In the 1970s and 1980s, Bremen professor Muhlis Kenter photographed Turkish workers, then known as guest workers.
Only a little text tonight as I’m battling chronic depression and the little grey cells are not firing on all cylinders.
Absence, longing, loneliness, hard work, isolation, family, home.
Social inequality, sexism, racism and life in exile.
As noted by Annabelle Steffes-Halmer in her article “Migrants’ stories for a new home” (2021) on another exhibition on the same theme, In Situ: Photo Stories on Migration (Museum Ludwig, June – October 2021), photographs of this type are “a story of emancipation. [They] tell tales of people who came to a foreign country, which they discovered for themselves and which ultimately became their home. It is not only a (photo) history of migration, but also the history of Germany.”
Have a great Easter everyone.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“They Used To Call Us Guest Workers”: Extending the Photography and the New Media Collection
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) is expanding its collection with key works by the photographers Muhlis Kenter, Nuri Musluoğlu, Asimina Paradissa and Mehmet Ünal. After coming to Germany from Turkey and Greece in the 1960s and 70s, the four documented life, work and their political engagement there from a migrant perspective. The exhibition “They Used to Call Us Guest Workers” presents around 80 photographs and collages that depict the everyday lives of people with and without a migration background in the Federal Republic of Germany while addressing the themes of social inequality, sexism, racism and life in exile. Viewers have the opportunity to discover here an often-overlooked perspective on socio-political issues that are still highly topical today.
With a shared interest in society and politics, each of the four amateur photographers developed a unique approach and yet they all took up the tradition of the workers’ photography movement. Like its historical role model in the interwar period, this movement was dedicated to the battle against class barriers and social inequality. The aim was for workers to pick up a camera themselves to raise awareness of the realities of their lives and help shape the public debate with their images.
Workers’ Photography
John Heartfield and his contributions to the illustrated magazine “Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung” (AIZ) in the 1930s were an important source of inspiration for the workers’ photography movement. Founded in Hamburg in 1973, the magazine “Arbeiterfotografie” saw itself as a successor to the AIZ. The main figures in the workers’ photography movement all engaged with developments in society and politics but each developed a different approach. Their common goal was to use their cameras in the battle against social inequality. Workers were encouraged to pick up a camera in order to raise their own awareness for the realities of their lives and enable them to intervene in the public debate.
Between 1975 and 1990, the theme of migration played a central role in workers’ photography. The reports provide an in-depth look at those living in exile, at living and working conditions and women’s work, and at the peace movement and unequal educational opportunities for immigrants. The articles in the magazine were often published anonymously. The images were supplied by the 30 or so local working groups, who often took the photos together.
Muhlis Kenter
Bremen-based amateur photographer Muhlis Kenter (b. 1952 in Istanbul, Turkey) depicts work and everyday life in Germany. He documents Turkish workers in mining, the metal industry and a textile factory, and accompanies educational projects for Turkish children and young people with a migration background. In his expressive portraits, Kenter spotlights personal stories. His photographs spotlight people navigating between the sense of being foreign in an unfamiliar country and finding their place in Germany. But Muhlis Kenter also observes German society with his camera, focusing on pigeon breeding, fishing and gardening, which he sees as typical German hobbies.
Muhlis Kenter provides behind-the-scenes glimpses of factory work. He for example photographed workers of Turkish origin in a textile factory where people from different backgrounds work side by side in production. The photos were taken as part of a photo story for the magazine “Arbeiterfotografie”. Kenter often focuses on individuals and personal histories, resulting in expressive portraits. For his reportages, he creates complex compositions that highlight in an arresting way the interplay between people and technology at the companies he visits. In one series, he turned the tables, looking not at the lives of immigrants of Turkish origin but rather at “white German” society and what he regards as typical hobbies: pigeon breeding, fishing and gardening.
Muhlis Kenter was born in 1952 in Istanbul, Turkey. In 1972 he took up mechanical engineering studies in Aachen, where he joined a “workers’ photography” group. Alongside his studies, he acted as a support teacher for Turkish-speaking classes. Kenter later worked as a professor of mechanical engineering at the City University of Applied Sciences in Bremen, and he continues to avidly pursue photography.
Nuri Musluoğlu
Nuri Musluoğlu (b. 1951 in Istanbul, Turkey) photographs public life. The images he produced between 1975 and 1988 show mainly demonstrations, peace marches, strikes and protest actions, especially those taking place in his hometown of Heilbronn. Supplemented by footage of sporting events, street festivals and celebrations, as well as photos of his own family, a dense panorama emerges of German-Turkish coexistence as a collective experience. Musluoğlu’s photos document particularly vividly the protest culture during the years in question – including the peace movement and European Peace Marches, the trade union struggles and the anti-nuclear movements, and the resistance of Turks living in Germany against the military dictatorship in Turkey. He also lifts the veil on xenophobia in public spaces and the living conditions in asylum shelters.
Nuri Musluoğlu is a photographer and political activist. His camera accompanies him to demonstrations, such as the strike for a 35-hour week and protests by the peace movement, or the blockade of the US missile base in Mutlangen in 1983. He not only captures protest posters and scenes but also documents moments of solidarity – such as workers with and without a migration background dancing. Musluoğlu’s photographs chronicle political struggles as well as everyday moments in German-Turkish life, such as family celebrations and trips home. He examines in detail protest posters that touch on migration issues and in another image shows a worker of Turkish origin playing the saz.
Born in Istanbul in 1951, Musluoğlu came to Germany in 1965, trained as a toolmaker, and later became a social worker for the “Arbeiterwohlfahrt” (Workers’ Welfare Association). He is active in trade unions (IG Metall, ver.di) and the peace movement. Since 1985, his photos have appeared under a pseudonym in the weekly newspaper “Türkiye Postası”, which is aimed at workers and people seeking political protection.
Asimina Paradissa
Asimina Paradissa (b. 1945 in Vrastama, Greece) occupies a special position in amateur photography as one of the few migrant women behind a camera. She documented her own life in Germany from 1968 onwards, showing everyday life in a hostel for unmarried female workers in Wilhelmshaven as well as scenes of factory work captured from the workers’ point of view. Paradissa’s many self-portraits deal with questions of self-image and what it feels like to live in a certain place. Although her photographs are private, they are at the same time significant testimonies to contemporary history: By giving the women portrayed names and voices, they draw attention to the stories of female migrants and thus add a rare female perspective to the way in which we view migrant labour.
Asimina Paradissa gazes directly out at us from her pictures. Perched on her bicycle, she laughs openly into the camera, while in another picture she looks us earnestly in the eye as she sits on her bunk bed in a dormitory for unwed workers run by the Olympia typewriter works and caringly embraces her friend Evangelia Manolakaki. Even though others usually press the shutter, these images can still be described as self-portraits. Starting in 1966, Paradissa took photos on a regular basis as a way of reassuring herself about her new life in Germany. Among the “guest workers” who came to West Germany in the 1960s, one in three were women who lead lives largely hidden from the public eye. Paradissa is one of the few women of this generation to document her self-determined life in Germany with her camera. Her pictures are at once private remembrances and documents of the times.
Asimina Paradissa was born in 1945 in Vrastama, Greece. She came to Wilhelmshaven with her brother in 1966 as part of the recruitment agreements concluded between West Germany and Greece, among other countries. In 1972 she settled in Wuppertal. Alongside her job, she began to make photography and write poetry.
Mehmet Ünal
Mehmet Ünal’s (b. 1951 in Çanakkale, Turkey) photographic practice includes political image-text collages that emerge from actions and protests. In addition to individual images and series, he also produces posters that incorporate writing and found objects – often from public authorities and agencies – and thus comment on the particular experiences of migrants when dealing with bureaucracy. With their thematic acuity and compositional density, these posters are independent artworks that relentlessly expose exclusion and marginalisation.
Mehmat Ünal’s collages combine written, photographic and found objects from the world of German bureaucracy that reflect experiences of racism. Ünal expresses himself through satire and exaggeration; for example, he created a fake Deutsche Bahn advertising campaign offering a “foreigner’s pass” promoting the return transport of people to Turkey. He compares the application for a work permit to a “TÜV certificate for humans”. In his text-image combinations (circa 1982), Ünal criticizes Germany’s official policies towards immigrants and the degrading treatment of those who were once invited to the country as “guests”. After the recruitment of foreign workers was discontinued in the wake of the economic crisis of the early 1980s, Ünal observed a growing atmosphere of hostility towards those regarded as “foreigners”. The first arson attack on a refugee shelter took place in 1980 in Hamburg-Billbrook. Works that Ünal produced against the backdrop of political street protests were published in the magazine “Arbeiterfotografie” in 1984. In several collages, he draws on the legacy of John Heartfield, whose political montages in the mid-1920s brought him recognition as the founder of this genre.
Mehmet Ünal was born in Çanakkale, Turkey, in 1951. In 1976, he moved to Mannheim, where the former actor works as a photographer and journalist.
Text from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G)
Asimina Paradissa was 20 years old when she moved to Wilhelmshaven in northern Germany. In the photo, the Greek woman poses in front of the dormitory at the Olympia company. Back then, she took pictures of weddings, parties and visits to the zoo for her colleagues and friends. The 76-year-old is still a passionate photographer.
life alone and free like a tree and brotherly like a forest is our longing
Mehmed Nâzım Ran (17 January 1902 – 3 June 1963), commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet, was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the “lyrical flow of his statements”. Described as a “romantic communist” and a “romantic revolutionary”, he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than 50 languages.
In my humble opinion Diane Arbus is the best portrait photographer of the 20th century.
As can be seen in the quotation from a 1939 high-school essay on Plato when Arbus was just 19 years old (below), latent inside her was an appreciation of difference, uniqueness, and the importance of life – all awaiting an out, an emanation of her spirit later manifested in her photographs through the picturing of her subjects.
Arbus found her mature voice as an artist, her métier if you like, when in 1962 she switched from a 35mm camera to a 2 1/4 inch twin-lens reflex (TLR) Rolleiflex (later a Mamiyaflex), a square format which became her iconic signature.
