Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviators] (detail) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Those daring young men in their war machines
I have always been fascinated with flight, and aeroplanes. When I was seventeen, I tried to enrol in the RAF as a fighter pilot, hence my own interest in the subject artistically over the last 10 years.
These fabulous and rare French large format glass slides were for sale on Ebay many moons ago, illustrated as negative images only. They fetched an enormous sum of money, far beyond the humble means I had at my disposal to purchase them. But I kept the negative jpg images, inverted them into positives, and I have cleaned them up as best I can. Not the best outcome, not the best quality, but better than nothing … and it means that other people can get to see them.
Taken in 1913, or possibly in 1914 the first year of the Great War – there are no guns present on the bomber, but this is not unusual for the early part of the war as can be seen in the photograph of Captain Maurice Happe in his bomber of 1915 below – I have spent a long time researching the make of the bomber and, with the help of the knowledgeable Jacques Crouille (thank you!), ascertaining the period uniforms that the men are wearing. The photographs seem to have been shot in one sitting, for the images contain the same wooden sheds, picket fence, and two bomber aircraft (one with wire wheels, one with solid wheels) of the “pusher” type, possibly a Farman MF.11 Shorthorn bomber. This means that the propellor is at the back of the aircraft pushing the plane along, instead of being placed in the front.
What I find fascinating are the attitudes of the men toward the camera, and the wonderful details present in the images. With their nonchalantly relaxed pose, arm on wing, clad in thick, buttoned flight suits trimmed at leg and neck with real fur to keep them warm up in the beyond, these daring young men stare straight at the camera. Their early leather helmets or “bone domes”, used in motor-racing and adopted by pilots as head protection, rest on the wing beside them. Some wear thick bezelled, large crowned aviation (a term coined in 1863) watches, which in the Great War were to be used to make coordinated attacks possible at a precise moment. As the men pose in front of their aircraft, what is also notable is the fragility of the machine: lashings of wood and canvas, wire wheels, and a huge amount of wire bracing, so much so it seems that the pilots are caught in a spiders web of the stuff as they stand there staring down the camera.
It must be winter, for snow and mud is on the ground, caking their short boots, knee length boots, and the wheels of the bombers. With slicked down hair, sometimes parted in the middle, sometimes paired with a moustache, the men’s waists are cinched with thick belts, their hands sheathed in leather gloves. Or. Clutching their gloves in bare hands. One handsome young man – possibly a mechanic wearing the dark blue uniform of the Chasseurs Alpins, his large beret carrying the yellow (daffodil) hunting horn insignia – is encased in the wonderfully titled “bandes molletières” (or puttees in English terminology), attire more regularly seen on infantry troops, and wears a ring on the fifth finger of his right hand. What is most amusing is the small doll attached to the front of bomber in the first photograph in the posting, like a carved figurehead on the bow of a ship (see above). A good luck charm?
These men would have needed it. Because of their slow speed (106km/h), bombers were particularly susceptible to German fighters (over 160km/h) and ground fire. No parachutes were issued to the crews of Allied “heavier-than-air” aircraft in World War 1, since it was thought that if a pilot had a parachute he would jump from the plane when hit rather than trying to save the aircraft (Wikipedia). The average life expectancy of a British Royal Flying Corp (RFC) pilot was just 18 airborne hours.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
These photographs are used under “fair use” conditions for the purpose of research and education. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviators] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer Captain Maurice Happe, rear seat, commander of French squadron MF 29, seated in his Farman MF.11 Shorthorn bomber with a Captain Berthaut. The plane bears the insignia of the first unit, a Croix de Guerre c. 1915 Gelatin silver print Library of Congress
Italian Army Photographers 1915-1918 World War 1 – Italian Army: Second Battle of the Isonzo – Farman MF.11 Shorthorn light bomber of the Italian air force between 18 July – 3 August 1915 Gelatin silver print Italian Army Historic Photogallery CC By 2.5
Farman MF.11 Shorthorn bomber
The Maurice Farman MF.11 Shorthorn is a French aircraft developed before World War I by the Farman Aviation Works. It was used as a reconnaissance and light bomber during the early part of World War I, later being relegated to training duties. …
A pusher configuration unequal-span biplane like the earlier Farman MF.7, the MF.11 differed in lacking the forward-mounted elevator, the replacement of the biplane horizontal tail surfaces with a single surface with a pair of rudders mounted above it, and the mounting of the nacelle containing crew and engine in the gap between the two wings. The aircraft was also fitted with a machine gun for the observer, whose position was changed from the rear seat to the front in order to give a clear field of fire. …
The MF.11 served in both the British and French air services on the Western Front in the early stages of the war. As a light bomber it flew the first bombing raid of the war when on 21 December 1914 an MF.11 of the Royal Naval Air Service attacked German artillery positions around Ostend, Belgium.
The MF.11 was withdrawn from front-line service on the Western Front in 1915, but continued to be used by the French in Macedonia and the Middle East, while the British also used it in the Dardanelles, and Africa. The Australian Flying Corps (AFC), provided with the MF.11 by the British Indian Army, operated it during the Mesopotamian campaign of 1915-16.
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (detail) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
The winged badge worn on the vaseure, probably blue, indicates that this man is WW1 French aviation. French pilots wore kepi. This is not the case here. This man wore a beret with a badge, a horn, from the “Chasseurs Alpins”. At least in the beginning, a member of French aviation wore equipment from their first assignment. Here, probably Chasseurs Alpins. He’s not a pilot nor an officer, maybe a mechanic? Chasseurs Alpins were, and still are, elite mountain troops based in The Alps.
Jacques Crouille
Chasseur
Chasseur, a French term for “hunter”, is the designation given to certain regiments of French and Belgian light infantry (chasseurs à pied) or light cavalry (chasseurs à cheval) to denote troops trained for rapid action.
Chasseurs Alpins
The Chasseurs Alpins (English: Alpine Hunters) are the elite mountain infantry of the French Army. They are trained to operate in mountainous terrain and in urban warfare. …
France created its own mountain corps in the late 19th century in order to oppose any Italian invasion through the Alps. In 1859-70 Italy became unified, forming a powerful state. The French army saw this geopolitical change as a potential threat to their Alpine border, especially as the Italian army was already creating troops specialised in mountain warfare (the Alpini). On December 24, 1888, the first troupes de montagne (“mountain troops”) corps were created from 12 of the 31 existing Chasseurs à pied (“Hunters on Foot'”/”Foot Rifles'”) battalions.
Initially these units were named bataillons alpins de chasseurs à pied (“Alpine Battalions of Hunters on Foot”/”Alpine Foot Rifle Battalions”). Later this was shortened to bataillons de chasseurs alpins (“Battalions of Alpine Hunters”). From their establishment the chasseurs Alpins wore a plain and practical uniform designed to be suitable for mountain service. This comprised a loose-fitting dark blue jacket and blue-grey breeches, together with a large beret carrying the yellow (daffodil) hunting horn insignia of the Chasseur branch. They are believed to have been the first regular military unit to have worn this form of headdress.
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Bandes molletières
The bottom photograph shows his “bandes molletières” (literally “bandages”, in English leggings or more usually puttees).
Bandes molletières is a ribbon of cloth that encloses the calves from the ankle to the knee, and which was worn by the military. It protects the leg and replaces high boots, avoiding the entry of dirt or mud when crawling, without aggravating the shortage of leather, the main raw material necessary for the manufacture of boots.
They are fast to set up (30 seconds for cross-mounting with a little training) and, when properly adjusted, their compression effect allows men to withstand long periods of standing. Nevertheless, they become sodden with water in wet ground and when it rains.
