In the 1970s, Daniel Meadows was at the forefront of the independent photography movement. His practice is complex, passionate and sometimes deeply autobiographical.
Daniel Meadows’ early work broke with tradition and infused the medium with new energies and ways of seeing. Between 1971 and 1987, he produced an astonishing record of urban society in Britain, working in a uniquely collaborative way through his interviews with – and writing about – his subjects.
Text from the National Science and Media Museum website
The National Science and Media Museum presents the first retrospective of the career of Daniel Meadows – photographer, documentarian, digital storyteller and unofficial co-founder of a uniquely British photography movement. Daniel Meadows was one of a group of photographers who spearheaded the independent photography movement in the early 1970s, breaking with tradition and infusing the medium with new energies and ways of seeing. His practice is complex, passionate and sometimes deeply autobiographical.
Between 1971 and 1987, he produced an astonishing record of urban society in Britain, working in a uniquely collaborative way through his interviews with – and writing about – his subjects. Meadows is a documentarist and an exceptional storyteller. He reveals historic and culturally significant aspects of people’s lives, dating from the 1970s to the present day. This exhibition displays photographic works alongside oral testimonies by some of the people featured in the photographs and Digital Stories.
Meadows’ practice developed at Manchester Polythechnic, where he trained alongside fellow photographers Martin Parr, Brian Griffin, Charlie Meecham and Peter Fraser. Together they spearheaded a new documentary movement intent on establishing an independent method for making and disseminating photographs, outside the existing conventions of commercial practitioners and photojournalists. Meadows’ resulting work displays complexity and passion, and confers a personal and sometimes deeply autobiographical imprint. During his career he has produced an astonishing record of urban British society, working in a uniquely collaborative way, through photography, digital stories and recorded interviews, to capture extraordinary aspects of everyday life.
His career began in 1972, when he opened a photographic studio in a former barber’s shop in the Moss Side area of Manchester. The Shop on Greame Street features residents from the district who posed for a portrait which they then received free of charge. None has been previously exhibited, and a selection will be on public display for the first time from October.
Two further early projects are also included in the exhibition, both undertaken in partnership with Martin Parr. June Street, 1973, is an intimate portrayal of working class households in an area of Salford, which have since been demolished. Butlin’s by the Sea, 1972, presents a fascinating record of the holiday camp in Filey, North Yorkshire, just after the heyday of this style of British resort.
In 1973, Meadows, aged 21, also bought a 25-year-old Leyland PD1 double-decker bus for £360.20. He removed the seats to make space for a darkroom and living quarters and named it the Free Photographic Omnibus. He spent 14 months taking his Greame Street studio philosophy of free portraits on tour around England. Original photographs from the journey appear in the retrospective, along with a selection from a follow-up project in which Meadows sought out his Photobus subjects more than 20 years later to re-photograph them for National Portraits: Now and Then, 1995-2000.
Other notable works displayed include Decline in the Cotton Industry, 1975-1978, Welfare State International, 1976-1983, and Nattering in Paradise, 1984-1987. The gallery will also screen a selection of Meadows’ Digital Storytelling films. Condensing personal stories into two-minute features of approximately 250 heartfelt words and 12 images, he created “multimedia sonnets from the people”, leading American commentator J.D Lasica to call him “one of the icons of the Digital Storytelling movement.”
This exhibition and the accompanying publication is the product of research by Professor Val Williams as part of an ongoing study into British photography of 1970s and 1980s at the University of the Arts London. It is preceded by the research project, The New British Photography, 1968-1981, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Together Val Williams and Daniel Meadows have brought to light the photographer’s incredible archive of prints and negatives, along with ephemera and audio recordings. They have unearthed unpublished and sometimes forgotten treasures which add to a remarkable document – a dramatic, moving and empathetic evocation of a recognisable, yet increasingly alien era.
Press release from the National Science and Media Museum website
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) The former whaling ship, the ‘Terra Nova’ 1911
Gelatin silver print
Canterbury Museum NZ
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
John 15:13
It is difficult to describe how heroic a figure Robert Scott, ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ was to a child of the Empire growing up in the 1960s. He and his doomed party were, and still are, the quintessential heroes of my youth. Despite what we now know of Scott’s failures in leadership and organisation, he and his comrades remain embedded in English consciousness as all that is noble about the explorers of the time. They may have failed to become the first to reach the South Pole and died on the return journey but what a magnificent effort it was, what camaraderie and fortitude they showed in the face of adversity.
At the centre of the exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney is a representation of Scott’s base camp at Cape Evans. Visitors can walk inside the life-size hut and get a sense of the everyday realities for the 25 expedition members, from the cramped conditions and homeliness of the hut, to the wealth of specimens collected and experiments conducted. The exhibition also reunites the artefacts used by Scott and his team together with scientific specimens collected during the 1910-1913 expedition for the first time since their use in Antarctica. The exhibition uses life-size reproductions of the photographs of Herbert Ponting. At this scale it enables the viewer to inspect in intimate detail the habitus of their lives.
What a master of photography Ponting was. His photographs are classically framed and formally restrained; his use of light is magical. The camera always seems to be in the perfect position to capture the subject, neither too high or low but beautifully balanced so that the eye is led into the photograph, to investigate those wonderful nooks and crannies of the image plane. Because of the excellent quality press images I have been able to close in on details of the photographs (a la Ken Burns). The receding row of male faces to the left of Scott’s birthday dinner, June 1911 (below) that lead to Scott as the focal point at the head of the table, flags of St. George flying above, the two standing men acting as vertical counterpoints to the equipoise of the horizontal perspectival point – and then we glimpse the punctum of the piece of bread held between darkened fingers and thumb of the man caught in mid-conversation with his neighbour. Also note the framed images on the wall behind at top left, bearing witness to the fact that living is more civilised in such a desolate place if you are surrounded by images of culture and home.
This remembrance becomes poignant in the photograph Scott writing in his area of the expedition hut, Scott’s cubicle (below). In the detail of the image we observe candid photographs of what are presumably Scott’s wife in two photographs that are slightly different from each other, his wife and child, his father and small photographs of his children pinned to the hut’s wall. Memories of home and family that become multiple momenti mori – the death of the people in the images pinned to the wall, the death present in Pontings’ photograph (the little death at the point in time that the photograph was taken) and the death of Scott himself. The pocket watch hung from a wooden post only adds to this sense of refractive timelessness.
The sense of these men living in close quarters in this community is beautifully captured in Ponting’s photograph The Tenements, 9 October 1911 (below). Three vertical lozenges project into the space from the bottom of the image, each containing its own theatrical diorama. The balance and space between the men looking across, down, up and out of the image is outstanding. The distance between Oates in the top centre and the man on the right seems somehow infinite in the photograph, like the distance in Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest where Cary Grant is waiting for the bus in the middle of nowhere and on the other side of the road is another man, also waiting. The spatial tension between the two men in the photograph is palpable, emphasised by the stacked horizontal shelf behind them. The gaze of the man at bottom left allows the viewer some room for escape from the confines of the tenements and the confines of the image plane, for without that gaze the viewer would be caught with no way out. In the detail of this man we can, as before, note the importance of personal remembrances of home with a picture pinned on the wall behind his bunk and a Fry’s Cocoa box stored underneath.
And so to the final few photographs in the posting: the famous photograph of Scott and the Polar Party at the South Pole (below) taken by Henry Bowers. Taken the day after the party had arrived at the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen had beaten them to their goal by five weeks, Bowers (seated at bottom left) used a string to release the shutter of the camera that can just be seen in his right hand in the photograph – a photograph that was then printed by Herbert Ponting from the recovered glass plate negative. In the detail of Scott and Oates in this photograph you can see the weariness, anguish and defeat in faces that are sun and wind damaged, knowing that they had to trek all the way back from this awful place (as Scott himself said, “Great God! This is an awful place”).
I have put a photograph by Herbert Ponting, Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates during the British Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1913, below the detail of him at the South Pole. The face is almost unrecognisable from the strong, handsome face in Ponting’s picture, the prominent nose now blackened and dark being the only thing that make it recognisably the same person. In the detail of Ponting’s photograph, if you enlarge it, you can see two small points of light in his eyes, probably the light of the polar sun when Ponting took the photograph. For me these two spots of light become portents of what was to come as Oates walked out into a blizzard saying those immortal words, “I am just going outside and may be some time”. To me these points of light seared into his retina are like the driving snow that he walked out into in such a selfless act. It is very emotional for me as an Englishman and as a human being to look into the face of this man knowing what he was eventually to go through.
Though they failed in their quest to become the first to the South Pole, for this child, for this man they will forever remain my heroes.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Australian National Maritime Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Anonymous photographer Captain Robert Falcon Scott
Nd
Gelatin silver print
Licensed with permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Members of the ‘Terra Nova’ expedition with Scott in the centre
1911
Gelatin silver print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Scott’s birthday dinner, June 1911
1911
Gelatin silver print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Scott’s birthday dinner, June 1911 (detail)
1911
Gelatin silver print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Scott writing in his area of the expedition hut, Scott’s cubicle
1911
Gelatin silver print
Pennell Collection, Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Scott writing in his area of the expedition hut, Scott’s cubicle (detail)
1911
Gelatin silver print
Pennell Collection, Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) The Tenements, 9 October 1911
1911
Gelatin silver print
Pennell Collection, Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) The Tenements, 9 October 1911 (detail)
1911
Gelatin silver print
Pennell Collection, Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Edward Atkinson in the laboratory
1911
Silver gelatin print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Edward Atkinson in the laboratory (detail)
1911
Silver gelatin print
Canterbury Museum NZ
One hundred years after its tragic end, the definitive story of British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica is being told in a major international exhibition coming to the Australian National Maritime Museum this June.