In the photograph Nancy Bellamy’s bedroom, N.Y.C. 1961 (1961, below) we therefore have evidence of the early results of the use of this new camera. In this photograph I believe you can feel how Arbus is still getting used to his new way of seeing the world, for you have to approach your visualisation of the world in a completely different way when constructing the image plane in a square format. Here she is still unsure as to where to place the camera. The light is fantastic coming in through the window and flooding the room but the out of focus left wall is weak and simply does not work with the image.
Fast forward to 1963-1965 and we see Arbus in complete control of her physical and emotional environment. In photographs from this period, whether medium distance portraits showing subjects in situ or tightly cropped portraits with minimal backgrounds, we see her undoubted mastery of natural light, flash, construction and tensioning of the image plane but, above all, in control of the feeling that emanates from the photographs that flows to the viewer.
Whether direct / acceptance / this is who I am (Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey, 1963, 1963 below) to contained / introspective (Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966, 1966 below) – but never the dreaded “dead pan” – and on to the inscrutable / open / closed looks on each of the three faces in the photograph Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963 (1963, below), Arbus is the master at conjuring, no what is the word I’m looking for … Arbus is the master at materialising the energy of a person or place before our very eyes.
As the press release so eloquently states, “Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.”
An unspoken exchange between photographer and subject. A moment of revelation, or revelatio, where the curtain is pulled back to reveal our innermost secrets. Visualised by Arbus without judgement.
As the years progress towards 1968-1970 Arbus becomes bolder still. In photographs such as A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below), Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below) and Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, N.YC., 1970 (1970, below) we see and feel such an intimate bond between the photographer and the subject – all crap cut out, all extraneous noise gone, just the baring of the soul of the sitter looking directly into the camera. As Minor White used to say, a communication / communion between the photographer and the subject, back through the lens of the camera and onto the film, forming a Zenian circle of energy, hoping for a revelation of spirit in the negative and subsequent print – whether that be from a rock, a landscape or a portrait.
And in two photographs from the same sitting, we can begin to understand how Arbus achieved her aim. In the photograph Transvestite at the birthday party, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) we have the subject in situ, in context, laughing, happy, enjoying her birthday party surrounded by her things. Then things change. In Transvestite with her birthday cake, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) Arbus closes in on this wonderful human being on her bed with her birthday cake. Isolating her from the background through the use of flash, there she is, fag in hand, staring directly into the camera in all her strength and vulnerability. Arbus evinces what it is to be this human being, she has empathy for the subject in these intimate settings.
I believe that Arbus’ empathy for her subjects was greatly enhanced by the waist level engagement with her sitters when using her medium format camera. Instead of bringing the camera up to the eye, Arbus looks down into the viewfinder to locate and ground the energy of her subjects, and the camera is nestled at solar plexus / belly button, with all the connection to mother, blood, energy and water (Amniotic Fluid) from which we all come. When singing and in yoga practice, breathing comes from the stomach and the energy flows in an out of the navel, the Manipura (solar plexus) in yoga, linked to personal power, emotional balance, and metabolism, acting as a hub for energy distribution.1 Having used an old Mamiya twin-lens C220 medium format camera myself I can totally appreciate the unique perspective and energy such a camera position brings to picturing the world.
“These archetypal images have become deeply embedded in the collective conscience where conscience is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations. The snap, snap, snap of the shutter evinces the flaws of human nature, reveals the presence of a quality or feeling to which we can all relate. As Arbus states, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. That is why these photographs always capture our attention – because we become, we inhabit, we are the subject.”2
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ The (navel) is seen as a powerful energy centre in many traditions (Yoga, Ayurveda, TCM) and science, representing our origin, core strength, digestion (Agni/digestive fire), self-esteem, and life force (prana).
2/ Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Diane Arbus at Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 2011 – February 2012
Many thankx to David Zwirner for allowing me to publish the 5 images and installation photographs in the posting. All other photographs are used under fair use conditions for the purposes of eduction and research. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.”
Diane Arbus
“There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth: individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life…. I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at left, Arbus’ Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968; at centre, Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963; at second right, Mrs. T. Charlton Henry in a negligee, Philadelphia, Pa. 1965; and at right, Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at second left, Arbus’ Two friends at home, N.Y.C., 1965; at second right, Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home, Boston, Mass. 1966; and at right, Transvestite at her birthday party, N.Y.C., 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing Arbus’ photograph A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing in the centre distance, Arbus’ Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970; at second right, Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966; and at right, Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal., 1964
Lucas Samaras (Greek: Λουκάς Σαμαράς; September 14, 1936 – March 7, 2024) was a Greek-born American photographer, sculptor, and painter. …
His “Auto-Interviews” were a series of text works that were “self-investigatory” interviews. The primary subject of his photographic work is his own self-image, generally distorted and mutilated. He worked with multi-media collages, and by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid photographic film to create what he calls “Photo-Transformations”.
~ Sanctum Sanctorum: a sacred room or inner chamber; a place of inviolable privacy
Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum, an exhibition of forty-five photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971, is on view at David Zwirner, London, from 6 November to 17 January 2025, and travels to Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco in spring 2026. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph reproducing all works in the exhibition, jointly published by both galleries.
Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.
Arbus’s desire to know people embraced a vast spectrum of humanity. Her subjects in Sanctum Sanctorum include debutantes, nudists, celebrities, aspiring celebrities, socialites, transvestites, babies, widows, circus performers, lovers, female impersonators, and a blind couple in their bedroom.
The exhibition brings together little-known works, such as Girl sitting in bed with her boyfriend, N.Y.C. 1966; Ozzie and Harriet Nelson on their bed, Los Angeles1970; and Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963, alongside celebrated images like Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970 and A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968.
While many of Arbus’s photographs have become part of the public’s collective consciousness since her landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1972, seen in this context, viewers may discover aspects of even familiar works that have previously gone unnoticed.
Sanctum Sanctorum follows two recent major exhibitions of the artist’s work: Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited at David Zwirner New York (2022) and Los Angeles (2025), and Diane Arbus: Constellation at LUMA, Arles (2023–2024) and the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2025).
Exhibition Catalogue
This new title ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’ illuminates Diane Arbus’s singular ability to enter private worlds.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
One of Arbus’s lesser known pictures, this photograph is of the bedroom of Nancy Bellamy, the wife of Richard Bellamy, a leading gallerist in 1960s New York who influentially championed Pop Art and Minimalism. Before she began her personal projects, Arbus worked in fashion photography with her husband, Allan, and she first met Nancy when she modelled for the Arbuses on a fashion shoot. As well as modelling, Bellamy also worked as a dancer, painter and costume designer, and had a keen interest in spiritualism. Like ‘Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown 1963’, Arbus uses an empty room to create a portrait of the person – the dressmaker’s dummy, the canvas on the wall, the photographs by the mirror and the simple, yet elegant furnishings together create an impression of Arbus’s friend’s personality.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
The bishop in Diane Arbus’s photograph “Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal.” (1964, above) was Bishop Ethel Predonzan, a unique figure who believed she was in Santa Barbara to await the Second Coming of Christ and wore elaborate robes, described by Arbus as a “small lady in damask robes with hair of phosphorescent pink”.
Predonzan was a key subject in Arbus’s exploration of individuals on the fringes, showcasing the artist’s ability to find deep personal connection and reveal inner strangeness.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
Mrs T. Charlton Henry was a Philadelphia socialite, a philanthropist, and a fashion icon – often top of the ‘best-dressed’ lists. She was the kind of wealthy upper-class woman that Arbus’s father would have hoped to see in his Fifth Avenue department store buying the latest furs.
“Mrs. Henry, born Julia Rush Biddle of Philadelphia’s Main Line, weighs approximately 88 pounds. She will be 82 years old this month. She has been on the best-dressed list so often that she is now a member of fashion’s Hall of Fame. She still lives in Philadelphia, but commutes to New York for luncheon, shopping, theater. She sits, with the posture of another era, on a bound-to-be-seen banquette at La Caravelle restaurant and delves into a curry (“I’ll have jellied soup for dinner tonight”). Her silver and gold “57 varieties” hair is meticulously coifed; the fingernails that blow delicate little kisses of greeting to friends are tinted a deep pink. Her brown and white gingham Mainbocher is perked up with her favorite day jewels. There are marble-size pearls around the neck and one wrist, and massive yellow sapphires at the other wrist, the ears, and flashing away on a ring and a brooch.”
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
From life, the absurd, the (un)familiar
The death of the English photographer Martin Parr is very sad news 😦
I feel like I have known his intimate photographs from life for a very long time. Through his beautifully observed and humorous photographs Martin Parr became a national treasure.
Incisive and insightful, his best photographs shone a light on the British class system, British rituals and everyday conversations – “candid and often humorous depictions of everyday life” – captured with visual deftness and containing a wry sense of humour mirroring the British character.
“Parr’s work was at its best when he concentrated on the volume of space within the image plane and the details that emerge from such a concentrated visualisation – whether it be the tension points within the image, assemblage of colour, incongruity of dress, messiness of childhood or philistine nature of luxury.” (MB, 2102)
His photographs have a wonderful frisson about them, a genuine love of and resonance with the things he was imaging. The dirt under the fingernails of the child eating a doughnut, the lurid colours of the popsicle and jacket of the kid with dribble on his face, all fantastic. Images full of incongruity, humour, and pathos. The absurd and the (un)familiar.
And so it goes… we loose another great photographer.
Vale Martin Parr and thank you!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Read my text “Out in the midday sun” on the exhibition Martin Parr. Early Works at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (FFF), September 2024 – February 2025
“Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.”
“I think the mindset you require is stamina, discipline, and just sheer hard work. There are basically very few shortcuts. You’ve either got that ability to apply yourself to a given situation or a given idea and explore it and resolve it, or you haven’t. Most people are just lazy. The danger with photography is that it looks very easy but in fact, it’s a very difficult medium to really excel well in because basically, people don’t work hard enough – they’re lazy. Don’t be lazy!”
Martin Parr
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, Merseyside, England 1984 From the series The Last Resort Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) England. Bristol. Car boot sale. 1995 From the series British Food 1994-1995 Traditional C-type print
Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) From A to B. Tales of Modern Motoring series 1994 Pigment print
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
There’s a scene in one of my favourite movies, 1971’s American romantic black comedy-drama Harold and Maude directed by Hal Ashby, in which the glorious Ruth Gordon (in her best ever role) saves a tree from dying in the city by loading into the back of a ute, driving it at full speed through toll gates and out to the country to plant it in the forest, pursued by a motorcycle cop.
