although Atget’s interest was primarily in the texture of old Paris – not the city’s new promenades and modern monuments – he did make a few studies of automobiles, signs of modern times, beginning in 1922. Beside a pair of motorcycles rests an early-model Renault touring car, probably dating from 1908. It, too, may be a relic: its four-cylinder engine lies beside it.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Printer: Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Fête du Trône
1925, printed c. 1929
Matte gelatin silver print from glass negative
23.4 x 17cm (9 3/16 x 6 11/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999

Abbott made new contact prints from Atget’s glass-plate negatives, experimenting with various photographic papers and processes to try to approximate the clarity and detail of Atget’s own prints. Sometime early in 1930, Walker Evans visited Abbott’s studio in New York’s Hotel des Artistes, where she stored her vast Atget archive. Deeply affected by the French photographer’s work, Evans left that day with four of Abbott’s Atget prints: this one, Boutique, Marché aux Halles (displayed to the right), and two others. Although Atget’s work was never exhibited during his lifetime, his soulful documentation of Paris had a profound impact on both Abbott and Evans, and contributed to the emergence of a documentary style in twentieth-century American art photography.

Learning from Atget

When Abbott met Eugène Atget in 1926, he had been photographing Paris for thirty years. Working with a large wooden-view camera, Atget made what he modestly called “documents” of the city, compiling a vast visual archive of Parisian streets, courtyards, gardens, shop windows, architectural details, apartment interiors, and tradespeople. Atget’s studio was on the same street in Montparnasse as that of Man Ray, who purchased several dozen of his photographs, publishing four of them in the journal La Révolution surréaliste. Abbott was instantly captivated by Atget’s photographs when she encountered them in Man Ray’s studio. “Their impact was immediate and tremendous,” she recalled. “There was a sudden flash of recognition – the shock of realism unadorned. The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity.” In 1927 Abbott persuaded Atget to sit for a portrait in her own studio on the rue du Bac. Months later, following his sudden death at age seventy, she purchased his archive of some 8,000 prints and 1,500 glass negatives and set about promoting his work through exhibitions, publications, and sales of the prints, a selection of which are on display here. When she moved to New York in 1929, Abbott brought the archive with her, and eventually sold it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Printer: Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Boutique, Marché aux Halles, Paris
1925, printed c. 1929
Matte gelatin silver print from glass negative
23.1 x 17cm (9 1/8 x 6 11/16 in. )
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999
Creative Commons CC0 1.0

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Rue Laplace and Rue Valette, Paris
1926
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
Image: 22 x 17.6cm (8 11/16 x 6 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, by exchange, 1970
Creative Commons CC0 1.0

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Avenue des Gobelins
1927
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
36.8 x 28.6cm (14 1/2 x 11 1/4 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Rogers Fund, and Joyce and Robert Menschel and Harriette and Noel Levine Gifts, 1994

In this headless mannequin, clothed in a simple white uniform, Atget recognised a modern version of the commedia dell’arte clown Gilles, depicted by the eighteenth-century painter Jean Antoine Watteau, for example. It was for the type of transforming vision seen in this picture, which is among the very last in Atget’s lifelong exploration of Paris, that the artist’s work was so enthusiastically embraced by the Surrealists.

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Exhibition: ‘Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941’ at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, California

Exhibition dates: 29th March – 30th July 2023

Curator: Dr. Josie R. Johnson, Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) 'Cypress Root and Rock, Seventeen Mile Drive' 1929 from the exhibition 'Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941' at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, March - July, 2023

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Cypress Root and Rock, Seventeen Mile Drive
1929
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

On November 18, 1929, Edward Weston drove north from his home in Carmel to traverse the scenic coastal route of Seventeen Mile Drive. He made nine photographs of cypress roots and rocks that day, including this image. Less than three weeks earlier, the stock market had crashed, setting off a panic that plunged the United States into the Great Depression. Money troubles plagued Weston throughout his life, but on this November day, he was completely enthralled with the landscape. He wrote in his daybooks soon after that these photographs were “among the best seen and most brilliant technically I have yet done.”

Wall label from the exhibition

Transcending reality

While I admire the clever recontextualisation of the work of American photographers from the 1930s in this exhibition – into the sections Natural Wonders, Divine Figures, Everyday Splendors, Living Relics, The World of Tomorrow, Street Theater and Surreal Encounters – I am unsure that those photographers would ultimately see their work as a fusion of reality and dream, their documentary photographs “being both real and dream-like” that the concept of this exhibition proposes.

While all photographers use their imagination to visualise and take their photographs, to then extrapolate that these images are both reality-dream is, to my mind, a theoretical fancy that takes a kernel of the truth and views the images through a contemporary lens. Nothing wrong with that I hear you say and as the photographer Richard Misrach observes, “Photographs, when they’re made, can shift meaning with time, and often do.” And I agree that the meaning of photographs changes over time, is an ever fluid and shifting feast.

But can you imagine any of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers out in the field saying to themselves, “Oh! let’s take a dreamscape of these poor travelling people trying to survive the deprivations of hunger, poverty and joblessness”. It just wouldn’t happen. They didn’t think like that because it was a different era. They were concerned with representing with clarity and focus, with compassion and imagination not the melding of reality and dream, but the visceral feeling of the life being lived under the most trying of circumstances.

Following on from thoughts on the stunning landscape photographs of Ansel Adams in the last posting, one has to agree with Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne when she says that,

“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”1

All photographs are a mediated view of reality, captured through the imagination of the artist and (usually) the gaze of the camera lens… but that does not necessarily mean that they are a melding of reality and dream: of course they can be – but in the context of 1930s American photography what is more likely is that the artists where attempting to create something that transcends the moment. As that fantastic American landscape photographer Robert Adams observes,

“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect – a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”2

To my mind American photographers of the 1930s took photographs not only to document but also to honor what was greater and more interesting than they were. Not as a melding of reality-dream as this exhibition proposes, but as an exploration of what is possible through the interface of the image and imagination, the interface as Ansel Adams put it “between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself.”

Finally, the unknown to me photographs of Wright Morris are superb because of their very capricious fidelity.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Isobel Crombie. Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15
2/ Robert Adams. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1994, p. 179

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

In the fall of 1930, Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, yet Bass-Becking penned this statement one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. This exhibition of over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks offers an alternative understanding of 1930s photography in the US by taking Bass-Becking’s phrase as its point of departure.

The work of five photographers featured in the Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at the Cantor Arts Center – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Woven into this display is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries that present new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, this exhibition contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination.

“If you have a conscious determination to see certain things in the world you are a potential propagandist; if you trust your intuition as the vital communicative spark between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself, what you tell in the super-reality of your art will have greater impact and verity. … without the elements of imaginative vision and taste the most perfect technical photograph is a vacuous shell.”

Ansel Adams. “Exhibition of Photographs” (1936), reproduced in Andrea Gray. Ansel Adams: An American Place, 1936. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1982, p. 38 quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 17.

The present exhibition [exhibition of contemporary photography in November 1930 at Harvard University] attempts to prove that the mechanism of the photograph is worthy and capable of producing creative work entirely outside the limits of reproduction or imitation. … Photography exists in the contemporary consciousness of time, surprising the passing moment out of its context in flux, and holding it up to be regarded in the magic of its arrest. It has the curious vividness and unreality of street accidents, things seen from a passing train, and personal situations overheard or seen by chance – as one looks from the window of one skyscraper into the lighted room of another forty stories high and only across the street.

Lincoln Kirstein, introductory note, Photography 1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1930, n.p. quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 26.

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) 'Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California' March 1936 from the exhibition 'Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941' at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, March - July, 2023

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Migrant Mother, California
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

The Cantor Arts Center is pleased to present Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941, an exhibition featuring over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks. This material collectively pushes against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, and instead illustrates that artists of this era frequently used photography to ignite the imagination. The exhibition and the expansive art historical narratives it illuminates result from Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s study over the past three years of the Cantor’s Capital Group Foundation (CGF) Photography Collection – a major gift of over 1,000 twentieth-century American photographs.

Currently serving as the museum’s CGF Curatorial Fellow for Photography, Johnson comments: “The Cantor’s holdings of American photography from the 1930s are especially rich, and the generous terms of the Capital Group Foundation Fellowship enabled me to delve deeply into this fascinating chapter of photo history. Sifting through these prints allowed me to set aside what I thought I knew about this material and take a fresh look, giving me a new appreciation for the novel approaches these artists developed in the midst of a profoundly difficult historical moment.”

The work of five photographers from the CGF Collection – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Its conceit draws from a curious phrase by Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking about the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Though few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, Bass-Becking penned this statement in the fall of 1930, one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. Reality Makes Them Dream exemplifies the spirit of experimentation that Bass-Becking describes by highlighting an undercurrent of artistic practices in the United States that were sometimes more akin to those of Surrealism taking place concurrently in Europe.

