“Empathy, feeling, clarity, atmosphere. There we have it. The resolve to go beyond the mere recording of a situation or place, the documentary, to create an atmosphere of belonging. Narratives beyond the frame. Photographs that evoke feeling, passion and pride even today.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 22nd October – 4th November, 2026
Curator: produced with the John Sadovy Estate Collection and family members Yvonne Sadovy de Mitcheson and Liza Jane Sadovy
*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS PHOTOGRAPHS OF VIOLENCE AND DEATH – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Onlookers on the corner of Lévai Oszkár (now Fecske) Street and Déri Miksa Street, by the disabled Soviet ISU-152 self-propelled gun, on which the following message was written in poor Russian: “не кушайте все!!! уже давай[те] дом[ой]!!!” (Don’t gobble up everything!!! Go home already!!!) Hungary October 1956
Freedom is the power, right, or condition of acting, speaking, or thinking without hindrance, restraint, or control.
Key dimensions of freedom include:
“Freedom From” (Negative Freedom): Protection or liberation from external oppression, coercion, slavery, fear, want, or tyranny
“Freedom To” (Positive Freedom): The capacity, opportunity, and fundamental right to make choices, pursue goals, express beliefs, and control one’s own life
Civic and Political Rights: Constitutional guarantees – such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble – found in democratic societies
Responsibility and Limits: True freedom is rarely absolute; it is balanced by laws and ethical duties so that one person’s actions do not harm the rights, safety, or well-being of others.
Practical Balance: In daily life, real freedom involves having ownership over your time, choices, and personal growth while remaining accountable to your community.
Freedom
Eleven short years after the vicissitudes and ravages of the Second World War where Budapest was heavily bombed by the Americans and the capital was destroyed during the brutal 50-day urban siege when Soviet and Romanian forces encircled and captured the city from German and Hungarian Axis troops; eleven short years after the mass migration of people all across Europe and the descent of the Iron Curtain; eleven short years after the imposition of a Soviet led communist-dominated puppet government where communists were placed in crucial ministries – “most notably handing control of the Interior Ministry and the secret police (ÁVH) to the communists, the use of intimidation, arrests, rigged elections (such as in 1947), and political manoeuvring to systematically eliminate opposition parties” – elements of the Hungarian population rose up in revolt against oppression.
For a few brief days the uprising was successful. Freedom!
Repercussions against the oppressors especially the secret police were swift and brutal.
But the Soviets couldn’t allow this to happen, an assault on their authority and doctrine, so they sent in the troops and the tanks. They crushed the uprising. 2,500 to 3,000 Hungarians (mostly civilians and local resistance fighters) died and about 20,000 others wounded; an estimated 200,000 Hungarians fled the country as refugees, mostly escaping across the border into Austria.
“In the aftermath and subsequent repression led by János Kádár’s regime, thousands were imprisoned, and roughly 220 to 340 leaders and participants (including Prime Minister Imre Nagy and Pál Maléter) were executed.”1
What price freedom?
Can you imagine having lived through the horror of the Second World War to then come under the yoke of another repressive regime, one that sought to control what you said, what you thought, how you acted, how you created and your ability to think freely about yourself, others and the world in which you lived. That governed – to lead, control, or direct a nation, organisation, or group by making and enforcing laws and policies – your actions through intimidation, violence, arrest and execution.
Wouldn’t you fight for freedom?
These visceral, febrile photographs by that wonderful photographer John Sadovy perfectly capture the fever of the uprising, with all its spontaneity and violence, in all its hope and despair. The photographer depicts “the atmosphere, the faces, unfolding events, and the stories of everyday lives on the street, with empathy and clarity.”2
Empathy, feeling, clarity, atmosphere. There we have it. The resolve to go beyond the mere recording of a situation or place, the documentary, to create an atmosphere of belonging. Narratives beyond the frame. Photographs that evoke feeling, passion and pride even today.
Now think about today, think about Ukraine.
I think about Ukraine fighting the same oppressor, fighting a country that has always thought of Ukraine as belonging to Russia. Their possession.
I think about the posting I did on the flowering of Ukrainian Modernism between 1919 and 1934-1937 (In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, November 2022 – April 2023) and how that movement was crushed by Joseph Stalin’s regime and the enforcement of socialist realism. Where all art had to conform to Soviet ideals. Where Ukrainian artists reigned in their creativity or were sent to the gulag or executed. A whole culture subjugated under communist rule.