Scott’s Last Expedition will reunite real artefacts used by Scott and his team together with rare scientific specimens collected during the 1910-1913 expedition for the first time since their use in Antarctica.
When Scott set off on what was his second journey to explore the Antarctic on board the former whaling ship Terra Nova, he could not have predicted it would be his last. Tragically he and four of his colleagues died on the return trek to the South Pole two years later, having lost the race to be first. The exhibition however will go beyond the familiar tales of the journey to the Pole and the death of the Polar party to explore the Terra Nova expedition from every angle.
“Over the years public perceptions of Scott have varied greatly, from hero to flawed leader, and discussions of what really happened still captivate people,” said museum director Mary-Louise Williams today. “This exhibition will give visitors a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in this epic journey and the remarkable landscape of Antarctica,” she said.
Visitors will uncover Scott the man, learn more about the people who made up the expedition and explore every fascinating detail of this historic journey. At the centre of the exhibition will be a life-size representation of Scott’s Cape Evans’ base camp. Visitors can walk inside and get a sense of the everyday realities for the expedition’s members… from the cramped conditions and homeliness of the hut to the wealth of specimens collected and scientific investigations conducted.
Original artefacts, equipment, clothes, and personal effects will be displayed for the first time in Australia and show the group’s attempts to make life in one of the most hostile environments on Earth as bearable as possible. Food tins including Fry’s Cocoa, Trufood Trumilk, and Symington’s Pea Flour recovered from the hut will be on display together with instruments, a microscope, and even Scott’s gramophone.
Photographs of the environment and life in camp taken by expedition photographer Herbert Ponting and poignant letters and diaries by various expedition members create a vivid picture of what life was like… working in hostile conditions, the struggles for survival and the strength of human endurance and courage.
Scott’s Terra Nova expedition made a significant contribution to Antarctic science. The expedition included a full scientific program with a large team of scientists making new discoveries which directly led to a greater understanding of Antarctica. The scientists had to endure harsh Antarctic conditions to carry out their work. It was cold, windy and completely dark in winter and, if not careful, the scientists could easily get frostbitten. And yet despite the conditions, the expedition left a rich legacy that continues to inspire and inform today.
Natural History Museum, London, the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand and the Antarctic Heritage Trust, New Zealand, have collaborated to create this exhibition to commemorate the centenary of the expedition and celebrate its achievements.
Press release from the Australian National Maritime Museum
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) A member of the team tucks into a tin of Heinz baked beans in the Ross Dependency, during Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic, January 1912
1912
Silver gelatin print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Neerav Bhatt (photographer)
Installation view of the exhibition Scott’s Last Expedition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney, June – October 2011 CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Scott and the Polar Party at the South Pole
Left to right: Captain Lawrence Oates, Lieutenant Henry Bowers (seated), Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Dr Edward Wilson (Seated), Petty Officer Edgar Evans
1912
Licensed with permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.
Notice the camera release cord in the right hand of Lieutenant Henry Bowers.
The fatal journey
Scott’s 1,450 km journey to the geographic South Pole began on 1 November 1911, two weeks after the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen left his base camp at the Bay of Whales. Amundsen reached the pole first – on 14 December 1911 – and then raced back to tell the world their news. Scott and his team reached the Pole a month later on 17 January 1912 having been beset by fierce weather conditions. The disappointment was immense. The return journey was undertaken in horrid weather with harsh, intense cold and violent blizzards that, in the end, defeated them. Evans failed first, suffering concussion from a fall; Oates suffered dramatic frostbite to his feet – gangrene had set in – and he crawled out of the tent saying the now famous words, “I am just going outside and may be some time”. The remaining men – Scott, Wilson and Bowers – were weak with malnutrition, starvation and exhaustion and perished on or around 29/30 March 1912 – some three weeks after the world learned that Amundsen had reached the Pole first.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott at the South Pole (detail)
Captain Lawrence Oates at the South Pole (detail)
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates during the British Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1913
c. 1911
Silver gelatin print
Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates during the British Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1913 (detail)
c. 1911
Silver gelatin print
Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library
Anonymous photographer The snow cairn raised over Scott, Bowers and Wilson by the search party, their final resting ground (detail)
1912
Silver gelatine print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Australian National Maritime Museum 2 Murray Street
Darling Harbour
Sydney NSW 2000
Australia
Many thankx to The National Media Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Lady Clementina Hawarden (British, 1822-1865) Self Portrait
c. 1864
Albumen print
Courtesy of the National Media Museum/SSPL
Clementina, Lady Hawarden, is a poetic, if elusive, presence among nineteenth-century photographers. As a devoted mother, her life revolved around her eight children. She took up photography in 1857; using her daughters as models, she created a body of work remarkable for its technical brilliance and its original depiction of nascent womanhood.
Lady Hawarden showed her work in the 1863 and 1864 exhibitions of the Photographic Society. With the exception of a few rare examples, her photographs remained in the possession of her family until 1939, when the more than eight hundred images were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Only recently have they been the objects of research, publication, and exhibition.
John Moffat (Scottish, 1819-1894) William Henry Fox Talbot with camera and lens
1864
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Carlyle like a rough block of Michael Angelo’s sculpture
1867
Albumen print
Courtesy The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum/SSPL
Henry Herschel Hay Cameron (British born India, 1852-1911) Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron
1870
Albument print
Courtesy of the National Media Museum/SSPL
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) So Like a Shatter’d Column Lay the King
1875
Albumen print
Courtesy of The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum
Photographers have created some of the most famous and memorable images ever produced, combining science and art since 1839. The Lives of Great Photographers, a free to enter exhibition at the National Media Museum in Bradford, draws on the Museum’s renowned collection to focus on the pioneers behind the camera, exploring the extraordinary stories surrounding some of photography’s most important innovators and artists.
Featuring Henri Cartier-Bresson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Robert Capa, William Henry Fox Talbot, Weegee, Tony Ray-Jones, Fay Godwin and Eadweard Muybridge, the exhibition will display iconic images and artefacts from these and other great names, selected exclusively from the National Collection of Photography.
Exhibition curator Brian Liddy said: “Photography has been with us for more than 170 years, and in that time countless famous photographs have been taken by many famous photographers. Often we may think we know these men and women because we know their work so well, but over time so many photographers’ personal stories have become overshadowed by their most famous pictures. This major exhibition aims to redress the balance.”
As technology evolved, the breadth and range of photography increased, and the methods by which it could provide a source of income, or artistic expression, became more diverse. Julia Margaret Cameron, although primarily considered an artist, copyrighted her work and attempted to make a living by selling copies. Her personal connections gave her the opportunity to produce some of the first celebrity photographs in existence. Olive Edis employed photography as a serving war artist during the First World War and Edward Steichen’s career was remarkable for its variety as he moved effortlessly from art, to fashion, to advertising.
Photography also proved an ideal medium when it came to documenting world events. Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange were both driven by their social consciences to record the Great Depression in America. Photojournalism, the cousin of documentary photography, is represented in the exhibition by names such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, founding members of the world’s first photographic agency, Magnum. Both served in the Second World War and produced images that helped define an era.
One of the most notorious life stories is that of the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge. His pioneering work in chronophotography, whereby movement is captured by a sequence of photographic exposures, famously demonstrated that all four legs of a horse left the ground as it galloped. Until then the motion of a horse’s hooves were too quick for the human eye to determine. Perhaps less well known is the fact that Muybridge murdered his wife’s lover in cold blood but was later acquitted with a verdict of ‘justifiable homicide’.
Brian Liddy added: “This exhibition shows just how rich the museum’s collections are. The work of some of the best-known photographers in history will be shown alongside the kinds of cameras they would have had to carry and use in the course of their work. We’ve also taken the opportunity to show rarely seen material, such as pages from the notebooks of Tony Ray-Jones detailing what was going through his mind when he was thinking about how to get the pictures he wanted.”
“By recounting the lives of these great photographers, we hope to provide an insight into what led them to produce some of the greatest photographs ever taken.”
Press release from The National Media Museum
Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877) The Ladder
1844
Salted paper print from paper negative
Courtesy of the National Media Museum/SSPL
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) Princesses Helena and Louise
1856
Albumen print
Courtesy of The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum
Photograph of Princess Helena and Princess Louise, seated outside together wearing identical outfits, including hats. Both look to front. Upturned stool in foreground.
The two princesses look straight at the camera in what is an unusually direct pose. Princess Helena (1846-1923) and Princess Louise (1848-1939) were the fifth and six children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Princess Helena was herself a keen collector of photographs and compiled a number of albums commemorating her many visits to Balmoral
Text adapted from Roger Fenton – Julia Margaret Cameron: Early British photographs from the Royal Collection, London, 2010 on the Royal Collection Trust website
Eadweard Muybridge (English, 1830-1904) Man (Muybridge) throwing discus walking up steps walking
Plate 519 Animal Locomotion
1887
Collotype
Courtesy of the National Media Museum/SSPL
Unknown photographer Eadweard Muybridge
Date unknown
Courtesy of The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) Alfred Stieglitz
1905
Courtesy of the National Media Museum/SSPL
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Albanian woman Ellis Island
1905
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the National Media Museum/SSPL
At the Ethical Culture School in New York Lewis Hine taught photography to teenagers, encouraging them to observe others. He took his classes to Ellis Island to see arriving immigrants. “At times it looked like a costume ball,” he wrote, “with the multicoloured, many-styled national costumes,” This is one of over 200 photographs that Hine made himself at Ellis Island, representing an Albanian immigrant, wearing her best clothes, cleaned and immaculately pressed. Hine’s empathy with the neglected him led to a job with the National Child Labor Committee. He traveled the country photographing children at work in factories in New England, at coal mines in Pennsylvania, and canneries on the Gulf Coast. Hine’s photographs helped secure child labor laws in this country.