The joyful absurdity of her actions is mirrored in the terrific juxtapositions in life that are Gary Krueger’s considered photographs: for example, a “future tree” a circle with words in a lump of concrete surrounded by a constellation of fossil fuel oil stains.
As I said in a previous posting on the artist’s work, “Krueger’s street photography inverts the normal meaning of bathos… in that a silly or very ordinary subject suddenly changes to a beautiful or important one. There is black humour aplenty in these photographs as they picture the happenstance anachronisms of a major American city.”
Many thankx to the Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Maude saves a Tree from the film Harold and Maude (1971) with Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort, directed by Hal Ashby
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (re)Discoveries presents a new collection of photographs from the artist’s archive. These vintage photographs display a sometimes frenetic and often bizarre and fragmented world. Taken mostly in Los Angeles, California in the mid to late 1970s, Krueger’s curiosity and instincts helped him to create a remarkable body of street photography, one that he describes as “split-second juxtapositions in life.”
After graduating High School in 1963, Gary Krueger (1945 – ) drove his 1954 Ford west from Cleveland, Ohio, to study graphic design and photography at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1964 to 1967. Later Cal Arts, Chouinard was a professional art school founded in 1921 by Nelbert Murphy Chouinard. In 1961, Walt and Roy Disney guided the merger of Chouinard and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to establish the California Institute of the Arts. Notable alumni include Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Joe Goode, and Allen Ruppersberg, with whom Krueger collaborated on Ruppersberg’s narrative photo works, including 23 Pieces (1969) and 24 Pieces (1970). Upon graduation from Chouinard, Krueger was hired by WED, Disney’s “Imagineering” Division. to photograph the Park and its events. He eventually left WED to pursue a successful career as a commercial and editorial photographer.
“Gary Krueger’s plain ol’ photographs (unless I’m missing a point) – small, tough, and sharp – are good, granite reportage. Baldessari’s “Fables” and Krueger’s no-nonsense photos cut like a hot ripsaw through the cool, marshmallow quality of both exhibitions.” – Peter Plagens, from a 1973 ARTFORUM review of the exhibition, Southern California: Attitudes 1972, at the Pasadena Art Museum.
Gary Krueger’s work is represented in The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His work has recently been feature in The Guardian, Creative Review, Huck and The Eye of Photography.
Press release from Joseph Bellows Gallery
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Joseph Bellows Gallery 7661 Girrard Avenue La Jolla, California Phone: 858 456 5620
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment
I love artist’s that challenge your point of view, knowledge of the world, prejudices and biases – which we all have.
I love artist’s who make you think about the stories they tell, and how you relate to their intimate, constructed and memorable worlds.
Carrie Mae Weems is one such generational artist.
Weems blends the poetic and conceptual in photographs and bodies of work which investigate history, identity, racism, executive and patriarchal power from the perspectives of female / Black American.
What a fabulous artist, a guide into circumstances seldom seen, now revealed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallerie d’Italia, Turin for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I discovered that I was the reference point, and the point of view, pointing the viewer toward the likes of me in history. Later, I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown.”
Carrie Mae Weems
“My work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition.”
“Weems was trained as both a dancer and a photographer before enrolling in the folklore studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s, where she became interested in the observation methods used in the social sciences. In the early 1990s, she began placing herself in her photographic compositions in an “attempt to create in the work the simultaneous feeling of being in it and of it.”2 She has since called this recurring figure an “alter-ego,” “muse,” and “witness to history” who can stand in for both the artist and audience. “I think it’s very important that as a Black woman she’s engaged with the world around her,” Weems has said, “she’s engaged with history, she’s engaged with looking, with being. She’s a guide into circumstances seldom seen.”3
Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin
Installation walk through of the exhibition 17th April – 7th September, 2025
Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the series Roaming, 2006
Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter puts the artist – as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys – at the center of the discourse. Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. A comprehensive survey, The Heart of the Matter features generous presentations of landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1978-1984) to her most recent series on the Black church. Throughout the exhibition and accompanying book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the iconic artist’s mind and eye. Newly commissioned essays and additional contributions from esteemed thinkers and scholars across generations underscore the singular value of Weems’s vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.
Text from the Aperture website
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) The Edge of Time – Ancient Rome 2006 From the series Roaming
Carrie Mae Weems’s “Rome Series,” titled ” Roaming” (2006), features photographs taken during her residency at the American Academy in Rome where she performed “photographic actions” contrasting her presence with grand architecture and monumental surroundings. In these works, Weems, often in her signature long black dress with her back to the camera, challenges viewers to confront power structures and historical contexts associated with the sites of Rome. The series explores themes of history, power, and the individual’s relationship to imposing edifices of authority.
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Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the series Museums, 2006-ongoing
Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin
Gallerie d’Italia – Torino presents the exhibition by American artist Carrie Mae Weems, open to the public from April 17 to September 7, 2025. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Aperture and curated by Sarah Meister, former curator of the photography department at MoMA in New York. It is part of the main program of the second edition of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival, titled Beneath The Surface, curated by Menno Liauw and Salvatore Vitale.
A major new exhibition dedicated to the internationally renowned artist Carrie Mae Weems, known for her photographic explorations of cultural identity, sexism, and class belonging.
The exhibition will feature a world premiere of a project commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo specifically for this occasion, integrated into a powerful retrospective showcasing works from Weems’ most famous photographic series. Visitors will be guided through the artist’s entire career, following a deeply personal and spiritual journey.
The selected works highlight Carrie Mae Weems’ unique ability to address the complexities and injustices of the world around us. Her photography is rooted in spaces often excluded from mainstream narratives: artists’ studios, Southern U.S. plantations, domestic interiors, and the “invisible institutions” that emerged as places of worship for Black communities during times of oppression, juxtaposed with images of monuments and museums that have historically been sites of exclusion.
At the heart of the exhibition is Preach, a new project created specifically for this event as an original commission. This ambitious and intense installation explores religion and spirituality among African American communities across generations. The series celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that define Weems’ Black Church experience while simultaneously confronting the violence and oppression that are inseparable from this history. In the new poetic text accompanying the installation, Weems writes: “Through flames and bombs, pray wherever and whenever you can, in ports and cabins, in palaces and basements, in theaters and clubs. From your secret hiding place, you have discovered new forms of worship…”. Using herself as both muse and guide, Weems invites us to join in this spiritual awakening and to condemn the persecution that has turned these sacred spaces into sites of refuge and activism. Preach intertwines early images from Harlem, San Diego, and Sea Island, Georgia, with a vast collection of new works that evoke the transcendental and secular realities of Black religious expression today.
The retrospective also includes many of Weems’ early works, such as the historic Kitchen Table Series (1990) and Museums (2006-ongoing); a selection of more recent projects, such as Scenes and Takes (2016) and Painting the Town (2021); as well as significant video installations, including The Shape of Things (2021) and Leave Now! (2022). Together, these works take visitors on a journey spanning Weems’ entire career, showcasing the depth and diversity of her artistic language.
The exhibition also benefits from the collaboration of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, which has developed activities inspired by the values of inclusion and the appreciation of diversity as a source of enrichment, themes that resonate with the exhibition’s content and align with the foundation’s strategic challenges. Photography serves as a tool for storytelling, documentation, and identity-building, contributing to inclusion and community formation. Through widespread urban communication campaigns and collaboration with the public program #Inside, the foundation’s initiatives aim to promote participation and extend the exhibition’s themes to increasingly diverse audiences, particularly in light of the simultaneous presence of the EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival 2025 in the city.
The exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter will be accompanied by a catalogue co-published by Società Editrice Allemandi / Aperture. In addition to numerous images of the American artist’s works, the catalog will feature contributions from scholars of different generations, underscoring the unique value of Weems’ vision in addressing these themes.
Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through the acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.
Carrie Mae Weems. Biography
Carrie Mae Weems, a conceptual artist, examines and challenges perceptions of race and femininity in search of new models of life. Rooted in the specificity of her experience as a Black woman yet universal in its exploration of family relationships, cultural identity, power structures, and social hierarchy, her artistic practice is primarily photographic but also incorporates text, textiles, audio, installations, and video.
Informed by storytelling, folklore traditions, and the observational methodologies of social sciences, her approach to image-making ranges from staged and serialised narratives to the appropriation and adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery. Weems critically addresses photography’s complicity in perpetuating dehumanising representations and the historical omission of Black women from institutions and art canons.
Weems lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband, Jeffrey Hoone. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Syracuse University.
Text from the Gallerie d’Italia website
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing the work North Star, 2022
In 1936 Carrie Mae Weems’s grandfather Frank Weems traveled 550 miles to Chicago on foot from Earle, Arkansas, partly with the aid of the North Star, which appears in these seven oval photographs as a cold and abstract promise. Frank Weems had been beaten after organising a labour strike to protest abysmal wages and working conditions in the cotton fields. For the artist, the abstracted world holds a tremendous yet distant possibility that her grandfather seized step by step.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing at left, work from the series Family Pictures and Stories 1978-1984
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing the installation Preach, 2025
At the heart of the exhibition is Preach… this ambitious and intense installation explores religion and spirituality among African American communities across generations. The series celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that define Weems’ Black Church experience while simultaneously confronting the violence and oppression that are inseparable from this history.
In the new poetic text accompanying the installation, Weems writes: “Through flames and bombs, pray wherever and whenever you can, in ports and cabins, in palaces and basements, in theaters and clubs. From your secret hiding place, you have discovered new forms of worship…”. Using herself as both muse and guide, Weems invites us to join in this spiritual awakening and to condemn the persecution that has turned these sacred spaces into sites of refuge and activism.
Preach intertwines early images from Harlem, San Diego, and Sea Island, Georgia, with a vast collection of new works that evoke the transcendental and secular realities of Black religious expression today.
Text from the Gallerie d’Italia Instagram web page
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Hudson’s Fish Market, Atlantic City, New Jersey 1973 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
Seeing beyond the moment
In the last posting on the work of Peter Hujar I was speaking of photographers that I have a particular affinity for. Another such artist is the now departed American photographer George Tice (1938-2025) with his large format black and white photographs of the urban landscape, mainly taken around the city of New Jersey where he lived for most of his life.