Puttees
Puttee, also spelled puttie, is the name, adapted from the Hindi paṭṭī, bandage (Skt. paṭṭa, strip of cloth), for a covering for the lower part of the leg from the ankle to the knee, alternatively known as: legwraps, leg bindings, winingas, or wickelbander. They consist of a long narrow piece of cloth wound tightly, and spirally round the leg, and serving to provide both support and protection. They were worn by both mounted and dismounted soldiers, generally taking the place of the leather or cloth gaiter.
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
The winged badge worn on the vaseure, probably sand colour, says that this man is WW1 French aviation. He may be an observer / gunner as he is wearing a kepi, but not a good one. He has no wings on the collar, so he’s not an officer. The gloves and the watch may indicate he is member of the flight crew. Observer? Gunner? It’s hard to be precise as the French air force was at its beginning and uniforms came from different army corps. Aviation at that time was part of the Land Force.
Jacques Crouille
Kepi
The kepi is a cap with a flat circular top and a peak, or visor. Etymologically, the term is a loanword of the French képi, itself a re-spelled version of the Alemannic Käppi: a diminutive form of Kappe, meaning “cap”. In Europe, this headgear is most commonly associated with French military and police uniforms, though versions of it were widely worn by other armies during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Kepi, French Air Service, Kiffin Rockwell, Lafayette Escadrille
This kepi is an example of the type worn by Foreign Legion in the French Army during the First World War. This kepi was worn by Kiffin Rockwell in the French Air Service. It was not unusual for individuals that transferred to the air service to continue to use the uniform of their original service branch.
Kiffin Rockwell flew with the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I. Kiffin and his brother Paul went to France in August 1914 and joined the French Foreign Legion. Kiffin entered combat in the winter of 1915 and was severely wounded at Neuville-Saint-Vaast later that May. Following a lengthy convalescence, Kiffin obtained a transfer to the French Air Service and was one of the original members of the Escadrille Lafayette, a squadron of American pilots flying for France. Rockwell shot down his first of four German aircraft on May 18, 1916, in Alsace. On September 23, 1916, he was shot down over Verdun and buried at Luxiul. For his services to France, Rockwell was awarded the Medaille Miliataire and the Croix de Guerre with two palms.
Text and image from the National Air and Space Museum website [Online] Cited 12/03/2019. No longer available online
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French?) Untitled [Early French aviator] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (detail) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
German pilot helmet of World War I Dated to 1910s Hat size 57 Made of Leather, wool, cotton/linen and metal Height: 150 mm (5.9 in); Width: 210 mm (8.2 in); Depth: 225 mm (8.8 in) Hamburg Museum CC3.0
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Unknown photographer (French) Untitled [Early French aviator] (details) c. 1913-1914 Positive from glass plate negative
Exhibition dates: 7th June – 22nd September, 2019 Visited September 2019 posted March 2020
Curator: Barbara Engelbach
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print
The eye of the law guards
I saw this TERRIFIC exhibition at Museum Ludwig while I was on my European photography research trip. None of the photographs are available online, so I am grateful that I took some iPhone installation images while I was there.
Tight, focused social documentary images that have real presence and power. They feel cooly and directly observed, essential, gritty, a unique take on an in/hospitable institution and the people in it. The word Havelhöhe translates to “hospital”. Katz was there for 18 months for the treatment of tuberculosis.
I admire the light, subject matter and the photographer’s point of view, his frontal and demanding perspective.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
All iPhone installation images taken by Marcus Bunyan. Please click n the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Benjamin Katz Berlin Havelhöhe, 1960/61 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz became known in the 1980s as a fixture of the art scene in West Germany. He took portraits of artists such as Georg Baselitz, James Lee Byars, A.R. Penck, Cindy Sherman, and Rosemarie Trockel, photographed the bustling art scene at openings, and documented the creation of major exhibitions such as Westkunst in Cologne in 1981, documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, and von hier aus in Düsseldorf in 1984.
On the occasion of the eightieth birthday of Benjamin Katz (born on June 14, 1939, in Antwerp, Belgium), the Museum Ludwig will present his series of photographs Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961), which has never before been shown in its entirety. The series was recently acquired directly from the artist’s archive. Even before Katz devoted himself professionally to photography, he captured his surroundings in 1960 and 1961 during an eighteen-month stay at the Havelhöhe hospital. Suffering from tuberculosis, he spent his time there as a patient and photographed everyday life: his fellow patients, the hospital staff, the buildings built during the Nazi era as an air force academy, and the surrounding area. The photographs represent a socio-historical as well as an artistic and personoal document, since they record Katz’s beginnings as a photographer. Berlin Havelhöhe also exemplifies the image of the artist as a young man.
Director Yilmaz Dziewior: “The Museum Ludwig has a large collection of Katz’s portraits of artists spanning several decades. It also includes his extensive documentation of the 1981 exhibition Westkunst as well as photographs from the installation of many exhibitions. I am all the more delighted that we were able to acquire Berlin Havelhöhe, a significant early series by Katz. We would like express our warmest thanks for his trust and for sharing his memories with us.”
The entire series will be shown in the form of forty-one photographs printed in three different sizes and 318 vintage prints mounted on A4 paper. On the first floor, as part of the permanent collection, the Museum Ludwig will also present Katz’s well-known portraits of artists, which he took during his studio visits beginning in the 1980s, including Georg Baselitz, A.R. Penck, Gerhard Richter, and Rosemarie Trockel.
Benjamin Katz: Berlin Havelhöhe, 1960/1961 is the sixth presentation in the photography room, which since 2017 has featured changing selections of the approximately 70,000 works from the Museum Ludwig photography collection. The photography room is located in the permanent collection on the second floor.
Text from the gallery website [Online] Cited 04/03/2020
Wall text from the exhibition Benjamin Katz Berlin Havelhöhe, 1960/61 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print
Installation view of the exhibition Benjamin Katz Berlin Havelhöhe, 1960/61 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Benjamin Katz Berlin Havelhöhe, 1960/61 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print
Installation view of the exhibition Benjamin Katz Berlin Havelhöhe, 1960/61 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print
Installation view of the exhibition Benjamin Katz Berlin Havelhöhe, 1960/61 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Some of the text translates as: ‘The English finder’ (bottom left) and ‘The eye of the law guards’ (centre)
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Benjamin Katz Berlin Havelhöhe, 1960/61 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled (installation view) 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Katz (Belgian, b. 1939) Untitled 1960-1961 From the series Berlin Havelhöhe (1960/1961) Gelatin silver print
Museum Ludwig Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln, Germany
Opening hours: Tuesday through Sunday: 10 am – 6 pm
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (girl on porch) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
One of the great joys about compiling this archive is the ability to rescue unloved and unknown images. To give them a voice in the contemporary world.
These 2 1/4″ square (6 x 6cm) medium format black and white negatives come from the collection of my friend Nick Henderson. There is no marking on any of the negatives, leading me to believe that the film numbers were on the backing paper of the 120 film roll. The negatives are housed in paper packets adorned with a logo and words ‘APS Developing and Printing Service’ – perhaps Australian Photographic Services? Each packet contains basic title information for some of the photographs. Looking at the photographs and their perspective on the world, it would seem that the camera is a waist view camera, in other words the photographer was looking down into the viewfinder, the camera not held at eye level. The camera could possibly have been a Voigtländer or similar camera (see below). The quality of the negatives is reasonable, with some fall off in terms of sharpness occurring at the edge of the image. The photographs can be dated to 1946-1947 due to the February 1947 expiry Victorian registration label on the Chevrolet (thank you Simon Barnfield for spotting this!), are taken by an unknown photographer (probably male)… photographs of life in Sydney, his family and their travels around Australia. This is the first tranche of photographs with roughly the same number to come in the second part of the posting.