From Touchstones of the Twentieth Century: A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame (exhibition, 2020-21)
Unknown photographer Lewis Hine photographing children in a slum
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the National Media Museum/SSPL
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) George Davison
1918
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the National Media Museum/SSPL
George Davison (19 September 1854 – 26 December 1930) was an English photographer, a proponent of impressionistic photography, a co-founder of the Linked Ring Brotherhood of British artists and a managing director of Kodak UK. He was also a millionaire, thanks to an early investment in Eastman Kodak.
This photograph was published alongside Poodle Parlour, London (PGP 279.33B) in the satirical magazine Lilliput in 1939, offering a comparison between the living conditions of the urban poor and the care lavished on pets by their wealthy owners. The juxtaposition made a simple political point and encouraged the viewer to think about the unequal organisation of society. This was a rhetorical technique common in left-wing illustrated journals on the Continent. The Austrian magazine, Der Kuckuck, had published a similar story in 1931 comparing the living conditions of the Berlin poor with the more salubrious accommodation of the city’s dog home.
Cartier-Bresson had been a prisoner of war in Germany for nearly three years. He tried to escape two times, and then on the third time was successful. And partly because of that experience he was commissioned by the US Office of War Information to make a film about the return of displaced persons and prisoners of war.
And this incident appears in the film. The cameraman is filming this scene, and Cartier-Bresson, is right next to him making his own pictures. This is at a displaced person’s camp. And the woman in the black dress had been denounced to the Gestapo by the woman she’s about to hit. And here they’re both telling their stories to the man on the right who’s obviously the man in authority.
And what’s typical in this picture of Cartier-Bresson’s best work after the war, is that it’s all boiled down to these three protagonists. The anger of the woman who had been betrayed totally saturates her body, just the way the shame and the guilt of the woman who had done the betraying occupies her body, right down to where she’s got her thumb inside her fist.
Many thankx to the Huis Marseille Museum for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Adam Fuss A Survey of his Work: 1986/2010 at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam showing at right, Untitled (1999, below) from the series My Ghost
Installation view of the exhibition Adam Fuss A Survey of his Work: 1986/2010 at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam showing at second right, Untitled (1999, below) from the series My Ghost
Installation view of the exhibition Adam Fuss A Survey of his Work: 1986/2010 at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam showing at left, Untitled (2003, below)
What immediately stands out with the work of Adam Fuss is that, both in terms of the chosen subject matter and in his approach to the photographic technique, he has greatly dissociated himself from conventional photography. That which Fuss produces is, in fact, still a photograph; but in order to achieve that, he did rid himself of all the finer luxuries available to users of the medium nowadays. Like a present-day alchemist, Fuss has mastered the medium’s most elementary and primitive forms; he sees just as much potential for creativity in technical knowledge as in the imagination, or the visionary power of the photographer.
His subjects (silhouettes, gossamer christening gowns, rabbits, butterflies, snakes, lace, smoke, drops of water) have also been removed from their natural habitats. In the studio they become so epitomised that they assume the strength and quality of a symbol, or icon, fraught with emotion. Fuss seems, figuratively speaking, to have given wings to his images: they have a weightless and elusive appearance, as though being supernatural in origin and import.
Bipolarity
Though ostensibly sublime, the work’s impact on the viewer is nevertheless one of predominantly earthly beauty. This may be a consequence of the bipolarity that lies at the heart of it. All of Fuss’s endeavours have a twofold focus: on matter and mind, on earth or water and the dynamics of fire or air – in short, on vital forces in relation to space and history. Sometimes, as a true photographic magician, he allows the vital fluids of animals (snakes, rabbits) literally to corrode the silver salts of the light-sensitive photographic emulsions. As though trying to allow the image and its model to share the same source of life.
In his technique as well, Fuss wants to reconcile, to connect, past and present. With this he goes back, through experimentation, to the source. Here and there his printing technique is reminiscent of the zeal and the limitations with which Daguerre and Fox Talbot, the disputed founders of photography, wanted to put their discoveries into practice. In the course of time, he came to master the various old and highly complex processes – that of the daguerreotype, the calotype, the photogram, the platinum print – to a degree that remains unsurpassed. Each of these works is unique, and their technical standard is unparalleled. Fuss’s accomplishments include the making of the world’s largest daguerreotypes. (Both daguerreotypes of the Taj Mahal on display here can be counted among these.)
‘Poetic Genius’
Throughout his work Adam Fuss seeks the very essence of the image; to him that lies particularly at the point where an observation of reality is so intensified that it takes on magical powers, so to speak. His outlook on this comes from the notion of ‘Poetic Genius’ expressed by the British poet, writer, engraver and painter William Blake (1757-1827). It seems that Fuss’s idea of producing daguerreotypes of poems and incorporating them into his work also began with Blake.
In Fuss’s extensive 1998 interview with Mark Haworth Booth (then Curator of Photography at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London) he explained this in relation to his photographs of babies in water, saying that the colour photographs are actually not about an individual, a child. The titles Invocation, Journey, Wish have more to do with emotional, romantic ideas. What the image conveys is a feeling, a sensibility. This is no depiction of a baby in water, even though it may be that as well.
Fuss has an incomparable command of the photogram technique. Since 1988 he has been achieving astonishing results with this. The photogram is produced without a camera – and yields, by definition, a unique print. The physical and lifelike quality of these silhouettes is further heightened by the 1:1 scale on which this technique is based. The previously mentioned photographs of babies in water, from the series Invocation (a continuous series with silhouettes of children) are the earliest photograms shown here. Since 1999 Fuss has been making work which he titles My Ghost. Here the themes relate to memory, loss, but also images of remarkable beauty, such as those of peacock feathers. In this series his magnificent daguerreotypes play a leading role.
Installation view of the exhibition Adam Fuss A Survey of his Work: 1986/2010 at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam showing at left, Untitled (1999, below) from the series My Ghost; at second left, Medusa (2010, below); and at right, Untitled (1999, below) from the series My Ghost
Consumed by the passion of unrequited love, a young woman lies suspended in the dark space of her unrealised dreams in Henry Peach Robinson’s illustration of the Shakespearean verse “She never told her love,/ But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,/ Feed on her damask cheek” (Twelfth Night II,iv,111-13). Although this picture was exhibited by Robinson as a discrete work, it also served as a study for the central figure in his most famous photograph, Fading Away, of 1858.
Purportedly showing a young consumptive surrounded by family in her final moments, Fading Away was hotly debated for years. On the one hand, Robinson was criticised for the presumed indelicacy of having invaded the death chamber at the most private of moments. On the other, those who recognised the scene as having been staged and who understood that Robinson had created the picture through combination printing (a technique that utilised several negatives to create a single printed image) accused him of dishonestly using a medium whose chief virtue was its truthfulness.
While addressing the moral and literary themes that Robinson believed crucial if photography were to aspire to high art, this picture makes only restrained use of the cloying sentimentality and showy technical artifice that often characterise this artist’s major exhibition pictures. Perhaps intended to facilitate the process of combination printing, the unnaturally black background serves also to envelop the figure in palpable melancholia.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 27/01/2020
The historian and art critic, John Ruskin, had a great influence in Great Britain not only on the Pre-Raphaelite movement created in 1848, but on the development of early photography in the 1850s. The leading Pre-Raphaelite painters, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown and their followers, wished to change the pictorial conventions laid down by the Royal Academy, and in order to demonstrate the transformations in modern life, invented a radically new idiom marked by bright colours and clarity of detail.
Pre-Raphaelite painters and photographers frequently made similar choices of subjects, and the photographers, particularly Julia Margaret Cameron, David Wilkie Wynfield and Lewis Carroll, were often had close links with the painters.
When painting landscapes, the Pre-Raphaelite artists answered Ruskin’s call, meticulously observing nature in order to capture every nuance of detail. For their part, photographers, such as Roger Fenton, Henry White, William J. Stillman and Colonel Henry Stuart Wortley, experimented with the new process of wet plate collodion negatives that allowed much greater image detail, and achieved similar effects. Although highly impressed at first by the daguerreotype, which enabled the eye to see tiny, overlooked details, Ruskin was nonetheless still very critical of landscape photography, which could not reproduce the colours of nature and in particular of the sky. This failing also gave rise to a major debate amongst photography critics.
In portraiture, there were clear links between the painted portraits of Watts and Cameron’s photographic portraits. By using special lenses and photographing her models in close-up, Cameron, achieved, with a glass negative, exactly the opposite effect to the clear image advocated by Ruskin, and her work was distinctive for the breadth of relief and contour, as well as the compositions evoking Raphael’s paintings, also a source of inspiration for Watts.
The painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti repeatedly drew and painted Jane Morris, a model with whom he was infatuated, and he asked Robert Parsons to produce a series of photographs, under his personal direction, which captured the fascinating presence of the young woman as effectively as his own paintings.
Just like the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Victorian photographers would turn to religious or historical subjects, finding a shared inspiration in the poems of Dante, Shakespeare and possibly Byron, and above all in the Arthurian legend made popular once more by Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate. From a formal point of view, Millais’ Ophelia, one of his most successful paintings, was a source for Henry Peach Robinson’s photograph, The Lady of Shalott, even though it had a different theme.
Finally, Pre-Raphaelite painters and Victorian photographers both liked to present scenes from modern life with a moralising undertone: hence She Never Told Her Love, a photograph by Robinson that was very successful when exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1858, William Holman Hunt’s painting, Awakening of Conscience, and Rossetti’s Found, a painting depicting a countryman who comes across his former sweetheart, now a prostitute in the city.