I have written twice before on the work of this magnificent photographer when he was alive: “An American iconography” on the exhibition George Tice: Urban Landscapes at the Joseph Bellows Gallery, September – October 2016; and text on the exhibition George Tice Lifework: A Tribute, Photographs 1953-2013 at Joseph Bellows Gallery, June – July 2022.
Précising these texts, I would say that Tice’s ongoing epic visual poem is at its strongest in his early period, from 1973-1974.
Tice, like Atget, had an innate ability to place the camera in such as position a to reveal subject matter in a new light. More intuitive, more sensitive to other ways of seeing, these great photographers look at the world from a different point of view. Tice’s recognition of subject matter that mere mortals pass by is translated into beautiful, serene, tonal and dare I say, sensual images, that belie the complexity of their previsualisation. As Sanford Schwartz in The New York Times, on December 3, 1972 noted: “Tice’s pictures… show a remarkable blend of intimacy, affection and clear-sightedness.”
Tice’s consumate control of the construction of the image plane never gets in the way of the elemental, eternal, and magical aspects of the photograph. As he observed, “The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal.”
It is to his great credit that Tice saw beyond the moment. He felt that magical something when you have a connection to your subject and take a special photograph, revealed in the negative and then the print. He embedded that feeling in photographs that radiate his own signature.
For his are not only photographs of the phenomenal but also the noumenal, that feeling of something ineffable that we cannot put our finger on, something in this world that is close to the ineffable mysteries of the soul – a feeling, an emotional energy of connection to earth, body, spirit and soul – for the photograph has the ability to go beyond the symbolic, to approach the impossible, the real.
Through his photographs Tice reached beyond the everyday. What more does one need to say?
Travel well on your great journey my friend.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Rooftops, 21st and King Street, Paterson, New Jersey 1969 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Route #440 Overpass, Perth Amboy, 1973 1973 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Tenement Rooftops, Hoboken, New Jersey 1974 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Railroad Bridge, High Bridge, New Jersey, 1974 1974 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Pulaski Skyway, Jersey City, New Jersey, 1974 1974 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Petit’s Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, New Jersey 1974 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Industrial Landscape, Kearny, New Jersey 1973 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Hand of Man 1902 Photogravure
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Drawbridge, Morgan, New Jersey, 1973 1973 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Houses and Water Towers, Moorestown, New Jersey, 1973 1973 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Goldy Pharmacy, Mount Holly, New Jersey, 1974 1974 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Steve’s Diner, Route 130, North Brunswick, 1974 1974 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Lexington Avenue, Passaic, New Jersey, 1973 1973 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Dari O’ Lite, Wood Avenue, Linden, New Jersey, 1973 1973 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Palace Funhouse, Ashbury Park, New Jersey, 1995 1995 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Car For Sale, Paterson, New Jersey, 1969 1969 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Jahos Brothers Clothing Store, Trenton, NJ, 1973 1973 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Esso Station and Tenement House, Hoboken, NJ, 1972 1972 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Minnie’s Go-Go, Route 130, Merchantville, 1975 1975 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, 1938-2025) Telephone Booth, 3 am, Railway, NJ, 1974 1974 Gelatin silver print Joseph Bellows Gallery
Joseph Bellows Gallery 7661 Girrard Avenue La Jolla, California Phone: 858 456 5620
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment
“Frank was not afraid to put himself out there as an artist, challenging himself to see differently, to develop further as an artist and as a human being.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
While the photographs from his groundbreaking photobook The Americans (1958) have defined the artistic reputation and legacy of Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank and his influence on a later generation of documentary photographers, I am so grateful to the man for not retreating into his shell as so many artists do, finding a style which makes them famous and makes them money and then repeating the formula over and over again ad nauseam.
Frank was ever creative, always exploring new ways of filmic and photographic expression. I admire that. While “his perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums” did not produce another seminal body of work – indeed Arthur Lubow has argued that if the aim of this exhibition is to reposition Frank’s reputation through showcasing six decades of later work the problem being that his genius as a photographer did not carry over into filmmaking1 – no matter!
Frank was not afraid to put himself out there as an artist, challenging himself to see differently, to develop further as an artist and as a human being. As he said, “I think of myself, standing in a world that is never standing still … I’m still in there fighting, alive because I believe in what I’m trying to do now.”
Critical to his new way of seeing after The Americans was Frank’s move beyond a single, static image into combining multiple negatives, images, text together. Recently I again delved through my copy of Frank’s 1972 photobook The Lines of My Hand, which “demonstrates Frank’s particular interest in the visual effects and meaning produced from combinations of images, either within a single photograph or formed by printing multiple negatives together to create a dense montage.” (Text from MoMA)
What’s so striking about the photobook is its tightly packed nature, its pages filled with ideas and images. Frank was using his intuition to construct a new language of photography: multiple, diverse and overlaid perspectives complicit with narratives not external to the self but an internal vision of a felt reality, visions that exist somewhere between documentary and fiction.
Here is abstraction and isolation, loneliness in the dream… the white line eternally disappearing into the distance in 34th Street (1949); tickertape floating in the air in Wall Street (1951); stiff men in bowler hats in City of London (1951) and the lines of the hand in Untitled [The Lines of the Hand] (Paris, 1949-1951, below) with the declaration ‘Sciences and Mysteries’. Sciences and mysteries, realities and abstractions, the known and unknown. The Lines of My Hand are the song lines of Frank’s life, the photographs breathing into existence his innermost thoughts and truths. Who am I? What do I believe in?
“Outside it is snowing, no waves at all. The beach is white, the fence posts are grey. I am looking back into a world gone forever. Thinking of a time that will never return. A book of photographs is looking at me. Twenty-five years of looking for the right road. Post cards from everywhere. If there are any answers I have lost them.” (Opening words from The Lines of My Hand)
“Frank felt trapped by the expectations and pigeonholing that the lionization of “The Americans” induced, and he recoiled in horror at the prospect of repeating himself. Beyond that, he gave various explanations over the years for why he abandoned the 35 mm camera that he brandished like a sorcerer’s wand. He explained that he had lost faith in the capacity of a single photograph to convey the truth. And his search had turned inward. “The truth is the way to reveal something about your life, your thoughts, where you stand,” he said.”2 This turning inwards was facilitated by his move in 1970 with his wife June Leaf to the rural town of Mabou on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada: “what I wanted to photograph was not really what was in front of my eyes but what was inside.”
Personally I don’t think it matters that the later photographs are not as memorable as those in The Americans. What matters is that Frank believed in what he was doing: it was his truth telling. “I am no longer the solitary observer turning away after the click of the shutter,” Frank declared. “Instead I’m trying to recapture what I saw, what I heard and what I feel. What I know!”
Finally, in the film Life Dances On (1980), his wife looks at the camera and asks Frank, “Why do you make these pictures?” In an introduction to the film’s screening, he answered: “Because I am alive.”
The Museum of Modern Art announces Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, an exhibition that will provide new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser-known aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank’s expansive career. The exhibition will delve into the six decades that followed Frank’s landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019, highlighting his perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums. Coinciding with the centennial of his birth and taking its name from the artist’s 1980 film, Life Dances On will explore Frank’s artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. The exhibition will feature more than 200 objects, including photographs, films, books, and archival materials, drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection alongside significant loans.
Text from the MoMA website
Unknown photographer Robert Frank, shown from behind, making “Pull My Daisy” 1959 John Cohen/John Cohen Irrevocable Trust, via The Museum of Modern Art, NY
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Pull My Daisy 1959 Robert Frank/The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via the Museum of Modern Art
Pull My Daisy incorporated improvisation by actors, artists and poets.
“I think of myself, standing in a world that is never standing still,” the artist Robert Frank once wrote. “I’m still in there fighting, alive because I believe in what I’m trying to do now.” Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue – the artist’s first solo exhibition at MoMA – provides a new perspective on his expansive body of work by exploring the six vibrant decades of Frank’s career following the 1958 publication of his landmark photobook, The Americans.
Coinciding with the centennial of Frank’s birth, the exhibition will explore his restless experimentation across mediums including photography, film, and books, as well as his dialogues with other artists and his communities. It will include some 200 works made over 60 years until the artist’s death in 2019, many drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection, as well as materials that have never before been exhibited.
The exhibition borrows its title from Frank’s poignant 1980 film, in which the artist reflects on the individuals who have shaped his outlook. Like much of his work, the film is set in New York City and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, moved in 1970. In the film, Leaf looks at the camera and asks Frank, “Why do you make these pictures?” In an introduction to the film’s screening, he answered: “Because I am alive.”
The Museum of Modern Art presents Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, an exhibition that provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser-known aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank’s expansive career. On view from September 15, 2024, to January 11, 2025, the exhibition delves into the six decades that followed Frank’s landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019, highlighting his perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums. Coinciding with the centennial of the artist’s birth, and taking its name from his 1980 film, Life Dances On explores Frank’s artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. The exhibition features more than 250 objects, including photographs, films, books, and archival materials, drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection alongside significant loans. Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue is organised by Lucy Gallun, Curator, with Kaitlin Booher, Newhall Fellow, and Casey Li, 12 Month Intern, Department of Photography.
“This exhibition offers visitors a fresh perspective on this beloved and influential artist,” said Gallun. “The enormous impact of Frank’s book The Americans meant that he is often remembered as a solo photographer on a road trip, a Swiss artist making pictures of an America that he traversed as an outsider. And yet, in the six decades that followed, Frank continually forged new paths in his work, often in direct artistic conversation with others, and these contributions warrant closer attention. The pictures, films, and books he made in these years are evidence of Frank’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life, at once searing and tender.”
Organised loosely chronologically, Life Dances On focuses on the theme of dialogue in Frank’s work and reflects on the significance of individuals who shaped his outlook. Frank’s own words are present throughout the exhibition – in the texts he scrawled directly onto his photographic negatives, in the spoken narrative accompanying his films, and in quotes woven into the exhibition catalogue published by MoMA in conjunction with the exhibition. Also revealed throughout the exhibition is Frank’s innovation across multiple mediums, from his first forays into filmmaking alongside other Beat Generation artists, with films such as Pull My Daisy (1959), to the artist’s books he called “visual diaries,” which he produced almost yearly over the last decade of his life.