What makes these photographs particularly interesting is:
1/ the breadth of subject matter taken just after the Second World War and the fact that they are medium format
2/ the relaxed nature and beauty of the photographs of the children, and the light!
3/ the unknown images of places such as Bondi Beach and historical monuments, such as that of the forlorn The Dog on the Tuckerbox
4/ the photographs of the motor sport activity of hillclimbing, unfortunately no place known but its has been suggested it could be the 90-years-old Maldon hill climb at Mt Tarrengower because of the box-ironbark (and the fact that there are photographs of Maldon in the collection).
Variously we have country towns, theatrical groups, sailing, boating, churches, Sydney ferries, a trip to Maldon in Victoria for the Maldon Show, family picnics, cars and caravans, houses and horse riding, churches and children, and the oh so cute dogs in their own car boxes. So Australian. The photographs really give an extensive insight into suburban life in Australia just after the privations of the Second World War… and the photographer had a good eye. That is what is most important – that they knew how to take a good photograph.
Talking to my friend James McArdle who writes the oh so excellent On this Date in Photography website (essential reading!), he was unaware of the time it takes to prepare images for these postings. It has literally taken me hours and hours of hard work to scan these negatives and then digitally clean and balance them. All to give them a new lease of life in the world, to preserve their captured memories and histories. I hope you can appreciate all the hard work and admire the images I have revealed.
Many thankx to Nick Henderson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All photographs collection of Nick Henderson. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See Part 2 of the posting.
APS (Australian Photographic Services?) Developing and Printing Service Film packets and negatives 1946-1947 Negatives: 2 1/4″ square (6 x 6 cm) Packet (closed): 3 7/8 x 3 1/4″ (10cm x 8cm) Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Voigtländer Billiant 1930s Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr
The Voigtländer Brillant is a range of pseudo-TLR cameras, and later true TLR cameras, taking 6 × 6 cm exposures on 120 film, made by Voigtländer from 1932. Famed Hungarian-Dutch photographer Eva Besnyö used a Brillant for her early work.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Circular Quay, Sydney) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Karrabee ferry, Sydney, leaving High St Wharf, Kurraba in the background) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Karingal and Karrabee ferry
Karingal and Karrabee were built by Morrison & Sinclair, Balmain for Sydney Ferries Limited, being launched in 1913. They were the smallest of the round-ended K-class Sydney ferries, and could carry 608 and 653 passengers respectively.
They were near identical sister ferries operated by Sydney Ferries Limited and its NSW State Government operated successors on Sydney Harbour from 1913 until 1984. Wooden ferries built at the time of Sydney Ferries’ rapid early twentieth century, they were the smallest of the round-end “K-class ferries”.
The ferries were built as coal-fired steamer and were converted to diesel in the 1930s – the first Sydney Harbour ferries to be so converted. Unlike many early twentieth century Sydney Ferries, they survived the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the 1930s, and the State Government takeover in 1951.
Karrabee sank at Circular Quay after taking on water during the Great Ferry Race in 1984 – an incident that received extensive media coverage – and did not return to service. Karingal, and the other three remaining old wooden ferries, were taken out of service shortly after Karrabee’s sinking. In service for 71 years, they were among the longest-serving ferries on Sydney Harbour.
“Karingal” and “Karrabee” are Australian Aboriginal words meaning ‘happy home’ and ‘cockatoo’ respectively.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bondi Beach, Sydney) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bondi Beach, Sydney) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bondi Beach, Sydney) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (The Dog on the Tuckerbox) Gundagai, 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (The Dog on the Tuckerbox) Gundagai, 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
The Dog on the Tuckerbox
The Dog on the Tuckerbox is an Australian historical monument and tourist attraction, located at Snake Gully, approximately five miles (eight kilometres) from Gundagai, New South Wales as described in the song of the same name.
The inspiration for the statue has been traced to a doggerel poem, “Bullocky Bill”, published anonymously by “Bowyang Yorke” in 1857 (other references have 1880 in the Gundagai Times, however confirmation of either is hard to find), which humorously describes a series of misfortunes faced by a bullock driver, culminating in his dog either sitting on or spoiling the food in his tucker-box (an Australian colloquialism for a box that holds food, similar to a lunchbox, but larger). …
A dog monument was first erected at a site nine miles from Gundagai in 1926. Gundagai stonemason Frank Rusconi suggested a memorial using the legend of the Dog on the Tuckerbox in 1928; and in 1932 the proposal was taken up by the community…
The Back to Gundagai Committee chose the Five Mile camping site rather than the Nine Mile Peg as a location for the monument on the basis that it was more convenient to the Hume Highway and closer to the town, thereby more beneficial to tourism.
A nationwide competition was held to obtain the most suitable inscription for the monument. The chosen inscription on the base of the monument was written by Brian Fitzpatrick of Sydney. The inscription says:
“Earth’s self upholds this monument To conquerors who won her when Wooing was dangerous, and now Are gathered unto her again.”
The dog section of the monument was modelled by Rusconi and cast at ‘Oliver’s Foundry’ in Sydney. Rusconi also sculpted its base.
The Dog on the Tuckerbox monument was erected in 1932 as part of ‘Back to Gundagai’ week, and a large crowd “gathered to her again” to witness the unveiling by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons on 28 November 1932. It was planned to donate money placed in the wishing well at the base of the monument to the Gundagai District Hospital. A souvenir shop was also opened nearby. Copyright on the monument was vested in the Gundagai Hospital, who for many years received a useful income from receipt of royalties from firms using the iconic image.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria) (detail) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown location, possibly the 90-years-old Maldon hill climb at Mt Tarrengower because of the box-ironbark (and the fact that there are photographs of Maldon in the collection).
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria) (detail) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria) (detail) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boat) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boat at sea) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (child on porch) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boy outside house) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boy smiling) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boy and girl smiling) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (child on lawn) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (child and chairs) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (man and woman) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (house) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boy on horse) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (dog and saucepan) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (1932 Chevrolet) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Chevrolet and caravan) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (1932 Chevrolet and dogs) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
The photographs can be dated to 1946-1947 due to the February 1947 expiry Victorian registration label on the Chevrolet. Thank you to Simon Barnfield for spotting this.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Chevrolet and caravan) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (man and car) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (family picnic) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (man and car) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (house on hill) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (room interior) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Future Miss Maldons, Maldon Show, Maldon, Victoria, with Maldon Timber & Hardware at 28 Main Street in the background) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Where are they now, so many ghosts with flowers in their hair.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Scottish band, Maldon Show, Maldon, Victoria) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (church) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (church) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (group of actors) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (actor and ballerina) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (actor) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (band performances) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bilsons, country town) 1946-1947 Medium format negative Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Exhibition curators: Dr Simone Förster together with Anna Volz
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Self-Portrait with Silver Ball 1931 Gelatin silver print Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg
Another strong woman, another inspirational female avant-garde 1930s photographer. Just look at the darkness of the pear in her photograph Fruit Basket (1931, below). The photographer proclaims the beauty and decay of nature. Magnificent.
Marcus
Many thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on thep hotographs for a larger version of the image.
For the autodidact Aenne Biermann (1898-1933) the camera was a means of closing in on things and situations in her immediate environment. From the mid 1920s onwards she found great pleasure in capturing unfamiliar and unexpected views of everyday experiences and events in her photographs. Although Aenne Biermann worked in relative isolation with regard to the avant-garde developments in larger cities, comprehensive displays of her work were shown at all major modern photographic exhibitions from 1929 onwards. Her oeuvre, created within just a few years – Aenne Biermann died in 1933 following an illness – is now regarded as one of the most important within the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement in photography and New Objectivity.