In the 1880s, Pre-Raphaelite painting would be transformed, with artists and writers like William Morris, Burne-Jones, Whistler and Oscar Wilde, into a very different movement concerned only with the cult of beauty and rejecting Ruskin’s concept of art as something moral or useful. British photographers, however, inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites would inspire the Pictorialist movement that flourished in the 1890s, encouraged by the writings of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson, extolling artistic photography.
Richard Nicholson (British, b. 1968) Peter Guest darkroom 2006 Courtesy of the artist and Riflemaker
I started my life as an artist as a black and white photographer. I spent many hours ensconced in the enveloping black and red safety light of the darkroom, listening to the sound of running water – a nurturing, womb-like environment despite the toxic nature of the chemicals involved. It was magical to see the image appear in the developing tray out of nothing, an alchemical process that never ceased to amaze me, a link to the early days of photography and the wonder that those first images would have generated. At that time the photography course at Phillip Institute (soon to become part of RMIT University) had 3 huge darkrooms; now they have one with only a couple of enlargers.
Working in those darkrooms did teach you a solid foundation for your art practice: for one thing, the value of developing a working methodology – choosing a good negative that you wanted to print, spending time with it, adjusting the enlarger to obtain optimum size and printing it beautifully – for in a good day I could only print one or possibly two negatives a day. Then there was the process of washing the chemicals out of the paper and drying the prints. The whole process taught you patience, precision and dedication to the task at hand so that the negative revealed in the print something else that might be present, some ‘other’ that photography has the ability to capture if you take time, are aware and receptive to this illumination. These disciplines have held me in good stead during the following years.
I still love analogue colour and black and white photographs. To me it is like the difference between an LP and a CD. The CD might have it all over the LP in terms of information captured but there is this ineffable feeling about an LP with it’s scratches and pops, it’s atmosphere. The same goes for an analogue print and it is something that you can’t quite put your finger on. I believe that there is still a place for analogue prints in the world – for the magical process, for their beauty, sensitivity and downright inspiration. Long may they live.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Riflemaker Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Richard Nicholson (British, b. 1968) Roy Bass darkroom, Michael Dyer Associates, Covent Garden 2006 Courtesy of the artist and Riflemaker
The End of Professional Photographic Darkrooms and Music Recording Studios
The impact of digital technology on print photography and music production is the subject of ANALOG at Riflemaker, Soho from 10 January 2011. The exhibition invites us inside the last of London’s photographic darkrooms as well as taking a visit to a working reel-to-reel music studio, courtesy of an installation by Lewis Durham of the band Kitty, Daisy & Lewis.
Richard Nicholson. “A Survey of London’s Remaining Professional Darkrooms 2006-2010”
1979. The year my father constructed a darkroom and introduced me to photography. I was immediately entranced by the printing process and cherished the long hours spent in this dark, private space; standing in the gloom of the red safelight, slowly rocking the print tray, watching the ghost-like image reveal itself through the gently lapping developer solution. As I experimented with the many formulas and techniques detailed in my father’s guidebooks, I often found the most interesting prints were the chemically stained accidents pulled from the bin at the end of a session. The darkroom became a bolt-hole for me; a private space where I could escape from the noise of family life. As I passed through school, university and various jobs, I often sought out a darkroom to escape from the crowd. But as I honed my skills – solarising, masking, bleaching, split-toning, hand-colouring – my prints began to attract public attention.
2006. I’m working in London as a photographer. I’m still shooting film, but digital is becoming ubiquitous. The photographic manufacturer Durst announces that it will no longer be producing enlargers. Annual sales have dropped from a peak of 107,000 units in 1979 to just a few hundred units in recent years. The darkroom has always been integral to my practice as a photographer. But for how much longer? Once bustling hire darkrooms have become eerily quiet, and London labs are dropping like flies. Joe’s Basement, Primary, Metro Soho, Keishi Colour, Ceta, Team Photographic, Sky – all gone. Polaroid has stopped making instant film and Kodak and Fuji are discontinuing one emulsion after another. The recently introduced Canon 5d camera has persuaded many diehard film photographers that digital is the future, and those who remain unconvinced are facing clients who no longer have the budgets for film, Polaroids, clip-tests, contact-sheets and prints. The darkroom’s days are numbered.
Against this backdrop, I begin to look at the darkroom in a new light. My enlarger (a handsomely engineered GeM 504) has been an invisible tool, but now it presents itself as a sad and lumpen creature in the face of extinction. With its long neck, heavy head and inviting focus handles, the thing has a human form which elicits sympathy – the surrounding matt black walls add an air of theatricality. Hearing tales of noble machines being unceremoniously dumped in skips when labs close down, I decide to document them before they all disappear.
I chose to photograph professional darkrooms because they are often shrouded in mystery; hidden behind the tidy glass facade of the lab’s front desk. As a keen printer myself, I was curious to see the workspaces of the master printers; craftsmen who had spent their working lives in darkness. The spaces I discovered were often haphazard and brimming with personal details; coffee cups, CD collections, family snapshots, unpaid invoices, curious knick-knacks brought back by globe-trotting photographers. These human elements transformed what might have been a detached typology of modernist industrial design into something more intimate and nuanced.
I photographed each darkroom on large format film. Working in total darkness, I carefully painted these normally dingy spaces with a flashgun, seeking to reveal the beauty of the machinery, and shed some light on the clutter stained with the patina of time. Some of the darkrooms were busy, whilst others were neglected (all attention being given to the new inkjet printer in the adjoining corridor). Many of the darkrooms were facing imminent closure. (The one with the slogan pinned to the wall, ‘I want to stay here forever’, was dismantled the day after I photographed it and is currently being converted into luxury apartments.)
Many of the iconic images of recent decades were crafted in these rooms. Mike Spry’s high contrast lith prints of U2 and Depeche Mode for music photographer Anton Corbijn, Peter Guest’s black and white prints of the Trainspotting cast for portrait photographer Lorenzo Agius, or Brian Dowling’s intricately masked colour prints for fashion photographer Nick Knight. Such commercial work is now routinely carried out in Photoshop and professional printers have had to seek out new avenues for their skills. The art market is perhaps the last bastion for traditional darkroom printing, but even this area is being taken over by digital machines – Lightjet, Lambda, and Chromira printers. But suddenly there is a resurgence of interest in analog processes amongst younger photographers who were brought up on digital. Left cold by the clinical nature of the virtual workspace, they seek depth and authenticity via the chemical ambience of the traditional darkroom. Alternative processes from the early history of photography are being rediscovered, Polaroid instant film has been relaunched, and the craze for poorly engineered Russian and Chinese film cameras (Lomo, Holga, Diana etc) continues unabated.
I wonder at this enthusiasm. Like many committed film photographers, I experienced a belated epiphany when I finally switched to digital. My darkroom skills were easily transferred to the digital realm, and I soon discovered that Photoshop offered creative printmaking possibilities that far exceeded what I could achieve in the darkroom. Whilst I don’t miss the chemistry of the darkroom – much of it highly toxic – I do miss the aura of the red safelight and the soothing sound of running water. I miss the excited sense of performance when making a complicated print (there’s no ‘undo’ button in the darkroom), and the physicality of dodging and burning – the manual shaping of the light. With film I had a network of contacts across London and felt embedded in the city, whereas with digital I feel disembodied. The history of photography is young and fast moving. The darkroom era was short lived. This collection of images represents its apotheosis.”
Richard Nicholson, November 2010
I would like to thank all the printers who kindly allowed me to photograph their darkrooms.
Nicholson, Richard. “A Survey of London’s Remaining Professional Darkrooms 2006-2010,” in Taylor, Tot (ed.,). ANALOG: trends in sound and picture book. London: Riflemaker, 2011, pp. 17-19. ISBN 978-0-9563571-6-8.
Richard Nicholson (British, b. 1968) Roy Snell darkroom, Earlsfield 2006 Courtesy of the artist and Riflemaker
Richard Nicholson (British, b. 1968) Gordon Bishop Associates, Paddington Street 2006 Courtesy of the artist and Riflemaker
The Riflemaker Gallery 79 Beak Street, Regent Street, London W1
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Skegness Beach, Lincolnshire, 12th August 2007 from the series We English 2007
Being an ex-pat English these photographs have a very special resonance for me. They are beautifully visualised and resolved photographs that do not rely too heavily on the artist’s conceptualisation of landscape (the ever present hand of the artist) in the construction of narrative within the picture plane.
In other words the artist allows the image to speak for itself, “a sensitive, resolved response to scenes of ordinary people and how they inhabit and utilise the spaces around them,” with the layering of meaning, the back stories (boundaries, sites of contestation, notions of identity and colonisation of spaces amongst others) kept in balance with the sublime elements of the constructed landscape.
The photographs work all the better for this restraint and offer the viewer sensual images that are open and receptive, spaces that are invigorating and enlightening, Roberts has created a magical series of photographs that poignantly capture the essence of what it is to be English.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Simon Roberts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. The permission is much appreciated. Please click on the photographs to view a larger version of the image.
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) South Downs Way, West Sussex, 8th October 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Heberdens Farm, Finchdean, Hampshire, 20th December 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Rushey Hill Caravan Park, Peacehaven, East Sussex, 21st December 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Fantasy Island, Ingoldmells, Lincolnshire, 28th December 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Mad Maldon Mud Race, River Blackwater, Maldon, Essex, 30th December 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) The Haxey Hood, Haxey, North Lincolnshire, 5th January 2008 from the series We English 2008
“We English is the result of a year’s travel around England by Roberts, in a motorhome, documenting its landscape on a large format 5 x 4 camera. Informed by the photography of his predecessors Tony Ray Jones, John Davies and Martin Parr, and by the romantic tradition of English landscape painting, Roberts depicts the English at leisure within pastoral landscapes in a manner that is entirely his own. The work is beautiful, accessible and often heart-warming. This is the most significant contribution to the photography of England since John Davies’s ‘The British Landscape’.”