By focusing on dialogue and experimentation, the exhibition explores such enduring subjects as artistic inspiration, family, partnership, loss, and memory through the lens of Frank’s own personal traumas and life experiences. Among the works presented in the exhibition is a selection of photographs drawn from Frank’s footage for his 1980 film Life Dances On. These works reflect on the significance of individuals who shaped Frank’s own outlook – in this case, his daughter Andrea and his friend and film collaborator Danny Seymour. Like much of his work, the film finds its setting in Frank’s own communities in New York City and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, moved in 1970. An abundance of material was loaned to the exhibition by the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, including works from the artist’s archives that are shown publicly for the first time, as well as personal artefacts, correspondence, and book maquettes. …
MoMA has been exhibiting Frank’s work since 1950, early in his career. In 1962, the Museum featured Frank’s work in a two-person exhibition alongside photographer Harry Callahan. Since then, the Museum has regularly collected and exhibited his work, and today the Museum’s collection includes over 200 of Frank’s photographs. That collection has been built through important gifts from Robert and Gayle Greenhill in 2013, and more recently, a promised gift to the Museum from Michael Jesselson, comprising a remarkable group of works, many of which are presented at MoMA for the first time in this exhibition. In 2015, the artist made an extraordinary gift of his complete film and video works, spanning the entirety of his career in filmmaking. MoMA’s Department of Film has since been engaged in a multiyear restoration project of these materials. Building upon this significant history with the Museum, Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue is the first solo exhibition of Robert Frank’s work at MoMA.
Publication
The accompanying publication, edited by Gallun, features photographs, films, books, and archival materials, layered with quotes from Frank on his influences and process. Three scholarly essays, excerpts from previously unpublished video footage, and a rich visual chronology together explore Frank’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life. 192 pages, 150 illustrations. Hardcover, $60. ISBN: 978-1-63345-164-3. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Press release from MoMA
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Beauty Contest, Chinatown c. 1968 Robert Frank/The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via The Museum of Modern Art, NY
Frank collaged multiple prints of news photographers to convey a sense of the frenzy.
When Frank was moving to Nova Scotia, Frank photographed a bulletin board in his East Village loft, making one picture out of many.
The Beginning of Something New
The summer of 1958 marked a shift in Frank’s work. He had already finalised the selection of pictures that would appear in his photobook The Americans. For a new series, Frank photographed passersby from the window of a New York bus as it traversed Fifth Avenue. The pictures – a sequence of frames that appear linked by his own movement – indicated a notable moment of change beyond a single, static image. In 1972 he reflected on their significance: “When I selected the pictures and put them together I knew and I felt that I had come to the end of a chapter. And in it was the beginning of something new.”
Frank was also on the lookout for cinematic scenes. On the night of Independence Day, he photographed revelers sleeping on the beach among the holiday detritus. The stillness of the nighttime images contrasts with the daylit beach scenes he captured of his family on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Frank also shot his first film that same summer. Although it would remain unfinished, the film anticipated the collaborative and experimental spirit of his work to come.
The Way These Painters Lived
From his window across a courtyard, Frank could watch the painter Willem de Kooning as he paced in his studio and contemplated his canvas. “I think that the people that influenced me most were the abstractionist painters I met; and what influenced me strongly was the way these painters lived,” Frank said of his time embedded in New York City’s vibrant arts community. “They were people who really believed in what they did. So it reinforced my belief that you could really follow your intuition. … You could photograph what you felt like.”
During these years, Frank continued to earn a living by photographing artists and writers for magazine print commissions, while also embracing the creative challenges of filmmaking alongside photography. His proximity to a diverse group of painters, sculptors, writers, and poets in the late 1950s would lead to boundary-pushing explorations like his first finished film, Pull My Daisy (1959), co-directed with artist Alfred Leslie, and filmed in Leslie’s own loft.
The Truth is Somewhere Between the Documentary and the Fictional
In 1968 Frank premiered his first feature-length film, Me and My Brother, at the Venice Film Festival. Built as a film within a film, the story prompts questions about participation in traditional society and culture, and about what experiences of life are understood as valid. “The truth is somewhere between the documentary and the fictional, and that is what I try to show,” Frank explained. “What is real one moment has become imaginary the next.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Frank turned his camera toward friends and neighbours, he also captured events of the time – manifested in political protests, music, poetry, and other aspects of social change and counterculture. During this period, Frank contributed cinematography to films directed by others and also spearheaded his own projects, which featured both recognisable figures and everyday folks on the street. In Me and My Brother, one character advises another: “Don’t make a movie about making a movie. MAKE IT. … Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you didn’t even have to have a piece of celluloid between you and what you saw?”
The Lines of My Hand
Frank’s photobook The Lines of My Hand offers a retrospective view of his career up until the date of its publication, in 1972. Pairing text and image, the book begins with early photographs made in Switzerland in the 1940s and ends with montages of film strips from Frank’s films of the 1950s and ’60s. Its title, perhaps a rumination on one’s past and one’s fate, is drawn from a sign pictured in a 1949 photograph of a Paris fortuneteller’s booth, on view here. This section of the exhibition also brings together a selection of older photographs that appear in the first Lustrum edition of the book.
The Lines of My Hand demonstrates Frank’s particular interest in the visual effects and meaning produced from combinations of images, either within a single photograph or formed by printing multiple negatives together to create a dense montage. In later editions, in keeping with his practice of revisiting and rearranging his images, Frank made changes to the photographs and graphic design and updated the book with his most recent works, using photocopies and notebooks to sequence the book’s new iterations.
In Front of Me I Have the Sea
In 1970 Frank and Leaf relocated from New York City to the rural town of Mabou on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. The photographer Walker Evans, Frank’s friend and mentor, came to visit them soon after at their old fisherman’s cabin overlooking the sea. Evans’s photographs capture the house’s hulking wood stove and the clothesline strung outside it, elements of the couple’s daily routine that also became material for artistic work. Living there, they “learned a completely different rhythm of life.”
In Mabou, Frank’s work shifted its focus, becoming a means of processing his feelings, including profound grief. His change of environment, he acknowledged, had been significant: “All of a sudden you are in the company of something very powerful. … [But] what I wanted to photograph was not really what was in front of my eyes but what was inside.” For Frank, the sea was a dynamic ground against which to measure his life. He reflected, “I have a lot in back of me and that’s a tremendous pull, of what has happened in my life, backward. And in front of me I have the sea.”
There Are Ways of Strengthening the Feeling
In the 1970s, Frank began regularly incorporating an instant print process, commonly known by the brand name Polaroid, into his work. He valued the immediacy of Polaroids, which enabled him to create an image instantly but then consider a work’s full composition over time. “I am no longer the solitary observer turning away after the click of the shutter,” Frank declared. “Instead I’m trying to recapture what I saw, what I heard and what I feel. What I know!”
Throughout the rest of his career, Frank experimented with images by scratching words directly into the negatives and collaborating with printers to enlarge them into bigger prints and combinations. This process became especially significant for him after the sudden death of his daughter, Andrea, late in 1974. Frank began constructing monuments out of wood and materials around him in the landscape, which then figured into photographic memorials. “The Polaroid negative allows me to add that on it if it isn’t in the picture – I can put a word in it, I can combine two pictures – there are ways of strengthening the feeling I have,” Frank described.
The Video Camera Is Like A Pencil
In the early 1980s, Frank started using a Sony Portapak, a portable video camera that allowed him to instantly play back recordings. He could then erase, edit, and add new content on the tape. On video, Frank brought together fragments that at first seem unrelated, but through the choices he made while assembling them, offer a window into his personal preoccupations. Video, he noted, is “like a pencil. You can say things that you could never say with film.”
Home Improvements (1985), Frank’s first work in video, was made between New York City and Mabou. From it, the artist made a new work in which he captured still images of the footage using a large-format Polaroid camera. The resulting photographs feature snippets of found text; portraits of family members; and – in the last image – Frank himself, captured in a reflection behind his camera. “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside,” Frank narrates in the video. “Trying to say something that’s true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is always different.”
Memory Helps You – Like Stones In A River Help You To Reach The Shore
In his last decades, Frank’s work centered ever more upon his own life. Instead of travelling and looking outward, he found stories and compositions by panning his camera around his homes. His camera lingered on collected objects: figurines on the windowsill, postcards pinned to the wall, the typewriter on the table, and – always – photographs from years earlier. “I want to use these souvenirs of the past as strange objects from another age,” he once wrote. “They are partly hidden and curiously resonant, bringing information, messages which may or may not be welcome, may or may not be real.”
Frank also collected memories in his “visual diaries,” small, softcover books in which he, with his assistant, the photographer A-chan, arranged new and old pictures in sequences with personal resonance. Toward the end of his life, these photobooks became his main artistic output. Looking back at the souvenirs of his life – the settings in which it had taken place and the people who populated it – was incredibly generative: “Memory helps you,” he mused. “Like stones in a river help you to reach the shore.”
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Bonjour – Maestro, Mabou 1974 Robert Frank/The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via The Museum of Modern Art, NY
Frank hung an earlier landscape collage from a clothesline in a see-through frame, with the same landscape visible behind it.
After the death of Andrea Frank, his young daughter, in a plane crash, Frank memorialised her in a collage that he embellished with paint and a heartfelt, handwritten message.
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Los Angeles – February 4th – I Wake Up – Turn On TV 1979 Robert Frank/The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via The Museum of Modern Art, NY
In words and pictures he expressed a forlorn mood in a hotel room.
Robert Frank never recovered from the success of “The Americans.” On its publication in the United States in 1959, the book was initially excoriated as un-American, particularly in the photography magazines, for its sour, disillusioned take on life in this country. The rich looked bored, the poor desperate, the city fathers fatuous, and the flags threadbare or soiled. What’s more, specialists in photography faulted his technique for muddiness, grain and blur.
But in a slow burn, Frank’s willful violation of the conventional rules of photography was understood to serve the purpose of personal expression, and his dissection of national alienation and social divides was deemed prophetic. The smoke blew away, and “The Americans” stood clearly as a towering monument, one of the most important and influential books in the history of photography.
Frank hated that. In the early ’60s, he renounced still photography in favor of filmmaking. When he went back in the ’70s to making photographs – “in the time left over between films or film projects,” as he put it – he eschewed the street photography that had established his reputation. Instead, he mostly made studio or landscape pictures, which he liked to splice together into montages or embellish with scratched and stenciled words.