The exhibition comprises some 100 original photographs from the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation that boasts one of the most extensive collections of Aenne Biermann’s work. Selected works from public and private collections, together with records and archival documents, illuminate the artist’s work and career.
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Ficus elastica 1926-1928 Silver gelatine print 46.7 x 35cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
An avid amateur mineralogist, it was through her collection of rocks that in 1926 she met the geologist Rudolf Hundt, who commissioned her to photograph his specimens the following year for his scientific work. Her photographs of minerals transformed her practice from the early personal views of her children to the close-up, direct studies of form that would define her photographs of plants and people that followed and make her a central figure in New Objectivity photography. Thus 1926 began a period of intense productivity for Biermann that lasted until her untimely death, from liver disease, at the age of thirty-five, in 1933.
Mitra Abbaspour on the Museum of Modern Art website Nd [Online] Cited 03/08/2019
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Finale before October 1928 Silver gelatine print 47.4 x 34.8cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) A Child’s Hands 1928 Silver gelatine print 12.3 x 16.6cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Lady with Monocle 1928/1929 Silver gelatine print 17 x 12.6 cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) View from my Studio Window 1929 Silver gelatine print 23.6 x 17.3cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
Today, Aenne Biermann (1898-1933) is considered one of the major proponents of ‘New Photography’. Although she was only active as a photographer for a few years and, unlike her female colleagues Florence Henri, Germaine Krull and Lucia Moholy, for example, had neither an artistic training nor moved within the avant-garde circles of major urban centres, Aenne Biermann developed her own markedly modern pictorial style that established her position as a representative of contemporary avant-garde photography within a very short time. Clear structures, precise compositions with light and shadow, as well as cropped images focussing on specific details are characteristic of Aenne Biermann’s photography. They elicit a unique poetry from the people and objects in her everyday surroundings and establish an ‘intimacy with things’, as Aenne Biermann wrote in 1930.
Growing up in a Jewish factory owner’s family on the Lower Rhine, Aenne Biermann did not move on to higher education; instead, her musical skills were furthered and she was given piano lessons. Following her marriage to the merchant Herbert Biermann in 1920, she moved to Gera / Thuringia and became part of an upper-middle class, intellectual society that was extremely open to modern movements in art and culture and cultivated these within its own local radius. For Aenne Biermann, the starting point for her close involvement with photography was the birth of her children Helga (1920) and Gerd (1923). Initially used merely as a medium to document her children’s progress, from the mid 1920s Aenne Biermann developed her own, creative sphere in her photographic work. She focussed her camera on plants, objects, people and everyday situations and used the medium as an artistic means to access her own personal surroundings.
In 1928 the art critic Franz Roh arranged for the photographer’s first solo exhibition to be held at the Graphisches Kabinett Günther Franke in Munich and presented her work in Das Kunstblatt, a trend-setting monthly magazine for contemporary art in Germany. This led to her participation in numerous major exhibitions of modern photography, such as Film und Foto (1929), and solo exhibitions in Oldenburg, Jena and Gera. Aenne Biermann’s pictures received awards in photographic competitions and were published in books, art magazines and illustrated journals. In 1930 her photographs appeared in Franz Roh’s Fototek series of books: Aenne Biermann. 60 Fotos is one of the rare monographs of a photographer’s work of the time.
As a result of the artist’s early death and the family’s forced emigration in the 1930s, a large part of the photographer’s archive was lost. Its whereabouts remains unknown to this day. In more than forty years of extensive and intense research Ann and Jürgen succeeded in assembling a large number of images that give a representative picture of Aenne Biermann’s œuvre and now form one of the largest collections of the photographer’s work.
The presentation comprises more than 100 original photographs, 73 of which are, in part, large-format exhibition prints from the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation. Loans from the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Gera, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Kunstbibliothek, the Münchner Stadtmuseum, the Galerie Berinson, Berlin, the Franz Roh Estate and the Dietmar Siegert Collection, Munich, as well as the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Archive, Zülpich, complement the exhibition.
Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne [Online] Cited 28/07/2019
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Contemplation 1930 Silver gelatine print 58 × 42cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Repair 1930/31 Silver gelatine print 24.8 x 18cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Rail Tracks 1932 Silver gelatine print 24.1 x 17.5cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Fruit Basket 1931 Silver gelatin print 16.6 x 23.6 cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Eggs 1931 Silver gelatin print 17 x 23.9cm Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Photo: Sibylle Forster
In which the visions (ghosts?) in these haunting photographs live, breathe, and barely exist in a strange closed world. Where the subjects seem so vulnerable.
In which there is little sentimentality. The portraits emit a deep sense of melancholy in their re/pose, in the subjects temporal existence separated out from time. Heath photographs people as they are. He projects himself, not his ego, into this vision of vulnerable humanity.
In which this vision of truth illuminates the complex relationship between human nature and reality through emotional energy.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“… the conundrum of the title is a reference about how to navigate the terrain of solitude one wishes to experience (to be alone), but also how to make that extend into a conversation with the subjects in front of you that will eventually become a single body of work for many to view (to be of more than one). This is of course conditional to your position within the world at large and how you view your presence within the greater universal ether. You must carry your solipsism like a rusty bucket of dirty brown well water. In Heath’s case, the solitary monologue and the ramble of the flaneur become something of a mantra – an incessant need to repeat, to be part of the cacophony of the worship of modern life in which the self and the crowd / city are forced to adjust to one another, but at safe distance with impassioned and yearning eyes.”
Extract from Brad Feuerhelm. “David Heath: “Dialogues With Solitudes”,” on the ASX website November 23, 2018 [Online] Cited 26/05/2019
“”A Dialogue with Solitude” is a self-portrait in which the artist himself never really appears, but is revealed and interpreted by every detail. Its revolt is alive with sympathy and acceptance of man’s modern placement in the world, mated with contradictory realization and resistance which deny and combat the absurdities of existence. This is expressed with a sincere poetry which is never shocked out of countenance by reality.”
Edwards, exh. label for A Dialogue of Solitude, 1963, on file in the Photography Department, Art Institute of Chicago quoted in Hugh Edwards. “Dave Heath,” on the Art Institute of Chicago website [Online] Cited 26/05/2019
The first major UK exhibition dedicated to the work of this hugely influential American photographer.
Heath’s psychologically charged images both reflect and respond to the alienation particularly prevalent in post war North American society. He was one of the first of a new generation of artists seeking new ways to try and make sense of the increasing sense of isolation and vulnerability that typified the age.
Predominantly self-taught, Heath was nonetheless extremely informed and versed in the craft, theory and history of photography and taught extensively throughout his life. Although greatly influenced by W. Eugene Smith and the photographers of the Chicago School, including Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, Heath cannot be neatly pigeonholed as either a documentary or experimental photographer. His work feels more at home within a narrative or poetic tradition, where an interior reality takes precedence.
Taking his masterwork and first publication, A Dialogue With Solitude, as a point of departure, this exhibition highlights Heath’s preoccupations with solitude and contemplation and further makes explicit the importance of sequencing in his practice. Heath was clear that “the central issue of my work is sequence” and held the belief that the relativity and rhythm of images offered a truer way of conveying a universal psychological state than a single image. He perfected a form of montage, often blending text and image to create visual poems, which captured the mood of the decade in a manner akin to a photographic protest song.
Heath’s photographs are shown in dialogue with cult American films from the 1960s similarly focused on themes of solitude and alienation. These include: Portrait of Jason by Shirley Clarke (1966); Salesman by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Mitchell Zwerin (1968); and The Savage Eye by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick (1960).