To tease out these under-examined connections, and de-emphasise the association of American photography of the 1930s with the unbiased documentation of real people and events, works by the five core CGF artists are interwoven with a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, both iconic and overlooked, such as Walker Evans, Hiromu Kira, and Dorothea Lange. Edward Weston’s bold experimentation with forms both natural and man-made – exemplified by highly evocative works such as Pepper No. 35 (1930) and Egg Slicer (1930) that inspired Bass-Becking’s comment – blends harmoniously with contemporary prints from the community of Japanese-American photographers in Los Angeles that often supported Weston’s work. Examples of fashion and editorial photography, including colour images by Toni Frissell and Paul Outerbridge, draw connections across the galleries with photographs of airplanes, household items, and tourist sites made by seasoned artists and amateur hobbyists alike. Helen Levitt’s surreal tableaux on the streets of New York echo Berenice Abbott‘s studies of the metropolis with multiple layers of history jumbled into the same block. Ansel Adams’s pristine images of the Sierra Nevada hang alongside little-known photographs by Seema Weatherwax, his darkroom assistant in the late 1930s who was similarly enchanted with nature but developed a vision all her own. Despite gaining the respect of not only Adams, but also Weston, Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, Weatherwax shared her own work publicly for the first time in 2000 at the age of 95. Her photographs evidence her technical abilities and, not unlike her peers on view in this exhibition, find beauty in the everyday. Altogether, these photographs effectively illustrate Johnson’s three year exploration of the collection which revealed that despite the very real financial, political, and cultural challenges of the Great Depression, certain photographers chose not to focus on the camera’s cold mechanical precision, but rather used it as a medium to spark their imaginations – fusing reality and dream into one. …

The first exhibition curated by a CGF fellow, Reality Makes Them Dream is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. It features an essay by Johnson and contributions from the community of photography scholars at Stanford University – Kim Beil, associate director of the ITALIC arts program for undergraduates; Yechen Zhao (PhD in art history ’22); Anna Lee, photography curator for special collections at the Stanford Libraries; Rachel Heise Bolten (PhD in English ’22); Altair Brandon-Salmon (PhD candidate in art history); Marco Antonio Flores (PhD candidate in art history); and Maggie Dethloff, PhD, assistant curator of photography and new media at the Cantor.

Press release from the Cantor Arts Center

Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) 'Gano Grain Elevator, Western Kansas' 1940, printed 1979-1981 from the exhibition 'Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941' at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, March - July, 2023

Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
Gano Grain Elevator, Western Kansas
1940, printed 1979-1981
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

In Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s exhibition … Johnson interweaves the Capital Group Foundation Collection images with additional works by other artists, building narratives that nuance our understanding of American photography in the 1930s. Her essay pushes against longstanding narratives that overemphasise the purity of straight photography and the veracity of documentary photography in this decade. Her research reveals instead that many artists used the medium of photography to fuse reality and dream into one.

Johnson divides Reality Makes Them Dream into seven sections exploring subjects commonly photographed in the 1930s as being both real and dream-like. Looking beyond well-traveled approaches to photographs captured in the decade defined by the Great Depression, “Natural Wonders” features awe inspiring organic forms from still life and nature photography. “Divine Figures” presents methods of elevating the human figure to the status of a god-like being in portraiture, nude studies, dance photography, and photographs of modern labourers. “Everyday Splendors” explores the transformation of commonplace scenes and objects into vibrant masses of shapes and textures. The portraits, architectural photographs, and still life images in “Living Relics” exemplify the tendency of these photographers to depict emblems of a purer and more noble past that they hoped to reclaim. “The World of Tomorrow” considers the opposite end of the temporal spectrum, where photographers captured glimpses of a futuristic, machine-driven utopia in urban or industrial scenes. “Street Theater” encompasses street photography and urban architectural studies that approach their subjects as if they are actors and stage sets in their own make-believe world. Finally, “Surreal Encounters” highlights Surrealist strands in the work of American photographers as they emphasised the uncanny and fantastical in the physical world around them.

Veronica Roberts, Director of the Cantor Arts Center

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Sculptor’s Tools, San Francisco, California
1930, printed c. 1974
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

In 1930, a meeting with the photographer Paul Strand inspired Ansel Adams to abandon the use of soft-focus camera settings and textured printing papers in pursuit of “absolute realism.” However, Adams did not renounce the photograph’s capacity to convey an artist’s imaginative vision; instead, he launched a crusade for photography to be recognised as a “pure art form.” This image of the tools belonging to the San Francisco sculptor Ralph Stackpole stages Adams’s main argument at the time: Photography is no less a form of art than sculpture, so long as the artist’s tools (a camera or a hammer and chisel) are employed directly, without imitating another medium.

Wall label from the exhibition

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Sumner Healy Antique Shop
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Judge Leonard Edwards
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Woven into this exhibition is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, adding breadth to this survey of American photography of the 1930s and presenting new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. This project interprets the term “American” loosely, encompassing photographers who lived in the United States for extended periods but who did not necessarily hold citizenship, as well as locations including Alaska and Hawaii, which were then still US territories. Thirteen of the forty-two photographers featured in this catalogue were born outside the United States, reflecting diasporic patterns that brought Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s and European immigrants – especially Jews fleeing antisemitism – in the 1910s and mid-1930s.7 Many turned to photography as a way to earn a living, and their photographs often expressed their enchantment with the dramatic natural landscapes or unfamiliar cultural practices they encountered in their newly adopted nation.

Together, this material demonstrates that Bass-Becking’s idea [Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream”] offers an interpretive lens for a much wider swath of photography than either he or Weston might have realized. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary in style and purpose , this project contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination, even while pursuing an increasingly transparent approach that mirrored the world as they saw it. From the delicate curve of a seashell to the jostle of a crowded city street, reality made the photographers and their audiences dream.

Footnote 7. Another ten were second- and/or third-generation immigrants.

Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 11.

Natural Wonders

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Dogwood, Yosemite National Park, California
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Ansel Adams is best known today for the majestic landscape photographs he made throughout his life, but in the 1930s he gravitated toward tightly framed images of a more intimate scale. This photograph of dogwood blossoms exemplifies Adams’s close looking at nature from this period. Even among the grand vistas of Yosemite, he often turned his lens to humbler sights while retaining the same density of detail across the picture plane, illuminating multitudes in a patch of moss or a pile of pine needles. Adams explained at the time: “Honest simplicity and maximum emotional statement suggests the basis of a critical definition of photography as an Art Form – that is, as a means of more than factual statement.”

Wall label from the exhibition

Cedric Wright (American, 1889-1959)
Wildflowers
1930s-1940s
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

George Cedric Wright (April 13, 1889 – 1959) was an American violinist and a wilderness photographer of the High Sierra. He was Ansel Adams’s mentor and best friend for decades, and accompanied Adams when three of his most famous photographs were taken. He was a longtime participant in the annual wilderness High Trips sponsored by the Sierra Club. …

In an article published in 1957, which included eight full-page photographs, Wright described his thoughts about how high mountain beauty resembles great music: “Beauty haunts the high country like a majestic hymn, sings in cold sunny air, the brilliant mountain air – makes of sunlight a living thing – floats in cloud forms – filters changing floods of light ever clothing the mountains anew. Beauty arrives in deep voice of river and wind through forest, swelling the chorus, giving sonority universal proportions.”[Wright, Cedric. “Trail Song: An Artist’s Profession of Faith” Sierra Club Bulletin. San Francisco: Sierra Club. 42 (6): 50-53]. He dedicated these words to Sierra Club leader William Edward Colby, and they became part of the introduction to Wright’s posthumous book, Words of the Earth.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Bradford Washburn (American, 1910-2007)
Mount La Perouse
c. 1933
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries

Bradford Washburn became a well-known mountaineer and aerial photographer while still in college. In the early 1930s, he climbed and surveyed multiple peaks in the Fairweather Range of southeastern Alaska, including Mount La Perouse. Although Washburn’s photographs functioned as topographical records and route maps, he also displayed them in artistic contexts, where they elicited deeply poetic and emotional responses from viewers. In the 1940 issue of U.S. Camera Magazine, an editor wrote of Washburn’s Alaskan photography: “Sea and mountain and plain, join island and cape and bay in a beauty that is the true setting for the fantasy of northern lights and midnight sun. … Here is an America that is no more a last frontier or hinterland, but a fruitful part of America, present – a glowing promise to America, future.”

Wall label from the exhibition

Henry Bradford Washburn Jr. (June 7, 1910 – January 10, 2007) was an American explorer, mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer. He established the Boston Museum of Science, served as its director from 1939-1980, and from 1985 until his death served as its Honorary Director (a lifetime appointment). Bradford married Barbara Polk in 1940, they honeymooned in Alaska making the first ascent of Mount Bertha together.

Washburn is especially noted for exploits in four areas.

1/ He was one of the leading American mountaineers in the 1920s through the 1950s, putting up first ascents and new routes on many major Alaskan peaks, often with his wife, Barbara Washburn, one of the pioneers among female mountaineers and the first woman to summit Denali (Mount McKinley).

2/ He pioneered the use of aerial photography in the analysis of mountains and in planning mountaineering expeditions. His thousands of striking black-and-white photos, mostly of Alaskan peaks and glaciers, are known for their wealth of informative detail and their artistry. They are the reference standard for route photos of Alaskan climbs.

3/ He was responsible for creating maps of various mountain ranges, including Denali, Mount Everest, and the Presidential Range in New Hampshire.

4/ His stewardship of the Boston Museum of Science.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Hy Hirsh (American, 1911-1961)
Untitled
Late 1930s
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection

Hyman Hirsh (October 11, 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – November 1961, Paris, France), was an American photographer and experimental filmmaker. He is regarded as a visual music filmmaker, as well as one of the first filmmakers to use electronic imagery (filmed oscilloscope patterns) in a film. …

Photography style

Hirsh’s early photographs were influenced by California photography movement Group f/64, who had first exhibited in 1932 at the de Young Museum where Hirsh later worked. In 1932. Hirsh’s photo work from that period used sharply focused black and white renderings and little manipulation in their process. Hirsh was then influenced by the social documentary of the Farm Security Administration [FSA] photographers who recorded the impact of the Great Depression on displaced workers and their families. Hirsh followed suit, exploring social issues through visages of vacant lots, rusted machinery, and other images of urban decay. Recognition for these photographs led to seven exhibitions in Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1935 to 1955. A 1936 group show entitled “Seven Photographers” at L.A.’s Stanley Rose Gallery put him alongside the leading figures of West Coast photography, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston. Hirsh also appeared in the publication U.S. Camera in 1936, 1937 and 1939.