It’s this late work – if such a rubric can be applied to the six decades of movie, video and photo production that preceded his death at 94 in 2019 – that is the focus of “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue,” opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Lucy Gallun, the exhibition marks the centenary of Frank’s birth and is his first solo show at MoMA. Although there are some omissions (his return to documentary photography in Beirut in 1991, for example), it presents as eloquent a case as can be made for this later art, often left in the shade by what came before.
Frank felt trapped by the expectations and pigeonholing that the lionization of “The Americans” induced, and he recoiled in horror at the prospect of repeating himself. Beyond that, he gave various explanations over the years for why he abandoned the 35 mm camera that he brandished like a sorcerer’s wand. He explained that he had lost faith in the capacity of a single photograph to convey the truth. And his search had turned inward. “The truth is the way to reveal something about your life, your thoughts, where you stand,” he said. He believed film was a better way to do that.
Film (joined by video in the ’80s) allowed Frank to record his feelings directly. In addition to clips from his movies and videos, the museum is showing “Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage,” an assemblage of previously unseen diaristic moving images, stitched together by Frank’s longtime editor, Laura Israel, and art director Alex Bingham – most ambitiously, in a five-screen installation that jumps between shots taken in the house in Mabou, Nova Scotia, and the apartment on Bleecker Street in the East Village in New York that Frank shared with his wife, artist June Leaf, as well as visits he made to his parents in Switzerland (where he was born) and to Russia. Topping it off, MoMA, which received Frank’s entire film and video archive as a gift from the artist, will present a complete motion-picture retrospective, from Nov. 20 to Dec. 11.
The aim is to reposition Frank’s reputation by showcasing the art that occupied most of his life. The trouble is: His genius as a photographer did not carry over to filmmaking. That was evident from the outset. His first completed movie, “Pull My Daisy,” a collaboration with artist Alfred Leslie, incorporated improvisation by the actors within the framework of a rehearsed script. With a voice-over by Jack Kerouac and appearances by Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso and Larry Rivers, the film resonates as a historical document of the Beat movement. As a movie, though, its madcap bohemianism is a clunky, leaden bore. First screened publicly in 1959 on a double bill with John Cassavetes’ similarly improvised “Shadows,” it wilts, woefully dated, when viewed today alongside that other milestone of independent American cinema.
A self-portrait of the artist, in September 1993. Frank caught himself studying a strip of filmed images.
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) The Suffering, the Silence of Pablo 1995 Robert Frank/June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via Museum of Modern Art, NY
After the suicide of his son, Pablo Frank, the photographer composed this testament to his young, painful life.
I have so many exhibitions to post within the next few weeks that you get two postings this weekend and next weekend!
It’s always a pleasure to see the work of Gregory Crewdson – stylish, stylised, hyperreal, dead pan, cinematic, panoramic large-scale transcendent photographs.
Many thankx to the Albertina Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs for the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gregory Crewdson. Retrospective
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) is one of the world’s most renowned photographers. Since the mid-1980s, Crewdson has been using the backdrop of small American towns and film sets to create, like a director, technically brilliant and colourfully seductive photographs that focus on human isolation and the abysses of society. The enigmatic scenes self-reflexively raise questions about the boundary between fact and fiction but can also be related to socio-political developments.
Watch this emotional video of the artist in the middle of his exhibition at the Albertina Museum.
Gregory Crewdson. Retrospektive | Mit Kurator Walter Moser
Curator Walter Moser on Cregory Grewdson’s unique work
Gregory Crewdson | Mit Co-Kuratorin Astrid Mahler
“Gregory Crewdson’s latest series is set in the fictional small town of ‘Eveningside’. It is the last part of a trilogy in which Crewdson addresses the socio-political conditions of his country and the failure of the American Dream,” says co-curator Astrid Mahler about the last part of our major retrospective of the world-famous photographer Gregory Crewdson.
What I am interested in is that moment of transcendence, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world.
Gregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) is one of the world’s most renowned photographers. Since the mid-1980s, Crewdson has been using the backdrop of small American towns and film sets to create, like a director, technically brilliant and colourfully seductive photographs that focus on human isolation and the abysses of society. The enigmatic scenes self-reflexively raise questions about the boundary between fact and fiction but can also be related to socio-political developments.
The retrospective at the Albertina comprises a total of nine groups of works, created over the last three and a half decades and conceived serially. Starting with his Early Work (1986-1988), the exhibition includes Crewdson’s best-known series such as Twilight (1998-2002), which depicts scenes shaped by cinematic language, with people being confronted by unexplainable phenomena in their everyday lives. The impressive, mysterious large-scale scenes from the Beneath the Roses series (2003‒2008) deal with people’s isolation and alienation from their environment. The most recently completed group of works Eveningside (2021-2022) portrays an unheroic image of a fictional small town of the same name in atmospheric black and white. Following Cathedral of the Pines (2013-2014) and An Eclipse of Moths (2018-2019), Eveningside represents the final part of a trilogy through which the artist examines the social decline of society far removed from the American dream.
Crewdson’s large-scale pictures are preceded by months of planning; they are created with the participation of hundreds of people from casting, wardrobe and art departments, plus technical specialists. Production photographs taken in parallel illustrate the highly elaborate process of design, culminating in an extensive post-production process in which the final photographs are assembled from multiple shots.
As a generous gesture, the exhibition is accompanied by a significant donation to the Albertina’s photo collection. This extensive assimilation of works strengthens the focus of the collection on contemporary photography.
Early Work was created as Crewdson’s final project at Yale University’s School of Art. Among other places, Gregory Crewdson photographed the series in the US state of Massachusetts, mostly in the small town of Lee, which is very close to the family’s summer home. Due to his personal connection to this region, the artist still realises almost all of his photographic projects in the Massachusetts area. In the photographs, Crewdson arranged the town’s residents in the context of their domestic settings. Using relatively modest technical devices at the time, he transformed the real places into mysterious, uncanny scenes with the help of artificial lighting. Introverted protagonists rendered in tightly cropped views present typically American suburbs as places of human isolation and oppression. David Lynch’s surreal masterpiece Blue Velvet, in which the main character encounters human abysses behind the idyllic façade of a small town, served as a major model. The film, which came out in 1986, turned out to be stylistic inspiration for Crewdson and also became an important source of reference for his subsequent series. Crewdson also dealt with more documentary positions, such as those of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. On their journeys across the United States, they enhanced everyday motifs with symbolic meaning through close-up views and vibrant colours. Especially Eggleston employed these means to allude to disconcerting aspects in society.
Natural Wonder, 1991-1997
Inspired by the dioramas in natural history museums, for Natural Wonder Gregory Crewdson built three-dimensional models in his studio, which he then photographed. The pictures show enigmatic rituals and cruel incidents happening in nature, which take place against the backdrop of the suburbs without people realising. For example, birds sit around a mysterious circle of eggs, or nature takes possession of a decaying animal carcass. As a metaphor for suppressed anxieties and traumas, the depicted landscape functions as a mirror of the unconscious and the human psyche. In Crewdson’s series, autobiographic elements – his father was a psychoanalyst – and overriding social themes characteristically coincide. The symbolism of Natural Wonder has essentially been inspired by cinematography: in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds (1963), the eponymous animals, suddenly infesting an idyllic world, symbolise dysfunctional relationships and human fears. In Blue Velvet (1986), David Lynch eliminates the line between reality and illusion, between the familiar and the eerie, between idyll and violence through the motif of a prepared robin or of a severed human ear covered with ants, which is found in a meadow.
Hover, 1996/1997
In Hover, his third series, Gregory Crewdson abandons the aesthetic achievements of earlier works: he takes pictures in black and white from a bird’s-eye view with the help of a crane. The strategy characteristic of Crewdson’s work to merely adumbrate a narrative while abstaining from resolving it and keeping it in mysterious suspense reaches an early climax in Hover. With a distanced, objectifying gaze he shows familiar occurrences in a small town as they tip over into the unusual. The recurring motif of the circle refers not only to popular science fiction movies and works of land art, but also quotes Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958), in which the circle is considered a metaphor for romantic obsession.
Gregory Crewdson now began to plan his sessions in advance and in great detail. As were other series, Hover was shot in the real place of Lee with the aid of residents performing as protagonists. Occasionally, Crewdson still resorted to improvisation; for example, he called the police for the purpose of integrating the police car into the photograph.
Twilight, 1998-2002
Twilight is one of Gregory Crewdson’s most well-known works. It is informed by cinema even more than earlier series. In its scenes, which are mostly set at dusk, Crewdson resorts to the fantastic as the principal theme. Inexplicable phenomena intrude into everyday life. Familiar objects are repurposed, and people give the impression of being exposed and unprotected because of their nudity.
Similar to a film production, a crew of about sixty took part in Twilight. In this series, Crewdson arrived at his characteristic repertoire of motifs, such as open cars, windows, and mirrors, which he varied and put together like vocabulary and would also use for subsequent works. Crewdson began to fully concentrate on the mise-en-scène, leaving the technical implementation of the shots to Richard Sands for the first time – a practice continued to this day. This high-profile director of photography from the world of cinema has worked with Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, among others.
The photographs, which Crewdson refers to as “single-frame movies,” contain multiple references to classical painting and popular culture, a telling example of the latter being Steven Spielberg’s science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Gregory Crewdson’s postmodern approach becomes manifest in these images: starting out from the idea that reality is no longer “authentic” but merely experienced through the media, the recognisable references reveal the staging they are based on.
Beneath the Roses, 2003-2008
In Beneath the Roses, the surreal, uncanny atmosphere of earlier series gives way to an essentially melancholic and psychologising key tone. The protagonists, captured in desolate surroundings, are shown frozen and motionless. Lonely, isolated, and without interacting, they appear totally alienated. Especially for his interior shots, Gregory Crewdson borrows from Edward Hopper’s painting. Situations of human introspection in anonymous, everyday architectural settings that both suggest intimacy and accommodate a voyeuristic gaze are unmistakable parallels.