Chris Boot, Publisher, 2009
Artist statement
Initially, I was simply thinking about Englishness and how my upbringing had been quintessentially English. How much of this was an intrinsic part of my identity? In what ways was my idea of what constitutes an ‘English life’ or English pastimes (if there are such things) different to those of others’? My own memories of holidays, for example, were infused with very particular landscapes; the lush green-ness around Derwent Water or the flinty grey skies – and pebbles – of Angmering’s beaches. It seemed to me that these landscapes formed an important part of my consciousness of who I am and how I ‘remember’ England.
Seeking out ordinary people engaged in diverse pastimes, I aim to show a populace with a profound attachment to its’ local environments and homeland. We English explores the notion that nationhood – that what it means to be English – is to be found on the surface of contemporary life, encapsulated by banal everyday rituals and activities.
The same themes of identity, memory, history and attachment to place – of belonging – resonate throughout We English. To access these abstractions, I’ve produced a series of colour landscape photographs, which record places where groups of people congregate for a common purpose and shared experience. Since landscape has long been used as a commodity to be consumed, I focus on leisure activities as a way of looking at England’s shifting cultural and aesthetic identity. The photographs are rooted in a consciousness of my own attachment to my homeland and are an intentionally lyrical rendering of everyday English landscapes. They draw on issues of cultural geography and contemporary landscape theory, together with vestiges of English romanticism.
We English is not just a mode of social and anthropological commentary, although there are important elements of this in the work; more, it aims to constitute a sensitive, resolved response to scenes of ordinary people and how they inhabit and utilise the spaces around them. The photographs also explore the way in which landscapes can become a site of conflict or unease, where perceived notions of nationhood and quintessential Englishness are challenged, as diverse social groups seek to colonise shared public spaces. Notions of limits and boundaries re-appear throughout the work, reflected in the rivers, trees and hedges that create physical divisions, delineating and defining the limits of human interaction. Indeed, leisure activities often occur at boundary points: the edge of towns and cities, next to lakes and reservoirs, alongside footpaths and mountain ridges.
The project derives its title from the suggestion that photographer and subjects – we ‘English’ – are complicit in the act of representation. (During the five months that I travelled around England in a motorhome, people were invited to post their ideas about events I could photograph on a dedicated website and to share their experiences of living in their particular locality).
The project has been supported by Arts Council England, the National Media Museum and the John Kobal Foundation. A monograph of the photographs will be published in September 2009 by Chris Boot Ltd.
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Grantchester Meadows, Cambridgeshire, 23rd January 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Cotswold Water Park, Shornecote, Gloucestershire, 11th May 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Paul Herrington’s 50th Birthday, Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, 15th June 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station, Nottinghamshire, 16th June 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Blackpool Promenade, Lancashire, 24th July 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Chatsworth House, Bakewell, Derbyshire, 7th August 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Bradford Bandits BMX Club, Peel Park, Bradford, West Yorkshire, 17th October 2009 from the series We English 2008
Exhibition dates: 26th March – 6th September, 2010
Looks like a great exhibition – wish I was there to see it!
Many thankx to Claire Laporte and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Adam Helms (American, b. 1974) Untitled Portrait (Santa Fe Trail) 2007 Double-sided screenprint on paper vellum edition 2/2 101.3 x 65.7cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee 2007.131
Idris Khan (British, b. 1978) Homage to Bernd Becher 2007 Bromide print edition 1/6 49.8 x 39.7cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) Water Towers 1980 Nine gelatin silver prints 155.6 x 125.1cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Donald Jonas
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Orange Disaster #5 1963 Acrylic and silkscreen enamel on canvas 269.2 x 207cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Harry N. Abrams Family Collection 74.2118
Joan Jonas (American, b. 1936) Mirror Piece I 1969 Chromogenic print 101 x 55.6cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
Zhang Huan (Chinese, b. 1965) 12 Square Meters 1994 Chromogenic print A.P. 3/5, edition of 15 149.9 x 99.7cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Manuel de Santaren and Jennifer and David Stockman
From March 26 to September 6, 2010, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance, an exhibition that documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice. Drawn largely from the Guggenheim’s extensive photography and video collections, Haunted features some 100 works by nearly 60 artists, including many recent acquisitions that will be on view at the museum for the first time. The exhibition is installed throughout the rotunda and its spiralling ramps, with two additional galleries on view from June 4 to September 1, featuring works by two pairs of artists to complete Haunted’s presentation.
The works in Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance range from individual photographs and photographic series to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements; projected videos; films; performances; and site-specific installations, including a new sound work created by Susan Philips for the museum’s rotunda. While the show traces the extensive incorporation of photography into contemporary art since the 1960s, a significant part of the exhibition will be dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists.
Haunted is organised around a series of formal and conceptual threads that weave themselves through the artworks on view:
Appropriation and the Archive
In the early 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol began to incorporate photographic images into their paintings, establishing a new mode of visual production that relied not on the then-dominant tradition of gestural abstraction but rather on mechanical processes such as screenprinting. In so doing, they challenged the notion of art as the expression of a singular, heroic author, recasting their works as repositories for autobiographical, cultural, and historical information. This archival impulse revolutionised art production over the ensuing decades, paving the way for a conceptually driven use of photography as a means of absorbing the world at large into a new aesthetic realm. Since then, a number of artists, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sarah Charlesworth, Douglas Gordon, Luis Jacob, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Sara VanDerBeek, have pursued this archival impulse, amassing fragments of reality either by creating new photographs or by appropriating existing ones.
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled Film Still #58 1980 Gelatin silver print 20.3 x 25.4cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gift, Ginny Williams
“I’ve always played with make-up to transform myself, but everything, including the lighting, was self taught. I just learned things as I needed to use them. I absorbed my ideas for the women in these photos from every cultural source that I’ve ever had access to, including film, TV, advertisements, magazines, as well as any adult role models from my youth.”1
Cindy Sherman (b. 1954, Glen Ridge, N.J.) emerged onto the New York art scene in the early 1980s as part of a new generation of artists concerned with the codes of representation in a media-saturated era. Along with many artists working in the 1980s, Sherman explored photography as a way to reveal and examine the cultural constructions we designate as truth. Confronting the belief that photographs are truthful documents, Sherman’s fictional narratives suggested that photographs, like all forms of representation, are ideologically motivated. She is aware that the camera is not a neutral device but rather a tool that frames a particular viewpoint.
1/ Cindy Sherman, quoted in Monique Beudert and Sean Rainbird, eds., Contemporary Art: The Janet Wolfson de Botton Gift, p. 99.
Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time
Historically, one of photography’s primary functions has been to document sites where significant, often traumatic events have taken place. During the Civil War, which erupted not long after the medium was invented, a new generation of reporters sought to photograph battles, but due to the long exposure times required by early cameras, they could only capture the aftermath of the conflicts. These landscapes, strewn with the dead, now seem doubly arresting, for they capture past spaces where something has already occurred. Their state of anteriority, witnessed at such an early stage in the medium’s development, speaks to the very nature of a photograph, which possesses physical and chemical bonds to a past that disappears as soon as it is taken. As viewers, we are left with only traces from which we hope to reconstruct the absent occurrences in the fields, forests, homes, and offices depicted in the works in the exhibition. With this condition in mind, many artists, among them James Casebere, Spencer Finch, Ori Gersht, Roni Horn, Luisa Lambri, An-My Lê, Sally Mann, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, have turned to empty spaces in landscape and architecture, creating poetic reflections on time’s inexorable passing and insisting on the importance of remembrance and memorialisation.
“A good work of art can never be read in one way. My work is full of contradictions. An artwork is open – it is the spectators looking at the work who make the piece, using their own background. A lamp in my work might make you think of a police interrogation, but it’s also religious, like a candle. At the same time it alludes to a precious painting, with a single light shining on it. There are many way of looking at the work. It has to be ‘unfocused’ somehow so that everyone can recognize something of their own self when viewing it.”1
The power of photography to recall the past has inspired many contemporary artists to use photographs to revisit the experience of historical events. In so doing, artists reconsider the photograph itself as an object imbued with history. They became aware that using the medium of photography would lend the elements of specificity and truth to their work.
Since the late 1960s, Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris) has worked with photographs collected from ordinary and often ephemeral sources, endowing the commonplace with significance. Rather than taking original photographs to use in his installations, he often finds and rephotographs everyday documents – passport photographs, school portraits, newspaper pictures, and family albums – to memorialise everyday people. Boltanski seeks to create an art that is indistinguishable from life and has said, “The fascinating moment for me is when the spectator hasn’t registered the art connection, and the longer I can delay this association the better.”2 By appropriating mementos of other people’s lives and placing them in an art context, Boltanski explores the power of photography to transcend individual identity and to function instead as a witness to collective rituals and shared cultural memories.
At once personal and universal in reference, Boltanski’s work serves as a monument to the dead, hinting at the Holocaust without naming it. Within this haunting environment, Boltanski intermingles emotion and history, sentimentality and profundity.
Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition
1/ Christian Boltanski, “Tamar Garb in conversation with Christian Boltanski,” in Christian Boltanski (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), p. 24. 2/ “Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness”
Documentation and Reiteration
Since at least the early 1970s, photographic documentation, including film and video, has served as an important complement to the art of live performance, often setting the conditions by which performances are staged and sometimes obviating the need for a live audience altogether. Through an ironic reversal, artworks that revolved around singular moments in time have often come to rely on the permanence of images to transmit their meaning and sometimes even the very fact of their existence. For many artists, these documents take on the function of relics-objects whose meaning is deeply bound to an experience that is always already lost in the past. Works by artists such as Marina Abramović, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Joan Jonas, Christian Marclay, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ana Mendieta, and Gina Pane examine various aesthetic approaches inspired by the reiterative power of the photograph. Using photography not only to restage their own (and others’) performances but to revisit the bodily experience of past events, these artists have reconsidered the document itself as an object embedded in time, closely attending to its material specificity in their works.
James Casebere (American, b. 1953) Garage 2003 Chromogenic print, face-mounted to acrylic 181.6 x 223.5cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Anonymous gift
“Black and white had more to do with memory and the past. Color was too much about the present, I associated it with color TV, which was not a part of my past. I wanted the images to be related to a sense of history, let’s say, whether personal or social. And I think black and white adds a certain level of abstraction.”1
Since the mid-1970s James Casebere (b. 1953, Lansing, Michigan) has been carefully constructing architectural models and photographing them, yielding images somewhere between realism and obvious fabrication. His photographs are stripped of color and detail to evoke a sense of emotional place rather than the physicality of a place’s forms. Casebere is interested in the memories and feelings that are brought to mind by the architectural spaces he represents. The resulting works are dramatic, surreal, and remarkably true to life, embracing qualities of photography, architecture, and sculpture.
His tabletop models imitate the appearance of architectural institutions (home, school, library, prison) or common sites (tunnel, corridor, archway), representing the structures that occupy our everyday world. These models, made from such featureless materials as Foamcore, museum board, plaster, and Styrofoam, remain empty of detail and human figures. It is only when Casebere casts light on their bland surfaces and spartan interiors that the models are transformed. By eliminating the details, and taking advantage of dramatic lighting effects and the camera’s ability to flatten space, Casebere is able to transform familiar domestic spaces to find the extraordinary in the everyday. He asks viewers to rely on their memory to fill in the gaps and to create a context in which to understand his images.
Casebere stages his photographs to construct realities inspired by contemporary American visual culture that blur the line between fiction and fact. In this way, his images suggest psychologically charged spaces and have an otherworldly quality. The notion that these may be actual places seems plausible, but the lack of human presence leads us to wonder what has happened here. The viewer may imagine a human story within the abandoned spaces. Without people or colour, the photographs are about our own associations with these spaces and what they may represent.
When Andy Warhol created his silkscreen paintings of Marilyn Monroe in the wake of her death, he touched on the darker side of a burgeoning media culture that, during the Vietnam War, became an integral part of everyday life. Today, with vastly expanded channels for the propagation of images, events as varied as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the deaths of celebrities such as Princess Diana and Michael Jackson have the ability to become traumatic on a global scale. Many artists, including Adam Helms, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Cady Noland, and Anri Sala, have reexamined the strategy of image appropriation Warhol pioneered, attending closely to the ways political conflict can take on global significance. At the same time, photography has altered, or as some theorists argue, completely reconfigured our sense of personal memory. From birth to death, all aspects of our lives are reconstituted as images alongside our own experience of them. This repetition, which is mirrored in the very technology of the photographic medium, effectively produces an alternate reality in representation that, especially when coping with traumatic events, can take on the force of the uncanny. Artists such as Stan Douglas, Anthony Goicolea, Sarah Anne Johnson, Jeff Wall, and Gillian Wearing exploit this effect, constructing fictional scenarios in which the pains and pleasures of personal experience return with eerie and foreboding qualities.
Press release from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website [Online] Cited 22/08/2010 no longer available online
Gillian Wearing (British, b. 1963) Self-Portrait at Three Years Old 2004 Chromogenic print 182 x 122cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Purchased with funds contributed by the International Directors Council and Executive Committee Members: Ruth Baum, Edythe Broad, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May Engelberg, Shirley Fiterman, Nicki Harris, Dakis Joannou, Rachel Lehmann, Linda Macklowe, Peter Norton, Tonino Perna, Elizabeth Richebourg Rea, Mortim
“I taught myself to use a camera – it’s not very difficult to use a camera, but I never bothered looking at any textbooks on how to make a picture. I had a much more casual relation to it. For me at the time it was much more about the process rather than the results.”1
Photography has not only profoundly impacted our understanding of historical events, it has also changed the way we remember our personal histories. Beginning at birth, all aspects of our lives are recorded as images alongside our own experiences of them. These parallel recording devices, the camera and personal memory, produce alternate realities that may sometimes be synchronised but at other times are askew.
Gillian Wearing (b. 1963, Birmingham, England) uses masks as a central theme in her videos and photographs. The masks, which range from literal disguises to voice dubbing, conceal the identities of her subjects and free them to reveal intimate secrets. For her 2003 series of photographs Album, Wearing used this strategy to create an autobiographical work. Donning silicon prosthetics, she carefully reconstructed old family snapshots, transforming herself into her mother, father, uncle, and brother as young adults or adolescents. In one of the works, Wearing recreated her own self-portrait as a teenager – and in fact the artist considers all the photographs in this series as self-portraits. She explains: “I was interested in the idea of being genetically connected to someone but being very different. There is something of me, literally, in all those people – we are connected, but we are each very different.”2
To make the Album series, Wearing collaborated with a talented team (some of whom have worked for Madame Tussaud’s wax works) who sculpted, cast, painted, and applied hair to create the masks, wigs, and body suits used in these photographs. The elaborate disguises the artist wears, when combined with the snapshot “realism” of the original images on which they are based, create an eerie fascination that serves to reveal aspects of her identity rather than conceal it.
Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004) carries this role-playing further back in time. Confronting the viewer with her adult gaze through the eyeholes of the toddler’s mask, Wearing plays on the rift between interior and exterior and raises a multitude of provocative questions about identity, memory, and the truthfulness of the photographic medium. Wearing says, “What I love about photographs is that they give you a lot and also they withhold a lot.”3
Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition
1/ “Gillian Wearing,” interview by Leo Edelstein, Journal of Contemporary Art 2/ Quoted in Jennifer Bayles, “Acquisitions: Gillian Wearing,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (accessed January 25, 2010) 3/ Sebastian Smee, “Gillian Wearing: The art of the matter,” The Independent (London), October 18, 2003
Sophie Calle (French, b. 1953) Father Mother (The Graves, #17) 1990 Two gelatin silver prints in artist’s frames edition 2/2 181.0 x 111.1cm each Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation
Ana Mendieta (Cuban American, 1948-1985) Untitled (Silueta series) 1978 Gelatin silver print 20.3 x 25.4cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
Anne Collier (American, b. 1970) Crying 2005 Chromogenic print edition 1/5 99.1 x 134 x 0.6cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Tighe
Miranda Lichtenstein (American, b. 1969) Floater 2004 Chromogenic print edition 5/5 104.1 x 127cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
Sarah Anne Johnson (Canadian, b. 1976) Morning Meeting (from Tree Planting) 2003 Chromogenic print edition 73.7 x 79.7cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Pamela and Arthur Sanders; the Harriett Ames Charitable Trust; Henry Buhl; the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection; Ann and Mel Schaffer; Shelley Harrison; and the Photography Committee
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Virginia from the Mother Land series 1992 Gelatin silver print 76.2 x 96.5cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1071 5th Avenue (at 89th Street) New York
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Kelmscott Manor: Attics 1896 Platinum print Image and sheet: 6 1/16 × 7 7/8 inches (15.4 × 20cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of the artist, 1932
Attics often serve as metaphors for the space where memories reside. Here Frederick Evans captures the warm glow, the simple, rough-hewn timbers, and the striking geometry of the attic at Kelmscott Manor, the beloved summer retreat of designer William Morris (British, 1834-1896).
Morris, the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement – which valued Britain’s craft tradition and rejected its industrial revolution – drew inspiration from the architecture and workmanship of Kelmscott, designed and constructed in the 1500s. In 1896 Morris invited Evans to photograph the home, which he felt embodied the memory of Britain’s aesthetic past.