In 1943 San Francisco Museum of Art featured Hirsh in a solo exhibition. By now Hirsh had moved away from the straight-ahead aesthetic of Ansel Adams and Group f64, and his artistic photography took more cues from the world of experimental film. He made surrealist self-portraits by superimposing negatives of himself with broken sheets of glass. Later in Paris, as a study for one of his films, he shot colour slides of old wall posters that were peeling, exposing layers of posters underneath.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Bananas
1930
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection

Despite his many accolades, Edward Weston struggled to support himself throughout his career as a photographer. He found an important group of patrons in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, where several artist groups sustained a lively community of photographers in the 1920s and ’30s. The play of light, movement, and space in Shinsaku Izumi’s The Shadow (below) exemplifies their experimental ethos. In this context, the photographer Toyo Miyatake (1895-1979) organised three exhibitions of Weston’s photography between 1925 and 1931. At the final exhibition, he purchased this print (above) from Weston, perhaps because he shared Weston’s excitement for the pictorial possibilities of the rhythms and textures in a bunch of bananas.

Wall label from the exhibition

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Cornshocks and fences on farm near Marion, Virginia
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Marion Post Wolcott (June 7, 1910 – November 24, 1990) was an American photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression documenting poverty, the Jim Crow South, and deprivation. …

Post trained as a teacher, and went to work in a small town in Massachusetts. Here she saw the reality of the Depression and the problems of the poor. When the school closed she went to Europe to study with her sister Helen. Helen was studying with Trude Fleischmann, a Viennese photographer. Marion Post showed Fleischmann some of her photographs and was told to stick to photography.

Career

While in Vienna she saw some of the Nazi attacks on the Jewish population and was horrified. Soon she and her sister had to return to America for safety. She went back to teaching but also continued her photography and became involved in the anti-fascist movement. At the New York Photo League she met Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand who encouraged her. When she found that the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin kept sending her to do “ladies’ stories”, Ralph Steiner took her portfolio to show Roy Stryker, head of the photography division of the Farm Security Administration, and Paul Strand wrote a letter of recommendation. Stryker was impressed by her work and hired her immediately.

Post’s photographs for the FSA often explore the political aspects of poverty and deprivation. They also often find humour in the situations she encountered.

In 1941 she met Leon Oliver Wolcott, deputy director of war relations for the U. S. Department of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt. They married, and Marion Post Wolcott continued her assignments for the FSA, but resigned shortly thereafter in February 1942. Wolcott found it difficult to fit in her photography around raising a family and a great deal of traveling and living overseas.

In the 1970s, a renewed interest in Post Wolcott’s images among scholars rekindled her own interest in photography. In 1978, Wolcott mounted her first solo exhibition in California, and by the 1980s the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art began to collect her photographs. The first monograph on Marion Post Wolcott’s work was published in 1983. Wolcott was an advocate for women’s rights; in 1986, Wolcott said: “Women have come a long way, but not far enough. … Speak with your images from your heart and soul” (Women in Photography Conference, Syracuse, N.Y.).

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Pepper No. 35
1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise, Kings Canyon National Park, California
c. 1935, printed 1979
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Divine Figures

Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997)
Overview of the City
1935
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Ayleen Ito Lee
Cantor Arts Center Collection

In 1935, 25 of Stackpole’s bridge photographs were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Peter Stackpole (1913-1997) was an American photographer. Along with Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, and Thomas McAvoy, he was one of Life Magazine‘s first staff photographers and remained with the publication until 1960. He won a George Polk Award in 1954 for a photograph taken 100 feet underwater, and taught photography at the Academy of Art University. He also wrote a column in U.S. Camera for fifteen years. He was the son of sculptor Ralph Stackpole.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997)
Mother and Daughter
1934
Gelatin silver print
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Langston Hughes, Chicago, Illinois, 1941
1941, printed 2002-2003
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
Martha Graham – Ekstasis (Torso)
1935
Gelatin silver print
Given in memory of Belva Kibler by Barbara Morgan
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Barbara Morgan first attended a performance by Martha Graham’s modern dance company in 1935. The experience so deeply impressed her that she began photographing Graham and her fellow dancers regularly, becoming a recognised expert in the genre within a few years. Morgan typically captured a dancer’s entire body, but for Graham’s solo in Ekstasis, she explained: “When by moving a light which cast a certain shadow I suddenly felt a heroic scale evoked. … The torso expressed it all, and I felt as if I were on a lonely shore between Egypt and archaic Greece discovering a forgotten Venus.”

Wall label from the exhibition

John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) 'Classe (Marjorie Gestring, championne olympique 1936 de plongeon de haut vol)' 1935

John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
Class, Olympic High Diving Champion, Marjorie Gestring
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Marjorie Gestring, a future Stanford undergraduate from Los Angeles, won the 1936 Olympic gold medal in women’s springboard diving at age 13. John Gutmann photographed Gestring the following spring at a diving exhibition held as part of the weeklong festivities for the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. For Gutmann, the “rigid geometry” of her dives struck him as an “absolutely modern machine style.” More broadly, his image of Gestring soaring through the air captures the ethos of a moment when, having just completed the longest suspension bridge in the world, humans seemed capable of any accomplishment.

Wall label from the exhibition

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Nude (Charis) Floating
1939, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Herbert Matter (American born Switzerland, 1907-1984)
Untitled
1940
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries

Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. Matter’s innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design. …

As a photographer, Matter won acclaim for his purely visual approach. A master technician, he used every method available to achieve his vision of light, form and texture. Manipulation of the negative, retouching, cropping, enlarging and light drawing are some of the techniques he used to achieve the fresh form he sought in his still lifes, landscapes, nudes and portraits. As a filmmaker, he directed two films on his friend Alexander Calder: “Sculptures and Constructions” in 1944 and “Works of Calder” (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Russell Lee (American, 1903–1986)
Jim Norris and wife, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico
1940
Dye transfer print
Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Chao-Chen Yang (Chinese-American, 1910-1969)
Chief Owasippe
1939
Gelatin silver print
The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition Fund and the Asian American Art Initiative Acquisitions Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Chao-Chen Yang came to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago. He photographed in his spare time, regularly submitting prints like this one to the national circuit of photography salons. At first glance, this photograph might appear to be a portrait of the man named in the title. In fact, “Owasippe” references a legend about a Potawatomi chief who died waiting for his sons to return from a journey. The story originated in Michigan around the turn of the 20th century; by the 1930s, it had been popularised around the Midwest by the Boy Scouts of America. Yang likely heard the tale in Chicago and photographed a model whose true identity remains unknown. Although the headdress was familiar to settler audiences as a shorthand for “Native,” the one in this photograph references different cultural traditions than those of the Potawatomi. Reality thus became fodder for a fantasy that captured the interest of many viewers in the late 1930s, when Yang’s photograph won multiple awards from camera club juries across the country.

Wall label from the exhibition

Chao-Chen Yang (1910-1969) was a Chinese American photographer based in Seattle, Washington. Born Hangchow, China, Yang received degrees in foreign relations and art education from the University of Hwin-Hwa, Shanghai, and became the director of the Department of Art at the Government Institute in Nanking. Coming to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, he took night courses in art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1935 to 1939. He was transferred to Seattle as Deputy Consul and founded the Seattle Photographic Society in 1941. He served as director of the Northwest Institute of Photography and concentrated in colour photo printing processes.

Text from the Smithsonian website

Lit dramatically from above, the face of the “chief” emerges stoically from beneath a feathered headdress, the sartorial signifier of “Indianness” lifted by white Americans from the Oceti Sakowin Oyate of the Northern Plains (plate 27 [here above]). Concentrating on some distant point beyond the frame, he squints as if staring into the sun, but the nondescript background suggests that the photograph was likely made in a studio setting. All the better to decontextualize and generalize its subject, because the aim is not to reproduce the specificity of an Indigenous person, but to practice the visual shorthand popularized decades earlier by the photographer Edward S. Curtis and his North American Indian portfolios (fig. 2).1 The stereotyping function of this picture is reinforced by its title: “Chief Owasippe” is not Oceti Sakowin Oyate, but an invented leader of the Potawatomi, whose name continues to adorn the oldest Boy Scout camp in the United States, founded in 1911 in Michigan by a group of businessmen from Chicago.

Yet this reductive representation of the “vanishing Indian” – whose authenticity and natural purity came from his exteriority to the temporal and societal boundaries of modernity – was produced by a recent arrival to the United States with no personal connection to the politics of Indigenous assimilation, domination, and expropriation that underpinned this representational type. Chao-Chen Yang, employee at the Chinese consulate in Chicago, made this picture while enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. The photograph is his attempt to speak a foreign language: not English per se but the dialect of American identity, which is so filled with fantasy and contradiction that it feels right, with the theme of this exhibition in mind, to call it a language of dreams. What fluencies must the photographer possess to move freely within another person’s dream?

By the time Yang took this photograph, American artists’ fetishistic valorization of Indigenous culture had turned away from the Plains tribes from which the chief’s feather headdress originates and toward the southwestern tribes in New Mexico. In the 1920s, writers and artists including D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Sloan, and Marsden Hartley projected an “authenticity” onto Pueblo visual culture, which justified their appropriation of its subject matter and form to create a native modernist aesthetic.2 Many photographers did the same, including Ansel Adams and Wright Morris (plates 47 and 48). For its time, Yang’s photograph spoke a dated form of Indigenous appropriation, but the numerous exhibition stamps on the version of the print held by his estate reveal that this image was widely received by photography clubs across America – New York, Denver, all the way to Seattle, where Yang would become deputy consul in 1941.

Vexingly, the racist exoticization and flattening of Indigenous identity performed by the photograph also demonstrate its creator’s fluency with the visual language of artistic-minded amateur photographers in America…

Yechen Zhao. “Photographic Fluency (Its Pleasures and Pains): Kyo Koike and Chao-Chen Yang,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 55.