And you wonder why Ukraine is fighting for its survival and freedom from oppression?
Then we have a human being like József Mindszenty (29 March 1892 – 6 May 1975) who was a Hungarian cardinal of the Catholic Church, who for five decades “personified uncompromising opposition to fascism and communism in Hungary”. Tortured, tried, sentenced to life in prison in in a show trial in 1949 he spent 8 years in prison before being freed during the Hungarian Revolution, only to spend the next 15 years holed up in the American Embassy in Budapest. I would have liked to have met this man.
Uncompromising opposition to fascism and communism.
2/ Timothy Foote, “A Big Story ‘Life’ is Made for”. Life, 12 November 1956, 2.
Many thankx to Luca Pokornyi and the Liszt Institute for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Where heroes are not forgotten there shall always be new ones.”
Phrase used to commemorate the 1956 Hungarian revolution and freedom fight
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana. The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense (Volume 1), 1905
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution
The date, October 23, 1956, marked the beginning of the ill-fated revolution that ended with the re-imposition of Communist rule and the flight of some 200,000 Hungarians to Western Europe and the United States. It remains a somber anniversary of heroism in defeat that continues to resonate with Hungarians across the globe.
Written by Harrison King. Narration by Dr. Nicholas B. Breyfogle.
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Freedom fighter, with a captured Kalashnikov rifle on his shoulder, climbing on top of an ISU-152 assault gun in Jozsef Boulevard, at the Corvin Passage. The Kilian Barracks is seen in the background on the right Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Freedom fighters atop Soviet ISU-152 assault guns at the Corvin Passage. The Kilián Barracks is on the left, and in the background, in a circle of curious onlookers, a Soviet IS-3 heavy tank that has lost its turret Hungary October 1956
The ISU-152 is a Soviet self-propelled heavy howitzer used during World War II. It is very similar to the SU-152, mounting the same 152 mm ML-20S howitzer on an IS heavy tank chassis. Since the main armament was mounted in a casemate, it required repositioning the entire vehicle using the tracks, which made it awkward to aim. To support more mobile infantry and armour attacks, it was employed as mobile artillery rather than directly engaging the enemy itself. It was employed in numerous campaigns and nations well into the 1970s.
Text from the War Thunder Wiki website
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Three men watching the events around an ambulance bus behind the Erkel Theatre from the corner of Szilágyi Street and Köztársaság Square. One of them is holding a Molotov cocktail Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) A captured D-44 (85 mm) anti-tank gun, with the Kossuth Coat of Arms on the shield, in front of the Práter Street primary school, a major base for the freedom fighters Hungary October 1956
The D-44 (85 mm) is a Soviet towed divisional field and anti-tank gun designed between 1943 and 1944 by F.F. Petrov’s design bureau at Uralmashzavod.
The Kossuth Coat of Arms (Kossuth-címer) is a crownless historical coat of arms of Hungary, named after Lajos Kossuth, Regent-President of Hungary during the 1848-1849 Revolution.
Dsdugan D-44 85mm gun at Georgia Veterans State Park 2016 Creative Commons CC0 1.0
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Truck transporting gunmen at Horváth Mihály Square, at the intersection of Baross Street and Futó Street (Budapest, the 30th October, 1956). The vehicle was probably heading for Köztársaság Square Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Insurgents under cover in Köztársaság Square with a 7-62 mm DP light machine gun model 1948 used in the Hungarian People’s Army Hungary October 1956
János Pál pápa Square (Pope John Paul II Square) formerly known as Köztársaság Square (Republic Square), was the site of the historic and bloody siege of the Budapest Communist Party (Hungarian Workers’ Party/MSZMP) headquarters on October 30, 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution, followed by violent clashes and lynchings.
Map of János Pál pápa Square formerly known as Köztársaság Square (Republic Square), Budapest
The 7.62 mm DP (and modernised DPM) light machine gun was adopted by the Hungarian People’s Army in 1948. Under heavy pressure from the Soviet Union to standardize to Warsaw Pact equipment, Hungary replaced its existing, highly regarded – but “politically incorrect” – Solothurn machine guns with Soviet-designed small arms. In Hungarian military nomenclature, weapons adopted during this standardization wave in 1948 were designated as the Model 48 (48M) series.
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Untitled Hungary October 1956
A rebel flag-bearer triumphantly signals that the state security agency headquarters have been taken and the secret police are ready to come out.