Platinum prints always have such luminosity. A Sea of Steps by Fredrick H. Evans (1903, below) is a knockout. I remember some beautiful platinum prints many years ago (1989) up in Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the touring exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment that were an absolute knockout as well. Pity he didn’t print them himself but they were still superlative!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Shen Shellenberger and the Philadelphia Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the last five images in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Kelmscott Manor 1896 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 3/8 × 4 1/4 inches (18.7 × 10.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Angers: Prefecture, Sculptured Arches of 11th-12th Century c. 1906-1907 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 11/16 × 7 7/8 inches (24.6 × 20 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Southwell Cathedral, Chapter House Capital 1898 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) View across the nave to the transept at York Minster 1901 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Durham Cathedral: West End Nave 1912 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 1/2 × 4 13/16 inches (24.1 × 12.3cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Ancient crypt cellars in Provins 1910 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: North Transept: East Side 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 7/16 × 6 inches (23.9 × 15.3cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: Staircase in Confessor’s Chapel 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 1/2 × 6 1/8 inches (24.2 × 15.6cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: From the South Transept 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 1/2 × 7 7/16 inches (24.2 × 18.9cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: East Ambulatory 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 5/16 × 6 11/16 inches (23.7 × 17cm) Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: 12th-Century Mosaic Floor at the Sanctuary 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 5/16 × 8 7/8 inches (18.6 × 22.6 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Although Evans indicated that this mosaic floor was created in the twelfth century, the surface surrounding the High Altar of Westminster Abbey was in fact laid in 1268. King Henry III (1207-1272) commissioned the mosaic from Roman craftsmen who specialised in the opus sectile, or “cut work” technique, commonly called “Cosmati” after a well-known Italian family of mosaic artists. Materials used here include blue, red, and turquoise glass as well as yellow limestone, purple porphyry, green serpentine, and onyx. Evans’s unusual composition privileges the floor, drawing attention to the intricate and abstract design of squares, rectangles, and roundels.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: East End, North Ambulatory 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 3/8 × 7 1/2 inches (23.8 × 19.1cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: Apse from Choir 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 7/16 × 7 1/2 inches (23.9 × 19.1cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Country Life magazine commissioned Evans to photograph the interior of London’s Westminster Abbey in 1911, while the church was closed to worshipers in preparation for the coronation of King George V (1865-1936) and Queen Mary (1867-1953). Although the construction and removal of temporary facilities relating to the coronation regularly disrupted Evans’s work, the more than fifty photographs in the resulting portfolio reveal only the timeless beauty and grandeur of the Gothic structure that has hosted thirty-eight royal coronations since the year 1066.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: Henry VII Chapel, Detail of Henry VII Tomb 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 8 1/16 × 7 3/16 inches (20.4 × 18.2cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: Tomb of Edward III, Mary and William 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 8 11/16 × 6 5/8 inches (22.1 × 16.9cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) York Minster – In Sure and Certain Hope 1903 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) A Sea of Steps – Stairs to Chapter House – Wells Cathedral 1903 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Wells Cathedral: North Transept c. 1903 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 1/4 × 5 7/16 inches (18.4 × 13.8cm) Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Ely Cathedral: Octagon into Nave Aisle c. 1899 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 15/16 × 6 1/8 inches (20.2 × 15.6cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Fr: Sec: Spine of Echinus x. 40 c. 1887 Platinum print Image and sheet: 4 3/4 × 4 5/8 inches (12 × 11.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
Unlike many beginning photographers of the nineteenth century who experimented with straightforward portrait or landscape compositions, Evans’s earliest trials with photography involved minute organic matter and required the use of a microscope. His complicated “photo-microgram” process allowed him to capture the intricate structures of objects including a water beetle’s eye, tiny sea shells, and this section of a sea urchin’s spine. Although classified as scientific rather than artistic imagery by the Photographic Society of Great Britain, this photo-microgram demonstrates Evans’s ability to delineate the magnificence of organic patterns and presage his photographs that depict the structural beauty of cathedrals.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Berberis: Plant Study c. 1908 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 3/8 × 7 1/16 inches (23.8 × 17.9cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Redlands Woods c. 1908 Platinum print Image and sheet: 6 × 4 3/16 inches (15.3 × 10.6cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) An English Glacier: Near Summit of Scafell c. 1905 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 3/4 × 6 1/2 inches (24.8 × 16.5 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Exhibition Highlights the Exceptional Beauty of the Platinum Process in Photography
A cornerstone of photographic practice during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the platinum print is revered by photographers and viewers alike as one of the most beautiful forms of photography, with subtle and lustrous shades that range from the deepest blacks to the most delicate whites. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present an exhibition of more than 50 works from the late 19th century to the present, showcasing outstanding prints largely drawn from the Museum’s collection of photographs. The Platinum Process: Photographs from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, on view February 27 – May 23 in the Julien Levy Gallery at the Museum’s Perelman Building, will include images by early masters of the process including Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) and Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), as well as works by skilled contemporary practitioners such as Lois Conner (American, born 1951) and Andrea Modica (American, born 1960), who continue to engage in this historic and painstaking process in an era noted for electronic imaging.
“The exhibition offers an opportunity to share this exceptionally beautiful form of photography with our visitors, some of whom may be seeing it for the first time,” Curator of Photographs Peter Barberie said, adding “the Museum is fortunate to have a particularly strong and varied collection of work by some of the truly great practitioners of this process.”
Unlike standard silver printing, in which particles are suspended in gelatin, platinum is brushed directly onto the paper, allowing artists to create a matte image with an exceptionally wide tonal range. Introduced in 1873, the process was enthusiastically embraced by the group of photographers known as the Pictorialists, who believed that fine art photography should emulate the aesthetic values of painting. The group included Evans, whose beautifully rendered images of Britain’s Westminster Abbey, York Minster Abbey and Ely Cathedral are included in the exhibition, and Stieglitz (American, 1876-1946), who is represented in the show by a portrait of his wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986), as well as a landscape that foreshadows his Equivalents series.
While encompassing works spanning many dates and styles, The Platinum Process highlights one of the Museum’s treasures, the 1915 masterpiece “Wall Street” by Paul Strand (1890-1976, see above), whose work was at the forefront of the modernist aesthetic developing in New York during the early 20th century. Strand used the subtlety of the platinum print in this work to emphasise abstract patterns in the long shadows cast by figures that walk before a succession of monumental windows.
Reserves of platinum were appropriated for military use during World War I, and its high cost led manufacturers to cease production of commercial platinum paper by the 1930s. As photographers became more engaged in social concerns, documentation and realism, the process fell into disuse. It was not until the early 1960s when Irving Penn, then a successful photographer for Vogue magazine, began to experiment with the long-forgotten technique and took the first steps toward its revival. A meticulous craftsman, Penn was delighted by the luminous prints and lavish tonal range he could achieve using platinum and began to make new photographs with this process in the 1970s. Penn and many of the other contemporary artists on view including Thomas Shillea and Jennette Williams followed Strand’s example, using platinum not for idealised pictures, but to capture nuances of modern experience.
Press release from The Philadelphia Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 25/07/2019. No longer available online
Robert S. Redfield (American, 1849-1923) Heloise Redfield at Mount Washington 1889 Platinum print Image and sheet: 6 5/16 × 8 1/4 inches (16 × 21cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of Alfred G. Redfield, 1985
F. Holland Day (American, 1864-1933) Untitled 1905 Platinum prints mounted to paper Image and sheet (overall): 10 1/16 × 7 1/2 inches (25.6 × 19.1cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1970
Katharine Steward Stanbery (American, 1870-1928) Untitled (Two Girls Playing Jacks) 1907 Platinum print Image and sheet: 8 15/16 x 4 11/16 inches (22.7 x 11.9cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, and with funds contributed by The Judith Rothschild Foundation, 2002
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) City Hall Park, New York 1915 Platinum print Sheet: 13 7/8 x 7 3/4 inches (35.2 x 19.7cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of the artist, 1972
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Washington Heights, New York 1915 (negative); 1915 (print) Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 3/8 x 11 7/8 inches (23.8 x 30.2cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Wall Street 1915 (negative); 1915 (print) Platinum print Image: 9 3/4 × 12 11/16 inches (24.8 × 32.2cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Man in a Derby, New York 1916 Platinum print Image: 12 13/16 x 9 15/16 inches (32.5 x 25.2cm) Mat: 22 11/16 x 19 7/16 inches (57.6 x 49.4cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) The Italian, New York 1916 (negative); 1916 (print) Platinum print Image and sheet: 13 × 9 5/16 inches (33 × 23.7cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Rebecca, New York 1922 (negative); 1922 (print) Palladium print Image: 9 3/4 x 7 13/16 inches (24.8 x 19.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Collection, purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Hauslohner (by exchange), 1985
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, born United States, 1882-1966) George Seeley c. 1902-1903 Platinum print Image and sheet: 11 x 8 9/16 inches (27.9 x 21.7cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, and with funds contributed by The Judith Rothschild Foundation in honour of the 125th Anniversary of the Museum, 2002
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) The Two Families c. 1910 Platinum print Image and sheet: 5 3/8 × 11 5/16 inches (13.6 × 28.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of William Innes Homer, 1986
Käsebier’s family members and close friends served as her earliest photographic subjects, and familial themes remained paramount in the images she produced throughout her career. This photograph of Käsebier’s two daughters and their families, taken in Woburn, Massachusetts, is a dynamic portrait of a multigenerational gathering. Curiously, Käsebier manipulated this print to emphasise the act of photography. In the original scene, the young boy and seated woman at right look downward at a wire-mesh food cover resting on a plate. These objects have been removed from this print, replaced by the considerably more fascinating camera.
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Mrs. F. H. Evans c. 1900 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 1/2 × 5 1/4 inches (19.1 × 13.4 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
In 1889, at the age of thirty-seven, Käsebier enrolled at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute to study portrait painting. Although the art school did not teach photography, Käsebier began using a camera at home to document her growing children, eventually favoring photography over other mediums. She established a commercial portrait studio in New York City in 1897, working to “bring out in each photograph the essential personality that is variously called temperament, soul, humanity.” This portrait features Ada Emily Longhurst, wife of photographer Frederick H. Evans, whom Käsebier befriended while on a trip to England in 1901.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877) Lace 1839-1844 Photogenic drawing (salted paper print) Sheet (trimmed to image): 17.1 x 22cm (6 3/4 x 8 11/16 in.) Support: 24.8 x 31.1cm (9 3/4 x 12 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Patrons’ Permanent Fund Public domain
Many thankx to Kate Afanasyeva and the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to reproduce the photographs from the exhibition below. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) Ferns, Specimen of Cyanotype 1840s cyanotype National Gallery of Art, Washington R.K. Mellon Family Foundation Fund
Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes The Letter c. 1850 daguerreotype National Gallery of Art, Washington Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Southworth and Hawes’ aspirations for their portraits went far beyond those of the average photographer of their day. Whereas most daguerreotypists, simply concerned with rendering a likeness, used stock poses, painted backdrops, and even head restraints to firmly fix their subjects, Southworth and Hawes were celebrated not just for their technical expertise, but also for their penetrating studies, innovative style, and creative use of natural light. They sought to elevate their subjects “far beyond common nature” and embody their “genius and spirit of poetry,” as Southworth wrote in 1871. “What is to be done is obliged to be done quickly. The whole character of the sitter is to be read at first sight; the whole likeness, as it shall appear when finished, is to be seen at first, in each and all its details, and in their unity and combination.”2
Among Southworth and Hawes’ most accomplished studies, The Letter is exceptional in its composition and mood. Most American daguerreotype portraits made in the 1840s and 1850s were frontal, bust-length studies of single figures who rarely show any kind of facial expression because of the often long exposure times. The Letter, however, is a highly evocative study. With its carefully constructed composition and tight pyramidal structure, it presents two thoughtful young women contemplating a letter. Through their posture and expression, these women seem to gain not only physical support from each other, but also emotional strength. Although the identity of the women is unknown, as is the content of the letter, this large and distinguished daguerreotype reflects Southworth and Hawes’ aspiration to capture “the life, the feeling, the mind, and the soul” of their subjects.3
(Text by Sarah Greenough, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)
Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) Saint John the Evangelist, Chartres Cathedral c. 1854 Salted paper print from a paper negative National Gallery of Art, Washington Eugene L. and Marie-Louise Garbaty Fund, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund and New Century Fund Public domain
In 1851 the French government’s Commission des Monuments Historiques selected five photographers to document architectural treasures throughout the country. Nègre was not included, perhaps because he was a member of the opposition party, but he took it upon himself to photograph extensively in Marseilles, Arles, Avignon, and Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, and in 1854 he made many photographs of Chartres Cathedral.