Everyday Splendors

Shinsaku Izumi (Japanese-American, 1880-1941)
The Shadow
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection

In The Shadow (c. 1931, above), Izumi plays with the late-afternoon light, picturing a man riding a bike. In the upper-right-hand corner of the image, we see part of the front wheel; the entire rear wheel; the bicycle seat; and the cyclist’s feet, perfectly balanced and planted on pedals, riding past our line of vision. The rest of the image shows the bike traveling past a rectangular manhole cover, on the left side; and, on the right, the front wheel appears prominently as it casts a long shadow, with the individual spokes disappearing with each rotation. Against the brushed surface of the street, hard and soft patterns of gray emerge diagonally across the image…

The Shadow [is] a study of motion, light, and shadow, and, on another level, a metaphysical commentary on “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life.”

Susette Min. “Speculative Frameworks: Approaching the Interwar Years Work of Shinsaku Izumi and Nakaji Yasuim,” in Trans-Asia Photography Volume 5, Issue 1: Photography and Diaspora, Guest Edited by Anthony W. Lee, Fall 2014

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
One of the Wilkins family making biscuits for dinner on cornshucking day at Mrs. Fred Wilkins’ home near Tallyho, Granville County. North Carolina
1939
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Judith Hochberg and Michael Mattis
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Sonya Noskowiak (American, 1900-1975)
Washing, San Francisco, California
1937
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The United States General Services Administration, formerly Federal Works Agency, Works Projects Administration (WPA), allocation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Sonya Noskowiak (25 November 1900 – 28 April 1975) was a 20th-century German-American photographer and member of the San Francisco photography collective Group f/64 that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She is considered an important figure in one of the great photographic movements of the twentieth century. Throughout her career, Noskowiak photographed landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Her most well-known, though unacknowledged, portraits are of the author John Steinbeck. In 1936, Noskowiak was awarded a prize at the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She was also represented in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Scenes from San Francisco” exhibit in 1939. Ten years before her death, Noskowiak’s work was included in a WPA exhibition at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California.

Photography

Noskowiak primarily focused on landscapes and portraits between the 1930s and 1940s. Noskowiak embraced straight photography and used it as a tool to give newer meaning to her photographs. She emphasized the forms, patterns, and textures of her subject, to enrich the documentation of it.

Her earliest works reflect the work of photographers of her period and their thoughts on Pictorialism. In her earliest works, such as City Rooftops, Mountains in Distance (the 1930s), there is a graphic quality to how she abstracted the piece. There is the dark, strong industrial structure that contrasts with the light sky. There are almost no logs seen on the buildings, as if they are they are blurred beyond readability. This is an example of the ‘New Objectivity’ movement, which focused on a harder, documentary approach to photography.

Noskowiak often composed her photographs to intersect her subjects, which gave a more dynamic feel to her photographs. Examples of these are provided by her works Kelp (1930) and Calla Lily (1932). The composition crops the boundaries of the kelp plant and flower and draws the viewer’s eye to the texture of the plants. The kelp is so abstracted that if not for the title it would be unrecognisable. In Calla Lily, her use of chiaroscuro gives a luminous, almost floating feeling to the photograph.

Her photograph Agave (1933) is an intimate viewing of the cactus plant – another example of a composition separating the object from what is made visible shown and emphasising the plant’s beautiful pattern.

Noskowiak utilised the same technique of straight photography in her pictorial portraits and commercial works. The same intimacy shown in Agave can be seen in portrait works such as John Steinbeck (1935) and Barbara (1941). In both, she creates an intimate atmosphere, in which the viewer feels as though they are there interacting with the subjects. Even in her more commercial works, Noskowiak’s style and technique still remained important. In her untitled 1930s photograph, you have a model with a broad-brimmed hat that conceals her face. The composition of the piece relieves viewers from thinking about the photograph as an advertisement. The cropping and position of the model offers closeness, and viewers get the feeling of being in the moment with the model more than simply responding to the photo as an advertisement.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Cement Worker’s Glove
1936, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Junk
1934
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Florence Alston Swift
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Henry Swift Collection

Seema Weatherwax (Jewish-American, 1905-2006)
Yosemite
1940
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries

Seema Aissen Weatherwax was a photographer and social activist who was part of the Film and Photo League, worked with Ansel Adams in Yosemite, and shot Woody Guthrie and migrant workers at a California FSA camp. …

Emigrating from Tsarist Russia with her parents in 1913 to escape persecution and the conscription act, Seema Aissen graduated from high school and began studying science courses in Leeds, England. A few years after her father’s death, her mother took the three daughters to Boston to join relatives, and Seema became involved in photography. She moved to Southern California in 1929, lived in Tahiti for a year, and upon returning to Los Angeles joined the Film and Photo League in 1934. Ansel Adams asked her to run his darkroom in Yosemite in 1938. The following year she assisted Adams with the first Camera Workshop in Yosemite. In 1941 Seema met the writer Jack Weatherwax, and together with folk singer Woody Guthrie visited the Shafter Farm Security Administration Camp, managed by noted civil rights advocate Fred Ross. At Shafter she photographed Dust Bowl refugees and their surroundings. The Weatherwaxes moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1984. Following the death of her husband, Seema continued her activism, including working with the NAACP and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and at the age of 95 organized the first exhibition of her work. She passed away in 2006, two months shy of her 101st birthday.

Text from the Online Archive of California website

Prints made by Seema at Yosemite reveal a photographer whose confidence in her technical abilities allows her to pursue photography in daunting weather conditions7 and to render transcendent beauty through everyday forms, both natural and man-made. Her work from this period focuses not only on postcard-ready vistas but also on the physical structures that locate and organise human experiences within these natural surroundings: like a slush-covered road impressed by tire tracks, or a fawn viewed through a gridded windowpane. 8 In one winter scene from 1940, titled simply Yosemite, tall wooden utility poles with triple cross-arms anchor a dozen snow-coated cables (plate 38 [above]). Set amidst dark tree trunks laced with white boughs, these power lines are resplendent in the snow. They stream down the vertical axis of the scene, indelible reminders of a Yosemite modernised for tourism – reminders that Adams typically left out of his artistic work. Seema’s prints from the 1940s are variously signed “Seema,” “Seema Aissen,” and later “Seema Weatherwax,” reflecting the surname she adopts upon marrying writer and political activist Jack Weatherwax in 1942.

Anna Lee. “Seema (Sophie) Aissen Weatherwax: Photographer,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 72.

Living Relics

Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
Meeting House, Southbury, Connecticut
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Wright Morris developed a personal practice of pairing his photographs with texts, publishing the first of many of these combination projects in 1940. The page-long text paired with a variation of this photograph does not describe an observed scene but rather a scene imagined by the narrator, who sits “like a man caught in a spell” seeing “what nobody’d seen before.” By presenting this text with his photograph of an unidentified, weather-worn wooden building, Morris vaguely evokes a moment from the past, but leaves its meaning open to interpretation. As with memories and daydreams, the viewer’s impressions are subjective and imprecise, if not total figments of the imagination.

Wall label from the exhibition

Wright Morris (1910-1998) was a renowned writer and affective photographer. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers. Devoid of figures, his photographs depict everyday objects and atmosphere. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style.

Born in Nebraska, Morris attended Pomona College in Claremont, California. After graduation he traveled throughout Europe, purchasing his first camera in Vienna. Morris returned to California in 1934 determined to become a writer, but also continued to photograph. In 1935, he bought a Rolleiflex camera and began photographing extensively. Morris first exhibited his photo-texts in 1940, at the New School for Social Research in New York. This same year the Museum of Modern Art purchased prints for their collection and New Directions published images that would become his first book.

In 1942, Morris received the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships, funding the completion of The Inhabitants. Published by Scribners, The Inhabitants (1946) documented domestic scenes of the South, Midwest, and Southwest and although visually influential enjoyed little financial success. His second photo-text book, The Home Place (1948) was a visual novel, with short fictional prose accompanying each photograph. Although groundbreaking, it remained unmarketable and after its publication Morris invested in his more successful career as a writer. In 1956, Morris won the National Book Award for his tenth book, the unillustrated A Field of Vision. Morris continued to write and publish while teaching English and creative writing from 1962-1974 at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California. Morris’s acclaimed novel, Plains Song won American Book Award for Fiction 1981.

The Museum of Modern Art proved supportive of Morris throughout his career, both exhibiting and purchasing his work. MoMA curator John Szarkowski prompted a reconsideration of Wright Morris with the publication of God’s Country and My People (1968), widely considered Morris’s most successful photo-text book. Morris’s exhibition career burgeoned in his later years with many shows including Wright Morris: Origin of a Species, a 1992 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and following his death, Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris at Stanford’s Cantor Center of Art in 2002.

Anonymous. “Wright Morris,” on the Center for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 04/07/2023

Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
House in Winter, near Lincoln, Nebraska
1941, printed 1979-1981
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Wedding Cake House, Kennebunkport, Maine
1941, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Eroded Plank from Barley Sifter
1931, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Alma Lavenson (American, 1897-1989)
Eucalyptus Leaves
1933
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

The next year Lavenson made her own picture specimen, titled Eucalyptus Leaves, a forking branch against white ground (plate 49 [above]). The leaves are rounded, almost gingko-like, the stems slender and bending, a young plant or newer shoot, likely blue or silver dollar gum. It is hard to make sense of the light, which comes from the left, above, and the right – which is to say that there is an unnatural quality to the photograph. This looks like a studio picture, though Lavenson rarely worked indoors. But there are ways the photograph is in conversation with others made during this period, after she met Weston in 1930. It is a graceful picture, attentive to form and surface. Almost a decade later Lavenson would write, “In all my work – whether shacks or flowers or landscapes – I aim for perfection of texture and fineness of detail.”2 Up close the silver gelatin print has a lithographic quality, in its etched shadows and shining branch, the velvet opacity of the leaves.

Footnote 2. Alma R. Lavenson. “Virginia City: Photographing a ‘Ghost Town,'” in U.S. Camera Magazine 10 (June-July 1940), 66, quoted in Audrey Goodman. A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women’s Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021, p. 75.

Rachel Heise Bolten. “Eucalyptus Leaves,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 87.