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Untitled Hungary October 1956
The work of Hungary’s state security agency – Államvédelmi Hatóság or ÁVH – created a climate of fear, and it was much hated. During the revolution some of its members were publicly lynched. Here some leave their headquarters after rebels stormed the building.
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Conscript ÁVH soldiers at the wall of the party headquarters in Köztársaság Square a few moments before the shots were fired at them Hungary October 1956
The ÁVH (Államvédelmi Hatóság, or State Protection Authority) was the brutal secret police force of the People’s Republic of Hungary from 1945 to 1956. They maintained power through mass surveillance, political purges, show trials (such as those of László Rajk and József Mindszenty), torture, and forced labour camps like Recsk.
On October 23-25, 1956, ÁVH guards and rooftop snipers opened fire on peaceful student and civic protesters gathered at the Radio Building and outside the Parliament Building in Budapest, triggering an armed uprising.
During the revolution, angry crowds, local militias (such as József Dudás’ group), and defecting Hungarian soldiers hunted down, disarmed, and attacked ÁVH personnel. Some members were lynched or executed on the spot, while student and worker councils tried to place others into protective custody to prevent massacres.
Text from various sources
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Conscript ÁVH soldiers at the wall of the party headquarters in Köztársaság Square Hungary October 1956
The second of a series of shots showing an execution at close range. All those pictured were killed, except the man in the upper right corner, who was protesting his innocence.
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Cardinal and Prince-Primate József Mindszenty, who was released during the revolution, receives representatives of the Hungarian and foreign press in the courtyard of the Primate’s Palace in Úri Street. On the left, Pál Szőke, one of the organisers of the newly-formed Smallholders’ Party; behind Mindszenty’s left shoulder, János Tóth, former parish priest of the Regnum Marianum Church Hungary October 1956
József Mindszenty (29 March 1892 – 6 May 1975) was a Hungarian cardinal of the Catholic Church who served as Archbishop of Esztergom and leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary from 1945 to 1973. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for five decades “he personified uncompromising opposition to fascism and communism in Hungary”.
During World War II, Mindszenty was imprisoned by the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party. After the war, he opposed communism and communist persecution in his country. As a result, he was tortured and given a life sentence in a 1949 show trial that generated worldwide condemnation, including a United Nations resolution.
After eight years in prison, Mindszenty was freed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and granted political asylum by the United States embassy in Budapest. He lived there for the next fifteen years. He was finally allowed to leave the country in 1971, and died in exile in 1975 in Vienna, Austria.
His cause for sainthood was opened in 1993 and Pope Francis declared him Venerable in 2019.
Marking the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the Liszt Institute London presents a new selection of works by Czech-born British photojournalist, John Sadovy (1925-2010), in collaboration with John Sadovy Estate Collection and Sadovy’s daughters, Yvonne Sadovy de Mitcheson and Liza Jane Sadovy.
John Sadovy was on assignment to cover the events of the Revolution by the American Life Magazine as a freelance photojournalist in Budapest. Having spent only four days in Hungary between the 29th October and the 1st November, primarily in Budapest and also at the Hungarian-Austrian border, he produced nearly 700 photographs.
Sadovy’s photographs were published in Life Magazine on the 12th November 1956 and distributed internationally, soon after earning him wide international acclaim, including the prestigious 1957 Robert Capa Gold Medal, The Art Directors’ Club Medal, The National Press Photographers’ Association, and Encyclopaedia Britannica. His images capture the dramatic violence of the Revolution, while depicting the atmosphere, the faces, unfolding events, and the stories of everyday lives on the street, with empathy and clarity.
“They’re what all popular revolutions are about: violence, bravery, hatred of oppressors.”
~ Timothy Foote, “A Big Story ‘Life’ is Made for”. Life, 12 November 1956, 2.
Born on a farm in the small village of Písek, Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) and destined to be a farmer himself, John Sadovy had always dreamed of becoming a photographer. In 1939, he left home and eventually joined the 8th Polish Army in Italy under British Allied Forces Command. After the end of World War Two, when given the choice between returning to Písek or going to the United Kingdom, he chose the latter and arrived to England with very little with him – including his camera bought in Italy – and without speaking the language. He ended up in London, where he married and had two children. Sadovy became a very successful photojournalist, working as a correspondent for Life, Time, Picture Post and Vogue, as well as covering conflict, political events and celebrities. He is best known for his coverage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which affected the way the world saw the events in Hungary, however this is but a fraction of his life’s oeuvre.