Beneath the Roses is the most elaborate series in Gregory Crewdson’s oeuvre, which he originally developed as an idea for a film and to which more than one hundred specialists from casting, costume design, technical, and art departments contributed over the extensive period during which the series was realised. As in Twilight, he staged the interior shots in studios, whereas outdoor shots were taken in real places he had profoundly transformed according to his ideas. The artist meticulously prepared the shoot with architectural models, storyboards, scene scripts, and location shots. The focus was particularly on the choice of props, which appear both quintessentially American and timeless. Using different aperture settings, Crewdson took multiple photographs of each scene. In postproduction, which lasted over several months, he combined forty to fifty negatives, so that the constant depth of field in the final picture gives a hyperrealist impression.
Sanctuary, 2009
Sanctuary was created after the monumental large-scale project Beneath the Roses (2003-2008). The series marks a period of transition during which Gregory Crewdson put new artistic approaches to the test. When staying in Rome in 2009, he visited the Italian city of cinematography Cinecittà, where, in its film sets, his first group of works was realised outside the United States. He completed the project within two months with a small team and little technical and financial input. In Sanctuary, Crewdson heightened the tension between reality and fiction known from earlier series by making the sets as such the actual subject. The black-and-white photography accentuates the morbid appeal of the sets as ruins. In contrast to Crewdson’s usual practice of conveying loneliness and isolation with the aid of performers, in Sanctuary he creates an essentially melancholic atmosphere through the complete absence of people. In particular, the artist makes palpable the discrepancy between the hustle and bustle of past film shoots and the now ghostly desolation.
Cathedral of the Pines, 2013/2014
Cathedral of the Pines was created after a period of personal and artistic crisis. In the midst of the mighty pine forests near the city of Becket in Massachusetts, where Gregory Crewdson has lived since 2010, he discovered the eponymous path that became the starting point for this series. Cathedral of the Pines is one of the artist’s most personal groups of work. For the first time, he engaged persons from his family and circle of friends as performers. Moreover, he staged his interiors in real houses, working with a comparatively small team and a minimum of artificial light.
Cathedral of the Pines examines the subject of the human condition through the relationship between human beings and landscape. The nocturnal atmosphere of earlier series gives way to cool daylight and cold colours: completely in the nude or only partially covered and staring absent-mindedly, his performers seem frozen and withdrawn into their own emotional worlds. By placing windows prominently, Crewdson contrasts the relationship between interior and exterior space, as well as interior and exterior light. With its references to the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century – such as compositions by Caspar David Friedrich – or seventeenth-century Dutch painting – such as the art of Jan Vermeer – the motif of the window is also in the tradition of a symbol of contemplation and unfulfilled yearning.
An Eclipse of Moths, 2018/2019
Gregory Crewdson photographed An Eclipse of Moths during Donald Trump’s presidency, thus formulating his analysis of society as sociopolitical criticism. In the city where the series was shot, Pittsfield in Massachusetts, the majority of the population had worked for the local General Electric plant and many lost their jobs after the firm had closed down. In addition to high unemployment, the company left behind a devastated environment. Crewdson describes the situation of neglected postindustrial places through the contrast between light atmospheres rendered in vibrant colours and desolate motifs of everyday life. Potholed streets or dilapidated houses symbolise the fragility and frailty of a society that has lost its footing.
Different from Cathedral of the Pines (2013/2014), his previous series, in An Eclipse of Moths Crewdson returned to the cinematographic widescreen format. The artist depicted his protagonists as small figures in proportion to their surroundings and at a distance from one another. He frequently arranged his seemingly disoriented protagonists around street lamps, comparable to the eponymous moths circling around the light in the darkness. Apart from a multitude of props, he also used smoke and artificially sprinkled streets for this series so as to masterfully stage his light effects.
Eveningside, 2021/2022
Gregory Crewdson’s most recent series is set in a fictitious small town called Eveningside. Its imaginary geography is made up of various places in western Massachusetts the artist had used as scenes for earlier works. After Cathedral of the Pines (2013/2014) and An Eclipse of Moths (2018/2019), this atmospheric work in black and white constitutes the final part of Crewdson’s trilogy, which deals with the sociopolitical dark sides of a society removed from the American dream. In Eveningside, the artist often depicts people going about their work. Frozen in absolute standstill, they seem caught in their respective social contexts.
Crewdson’s arrangements ingeniously position the protagonists in space through lighting influenced by film noir and motifs like shopwindow and mirror. The artist shows their faces in reflections from irritating and slightly shifted perspectives with the aid of montage. Windows frame the protagonists as pictures within the picture und underscore the act of image-making as a self-reflexive practice.
The Swiss photographer Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) is well known for his revolutionary book Fabrik (Factory) (1943) – subtitled Ein Bildepos der Technik “A picture of technology” – which tells a subjective story of the relationship between human and machine through pairings of modernist images, through “a modern new style of photography showing not just how things looked, but how it felt to be there.” Tuggener portrays the mundanity of the “operational sequence” (la chaîne opératoire) of the machine, where the human becomes the oil used to grease the cogs of the ever-demanding “mechanical monsters.”
“As Arnold Burgaurer cogently states in his introduction, Tuggener is a jack-of-all-trades: he exhibits, ‘the sharp eye of the hunter, the dreamy eye of the painter; he can be a realist, a formalist, romantic, theatrical, surreal.’ Tuggener’s moves effortlessly between large-format lucidity and grainy, blurred impressionism, in a book that is a decade ahead of its time.” (Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. The Photobook: A History Volume I, Phaidon Press, 2005, p. 144.)
These pastoralist, romantic photographs of the seasons and of country life were unknown to me. While still exhibiting formal, romantic, theatrical and blurred impressionist qualities, these sensitive photographs by an expressionist photographer ask the viewer to stop and contemplate the cycles of land and life.
“After he had already composed four unique book pieces on the themes spring, summer, autumn and winter during the 1940s, he created completely new versions of these “farm books” under the title The 4 Seasons in 1973 and 1974, at the age of almost 70 years. They are devoted to simple life in the countryside, reflecting in sensitively observed, atmospherically charged, yet never picturesque recordings, the recurring cycle of nature and are at the same time a reflection on human life and transience.” (book description)
A gathering of chickens, farmers bread in a wheelbarrow, two bicyclists riding in the spring wind captured in a blurred moment of stasis, or the grizzled gamekeeper, pipe clamped between his lips, cleaning his shotgun while his wife darns socks behind surmounted by a stuffed animal overseeing both… all are beautifully observed.
These are images to imbibe so that we soak up their essence, so that we absorb their energy into our soul. It is the power of poet-photographer Tuggener’s pictures that they expand our experience and consciousness of the earth from which we come, taking us back to childhood, play, land, laughter, people, life through expressions of each season of the year.
As Tuggener observed in December 1950, “Everyone is at a loss when it comes to contemplating a picture without the aid of a text. And yet with a text, an image can only be explained, not experienced. That is because the soul resides at a greater depth, which words cannot reach. This realm is much larger than the periphery of the mind.”
Many thankx to the Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The Expressionist Photographer
The expressionist photographer does not exist in the commercial register. He is the freest of the free. Unbound by any purpose, he photographs only the pleasure of his experience. He is the artist seeking to express himself with his instrument, in this case the camera. Indeed, art is not art at all until an idea has been crystallised, visualised or set to music, and it does not matter which instrument we use to achieve this. However, the key factor is not reproduction, but the desire to make something. Ten years ago, I began to use photography as my language and to speak in self-contained books: about ball nights, about iron, about ships, about everything that particularly moves and excites my soul. The public, or rather the publishers, have no confidence in this approach. They say people would not understand a book without words, merely to be seen with the eyes. Yes, we are made more superficial by illustrated magazines and by reading: Everyone is at a loss when it comes to contemplating a picture without the aid of a text. And yet with a text, an image can only be explained, not experienced. That is because the soul resides at a greater depth, which words cannot reach. This realm is much larger than the periphery of the mind.
Jak. Tuggener Schweizerische Photorundschau 23, 8th of December 1950
The work of Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) is well positioned within 20th-century photography. His expressive photographs of glittering ball nights are legendary and his 1943 book Fabrik (Factory) is seen as a milestone in the history of the photo book. However, Tuggener was also captivated by a third subject: simple life in the countryside.
His countless sensitively observed, atmospherically charged, but never picturesque depictions of everyday farming life reflect the cycle of nature, while simultaneously contemplating life and its transience. In 1973/74, Tuggener compiled four individual book maquettes under the title Die 4 Jahreszeiten (The 4 Seasons): unique ready-to-print books, which he designed himself.
In addition to those book maquettes, this exhibition displays other photographs by Jakob Tuggener, which demonstrate how intensively this outstanding photographer devoted himself to the theme of country life for more than 30 years.
In parallel to the exhibition, Die 4 Jahreszeiten will also be presented in a book. In close collaboration with the Jakob Tuggener Foundation and Steidl Verlag, Fotostiftung Schweiz is thus providing new insight into the series of around 70 books that Jakob Tuggener himself considered the centrepiece of his oeuvre, even though they remained unpublished during his lifetime.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Jakob Tuggener – The 4 Seasons, published by Steidl Verlag, edited by Fotostiftung Schweiz, Jakob Tuggener-Stiftung and Martin Gasser.
Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) is one of the exceptional figures in 20th-century Swiss photography. He had the confidence to consider himself an artist from the outset. His expressive photographs of glittering ball nights are legendary and his book Fabrik (Factory) from 1943 is seen as a milestone in the history of the photo book. However, it has so far gone largely unnoticed that Tuggener was also captivated by a third subject: simple life in the countryside.
Already in the early 1930s, after his brief artistic education at the Reimann School in Berlin, Tuggener began to take an interest in rural life and the traditions of his homeland. This focus certainly had to do with the political developments in Europe, which prompted Switzerland to reflect on its own values and to disseminate them via the illustrated press. While Tuggener was earning his living as a freelance industrial photographer, he managed to make a name for himself with photographs of everyday country life, livestock markets and folk festivals, until the Second World War began. During his subsequent active army service, he still had enough time to pursue the subject further and also capture the changes of the seasons with his camera. As early as 1942/43, he compiled four individual book maquettes from the photographs he had taken since the mid-1930s – unique books that he designed himself and were ready to print. However, as was also the case with all his later book maquettes, Tuggener never found a publisher willing to publish them exactly as he had imagined. Only a small selection of images were presented by Arnold Kübler in the magazine Du in 1946. “Tuggener tries to hint at the inner workings of people and things in pictures,” wrote Kübler, also pointing out Tuggener’s special way of using the sequencing and juxtaposition of photographs to achieve a manner of artistic expression that went far beyond the documentary.