The World of Tomorrow

Akira Furukawa (American born Japan, 1890-1968)
Cargo
1929
Bromoil
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Egg Slicer
1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Ruth Bernhard (American born Germany, 1905-2006)
Kitchen Music
1930-1933
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Hiromu Kira (American, 1898-1991) 'The Thinker' about 1930

Hiromu Kira (American, 1898-1991)
The Thinker
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Dennis and Annie Reed Collection

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Drilling Rig, The Texas Co.
1937
Gelatin silver print
Elizabeth K. Raymond Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Lou Stoumen (American, 1917-1991)
Times Square in the Rain
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Lou Stoumen began photographing Times Square when he first moved to New York City at age 21. Decades later, he still recalled the day he made this photograph, when he rode an elevator to the top of the Times Building, then waited to snap the shutter until the rain “turned the great X of Broadway and Seventh Avenue into silvery rivers.” Stoumen continued photographing this famed stretch of the city for nearly half a century, but he remembered the years around 1940 as special: “Those days Manhattan was the center of the world, and Times Square was its heart.”

Wall label from the exhibition

It was raining in New York. Streets slick as oil, people hurrying past the trams and buses in Times Square with their umbrellas up. September 1940: the penultimate year of peace for America. An ocean away, bombs were falling on London, nightly. But here, for now, people could still think of it as a European war.

Some of the crowds in Lou Stoumen’s photograph Times Square (plate 59 [above]) might have come to catch Gone with the Wind, Wallace Beery’s new western Wyoming, or Busby Berkeley’s latest musical spectacular Strike Up the Band, starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Times Square: Here are the cinemas and the burning neon lights and the billboards for cigarettes and automobiles and cold, fizzy drinks. All the things you can buy and see during an autumn in New York.

Lou Stoumen was 23 when he made the photograph: The elevator at 1475 Broadway took him up the first 19 stories and then he took the stairs up the final six flights, to the top, and walked out onto the roof ledge.1 From there he pointed his camera out at 46th Street and Broadway capturing the TIMES sign from behind. The building had once been the home of the New York Times, but the newspaper had departed in 1913 and now the sign stood as an announcement of a location, a cry too, an exclamation of the times. …

Margaret Bourke-White photographed Drilling Rig, The Texas Co. (1937) (plate 56) within the oil well’s tower, looking up at the vertiginous pipes that pumped petroleum from beneath the ground. The cutting shadows cast by the latticework of the rig patterns the image with a rigorous geometry, all forms reduced to a series of rectangles and triangles. Humanity has disappeared from view, to be replaced by science and engineering, unchallengeable, mathematically correct.

Bourke-White had begun working for the newly established Life magazine a year earlier, already one of America’s most prominent news photographers.5 Yet she had been fascinated with shooting machinery since the late 1920s, claiming that “the beauty of industry lies in its truth and simplicity; every line is essential therefore beautiful.”6 The drilling rig is undoubtedly elegant; shorn of context, it becomes impossible to establish its scale or relationship to its environment. It stands as an autonomous creation, a pure distillation of form as function. Irresistibly, its towering pipes and metal superstructure, disappearing into the distance at the top of the photograph, recall the skyscrapers of Stoumen’s New York. Their symbiosis is more than coincidence: It is the drilling rig that enables the tower block. This is the stuff that the World of Tomorrow is built upon.

1/ William A. Ewing. Ordinary Miracles: The Photography of Lou Stoumen. Los Angeles: Hand Press, 1981, p. 22.
5/ Stephen Bennett Phillips. Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, in association with Rizzoli, New York, 2002, p. 83.
6/ Margaret Bourke-White in 1930, quoted in Theodore M. Brown. Margaret Bourke-White: Photojournalist. Ithaca, NY: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1972, p. 31.

Altair Brandon-Salmon. “Sign of the Times,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, pp. 101-102.

John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
“Switch to Dodge,” An American Altar, Detroit
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Street Theater

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Corrugated Tin Façade
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Warehouse, Water and Dock Streets
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Daniel Mattis
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
Powerhouse and Palm Tree, near Lordsburg, New Mexico
1940, printed 1979-1981
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Center of town. Woodstock, Vermont. “Snowy night”
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Marion Post Wolcott made this photograph halfway through her three-year appointment as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. Though most of her work (and that of the FSA overall) was understood at the time as “documentary” or factual in nature, this is one of several photographs by Post that tended to stir the imagination. For instance, Sherwood Anderson reproduced this photograph in his 1940 book on rural America, Home Town, to illustrate his metaphor for New England winters as times of peaceful slumber.

Wall label from the exhibition

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) 'Untitled' c. 1938

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Untitled from St. Joseph’s House
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
Vincent Bressi Fund
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Robert Disraeli (American born Germany, 1905-1988)
Sunday – After Church
1933
Gelatin silver print
Cantor Arts Center Collection
Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund

Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998)
Untitled
1940
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Helen Levitt avoided the descriptive or symbolic titles favoured by the previous generation of photographers, preferring instead to leave her photographs untethered to specific people or locations within New York. The viewer is thus given free rein to make associations or compose narratives from the streetscapes in each photograph, just as the shoe shiner in this image may have conjured his own daydream from the action unfolding on the street.

Wall label from the exhibition

Surreal Encounters

John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
Monster on Broadway, New York City
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

John Vachon (American, 1914–1975)
Girl on Lobster, Washington, D.C.
1938
Gelatin silver print
Gift of R. Joseph and Elaine R. Monsen
Cantor Arts Center Collection

By the early 1930s, discussions about Surrealism had spread from the art world into the mainstream, even if few Americans subscribed to, or even understood, its main tenets. Not long after, Americans began to use the words “surreal” and “surrealistic” to describe anything bizarre or dreamlike. Each of these three photographs could have fit this unofficial classification; by locating the extraordinary among the ordinary – a monster in the city, a woman riding a lobster, and another woman enacting the text on the magazine in her hands – each image is thoroughly uncanny.

Wall label from the exhibition

John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
Monument to the Chicken Center of the World, Petaluma, California
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

After photographing the town of Petaluma, north of San Francisco, John Gutmann sent dozens of prints to his agent in New York. He explained: “This little town of 9,000 inhabitants and its surrounding ranches is today one of the greatest, if not the greatest poultry center in the world. … Thousands and thousands of little chicken houses, covering the country, the low built hatcheries, the many signs and symbols, trucks fully loaded with poultry or eggs give a very unique character to this district.” Gutmann photographed this roadside monument several times, likely noticing the traces of past vandalism visible in this image.

Wall label from the exhibition

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Hot Coffee, Mojave Desert
1937, printed 1977 by Cole Weston
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Although Edward Weston regarded his photography with the utmost seriousness, his writings and accounts from friends reveal a spirited sense of humour. This photograph offers a rare example of this playful side. According to Charis Wilson, Weston’s travel companion at the time, they were struck by the absurdity of the hot coffee advertisement in the middle of the desert; the fact that the location bore the name “Siberia” added a second layer of irony.

Wall label from the exhibition

Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985)
The Repulsive Bed
1941
Gelatin silver print
Gift from the Alinder Collection
Cantor Arts Center Collection

In the summer of 1941, Edward Weston visited Louisiana with Clarence John Laughlin as his guide. Before driving to the same building that Walker Evans had photographed six years earlier, they visited another antebellum plantation house where Laughlin photographed a friend among the ruins. Weston shared Laughlin’s fascination with the ornate architecture, laden with history as it slowly deteriorated back into swampy earth. Yet Laughlin understood these forces as an embodiment of Surrealism. For him, New Orleans was a place “unparalleled in its violence of decay” but also where “the human spirit reached a singular flowering” in the face of this destruction.

Wall label from the exhibition

Dubbed “The Father of American Surrealism,” Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) was the most important Southern photographer of his time and a singular figure within the burgeoning American school of photography. Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from his peers who championed realism and social documentary.

Referring to his own fraught relationships with women, Laughlin described this ethereal photograph of a woman lounging atop a collapsed, tattered bed in a decaying house as an “Image of those who endure marriage, without love, because of convention. [The] marriage bed becomes repulsive, and part of it turns into a monster head.” The veil across the woman’s face gives her a haunting look, as if she is fading away along with the house around her. The cracks in the wall reinforce the idea of a fractured, failing marriage, while the shadows envelop her in darkness.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, White Chapel, Louisiana
1935, printed 1974
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Walker Evans admired the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a French photographer whose images of Paris caught the interest of a new generation of photographers shortly before his death. Though neither photographer self-affiliated with Surrealism, Evans recognised that “in some of his work [Atget] places himself in a position to be pounced upon by the most orthodox of surrealists.” Evans occasionally emulated Atget’s style, as in this image of an empty Louisiana plantation house, leading some American critics to describe Evans’s photography in a manner befitting a Surrealist. One 1938 review stated, “In some miraculous way [Evans’s] objects or persons acquire a super-reality, the implications of which echo across the years to startle and haunt, to jolt and to enchant.”

Wall label from the exhibition

Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1997)
Uncommon Man
1936, printed 1983
From Nathan Lerner – Fifteen Photographs: 1935-1978
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the Mattis Family
Cantor Arts Center Collection

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Jack Rabbit
1939
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Lisa and John Pritzker
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Sommer’s Jack Rabbit (1939) was one of the first 100 negatives the artist made with his new 8 x 10 inch view camera recommended by his friend Edward Weston.1 Living in the arid climate of Arizona to protect his lungs against the recurrence of tuberculosis, the casualties of the desert – rabbits, horses, coyotes – became some of Sommer’s signature photographic subjects.2 Weston, too, had a penchant for photographing dead things. Weston’s preference was for the corpses of birds, often those of shore birds near his coastal California home.3 Photo historian Robin Kelsey has made an excellent comparison of the two artists’ “rival” treatments of deceased animals, grounded in their diametrically opposed aesthetic concerns. As in Jack Rabbit, Sommer used evenly dispersed light to create a visual field that privileged no one thing above the rest,4 reflecting both an aesthetic and a philosophical orientation concerned with the essential oneness of the world.5 On the other hand, Weston treated his dead birds in the same manner as his nudes or his peppers, expressing what he termed “the universality of basic form.”6 Using light to emphatically trace the contours of the birds’ forms, Weston visually separated them from their backgrounds and transformed them into abstract objects. Aligned with their concerns, the two artists typically chose different moments of death and decay to capture: For Sommer it was desiccated or decaying bodies and for Weston it was stripped bones or newly deceased bodies.