Join us for the grand opening of the exhibition on 22 October. The evening will begin with a panel discussion featuring Dr Yvonne Sadovy de Mitcheson, one of Sadovy’s daughters; Dr Max Houghton, writer, curator and Course Leader of the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography programme at London College of Communication; Eva Norton, historian and educator; and Botond Zákonyi, Director of the Liszt Institute, Hungarian Cultural Centre London.
The panel will explore the role of photojournalism in shaping collective memory and public understanding of historic events. Focusing on Sadovy’s iconic photographs of the brief uprising, the discussion will consider how press images can preserve events that might otherwise be forgotten or distorted for political purposes. Together, the exhibition and panel will highlight the enduring significance of photojournalism within a contemporary context, while reflecting on the power of images to document history and influence public perception.
“A year ago, I may not have heard of Sadovy nor seen any of his work. Now, however, having worked with his intensely dramatic photographs of the 1956 Revolution, I do not believe I will ever forget them.”
~ Colin Ford, CBE, 2016
Text from the Liszt Institute London website
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Hungarians in the yard of the Traiskirchen refugee camp Hungary October 1956
NB. Traiskirchen refugee camp is outside Vienna, Austria, so the location may be incorrect.
The Traiskirchen refugee camp (officially the Bundesbetreuungsstelle für Asylwerber) is Austria’s largest and oldest reception centre for asylum seekers.
Traiskirchen is the home of the largest refugee camp in Austria and one of the largest of these camps in the EU. The refugee camp is based in the centre of Traiskirchen on the area of the former Imperial Artillery Cadet School which was built in 1900.
The buildings were first used by the government as a refugee camp between 1956 and 1960. The camp was first used as a shelter for Hungarian refugees, who had left their country as a result of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956. 113,810 people came to Austria on the 5th of November, and 6,000 were taken to the camp in Traiskirchen.
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) A Soviet soldier killed in action in József Boulevard, at the corner of Práter Street. The body was sprinkled with lime to avoid the risk of contamination Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Insurgents with a ‘flag with a hole’ symbol of the revolution Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Red Cross workers in Köztársaság Square Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) After the occupation of the party headquarters, two armed insurgents pose through the slit of the “flag with a hole” that has become a symbol of the revolution. The man on the right is holding a submachine gun with a drum magazine, the man on the left (Arnold Gerbicz) is holding grenades Hungary October 1956
Arnold Gerbicz was an armed Hungarian rebel who fought in the Csengery Street group during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest.
Following the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution by Soviet forces, Arnold Gerbicz survived and successfully escaped Hungary, ultimately settling in Manchester, England.
When the Soviet military launched Operation Whirlwind on 4 November 1956 to crush the revolution, armed cells like the Csengery Street Group (to which Gerbicz and his wife, Gabriella, belonged) were targeted. Facing mass arrests, executions, and heavy reprisals from the puppet Kádár regime, Gerbicz joined the exodus of approximately 200,000 Hungarian refugees who fled across the border into Austria.
Instead of staying in the continental refugee camps or migrating to places like Australia or the US, Gerbicz migrated to the United Kingdom.
For decades, the two young men in John Sadovy’s famous photograph – peering through the circular cutout of the revolutionary flag – remained unidentified icons. Decades later, historical researchers (working alongside institutions like the Committee of National Memory) officially identified Gerbicz after his daughter, Margit Stevens, came forward to confirm his identity and provide details of his life post-1956.
Text from various sources
The Csengery Street Group in the Siege of the Party Headquarters at Köztársaság Square
On the morning of October 30, the insurgents from Csengery Street—much like others across the city – heard reports that “ÁVH men were firing on the people” at Köztársaság Square. According to István Hegedűs, head of the district’s National Committee, a man named Steiner reported this to him; however, Hegedűs refused to authorize the armed men attached to the district committee to move to another district for any operation. The insurgents’ commander, however, no longer accepted such orders; under his leadership, the group rushed to the scene and took part in the siege of the Budapest Party Committee building. “Together with Sándor Horváth, we fired at the party headquarters from behind cover near the Erkel Theatre. I fired about 40 rounds, while Horváth emptied one magazine. [Antal] ‘Föcske’ fired from the ground floor; he had two magazines. [Jenő] Lengyel also opened fire,” testified István Huzián. Most members of the group also fired upon the headquarters from the direction of the Erkel Theatre. As is well known, tanks dispatched to relieve the party headquarters mistakenly aided the besiegers, who captured the facility in the early afternoon. No convincing evidence has emerged, however, to suggest that the Csengery Street group participated in any acts of summary justice against the defenders.