“The fact that I never had a family, a place or a story that defined me, inspired a need in me to join the community of mankind. I did so by inventing a poetic form linking this community, at least symbolically, in my imagination, through this form.” ~ Dave Heath
Curated by Diane Dufour, Director of LE BAL. Exhibition conceived by LE BAL with the support of Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto), Howard Greenberg Gallery (New York), Archive of Modern Conflict (London) and Les Films du Camélia (Paris).
Text from the Photographers’ Gallery website [Online] Cited 25/05/2019
The Photographers’ Gallery, in collaboration with LE BAL Paris, presents Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitudes; the first major UK exhibition dedicated to the work of this hugely influential American photographer (b. 1931 USA, d. 2016 Canada).
Heath’s psychologically charged images both reflect and respond to the alienation particularly prevalent in post war North American society. He was one of the first of a new generation of artists seeking new ways to try and make sense of the increasing sense of isolation and vulnerability that typified the age. Predominantly self-taught, Heath was nonetheless extremely informed and versed in the craft, theory and history of photography and taught extensively throughout his life. Although greatly influenced by W. Eugene Smith and the photographers of the Chicago School, including Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, Heath cannot be neatly pigeonholed as either a documentary or experimental photographer. His work feels more at home within a narrative or poetic tradition, where an interior reality takes precedence.
Heath was born in Philadelphia in 1931 and had a turbulent childhood, abandoned by his parents at the age of four and consigned to a series of foster homes before being placed in an orphanage. He first became interested in photography as a teenager, and joined an amateur camera club. He was fascinated by the photo essays in Life Magazine and cites one in particular as having a decisive impact on his future. Bad Boy’s Story by Ralph Crane, charted the emotional landscape of a young orphan. Not only did Heath identify with the protagonist, he immediately recognised the power of photography as a means of self expression and as a way of connecting to others. In the following years he trained himself in the craft, taking courses in commercial art, working in a photo processing lab, and studying paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. While stationed in Korea with the US Army, he began to photograph his fellow soldiers, eschewing the drama of the battlefield for quiet and private moments of subdued reflection.
On his return, Heath dedicated himself to photography, continuing his interest with capturing an “inner landscape” and training his lens on anonymous strangers whom he identified as similarly lost or fragile. Although he photographed in mostly public spaces, on the streets of Chicago and New York (where he moved to in 1957), his subjects seem detached from their physical context, shot in close-up, articulated by their isolation. His frames possess an intensity of concentration, showing single figures or close-knit couples entirely wrapped up in their own world. An occasional sidelong glance conveys a momentary awareness of being photographed, but for the most part Heath is an unobserved, unobtrusive witness. By concentrating on the fragility of human connection, focusing on the personal over the political, Heath gave ‘voice’ to those largely unheard and joined a growing community of artists searching for alternative forms of expression. His work was pivotal in depicting the fractured feeling of societal unease just prior to the rise of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War and his ground-breaking approaches to narrative and image sequence, his exquisite printing techniques, handmade book maquettes, multimedia slide presentations culminated in his poetic masterwork, A Dialogue with Solitude, 1965. This sensitive exploration of loss, pain, love and hope reveals Heath as one the most original photographers of those decades.
After 1970, Dave Heath devoted much of his time to teaching (in particular at Ryerson University, Toronto) in Canada, where he later became a citizen. He died in 2016.
Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery website [Online] Cited 25/05/2019
There’s something consistently awesome about Mexican photography that is so grounded, so essential, and yet at the same time so spiritual.
One of my favourite photographic artists of all time is Manuel Alvarez Bravo, he of the lyrical narrative, the sensual body, the assassinated worker. Iturbide seems to be cut from the same cloth – she was his assistant for two years; he her teacher about photography and life – and his influence is telling in Iturbide’s imaginative and sometimes incongruous images, such as the skull in Mexico… I want to get to know you! (1975, below) or Our Lady of the Iguanas, Juchitán, Mexico (1979, below).
Life, death, violence, sacrifice, beauty, identity and place, mixed with daubs of Surrealism, are constant themes of Mexican photography and this symbology can be seen in Iturbide’s unusual urban geometries and her eye for the unexpected. She is a visionary ethnographer who paints in black and white a story of magical literary realism… seeing through her camera something different than she sees with her eyes directly. She sees, and then feels, a different world.
Octavio Paz, the great Mexican poet, writing about the great Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, said that, “Reality exists, but it is more real in black and white.” And so here. Iturbide feels that black and white is more real than colour – and that reality is in black and white. It is in this tonal space that Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico pictures a place of beauty and contradiction, a place of transformations and interstitial spaces (intermediate, indeterminate spaces), an amalgamation of Indigenous and Spanish traditions. “I always shoot what surprises me,” she says. “My eyes see them, and my heart shoots them.”
Gracia Graciela, oh Graceful Beauty, for your gift to us.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Photography is also like life, right? … I think in my case, taking photos as therapy has a lot to do with death with everything I do, with Frida Kahlo, because I like to photograph things in therapy, things that are healing, which is powerful, right?”
Pedro Meyer (Spanish, b. 1935) Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide, Coyoacán (Mexico) 1983 Gelatin silver print
When I went to study at the university he was teaching at the university as well and I attended one of his courses; that’s how I got to know him. Then, after a couple of weeks I became his assistant. At that time he was not that famous in Mexico, he was very famous in Europe and the United States. He was known in Mexico but he was not really a big star. So, what I really need to make clear is that he was not just a teacher of photography; he was a teacher about life for me. Because he taught me about everything, he talked about literature, cinematography… so he was more of a teacher of life… he never said this picture is good or this picture is bad, he would never say that flat out. Instead, he would always say something to guide you in the right direction. Yet he would never say, “This is good or this is bad”.
With Álvarez I went to certain little towns but I was only his assistant for two years. After that I made the decision to cut the umbilical cord and make my own way.
Extract from Munem Wasif. “An Interview with Graciela Iturbide,” on the Chobi Mela website, November 24, 2014 [Online] Cited 06/04/2019
The photographs of Graciela Iturbide not only bear witness to Mexican society but express an intense personal and poetic lyricism about her native country. One of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, Iturbide captures everyday life and its cultures, rituals, and religions, while also raising questions about paradoxes and social injustice in Mexican society. Her photographs tell a visual story of Mexico since the late 1970s – a country in constant transition, defined by the coexistence of the historical and modern as a result of the culture’s rich amalgamation of cultures. For Iturbide, photography is a way of life and a way of seeing and understanding Mexico and its beauty, challenges, and contradictions.
This is the first major East Coast presentation of Iturbide’s work, featuring approximately 125 photographs that span her five-decade-long career. Organised into nine sections, the exhibition opens with early photographs, followed by three series focused on three of Mexico’s many indigenous cultures: Juchitán captures the essential role of women in Zapotec culture; Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in the Sand) concentrates on the Seri people living in the Sonoran Desert; and La Mixteca documents elaborate goat-slaughtering rituals in Oaxaca, serving as critical commentary on the exploitation of workers. Thematic groupings highlight Iturbide’s explorations of various aspects of Mexican culture, including fiestas, death and mortality, and birds and their symbolism. Her more recent work is presented in two series related to Mexico’s cultural and artistic heritage, featuring plants – mainly cacti – in “intensive care” at the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Gardens, as well as El baño de Frida (Frida’s Bathroom), depicting personal belongings in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom at the Casa Azul that had been locked away for 50 years after the artist’s death.