Although Weston’s Dead Man, Colorado Desert (1937) similarly focuses on the clearly defined form of a newly deceased body,7 there are crucial distinctions in its composition. Whereas Weston’s birds are photographed from above, aiding in their abstraction, the dead man is photographed from an angle to the side, which emphasizes both his human features and the bramble-filled space that he occupies (plate 83 [below]). His waist, legs, and one arm continue outside the frame to the top right. This makes Dead Man fundamentally different from Weston’s birds, because the man exists not as an abstract form, but as a body in space, a space that we can imagine Weston and his wife and collaborator Charis Wilson sharing and a space that we can imagine inhabiting ourselves.

Maggie Dethloff. “Violable Edges: Frederick Sommer’s and Edward Weston’s Photographs of Death in the Desert,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 131.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Dead Vulture, Mojave Desert
1937

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Dead Man, Colorado Desert
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center Collection

While traveling through the Colorado Desert on a photography excursion for his Guggenheim Fellowship, Edward Weston came across the corpse of a recently deceased man. He had apparently become ill and stranded while traversing the harsh landscape. Despite the unexpected, and certainly disturbing, nature of this encounter, Weston seamlessly fit the subject into his photography practice. He made two photographs, one of which Life magazine published alongside a short narrative by Weston titled “Desert Tragedy.” In the text Weston explained: “He must have died that day. But whatever aid he got came too late, hunger and privation had wasted his body and the merciless sun had dried him up. But he was quite beautiful in death.”

Wall label from the exhibition

Cantor Arts Center
328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way
Stanford, CA
Phone: 650-723-4177

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Sunday, 11.00am – 5.00pm

Museum of the City of New York website

Exhibition: ‘Celebrating the City: Recent Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something’ at the Museum of the City of New York

Exhibition dates: 18th February – 31st December, 2022

Curator: Sean Corcoran, senior curator of prints and photographs, Museum of the City of New York

William Klein (American, 1928-2022) 'Christmas Shoppers' 1954 from the exhibition 'Celebrating the City: Recent Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something' at the Museum of the City of New York, Feb - Dec, 2022

William Klein (American, 1928-2022)
Christmas Shoppers
1954
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Happy Easter to everyone around the world!

I had to have an emergency appendectomy on Wednesday night. Home now but not feeling so well just taking it easy… therefore a short text.

A fabulous exhibition in New York of photographs about New York: working, going, shopping, playing, gathering, loving, gazing, being, reflecting and buildings. Some excellent photographs that I have never seen before which evidence the soul of this imaginative city.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thank to the Museum of the City of New York for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Celebrating the City: Recent Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something' at the Museum of the City of New York

At left: Joseph Maida. Ben with fan 2001

At right: Mitch Epstein. Untitled [New York #3] 1995

Installation views of the exhibition Celebrating the City: Recent Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something at the Museum of the City of New York, showing in the bottom photograph at left, and enlargement of Bruce Cratsley’s Brooklyn Bridge Centennial 1983
Photos: Brad Farwell

Celebrating the City: Recent Photography Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something highlights a gift that has dramatically advanced the Museum’s already exceptional photography collection. Juxtaposing striking recent images with work by some of the 20th century’s most important photographers, including the Museum’s first images by Robert Frank and William Klein, the exhibition is a moving celebration of the power of photography to capture New York and New Yorkers.

Since the invention of photography, the streets of New York City have lured picture-makers from across the world. Each borough, neighbourhood, and corner offers and opportunity to see something new through the lens, yielding images as varied as the street life itself. New York’s diverse built environment provides a backdrop for the true subject of many photographers: the varied lives of New Yorkers.

The photographers in this exhibition have immortalised this ever-changing urban centre. Each has created a distinctive vision of the city, providing a window into a vast and complex metropolis. The have also made use of the changing technology of photography itself to produce images whose meanings range from apparently objective reflections of reality to highly crafted expression of the artists’ responses to the people and the city around them.

Introduction

New York City may always be in flux, but shared activities and experiences connect New Yorkers across time and space. For more than a century, many of the world’s best photographers have used their cameras to capture iconic scenes of New Yorkers in action – from mundane daily routines to special events of gathering and ritual. They have sought out the deeply personal moments that occur within this city of millions and have capture both the “New Yorkiness” of its inhabitants and he ways New York experiences are linked to the larger human condition.

The photographs in this gallery are arranged into themes that capture these quintessential New York moments without consideration to chronology. The images allow us to see a range of photographic styles applied to experiences that are common to so many New Yorkers, while also highlighting the ever-changing state of the city over many decades.

Wall text from the exhibition

Working

Michael Spano (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (Man in street on phone, Police Plaza near Canal Street)' 1994 from the exhibition 'Celebrating the City: Recent Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something' at the Museum of the City of New York, Feb - Dec, 2022

Michael Spano (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (Man in street on phone, Police Plaza near Canal Street)
1994
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Michael Spano has made New York City the constant subject of his work over a long career, while exploring the possibilities of the medium, from print solarisation to collage. This photograph exemplifies Spano’s keen observational eye and attention to composition, with repeating patterns and visual dichotomy produced through light and shadow. Several other examples of work by this artist are on also on view in this gallery, including photographs from the series “Auto Portraits” and “Splits.”

William Gordon Shields (American, 1883-1947) 'Flag Day' 1917 from the exhibition 'Celebrating the City: Recent Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something' at the Museum of the City of New York, Feb - Dec, 2022

William Gordon Shields (American, 1883-1947)
Flag Day
1917
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Joseph Maida (American)
Pizza Delivery
2002
Chromogenic development print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Mitch Epstein (American, b. 1952)
Untitled (New York City #21)
1997
Chromogenic development print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Going

Inge Morath (Austrian, 1923-2002)
A Llama in Times Square
1957
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Estate of Inge Morath

The noted photojournalist Inge Morath made this photograph of a llama in Times Square, easily her most recognisable photograph, for Life magazine in 1952. Although the image looks spontaneous, it was part of a highly planned assignment. The image was published in a one-page story, in the magazine’s humorous “Animals” section, and was entitled “High-paid llama in big city.” The piece featured a menagerie of television animals – including, in addition to the llama, dogs, cats, birds, a pig, a kangaroo, and a miniature bull – living at home with their trainers in a Manhattan brownstone. Morath’s full caption for the image reads, “Linda, the Lama [sic], rides home via Broadway. She is just coming home from a television show in New York’s ABC studios and now takes a relaxed and long-necked look at the lights of one of the world’s most famous streets.”

Michael Spano (American, b. 1949)
5th Ave. & the Park
2005
From the series Auto Portraits
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Ted Croner (American, 1922-2005)
Going Slushy Street, Times Square
1948
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Estate of Ted Croner

Ted Croner (American, 1922-2005)

Ted Croner (1922-2005) was an American photographer, described as an influential member of the New York school of photography during the 1940s and 1950s. His images are said to represent the best example of this movement.

Born in Baltimore in 1922 and raised in North Carolina, Croner developed an interest in photography while in high school. He honed his skills while serving as an aerial photographer in World War II before settling in New York City in 1947. At the urging of fashion photographer Fernand Fonssagrives, he enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch’s class at The New School where he studied with Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Lisette Model. During this period he produced many of his most memorable images including “Taxi, New York Night, 1947-1948”, which appears on the cover of Bob Dylan’s 2006 album, Modern Times. Another of Croner’s photographs was used on the cover of Luna’s album Penthouse.

Croner also had a successful career as a fashion and commercial photographer – his work was published in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. He also worked extensively with corporations such as Coca-Cola and Chase Manhattan Bank.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Ted Croner (1922-2005) was born in Baltimore, MD. and grew up in Charlotte, N.C. After joining the army during World War II, Croner worked as an aerial photographer with the United States Army Air Corps stationed in the South Pacific. In1946, Croner went to New York where he and Bill Helburn, another former Air Corps photographer, used their G.I. Bill aid to open a small photography studio on West 57th street in Manhattan. Shortly after that, Croner enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch’s photography class at the New School. Perhaps Croner’s best-known work, Taxi – New York Night, 1947-1948, was taken while he was a student in Brodovitch’s legendary “design laboratory”.

In 1948 Edward Steichen, then the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, chose to include Croner in two exhibitions at the Museum: “In and Out of Focus” and “Four Photographers” which included three other photographers: Bill Brandt, Harry Callahan and Lisette Model. Other exhibitions of Croner’s work followed. As he continued to accept commercial work at magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, Croner pursued his own photography, producing vigorously experimental, cinematic images of cafeterias, solitary diners and the city after dark.

Interest in Croner’s work was revived with the publication of The New York School, Photographs by Jane Livingston in 1992 which followed the 1985 exhibition of the same name at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. For the cover of the book, Livingston chose a picture by Croner, “New York at Night, 1948” which shows a Manhattan skyline reduced to abstract slashes of white light among black tall buildings against a gun-metal grey sky. This was followed by inclusion in the exhibition “By Night” at The Cartier Foundation in Paris in 1996, the Whitney Museum’s 1999 exhibition “American Century Part II” and in 2005, in the exhibition “At The Crossroads of Time: A Times Square Centennial” at the Axa Gallery in New York, and in “Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography 1940-1959” at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2010.