Eörsi László. “A Csengery Utcai Csoport, 1956,” on the Beszelo website Nd [Online] Cited 23/10/2026 (translated from Hungarian by Google Translate). Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) View onto Ferenc Boulevard from a damaged upstairs room in the Kilián Barracks Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) The crowd in front of the party headquarters in Köztársaság Square. Several people wave at Sadovy, who is taking photos from upstairs in the party headquarters. In the foreground, communist propaganda material is thrown on the fire Hungary October 1956
Exhibition commemorates the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution with award-winning photographer
From October 22 to November 4, the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London marks the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution with captivating images.
Although the Hungarian struggle against Soviet hegemony ended in defeat, this popular uprising marked the beginning of the twilight of communism in Europe – a process that, through the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
In 1956, numerous Western journalists arrived in Budapest to report on the events. Commissioned by LIFE magazine, photographer John Sadovy was among the first to enter the country; he captured several major events of the revolutionary days, a feat for which he was later awarded the prestigious Robert Capa Prize. The current exhibition presents these photographs, including previously unseen material from the photographer’s wider work.
The impact of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising is still felt today; its international legacy could be discerned in commentaries on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and in Hungary, in the outcome of this year’s parliamentary election.
Our shared understanding of these historical events – reinforced by images captured at the time – serves as an important reminder of just how fragile democracy is.
The exhibition is hosted at the gallery of the Liszt Institute – Hungarian Cultural Centre: 17-19 Cockspur St, London SW1Y 5BL and is open on weekdays between 11.00 am and 6.00 pm until 4th November 2026.
Press release from the Liszt Institute
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Woman spits in contempt on the body of a suspected AVO police agent suspended by his feet in Köztársaság Square Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) The body of a member of the Soviet security police, who was beaten to death Hungary October 1956
Probably a wider shot of the AVO police agent suspended by his feet (above)
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Three young teenagers at the corner of Üllői Avenue and Kisfaludy Street. One of them is carrying a small rifle on his back and has a bandage on his hand; the one in the foreground is wearing a cockade on his jacket Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Freedom fighter burying his face in his palms in front of the house at 36 Üllői Avenue Hungary October 1956
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Untitled Hungary October 1956
The photograph shows a groups with bicycles and children at a border crossing during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (around October 31, 1956) near Nickelsdorf, Austria, where Hungarian refugees fled across the border.
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Untitled Hungary October 1956
The image shows armed Hungarian freedom fighters and bodies on the cobblestone square outside the Communist Party headquarters on Republic Square (Köztársaság tér) in Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Armed anti-communist revolutionaries stand guard with captured or distributed weapons (including submachine guns) alongside the bodies of defenders and secret police (ÁVH) members who were killed or summarily executed during the heavy fighting.
John Sadovy (English born Czech, 1925-2010) Untitled Hungary October 1956
Liszt Institute London 7-19 Cockspur St, London SW1Y 5BL
Curator: Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography
1955-63: Beginnings
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) Dead Fish, Fire Island 1960-1962 Gelatin silver print, mounted on board Image/Sheet: 10 3/4 x 11 1/4 inches (37.3 x 28.5cm) Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Peter Hujar Collection Gift of Stephen Koch
Hujar found an unlikely elegance in this unpromising subject, discovered as he began spending more time in the early 1960s on Fire Island, off the southern coast of Long Island. The excavation of beauty out of decay points to Hujar’s early admiration for the wide-ranging work that Irving Penn had been publishing in Vogue magazine since the 1940s.
Large print label text
An empathetic eye
As many of you may know from reading Art Blart over the years, I deeply admire the work of the American photographer Peter Hujar (1934-1987).
With this exhibition we get to dive into the contact sheets of the artist which give insight into “the nature of his attention and the unique personality of each of his subjects.” They allow us, the viewer, to better understand the flow of Hujar’s creative process and the focus of his vision – the consistency of that vision, how he approaches his subject matter, his understanding of light, framing, presence – and the “rhythm of Hujar’s looking.”
I feel (a critical word) that Hujar approaches his subject with an open and informed mind. Using the experience of his many years as a commercial photographer he has the innate ability in his personal work to put the camera in the right place at the right time, to find time and time again what he is looking for in direct, honest, beautiful photographs of places, animals and people.