Nègre applied his growing understanding of light, shadow, line, and form in Saint John the Evangelist, Chartres Cathedral, and the photograph beautifully illustrates his willingness to sacrifice “a few details,” as he wrote, to capture “an imposing effect.” In addition, unlike photographers associated with the Commission des Monuments Historiques, who were asked to provide general studies of a building’s façade, Nègre was free to explore more unusual views. The statue of Saint John the Evangelist is situated high in the north spire of Chartres, several feet above a nearby balcony. Although difficult to see and even harder for Nègre to record (he most likely perched his camera on a platform), the view in his photograph succinctly captured what he called the cathedral’s “real character” and “preserved the poetic charm that surrounded it.”
Unknown photographer (American 19th Century) George E. Lane, Jr. c. 1855 Ambrotype National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Kathleen, Melissa, and Pamela Stegeman Public domain
Étienne Carjat (French, 1828-1906) Charles Baudelaire 1861, printed 1877 Woodburytype National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Jacob Kainen Public domain
William James Stillman (American, 1828-1901) The Acropolis of Athens 1869/1870 Carbon print National Gallery of Art, Washington Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel
J.G. Ellinwood (American, 1844-1924) Portrait of a Woman c. 1870 Tintype, hand-coloured National Gallery of Art, Washington Mary and Dan Solomon Fund
Clarence White (American, 1871-1925) Mrs. White – In the Studio 1907 platinum print National Gallery of Art, Washington Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel and R.K. Mellon Family Foundation Fund
Karl Struss (American, 1886-1981) Columbia University, Night 1910 Gum dichromate over platinum print Image: 24.1 × 19.9cm (9 1/2 × 7 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Untitled (Positive) c. 1922-1924 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of The Circle of the National Gallery of Art
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Untitled c. 1922-1924 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington New Century Fund
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Magasin, Avenue des Gobelins 1925 gelatin silver print, printed-out National Gallery of Art, Washington Patrons’ Permanent Fund Public domain
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Pioneer with a Bugle 1930 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Sid Grossman (American, 1913-1955) San Gennaro Festival, New York City 1948 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Anonymous Gift
Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013) Snow 1960, printed 2005 Chromogenic colour print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Saul Leiter
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C., 1966 1966 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of the Collectors Committee
The extraordinary range and complexity of the photographic process is explored, from the origins of the medium in the 1840s up to the advent of digital photography at the end of the 20th century, in a comprehensive exhibition and its accompanying guidebook at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. On view in the West Building, from October 25, 2009 through March 14, 2010, In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes Before the Digital Age chronicles the major technological developments in the 170-year history of photography and presents the virtuosity of the medium’s practitioners. Drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collection are some 90 photographs – ranging from William Henry Fox Talbot’s images of the 1840s to Andy Warhol’s Polaroid prints of the 1980s.
“In the Darkroom and the accompanying guidebook provide a valuable overview of the medium as well as an introduction to the most commonly used photographic processes from its earliest days,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art.
In the Darkroom
Organised chronologically, the exhibition opens with Lace (1839-1844), a photogenic drawing by William Henry Fox Talbot. Made without the aid of a camera, the image was produced by placing a swath of lace onto a sheet of sensitised paper and then exposing it to light to yield a tonally reversed image.
Talbot’s greatest achievement – the invention of the first negative-positive photographic process – is also celebrated in this section with paper negatives by Charles Nègre and Baron Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard as well as salted paper prints made from paper negatives by Nègre, partners David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, and others.
The daguerreotype, the first publicly introduced photographic process and the most popular form of photography during the medium’s first decade, is represented by a selection of British and American works, including an exquisite large-plate work by the American photographers Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes (see photograph above). By the mid-1850s, the daguerreotype’s popularity was eclipsed by two new processes, the ambrotype and the tintype. These portable photographs on glass or metal were relatively inexpensive to produce and were especially popular for portraiture.
The year 1851 marked a turning point in photographic history with the introduction of the collodion negative on glass and the albumen print process. Most often paired together, this negative-print combination yielded lustrous prints with a subtle gradation of tones from dark to light and became the most common form of photography in the 19th century, seen here in works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, and Gustave Le Gray.
Near the turn of the 20th century, a number of new, complex print processes emerged, such as platinum and palladium, gum dichromate, and bromoil. Often requiring significant manipulation by the hand of the artist, these processes were favoured by photographers such as Gertrude Käsebier, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.
The final section of the exhibition explores the rise of colour photography in the 20th century. Although the introduction of chromogenic colour processes made colour photography commercially viable by the 1930s, it was not widely employed by artists until the 1970s. The exhibition celebrates the pioneers of colour photography, including Harry Callahan and William Eggleston, who made exceptional work using the complicated dye transfer process. The exhibition also explores the range of processes developed by the Polaroid Corporation that provided instant gratification to the user, from Andy Warhol’s small SX-70 prints to the large-scale Polaroid prints represented by the work of contemporary photographer David Levinthal.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art website [Online] Cited 15/02/2010 no longer available online
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The Cloisters, Tintern Abbey 1854 Salted paper print from a collodion negative 18.3 x 22.1cm (7 3/16 x 8 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel Public domain
Although Roger Fenton’s photographic career lasted for only 11 years, he exerted a profound influence on the medium. Trained as a lawyer, he began to paint in the early 1840s, studying in Paris with Michel-Martin Drölling and later in London with Charles Lucy. But in 1851 he took up photography and produced a distinguished and varied body of work. He was a pivotal figure in the formation of the Photographic Society (later known as the Royal Photographic Society), garnering support from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He is best known for his 1855 photographs made during the Crimean War, among the first to document war. But he also made ambitious studies of English cathedrals, country houses, and landscapes as well as portraits of the royal family, a series of still lifes, and studies of figures in Asian costume.
When Fenton first began to make photographs, he generally posed figures in a fairly stiff, even anecdotal manner. But in 1854 he began to use figures to create a sense of tension at once intriguing and compelling. The Cloisters, Tintern Abbey shows this more dynamic approach. Fenton placed people in three groups, not interacting with one another but engaging in silent and solitary dialogue with their decaying surroundings. Tintern Abbey had, of course, inspired many artists and poets to reflect on both “the life of things” – as William Wordsworth wrote in his 1798 poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” – and on the transitory nature of life itself.
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) Fruit and Flowers 1860 Albumen print from a collodion negative National Gallery of Art, Washington Paul Mellon Fund public domain
In the summer of 1860 Fenton made his most deliberate and exacting photographs to date: a series of still lifes. Although the subject obviously had its roots in painting, his densely packed compositions are far removed from the renditions of everyday life by the Dutch masters. Instead, Fenton extravagantly piled luscious fruits and intricately patterned flowers on top of one another and pushed them to the front of his composition so that they seem almost ready to tumble out of the photograph into the viewer’s space. It is that very immediacy – the precarious composition, the lush sensuousness of the objects, and our knowledge of their imminent decay – that makes these photographs so striking.
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Cavalry Maneuvers behind barrier, Camp de Châlons 1857 Albumen silver print from glass negative National Gallery of Art, Washington
Platt D. Babbitt (American, 1822-1879) Niagara Falls c. 1860 Ambrotype National Gallery of Art, Washington Vital Projects Fund
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Terminal 1893, printed 1920s/1930s Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Martha’s Vineyard 108 1954 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Diana and Mallory Walker Fund
Dave Heath (Canadian, born United States, 1931-2016) Hastings-on-Hudson, New York 1963 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Howard Greenberg
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled (Car in Parking Lot) 1973 Dye imbibition print National Gallery of Art, Washington Anonymous Gift
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Providence 1977 Dye transfer print
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Summer Nights #2 (Longmont, Colorado) 1979 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Mary and David Robinson
Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) Dead Fish, Salton Sea, California 1983, printed 1997 Chromogenic colour print National Gallery of Art, Washington Anonymous Gift
Mark Klett (American, b. 1952) Under the Dark Cloth, Monument Valley, May 27 1989 Gelatin silver print from Polaroid instant film negative National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of the Collectors Committee
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Shipbreaking #10, Chittagong, Bangladesh 2000, printed 2001 Chromogenic colour print National Gallery of Art, Washington Fund for Living Photographers
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
The National Gallery of Art, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW.
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