Anonymous text from the Howard Greenberg Gallery website [Online] Cited 11/02/2022

Ted Croner (American, 1922-2005)
Home of the Brave, Times Square
late 1940s
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Courtesy of the Estate of Ted Croner

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Street – Design for a Poster
1903
Photogravure
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was perhaps no more important figure for the advancement of photography’s position in the arts than Alfred Stieglitz. At a time when photography was viewed as a fact-based, scientific craft, Stieglitz had an unerring ambition to prove that the medium was as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. This photograph, taken at Fifth Avenue and 30th Street, with its moody scene and soft-focused, impressionistic aesthetic, exemplifies the painterly qualities Stieglitz espoused (sometimes described as Pictorialism). In later years, the photographer changed course and embraced “straight” sharp-focused photography as the best representation of the artistic qualities of the medium.

Shopping

Walter Rosenblum (American, 1919-2006)
Chick’s Candy Store, Pitt Street, NY
1938
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Walter A. Rosenblum (1919-2006) was an American photographer. He photographed the World War II D-Day landing at Normandy in 1944. He was the first Allied photographer to enter the liberated Dachau concentration camp.

Rosenblum was a member of the New York Photo League where he was mentored by Paul Strand and Lewis Hine. He became president of the League in 1941. He taught photography at Brooklyn College for 40 years.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Stanton and Orchard Streets
1936
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Stanton and Orchard Streets' 1936 (detail)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Stanton and Orchard Streets (detail)
1936
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

A llama in Times Square… fireworks over the Brooklyn Bridge… polar bears playing in a pool at the zoo… subways, skylines, shadows, and stolen moments… all these things and more tell the varied story of New York City, captured by the lenses of many of the medium’s greatest photographers. Now, these images will be on view as part of “Celebrating the City: Recent Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something,” opening February 18th at Museum of the City of New York. The exhibition will feature approximately 100 photographs selected from the more than 1,000 images recently gifted to the Museum by the Joy of Giving Something (JGS), a non-profit organisation dedicated to the photographic arts.

“Photographs of New York are instantly recognisable and help us celebrate and elevate the many stories of our vibrant city that might otherwise go unnoticed,” says Whitney Donhauser, Ronay Menschel Director of Museum of the City of New York. “As we continue to emerge from the challenges of the COVID pandemic, this magnificent gift from the Joy of Giving Something dramatically advances MCNY’s already stellar 400,000+ image photography collection and gives us an even greater ability to share the stories of our beloved city and its inhabitants.”

“JGS is extremely pleased to donate a substantial group of prints from our collection to the Museum of the City of New York. Most of the work in our donation features New York as subject and it is a great match that the photographs stay in New York to be enjoyed by audiences far and wide,” says Jeffrey Hoone, President of Joy of Giving Something (JGS). “New York continues to be a subject for photographic artists from around the world and JGS is proud to help continue that legacy as we support younger artists through our many different programs. We applaud the Museum for their forward-thinking programs and their commitment to preserving and celebrating New York as a vibrant subject for photographers past, present, and future.”

Devoted to the field of photography, and ever on the search for its very best practitioners, JGS founder Howard Stein never limited himself to a single genre or style. Stein began acquiring photographs in the 1980s, eventually forming one of the most comprehensive collections in private hands, spanning the 19th through the 21st centuries. His understanding of the photographic medium and discerning eye for print quality and condition yielded a remarkable collection shared through exhibition loans around the world.

With images ranging from documentary to quirky, architectural to atmospheric, “Celebrating the City” features selections from this transformative donation, which notably includes works by 30+ creators new to the MCNY collection (see list on Page 4). The exhibition presents multiple images from Helen Levitt‘s dynamic and celebrated street photography; Sylvia Plachy‘s playful and eccentric examination of the people, animals, and moments of NYC; and Michael Spano‘s slice-of-life city shots spanning the 1990s and 2000s. Other key figures in 20th century photography are incorporated into the show, including Ilse Bing, Bruce Davidson, Mitch Epstein, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, William Klein, Saul Leiter, Alfred Stieglitz, Rosalind Solomon, and Paul Strand, to name a few – all capturing indelible, sometimes implausible, intimate, and often incredible moments of the city.

MCNY’s “Celebrating the City” is organised into 10 categories, from working, going shopping, playing, and gathering to loving, gazing, being, reflecting and building, all illustrating the universality of the city and offering the opportunity to compare how some of the best-known photographers have returned to the same subjects again and again.

Some exhibition highlights include:

Bruce Cratsley’s “Brooklyn Bridge Centennial” (1983)
Bruce Davidson’s “Square Riggers, South Street Seaport” (1996)
Elliott Erwitt’s “New York City” (1955)
Larry Fink’s “Studio 54” (1977)
Ken Heyman’s “Dogs’ Last Swim in Central Park Lake, New York” (1985)
Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s “Alice (Alice Rose George)” (1987)
Inge Morath’s “A Llama in Times Square” (1957)
Sylvia Plachy’s “Baseball Plié” (1982)

“In addition to offering glimpses of life in the city, ‘Celebrating the City’ juxtaposes various picture-making approaches, showing the different ways in which photographs are created as well as illuminating the decision-making process behind photography, collecting, and curation,” says Sean Corcoran, senior curator of prints and photographs, Museum of the City of New York. “We’ve paired the JGS photographs with a handful of recently acquired works – presented in the anteroom – in an effort to tell the story of a diverse and contemporary city from a range of perspectives.”

Press release from the Museum of the City of New York

Playing

Ken Heyman (American, 1930-2019)
Dogs’ Last Swim in Central Park Lake, New York
1985
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Estate of Ken Heyman

Paul Himmel (American, 1914-2009)
Dog in Central Park
c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Estate of Paul Himmel

Paul Himmel (American, 1914-2009)

Paul Himmel (1914 – February 8, 2009) was a fashion and documentary photographer in the United States.

Himmel was the son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants. He took up photography as a teenager and studied graphic journalism under art director Alexey Brodovitch. From 1947 to 1969, he worked as a professional photographer for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and several of his photographs were included in Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition.

In the 1950s, Himmel started his own projects, including series on boxers, the circus and ballet. He experimented with grain structure in his negatives and prints, using a series of silhouetted and elongated forms abbreviated almost to the point of abstraction.

Himmel took his last photograph in 1967, and by 1969, he became disenchanted with photography and retrained as a psychotherapist. An exhibit of his photographs in New York City in 1996 brought him back to public attention. Himmel’s photographs are fresh and unusual. Many are high-contrast, emphasising the design and patterns contained in an image. His subjects ranged from New York City scenes to nudes reduced to grainy vestiges to colour abstractions.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023)
Studio 54
1977
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Larry Fink was born in Brooklyn in 1941. In the 1960s, he studied with noted photographer Lisette Model. This photograph from Studio 54, made in 1977 in the hedonistic heyday of the disco era, is a well know image from Fink’s series “Social Graces,” which explored social class in America by comparing two different worlds: that of urban New Yorkers of “high society” and that of rural, working-class Pennsylvanians through social events like birthday parties. Fink has described his approach to his subject in a straightforward, non-judgmental manner, “The one thing I was trained in being was non-hierarchical. I don’t have an internal class system. Who you are is who is in front of me and who I am in the same, and that’s how we have to relate to each other.”

Joseph Maida (American)
Soccer Game
2002
Chromogenic development print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Pablo Delano. 'Merengue Musicians, Upper Broadway' 1994-1995

Pablo Delano (Puerto Rican, b. 1954)
Merengue Musicians, Upper Broadway
1994-1995
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the photographer

Pablo Delano (Puerto Rican, b. 1954)
Dancers at Dominican Day, Parade, Midtown
1994-1995
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the photographer

Gathering

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
New York City
1955
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
© Elliott Erwitt/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Dona Ann McAdams (American, b. 1954)
Group of Hassidic Men, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
1978
From the series Williamsburg, Brooklyn Portfolio
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Ed Grazda (American, b. 1947)
Abu Bakr Sedig Mosque, Flushing NY
1995
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Ed Grazda, from Flushing, Queens, had been photographing in Pakistan and Afghanistan for almost 15 years when the underground garage at the World Trade Center became the site of a car bomb attack, on February 26, 1993. The explosion killed six people and injured more than a thousand; in both print and televised media, the grisly scene was often accompanied by the phrase “Muslim terrorist.” As a counter to the spreading media stereotypes, Grazda began a new effort: to document some of the dozens of communities of New Yorkers who practice Islam. He engaged both the immigrant populations and the native New Yorkers, including converts, the longstanding African-American Muslim community, and a growing Latino-Muslim community. This project was eventually published as the book New York Masjid: The Mosques of New York in 2002.

Joseph Maida (American)
Men in Park
2001
Chromogenic development print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.
Courtesy of the Photographer

Loving

Ted Croner (American, 1922-2005)
Top Hats at Horse Show
1947-1949
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Estate of Ted Croner

Stephen Barker (American, b. 1956)
Nightswimming, NYC
1993-1994
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC and the Photographer

After Stephen Barker graduated from The Cooper Union School of Art in 1980, he became an assistant for noted portraitist Hans Namuth and architectural photographer Wolfgang Hoyt. In response to the growing AIDS crisis, Barker became an activist, working with ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and managing the Brooklyn Needle Exchange for two years. He also took his camera into New York City’s sex clubs. Given the necessity for anonymity, many of the figures that appeared in this work, entitled Nightswimming, appear indistinct at first glance. The settings are often darkened cinemas and hallways, yet there are flashes of intelligibility – tenderness, passion, and even introspection.

Mitch Epstein (American, b. 1952)
Untitled (New York #9)
1996
Chromogenic development print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Since the 1970s, Mitch Epstein has been an early proponent of colour photography as a fine art, which he often uses to subtly examine American society. This photograph, and several others on view in this gallery, are drawn from a body of work entitled “The City.” The photographer describes the collection as a “series of photographs that reveal the blurred line between New York City’s public and private space and question its increasing surveillance. These pictures describe a chaotic and layered city, where people create an intimate solar system of family, friends, and associates to survive the brute anonymity of public space.”