Iturbide’s powerful and provocative photographs are anti-picturesque, anti-folkloric. Her work embodies her empathetic approach to photography and her deep connection with her subjects, asking questions through its capacity for imaginary associations. Drawn primarily from Iturbide’s own collection, “Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico” also includes the Museum’s recent acquisition of 37 works by the artist, as well as loans from museums and private collections throughout the US and Mexico. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue produced by MFA Publications.
Text from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website [Online] Cited 05/04/2019
Nearly 140 Images in Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico Portray Photographer’s Native Country through Her Eyes
Throughout a five-decade-long career, photographer Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) has focused on capturing and understanding the beauty, rituals, challenges and contradictions of her native Mexico. Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico is the first major East Coast presentation of the artist’s work, featuring nearly 140 photographs that tell the visual story of her country since the late 1970s. Going beyond documentary photography, Iturbide’s work reveals Mexico’s complexities through her personal explorations. Focused on the tensions between urban and rural life, human presence and nature, and indigenous and Spanish cultures, her photographs have contributed to Mexico’s visual identity while calling attention to the rich syncretism, diversity and inequalities of Mexican society. The exhibition is drawn primarily from Iturbide’s own collection and also highlights a recent acquisition of her photographs, the first major group of works by the artist to enter the Museum’s collection – 35 purchased by the MFA and two donated by Iturbide. Loans from museums and private collections throughout the U.S., Mexico and France are also included. On view from January 19 through May 12, 2019 in the Henry and Lois Foster Gallery, the exhibition features interpretation in English and Spanish, as well as a documentary video of the artist, produced by the Museum and shot at Iturbide’s studio in Mexico City. Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue produced by MFA Publications, which features more than 100 striking tritone reproductions of evocative photographs alongside essays that invite readers to share in Iturbide’s personal artistic journey. This beautiful volume with a three-piece cloth and printed binding with foil stamping teases out key ideas and visual relationships across different moments in the photographer’s storied career. The exhibition is supported by the Leigh and Stephen Braude Fund for Latin American Art, The Bruce and Laura Monrad Fund for Exhibitions, and the Diane Krane Family and Jonathan and Gina Krane Family Fund. Generous support for the publication was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Publications Fund.
“I am thrilled to present Graciela’s groundbreaking images to our global audiences, and it has been a pleasure and honour to work closely with her in preparation for this exhibition,” said Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Curator of Photographs. “Her work has successfully and beautifully brought to the forefront the many untold stories of Mexican culture and history – from the eyes of an insider.”
The exhibition is organised thematically into nine sections and opens with early photographs. One of her first works, Zihuatanejo, México (1969, Collection of Les and Sandy Nanberg), is a pensive portrait of a young girl that marks the beginning of Iturbide’s forays into photographing the diverse peoples of Mexico. Shot during the same year, Mexico City (1969, Collection of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser) portrays a sex worker in what appears to be a cantina or pulquería. In fact, the subject is a figure in a wax museum. The photograph’s graphic background – a mural of a large skull painted on a wall – alludes to both Mexico’s long history of muralism and the country’s fascination with death. Works such as Little Bull / Torito (1982, Collection of Galeria Lopez Quiroga) and Juchitán (1975, MFA) reveal Iturbide’s attraction to unusual urban geometries and her eye for the unexpected. Together, these early images attest to the photographer’s keen observation of Mexican contemporary culture in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The next three sections of the exhibition focus on Iturbide’s deep commitment to photographing different populations throughout Mexico. One of her early projects was to document the way of life of the Seri Indians, a formerly nomadic group of fisherfolk living in the Sonoran Desert in northwestern Mexico. In 1978, Iturbide and anthropologist Luis Barjau immersed themselves within the community, staying for a month and a half on their first trip and another month on the second. The result of their collaboration was the 1981 book Los que viven en la arena ( Those Who Live in the Sand) and a selection of additional photographs that Iturbide printed and exhibited years later. The exhibition features two prints of one of Iturbide’s most well-known works, Angel Woman / Mujer ángel (1979, Collection of Elizabeth and Michael Marcus and Collection of Galeria Lopez Quiroga ), an ethereal image that captures a woman in traditional dress carrying a boom box as she heads down to the empty desert plain. The photograph exemplifies a theme running through the series: the impact of capitalism on the Seri people’s otherwise minimalist culture. This early project confirmed Iturbide’s interests in working thematically, raising her awareness of Mexico’s diversity and building close relationships with her subjects.
Over the course of a decade beginning in 1979, Iturbide traveled regularly to Juchitán, a city in southern Oaxaca. Juchitán is home to the Zapotec culture, in which women are known for their economic, political and sexual independence. Iturbide’s iconic photograph Our Lady of the Iguanas / Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (1979, Brooklyn Museum) portrays a woman, Zobeida Diaz, wearing a wreath of iguanas on her head as she makes her way to sell them at the market. The iguana has historical importance in Zapotec society, both as a gastronomic delicacy and as an animal believed to have healing properties. Our Lady of the Iguanas, reproduced today on everything from municipal offices to highway signs and murals, has become a symbol for the community of Juchitán and for Zapotec womanhood. Original contact sheets displayed alongside the photograph show a cinematic sequence of Diaz interacting with Iturbide as she poses for the camera. She appears to be overtaken by laughter at certain points – an indication of the artist’s empathetic way of connecting with her subjects. Yellow grease-pencil marks also reveal Iturbide’s working method and creative process, highlighting the image she had chosen to print and how she envisioned cropping it. In her final selection, the iguanas themselves appear to be posing for the camera – an idea that corresponds to Iturbide’s search for the unexpected and the symbolic.
In addition to highlighting the importance of women in Juchitán, Iturbide also captured the society’s openness to muxes – men who dress as women, sometimes referred to as a Zapotec third gender. Her photographs of a muxe named Magnolia – Magnolia with Mirror / Magnolia con espejo (1986, J. Paul Getty Museum) and Magnolia with Sombrero / Magnolia con sombrero (1986, MFA) – demonstrate her ability to connect intimately with the community. Immersing herself in Zapotec culture, Iturbide also recorded the enduring legacy of native traditions – from an annual two-day festival and pilgrimage celebrating an alligator deity to el rapto, a premarital ritual practiced by those in lower and middle classes. Her strong and poetic images of Juchitán not only gained her international recognition, but also became a point of departure for a new vision of Juchitec society that has since been integrated into Mexico’s identity.
Following the Juchitán section are Iturbide’s photographs of the annual goat-slaughtering ritual in the Oaxacan region of La Mixteca, in south-central Mexico. The tradition dates back to colonial times, when Spanish landowners contracted Mixtec workers to butcher animals for sale, and carries on today. Tens of thousands of goats are killed during the month-long festival, which involves ritualistic aspects such as saving a lone animal every year as an act of repentance before the slaughter. Iturbide’s photographs from this series also highlight the exploitation of workers in one of Mexico’s poorest regions, who have created a ritual out of their harsh working conditions as a way of coping with the violence and pain. This experience had a tremendous impact on Iturbide, marking a personal turning point. Her wrenching experience in La Mixteca became the last time she spent extended amounts of time with an indigenous community.
The next three sections focus on themes that recur throughout Iturbide’s oeuvre: fiestas, death and birds. Since the mid-1970s, Iturbide has traveled throughout the country, including Chalma, Oaxaca and Tlaxcala, to observe and record a variety of fiestas – lavish and visually stimulating celebrations, which often include elaborate costumes or disguises. Death is another dominant element of Mexican culture, and Iturbide’s photographs related to the subject reflect both a personal experience and larger cultural manifestations. Her works range from depictions of signs of mortality in everyday life, as seen in the early photograph Mexico… I want to get to know you! / México… Quiero Conocerte! (1975, MFA), to representations of surreal-like funerary rituals and celebrations like the annual Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Iturbide’s fascination with birds is intimately linked to her own emotional journey toward overcoming a personal loss. Her photographs of the subject – ranging from spectacular and sublime skies full of birds to close-up portraits of birds in trees and even self-portraits with birds – show her interest in the rites and cycles of the natural world, while also evoking the spiritual world.