In the military
After the outbreak of the Second World War in autumn 1939, Tuggener was called up for active service, like all Swiss men of military age. Naturally, he had his camera with him in his kit, so to speak, as he aimed to provide the illustrated magazines with pictures of daily soldiering life. This was only possible for a short time though, as censorship became increasingly strict and prohibited the publication of images with military content. Tuggener kept taking photographs, just for himself, but was beginning to run out of subjects. Although most of his time was spent on guard duty, Tuggener was certainly able to get something positive out of it: “When I stand guard at night,” he wrote home, “I contemplate the full splendour of nature, because before us, there lies a marvellous land and a mighty, open sky.”
During the winter of 1942, Tuggener was in the valley Fricktal, serving as a guard in the Oeschgen internment camp. It was a camp for Polish soldiers who had found refuge in Switzerland in June 1940 after being surrounded by Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the French-Swiss border. They were subsequently distributed among camps set up at short notice, where they lived in safety until after the war, but were strictly kept apart from the local population. Compared to a number of larger camps in places like Büren an der Aare or Wettingen, Oeschgen was a relatively small and manageable one, so Tuggener was soon able to approach these foreign men he was supposed to be watching over and strove to establish a rapport with them. Despite language difficulties, he succeeded in doing so very well, thanks to his camera – particularly as he came up with the idea of taking portrait photos of all the internees, then offering these to them for sale. As his financial situation was anything but a bed of roses during the war years, he appreciated this source of extra income, but was also pursuing a completely different goal with it: He was planning to publish a book about the internment camp, but it never materialised. Only a book maquette compiled shortly after his service in Oeschgen under the title Polen-Wache (Pole Watch) has survived. It is primarily a portrait book, a lively group portrait that visibly reveals Tuggener’s sympathy for the interned men and shows that he treated them as equals, even in his role as a guard. The portraits are complemented by wintry atmospheric images and by photographs of the monotonous daily camp routine, from morning roll call to working in the forest, or attending to the barbed wire fences in the surrounding area.
Book maquettes
Almost thirty years later, in a societal environment characterised by fears of foreign infiltration, Tuggener once again compiled four book maquettes, under the title Die 4 Jahreszeiten (The 4 Seasons). They were created during the preparations for his first major retrospective at Helmhaus Zurich in 1974, which he conceived as a kind of arc, with sections ranging from ‘Nature of Switzerland’ to ‘Peace and Earth in Farm Life’. With photographs from the years 1932 to 1973, these four book maquettes are among the last and most extensive that Tuggener created during his long career. Together, they convey a traditional image of the four seasons, as is familiar from music and painting. In sensitively observed, atmospherically charged, but never picturesque photographs, they reflect the recurring cycle of nature, while simultaneously contemplating life and transience. Alongside Tuggener’s four unique books, the exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz also presents many other photographs that demonstrate how intensively this master of black-and-white photography devoted himself to the theme of ‘country life’ for more than 30 years.
The book maquettes
During the long months of active service that Jakob Tuggener spent in small villages in the canton of Aargau, in Bernese Seeland and in Ticino, he would travel around with his Leica whenever off duty, capturing what increasingly fascinated him: farmers at work, village scenes, and modest still lifes in barns and inns. He also photographed private rooms though, such as kitchens or bedrooms, when granted access. People always took centre stage; he captured them in their familiar surroundings, as rawly and authentically as possible.
Tuggener developed and enlarged his photographs when at home on leave. In 1942/43, almost at the same time as the publication of his book Fabrik (Factory), he compiled four individual book maquettes with the titles Frühling, Sommer, Herbst and Winter (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter). With these ‘farmer books’, he created his own personal counter-world to the world of the factory. Jakob Tuggener also felt in his element in rural surroundings. In a later interview with Magnum employee Inge Bondi, he spoke very fondly about the smell of fresh manure in a snow-covered field, which he could still remember.
None of the book maquettes that Tuggener created during the war years were published, not even the one called Uf em Land (In the Countryside), which he compiled in 1953 using variations on earlier photographs and many new ones. Nevertheless, thirty years later, in connection with his first retrospective at Helmhaus Zurich, he returned to the theme and, between March 1973 and February 1974, put together new individual volumes on spring, summer, autumn and winter, under the title Die 4 Jahreszeiten. Compared to the original versions from 1942/43, these are about four times as extensive. Most of the photographs were new, which shows how intensively Tuggener had addressed the subject. The format of the maquettes, still 30 x 24 cm, had not changed though, and he had also retained the same simple layout for the pictures: single images, arranged either each on one page (very rarely in non-page-filling landscape formats) or as borderless double pages. The major themes relating to the seasons also remained the same: from tilling the fields in spring to haymaking in summer, to harvesting in autumn and through to forest work in winter. This time perhaps not so much a counter-world to factory work, but to the hectic pace of the modern city, Die 4 Jahreszeiten, encompassing more than 300 photographs, reflects how, in nature, things come into being and disappear, and it is simultaneously an allegory of the cycle of human life.
Like all earlier maquettes, Die 4 Jahreszeiten from 1973/74 contain juxtapositions and sequences of images that evoke certain associations or feelings. Tuggener believed in the suggestive power of images and the narrative potential of montage, as used to great effect in German expressionist film during the 1920s. The fact that these unique books remained unpublished during his lifetime is probably due to their author’s uncompromising nature: Tuggener insisted that his photographic compositions needed no explanatory text or captions. He saw them as an independent and viable means of expression – an attitude that put him far ahead of his time.
Zürcher Oberland (Zurich highlands)
In June 1955, Tuggener was commissioned by the printing house Wetzikon und Rüti to photographically document the region Zürcher Oberland for a photo book. This suited Tuggener well, as he was already quite familiar with the area. He worked on the project for a year and, for once, was well paid. The book came out in 1956 under the title Zürcher Oberland with the aim, as the publisher put it, of showing “the beauty of the […] so scenically diverse areas, and of their inhabitants in their homes and workplaces.” It is an idyllic world that appears in Tuggener’s 240 photos, arranged in a somewhat restless-looking layout, with snow-covered Alps in the background, and peaceful lakes and ponds in the foreground. There are also plenty of pictures of the grain harvest and haymaking, as well as photos that thematise the area’s rich cultural heritage. However, at the end of the pictorial section of this ‘ideal-world book’, a portrait of a contemplative man is juxtaposed with a nocturnal landscape in a manner that seems to call much into question. It is not surprising that Tuggener used only a few images from this book in his later book maquettes.
Forum alpinum
In 1964, Jakob Tuggener contributed photographs to the ‘Mountain Farmers Exhibition’ in the ‘Field and Forest’ pavilion at the Swiss National Exhibition (Expo 64) in Lausanne. He was also involved in a follow-up publication, which was meant to comprehensively present the problems of mountain regions. While the exhibition was still running, the book was advertised for sale by subscription, as a “contribution to the clarification of our mountain population’s current existential issues” and was published in 1965 as a 400-page volume of texts and images, entitled Forum alpinum. It covers seven Swiss mountain regions: western Switzerland (Jura and Gruyère), Valais, Bernese Oberland, central Switzerland, Ticino, Graubünden, and eastern Switzerland (Appenzell and St Galler Oberland). For each of the seven regions, there is a picture section with photographs by Jakob Tuggener, almost 130 in total. The interspersed blocks of text are about the people, agriculture, art, customs and music. There are also map extracts, aerial photographs and numerous woodcuts by Bruno Gentinetta. Forum alpinum has an almost square format and was designed by Kurt Büchel. Tuggener was busy for months, researching in his archive, travelling to take pictures in all the regions to be covered and working in his darkroom.
In the new photographs that Tuggener produced, it is evident that he was endeavouring to depict as many regional features as possible, without compromising his artistic standards. Naturally though, such a broad collection of images taken over many years presents itself as very heterogeneous. The photographs are mostly arranged as juxtapositions: of old and new, for instance, or of inner and outer. They are visual contrasts like those that characterise Tuggener’s own book maquettes, but in Forum alpinum, there are always comments inserted in between, which interrupt the images’ dialogue and reduce it to a message that is easy to grasp. In the book, for example, a photograph of a jukebox in Saint-Ursanne is juxtaposed with the evangelists on a cathedral’s medieval capitals. In the comment, it is noted with disappointment that young people are less interested in tradition and more open “to the superficial and international allure of the ‘juke box’.”
The exhibition
Alongside Tuggener’s four unique books, the exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz also presents many other photographs that demonstrate how intensively this master of black-and-white photography devoted himself to the theme of ‘country life’ for more than 30 years. In the exhibition The 4 Seasons and the accompanying publication of the same name, Fotostiftung Schweiz is delighted to present a previously unknown work by Jakob Tuggener to the public. This follows on from numerous projects with which it, together with the Jakob Tuggener Foundation, has gradually provided access to Tuggener’s oeuvre: In addition to various exhibitions and publications, the online collection, which now shows a comprehensive representative cross-section of Tuggener’s work, also serves this purpose. None of this would have been possible without the artist’s widow, Maria Euphemia Tuggener, who deposited his photographic estate at Fotostiftung Schweiz in 2004.
Jakob Tuggener Die 4 Jahreszeiten catalogue book cover
Often, artists take a new curve in their final phase of creation, their language and attitude changes, other themes and motifs come to the fore. The Swiss photographer Jakob Tuggener, on the other hand, remained true to himself and his work in an almost irritating way. After he had already composed four unique book pieces on the themes spring, summer, autumn and winter during the 1940s, he created completely new versions of these “farm books” under the title The 4 Seasons in 1973 and 1974, at the age of almost 70 years. They are devoted to simple life in the countryside, reflecting in sensitively observed, atmospherically charged, yet never picturesque recordings, the recurring cycle of nature and are at the same time a reflection on human life and transience. While the world and society changed fundamentally between 1940 and 1970 – life in the countryside no less than life in the city – Tuggener allowed himself to assemble recordings from this entire period into a new, very personal epic. Especially the constancy in Tuggener’s work, this unwavering confidence in the power of the pictures, is one of the special qualities of The 4 Seasons.
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