Gazing

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York (Woman and taxi)
1982
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Dick and Adele, the Village
c. 1947
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

George S. Zimbel (American-Canadian, b. 1929) 'Irish Dance Hall, The Bronx' 1954

George S. Zimbel (American-Canadian, 1929-2023)
Irish Dance Hall, The Bronx
1954
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

George S. Zimbel (July 15, 1929 – 9 January 2023) was an American-Canadian documentary photographer. He has worked professionally since the late 1940s, mainly as a freelancer. He was part of the Photo League and is one of its last surviving members. Born in Massachusetts, he settled in Canada about 1971. His works have been shown with increasing frequency since 2000, and examples of his work are part of several permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He has been described as a humanist. He has published several books of his photographs and in 2016 was the subject of a documentary retrospective film co-directed by his son Matt Zimbel and distributed by the National Film Board of Canada.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Rebecca Norris Webb (American, b. 1956)
Brooklyn, NY
2000
From the series The Glass Between Us
Chromogenic development print

Rebecca Norris Webb has lived in New York City for more than 25 years. Originally a poet, she brings a lyrical sensibility to her photography and often interweaves text into her imagery. This photograph is part of a larger series published as a book entitled The Glass Between Us: Reflections on Urban Creatures (2006), that examines people’s complex relationship with animals in cities, primarily in the context of “conservation parks” such as zoos and aquariums. This image, taken at the New York Aquarium in Coney Island, uses reflections and distortion of the water tanks to blur the boundaries between the young boy and the aquatic life he is observing.

Being

Ken Heyman (American, 1930-2019)
Willie
1962
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Estate of Ken Heyman

Ken Heyman met noted anthropologist Margaret Mead while attending Columbia University. The two became friends and worked together on several projects; the experience influenced Heyman to focus his photography on human relationships and interactions. Heymen went on to become a leading photojournalist, working for Life, LOOK, and TIME magazines. In the mid-1950s Haymen photographed “Willie,” a four-year-old boy from Hell’s Kitchen, over the course of several months in an attempt to observe him negotiate his one-block world. The results were published in Heymen’s first book in 1962. He went on to publish 45 additional books, including collaborations with composer Leonard Bernstein, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and artist Andy Warhol.

Philip-Lorca DiCorcia (American, b. 1951)
Alice (Alice Rose George)
1987
Chromogenic development print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, a native of Hartford, Connecticut, currently lives in New York City.He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with other notable New York-based photographers David Armstrong and Nan Goldin. Beginning in the 1980s, he created an influential body of work that blurred the lines between fact and fiction, blending a documentary style with staged photography techniques. The resulting photographs, often depicting mundane moments of life, are known for their dramatic cinematic quality. This image of noted writer, curator, and photography editor Alice Rose George exemplifies the taut psychological quality of diCorcia staged tableaux.

DiCorcia alternates between informal snapshots and iconic quality staged compositions that often have a baroque theatricality.

Using a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture’s spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real-life situations. His work could be described as documentary photography mixed with the fictional world of cinema and advertising, which creates a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire.

During the late 1970s, during diCorcia’s early career, he used to situate his friends and family within fictional interior tableaus, that would make the viewer think that the pictures were spontaneous shots of someone’s everyday life, when they were in fact carefully staged and pre-planned. His work from this period is associated with the Boston School of photography. He would later start photographing random people in urban spaces all around the world. When in Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo, he would often hide lights in the pavement, which would illuminate a random subject, often isolating them from the other people in the street.

His photographs give a sense of heightened drama to accidental poses, unintended movements and insignificant facial expressions of those passing by. Even if sometimes the subject appears to be completely detached from the world around them, diCorcia has often used the city of the subject’s name as the title of the photo, placing the passers-by back into the city’s anonymity. Each of his series, Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, A Storybook Life, and Lucky Thirteen, can be considered progressive explorations of diCorcia’s formal and conceptual fields of interest. Besides his family, associates and random people he has also photographed personas already theatrically enlarged by their life choices, such as the pole dancers in his latest series.

His pictures have black humour within them, and have been described as “Rorschach-like”, since they can have a different interpretation depending on the viewer. As they are pre-planned, diCorcia often plants in his concepts issues like the marketing of reality, the commodification of identity, art, and morality.

In 1989, financed by a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship of $45,000, DiCorcia began his Hustlers project. Starting in the early 1990s, he made five trips to Los Angeles to photograph male prostitutes in Hollywood. He used a 6×9 Linhof view camera, which he positioned in advance with Polaroid tests. At first, he photographed his subjects only in motel rooms. Later, he moved onto the streets. When the Museum of Modern Art exhibited 25 of the photographs in 1993 under the title Strangers, each was labeled with the name of the man who posed, his hometown, his age, and the amount of money that changed hands.

In 1999, diCorcia set up his camera on a tripod in Times Square, attached strobe lights to scaffolding across the street and took a series of pictures of strangers passing under his lights. This resulted in two published books, Streetwork (1998) which showed wider views including subjects’ entire bodies, and Heads (2001), which featured more closely cropped portraits as the name implies.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Reflecting

Stephen Barker (American, b. 1956)
Nightswimming
1993-1994
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC and the Photographer

Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001)
Mary and Robert Frank at San Gennaro Festival
1950
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Louis Faurer was born in Philadelphia, where he worked as a photo technician in portrait studios. After serving in the U.S. Signal Corps of Philadelphia during World War II, he began to commute to New York City for work at magazines and attended classes at Alexey Brodovitch’s Design Laboratory. There, he met fellow photographer Robert Frank. The two became fast friends and Faurer eventually moved into Frank’s large loft and used his darkroom. At the time, Faurer worked for various magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Vogue, and the short-lived Flair.

This image, made in those early days in New York, reflects Faurer’s close relationship with Frank and his then-wife Mary. The late 1940s and 1950s were especially important to Faurer’s development as a photographer and were when he created his most memorable images of New York. As in this photograph, Faurer concentrated his image making on people out on the streets, reflections of store windows, and the bright city lights. This psychologically charged work highlights the complexity and energy of city life.

Louis Faurer (August 28, 1916 – March 2, 2001) was an American candid or street photographer. He was a quiet artist who never achieved the broad public recognition that his best-known contemporaries did; however, the significance and caliber of his work were lauded by insiders, among them Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen, who included his work in the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions In and Out of Focus (1948) and The Family of Man (1955).

“Faurer … proves to be an extraordinary artist. His eye is on the pulse [of New York City] – the lonely “Times-Square people” for whom Faurer felt a deep sympathy. Every photograph is witness to the compassion and obsession accompanying his life like a shadow. I am happy that these images survive while the world keeps changing.” ~ Robert Frank

Text from the Wikipedia website

Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019)
Andrea on Third Avenue
1955
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Swiss-born Robert Frank immigrated to New York in 1947 to work for Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar. Frank continued to create editorial work for magazines such as Life, LOOK, and Vogue until he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955. The award freed him to travel throughout the country for two years to make the photographs that would result in his seminal book, The Americans. This photograph, of Frank’s daughter Andrea in their apartment near Astor Place on Third Avenue, is emblematic of much of the photographer’s work; it is tender and intimate while remaining slightly enigmatic.

Sylvia Plachy (American born Hungary, b. 1943)
Virgil Thomson
1986
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the “American Sound” in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neo-romantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of “an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment” whose “expressive voice was always carefully muted” until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to “moments of real passion”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Mitch Epstein (American, b. 1952)
Untitled (New York #11)
1996
Chromogenic development print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Mitch Epstein (American, b. 1952)
Untitled (New York #3)
1995
Chromogenic development print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,
Courtesy of the Photographer

Buildings

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
From the Viaduct, 125th Street, New York
1915
Plate from Camera Work No. 49/50, June 1917
Photogravure
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Arthur D. Chapman (American, 1882-1956)
East River, New York
1914
Platinum print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Arthur D. Chapman (American, 1882-1956)

Arthur D. Chapman (1882-1956) was born in Bakersfield, California. An amateur photographer, he moved to New York and worked as a printer for The Globe and Commercial Advertiser and The New York American; he also listed himself in the New York City directories as a bookbinder (1913) and a photographer (1917). Chapman lived in Greenwich Village from 1911 until 1917 and, in his afternoons off from work, photographed everyday scenes around Manhattan. In his own neighbourhood, he chose to show not the Bohemian image the Village then projected, but rather what the residential Village looked like. With the use of shadow, Chapman was able to give depth and character to his photographs, and those focused down a street usually featured a striking foreground. His subjects include rooftops, buildings, and street scenes with such titles as “9½ Jane Street,” “Clinton Court,” and “Kelly’s Alley.” Most of the photographs are from the 1910s and show a quaint side of the Village that has all but vanished.

During the early 1950s Chapman thought it would be of historical interest to re-shoot some of the areas in Manhattan he had photographed almost a half-century before, in order to document how time had changed those places. Unfortunately, some of the scenes he wanted to photograph were still considered too “sensitive” so soon after the Second World War, and he was unable to obtain permission from the city government.

The New-York Historical Society bought this collection from Chapman between 1950 and 1955 as he, in his retirement, found and printed from old negatives which had lain hidden in his extensive collection. In 1953, Chapman gave two self-portraits to the Society as a gift, one taken in New York in 1913 and the second taken in 1953 in New Jersey. Both show him working with his photographic equipment.

In 1921, following his World War I service in France with the Photographic Section of the Army Signal Corp Chapman moved to New Jersey, where he continued with his “hobby” until his death on June 5, 1956. He was a member of Pictorial Photographers of America, and a member of New York Typographical Union No. 6 for over fifty years.

Anonymous text from the New York Historical Society website Nd [Online] Cited 11/03/2022

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
A Brick-Built Wall, New York
1961
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

Bruce Cratsley (American, 1944-1998)
Brooklyn Bridge Centennial
1983
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

John Reid
Harlem Bridge, 4th Ave., NYC
c. 1870
Albumen print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Joy of Giving Something, Inc.,

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