In 1998, Iturbide was invited by Francisco Toledo to photograph the newly opened Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca. By design, the garden tells the story of the relationship between the people of Oaxaca and their native plants, which are arranged by ecological and cultural themes. The next section of the exhibition presents these photographs, particularly of cacti undergoing therapeutic treatment. The images, published in her 2004 book Naturata, reflect the caretaking aspect of the garden. A startling view of the tops of several columnar cacti in Botanical Garden / Jardín Botánico (1998-1999) shows them with bundles of newspaper padding and wooden boards as splints, all bound around the plants with rope. In another photograph, Botanical Garden / Jardín Botánico (2002) a thorny treelike plant receives an intravenous treatment as two bags of a cream-coloured liquid drip into lines connected to its limbs.
The final section features the most recent series in the exhibition, El baño de Frida (Frida’s Bathroom), which will be on view from February 27, 2019 through June 16, 2019 in the Museum’s Art of the Americas Wing, alongside another MFA exhibition, Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular. In 2005, Iturbide was commissioned to photograph personal belongings in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom at the Casa Azul, which had been locked away for 50 years following the artist’s death. Iturbide’s stark images provide an emotional narrative about the intimate space within the “Blue House,” where Kahlo was born and died, and the mystery of the objects. Iturbide’s photographs focus primarily on objects related to Kahlo’s pain – from a box of Demerol, an opioid pain medication, to a prosthetic leg. In one photograph, a hospital gown – stained by blood or paint – hangs ominously against the tiled wall, serving as a reminder of Kahlo’s many operations. In another, a self-portrait that depicts Iturbide’s bare feet in Kahlo’s bathtub, the photographer puts herself in the artist’s place and evokes one of Kahlo’s famous paintings, What the Water Gave Me (1938). Iturbide’s images reveal a side of Kahlo that is dramatically different from the colourful magical realist portrayed by her clothes and paintings. In photographing Kahlo’s private space, Iturbide grapples not only with the cultural and symbolic legacy of the painter, but with her own legacy as well. The series reveals a silent dialogue between the two women, two artists of Mexico, who have seen their art as a form of therapy and escape from everyday life.
About Graciela Iturbide
Iturbide was born in 1942 in Mexico City. In 1969, at the age of 27, she enrolled at the film school Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to become a film director. However, she was soon drawn to the art of still photography as practiced by the Mexican modernist master Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who was teaching at the University. From 1970 to 1971 she worked as Bravo’s assistant, accompanying him on various photographic journeys throughout Mexico. In the early half of the 1970s, Iturbide traveled widely across Latin America – in particular to Cuba and Panama. In 1978, she was commissioned by the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico to photograph Mexico’s indigenous population. Iturbide decided to document and record the way of life of the Seri people along the country’s border with Arizona. In 1979, she was invited by the artist Francisco Toledo to photograph the Juchitán people who form part of the Zapotec culture native to Oaxaca in southern Mexico. This series resulted in the publication of her book Juchitán de las Mujeres in 1989. Between 1980 and 2000, Iturbide was invited to work in Cuba, Germany, India, Madagascar, Hungary, France and the U.S., producing a number of important projects. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou (1982), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1990), J. Paul Getty Museum (2007), MAPFRE Foudation, Madrid (2009), Photography Museum Winterthur (2009) and Barbican Art Gallery (2012), among others. Iturbide is the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Foundation Award (1987); the Grand Prize Mois de la Photo, Paris (1988); a Guggenheim Fellowship for the project Fiesta y Muerte (1988); the Hugo Erfurth Award, Leverkusen, Germany (1989); the International Grand Prize, Hokkaido, Japan (1990); the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Award, Arles (1991); the Hasselblad Award (2008); the National Prize of Sciences and Arts in Mexico City (2008); an Honorary Degree in photography from Columbia College Chicago (2008); and an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute (2009).
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website [Online] Cited 05/04/2019
“For her, the camera is an instrument of sharing, making visible what, to many, is invisible,” Ms. Gresh said. Ms. Iturbide’s photos, she added, provide “a poetic vision of contemporary culture informed by a sense of life’s surprises and mysteries.”
“The dark ballast of Iturbide’s photography is a deep knowledge of predation: how humans prey on animals; how multinational corporations subsume developing economies; how modern industry exploits a largely indigenous underclass; how artists wrangle life from their subjects in the name of creation. In one haunting early photograph, a young Cuna woman walks through an open field in Panama, Pepsi-Cola’s logo embroidered on her shirt. The pernicious creep of capitalism, yes, but also its corollary: a vivid reminder that indigenous people, often relegated to an imagined antiquity, are full participants in contemporary life. …
In 1979, the painter Francisco Toledo invited Iturbide to visit his native Juchitán, in southeastern Oaxaca, a town known for its fierce independence and long-standing leftist sympathies. She returned frequently over the next decade, chronicling the public and private life of its largely Zapotec population. As a perpetual guest, Iturbide became a master of the threshold, of doorways and frames, storefront windows and cemeteries, masks and carnival, of the moments preceding and following transformation. …
Contact sheets enclosed in glass vitrines accompany select images, often annotated with grease pencil. According to Iturbide, there are – pace Cartier-Bresson – two “decisive moments” in photography: “One, when you take the photo; and two, when you discover it in the contact sheet, because you often think you took one photo, and another comes out.” In the sheet for Magnolia with Mirror (1986, above), a livewire thread of intimacy is palpable in the sense of giddy experimentation between artist and subject. In the proofs for Our Lady of the Iguanas, Zobeida Díaz shakes the hand of a passerby, adjusts her crown of iguanas, suppresses laughter. The sheets underscore the contingency and providence of any image’s origins, how a slightly upturned lip or shifted frame catapults one into the pantheon while another slips into obscurity.”
Extract from Christopher Alessandrini. “Graciela Iturbide, Visionary Ethnographer,” on The New York Review of Books website [Online] Cited 06/04/2019
Iturbide studied photography at universities in Mexico, where she met her mentor, the teacher, cinematographer, and photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Inspired by Bravo, she developed her particular interest in the daily life of Mexico’s indigenous cultures. Iturbide has photographed things and people found in Mexico City, in her native Juchitán, in Oaxaca, and on the Mexico-U.S. border. Her camera lens often traces Mexico’s rich life of religion and rituals. Torito represents an assemblage of a bicycle frame and a cow’s skull and horn, found in Mexico City, and shows the photographer’s exploration of the relationship between the individual and the broader culture.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Avenue of the Arts 465 Huntington Avenue Boston, Massachusetts
*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Dildo I) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
This series of photographs is of my partner, my lover, my best friend and my muse for twelve and a half years. We had such fun with life, pushing the boundaries at every opportunity. It was a privilege to be able to photograph him in every situation that we thought about, to capture the creativity of spirit and being, of existence.
There are many photographs of this handsome, intelligent man that I took – a deep collaboration that I will never have again in my lifetime. The photographs that emerged from our relationship remind me of those that Alfred Stieglitz took of Georgia O’Keeffe – strong images based on trust and intimacy.
To Paul, I am proud of the photographs we took together and I am eternally grateful for our love, relationship and exploration of body, mind and spirit. Thank you.
Marcus
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Mask I 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Mask II 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Horse bit) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Boots) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Balance I 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Mask III 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Dildo II) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Blind) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Balance II 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Balance III 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Balance IV 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Dildo III) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Hands on hips) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Blind) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Hands on hips) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Saliva I 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Saliva II 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Hands behind back) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Mask IV 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) Paul (Boots and mask) 1995-1996 From the series Mask Gelatin silver print
A wonderful posting of photographs by this master photographer, including numerous images (Young Mother, Middle-class; Middle-class Children; Peddler; Girl in Fairground Caravan; “Test your Strength” Showman; Workmen in the Ruhr Region) I have never seen before.
What can you say about the work of this legend of photography that has not been said before, by so many people, in so many words. Therefore I will not be verbose but just note a few impressions.
How did Sander get these people to pose for him in this direct, open way? There is no affectation, no histrionics, the sitters (whether outside en plein air or inside against a ubiquitous plain wall / blank canvas) gaze directly, steadfastly, into his camera lens – quite pre/posed, quietly proposed and confident of their own identity and image. The peddler with his box of wares, the café waitress with her tray of tea and milk, the pastry chef with his bowl, or the showman whose gnarled and dirty hand clasps a cigar.
The “presence” and aura of these people is incredible. You can ascribe this presence to modernism and New Objectivity (a sharply focused, documentary quality to the photographic art) that sought to portray the reality of a life but to do so holy to the exclusion of the poetic in Sander’s work would be a mistake. While not self-consciously poetic, Sander’s work still contains elements of the pictorial – for example the painterly quality in his use of depth of field in portrait’s such as that of Painter [Heinrich Hoerle] (where we notice the very small depth of field from the front of the shirt to the back), or the framing of Girl in Fairground Caravan with its notably impressionistic melancholy and longing.
What I am really looking forward to is the book that is being published from this exhibition. As the text on Amazon notes, “A novel feature of this book is that all the reproductions are based on vintage prints produced and authorised by August Sander himself. The croppings and the desired tonal values are authentically rendered here for the first time in the long publication history of Sander’s brilliant portrait work.”
This is as close as you will get in book form to the original printing and tonality of Sander’s work. I am sure the book will become a classic and sell out quickly so get your orders in now for a June 2019 release.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The portrait photographs by August Sander count among the masterworks of their kind. Ever since acquiring the photographer’s estate, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur has been busy cataloguing the Sander archive and has already presented these photographs in several theme-based shows. With “People of the 20th Century,” his most famous photographic compendium, Sander aspired to nothing less than to document the society of his day, based on examples of people pursuing different occupations and from various walks of life. The conceptually planned body of work testifies to the photographer’s acuity of perception and consummate skill at the use of the photographic medium. Over the decades, pictures such as “Young Farmers” (1914) and “Pastry Cook” (1928) have become photographic icons. But August Sander’s portraiture in fact harbours a large number of motifs of remarkable quality. These images provide insights, for example, into the population of the rural Westerwald region, the artist communities in Cologne and Berlin, and city life in general during his era.
In the current exhibition, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur is displaying a representative selection of more then 150 original prints from “People of the 20th Century.” The majority come from the collection’s own holdings, joined by works on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the Museum Ludwig Cologne / Photography Collection, the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin and private collections. Based on many years of research, the accompanying catalogue traces the genesis of these works in great depth and detail.
Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur website
The current exhibition with over 150 original photographs and numerous showcase material shows a representative cross-section of the project “People of the 20th Century”.
Sanders’ extensive portraiture was aimed at showing a cross-section of the population in which the different occupational and social types, spread over different generations, are reflected – a mirror of the times. In the title Sanders first published book in 1929, Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time), this intention finds its echo. Both the indirectly expressed face of time and the individual physiognomies were the subject of the photographer’s unbroken attention for decades.
In order to give shape and form to his growing compendium, Sander created a concept in the mid-1920s in which he extensively named the image groups and folders that he had focused on. The groups are called “The Farmer”, “The Craftsman”, “The Woman”, “The Estates”, “The Artists”, “The Big City” and “The Last Man”. The latter perhaps misleading name stands for a series of pictures that very respectfully shows people on the margins of society. Sander’s concept of that time, which proposes a sequence of groups and folders, is also followed by the current exhibition with the inclusion of individual or several representative portfolio prints from the corresponding picture folders.
For the most part, the photographs are taken from the inventory of the August Sander Archive, which was acquired in 1992, which forms the foundation for the further development of the Photographic Collection / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne. Exclusive loans from originals will be consulted, such as the Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Berlin, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Museum Ludwig Köln, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Pinakothek der Moderne. Munich as well as from important private collections.
At Schirmer / Mosel Verlag, the book “August Sander – Masterpieces” was created at the same time as the exhibition in German and English editions. For the first time in the publication history of the photographer, the original prints are reproduced in authentic tonality, as well as in original cut-out reproduction.
Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur website
The current exhibition, featuring over 150 original photographs and numerous documents shown in display cases, presents a representative cross-section of the “People of the 20th Century” project.
The portraits from August Sander’s epochal work are not only of fundamental importance for the history of photography; they are also highly exciting objects of study – masterpieces for anyone who has an unsentimental, unbiased love of people and life; who likes to ask questions about the past and gather experiences for the future; who has a passion for looking, discovering, fantasising, and analysing:
How do the people portrayed appear to us today? How did they spend their lives? What delighted or shocked them? What experiences left a mark on their faces, their hands, their physiognomy? What can they share with us from their own bygone world and times? How did Sander manage to meet and talk to so many different people, and to entice them into posing for a picture? What does the photographic material convey to us today – at a time when hardly any photographs are developed in the darkroom and a kind of magic has thus been lost? What does time and manual craft mean for artistic engagement?
Viewed together, the people August Sander (1876-1964) depicted in such an objective yet dignified and personal manner unfold a whole cosmos that brings history to life. Looking at Sander’s photographs challenges us to search for similarities, differences, and comparable qualities. They summon memories of accounts from the past, render tangible transformations in people’s living conditions and way of life; we see occupations that have changed, which no longer exist or have been replaced; developments or events in society are made more vivid to us, as are changing pictorial styles and artistic aesthetics.
And yet apart from the referential character of Sander’s photographs, their historical relevance and inspirational force, qualities that have been highlighted by renowned authors such as Walter Benjamin, Alfred Döblin, Golo Mann, and Kurt Tucholsky, the pictures depict very concrete moments and display individually a remarkable degree of aesthetic quality. They compellingly demonstrate Sander’s knack at capturing reality and his eye for composing specific details into lifelike documentary photographs. Being able to experience this quality up close based on August Sander’s original handmade prints is a real privilege and something that can only be made possible on this scale in rare cases due to the conservation requirements of these so-called vintage prints.
August Sander first presented his project “People of the 20th Century” in 1927 at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. He had selected more than 110 prints, a group that, as far as can be reconstructed, largely diverges from the current presentation, let alone the fact that several different prints of individual motifs were and are in circulation. Since Sander developed the project or – as he called it – his cultural work “People of the 20th Century” between circa 1925 and 1955, i.e., over the course of three decades, also incorporating motifs he had produced from 1892 onwards, his stock of original prints and portfolios had grown immensely by the end of his life. Within his archive, this group of works forms a kind of cache from which the photographer drew freely for exhibitions and publications. This was a uniquely innovative approach in his day. Sander’s awareness of the exponential effect of image series as opposed to individual images made him a pioneer of conceptual photography, as did his resolute use of an unmanipulated, factual reproduction of his chosen motifs. His portraits were meant to underline his documentary approach and to do without any artistic embellishments while nonetheless manifesting a fine-tuned and restrained design.
Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur website
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Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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