I look at the contact sheet for Caven Point, New Jersey, with David Wojnarowicz (1984, below) and observe that not one shot is wasted, that Hujar knows exactly his directorial language. He is an auteur with a recognisable personal style, recurring themes, and deep artistic control.
While less confrontational, more empathetic, more cinematic in the feeling of spatiality in the image, Hujar’s approach to subject matter is similar to a photographer of a slightly earlier generation, Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) who also ran a commercial photography studio, working as an art director, conceptualiser, and stylist before becoming disillusioned with the artificial demands of the commercial fashion world, then moving into mainly portrait photography.
Both artist’s know how to get the most from their subject matter letting the sitter – cow, horse, human, giant – speak of their place in the world, photographs revealing their inner spirit and energy. As Loring Knoblaunch observes, “As seen in these contact sheets, Hujar seemed to work best in a loose flow of time, where collaboration and connection were the variables that ultimately mattered to the capturing of a durable visual essence.” This is the embodiment of Hujar’s art.
Various texts insist on a sense of desolation (a state of extreme emptiness, destruction, or deep, hopeless sadness), fatalism and melancholy present in Hujar’s photographs:
“Woven throughout Peter Hujar’s photographs is a profound sense of fatality about the world. This bleakness in his art reflects both the abuse he faced as a child and his concern about the AIDS crisis which, at the time, only showed signs of worsening.” (Text from the Morgan Library & Museum Facebook page)
“Postindustrial Queens, windblown Caven Point, and burned-out, riot-torn Newark were places that appealed to Wojnarowicz’s and Hujar’s attunement to disaster. Their fatalism reflected the neglect and abuse each of them had known in childhood, as well as their consciousness of an AIDS crisis that only showed signs of deepening.” (Large print label text)
“Hujar’s work has always been filled with themes of darkness, melancholy, and alienation, and the visual evidence in his contact sheets reinforces those moods, but with a quiet undercurrent of attentive resolve.”
I don’t feel this at all.
As a gay man myself, having survived years of abuse growing up and having lived through the initial AIDS crisis in the 1980s and survived (and lost a lot of friends), I don’t find Hujar’s photography at all dark or bleak in regards to family, growing up or the AIDS crisis. In fact quite the opposite, I find his photographs uplifting, inspiring in their humanity and empathy.
Fatalism … what the hell is that anyway? “the philosophical and psychological doctrine that all events are fixed in advance by fate or an overarching power, making human free will, choices, and actions powerless to change the outcome”
No. Hujar’s very photographs speak against this concept (that human free will, choices and actions are powerless) through what he chooses to photograph, through the snap of the shutter (this instant not another) and through his photographs of protests against the lack of HIV/AIDS funding. Human actions DO matter in the outcome. And as to alienation (a state or feeling of being cut off, isolated, or estranged from people, society, or oneself), Hujar’s very engagement with the world – through his city, community and friends, through so many intersections with reality, so many points of view, forming such a nexus of connections – obviates such a reading of his work.
Through these contact sheets, through Hujar’s empathetic vision, we become, as Marina Vitaglione puts it, “immersed in the rhythm of Hujar’s looking.”
That looking is always lyrical, joyous and very human.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. What we need now is an exhibition on the beginnings of Hujar’s artistic career!
Many thankx to the Morgan Library and Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.
Many thankx also to Loring Knoblauch and the Collector Daily website for allowing me to publish the installation photographs in the posting. Permission is very much appreciated. Her review of the exhibition is excellent and offers the reader numerous insights into Hujar’s artistic practice.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The changing of a pose, the tilt of a head, a move a little closer, a different angle of approach, a laugh, a moment of relaxation, a moment of anxiousness or wariness, another shift, and then bang! There it is. And of course, Hujar couldn’t know whether he’d gotten or not, so he often kept going. But for students of studio portraiture, this is the master class on offer in this exhibit – watch what he was looking for, how he was moving and adapting (quietly and unobtrusively hunting even), and where he ultimately found the pivot point where something boring became something unexpectedly vulnerable or compelling.”
“Hujar’s work has always been filled with themes of darkness, melancholy, and alienation, and the visual evidence in his contact sheets reinforces those moods, but with a quiet undercurrent of attentive resolve. He actually found what he was looking for more often than not, which is part of the reason his place in photographic history is secure.”
installation views of the exhibition Hujar:Contact at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York City, New York, May – October, 2026. Many thankx to Loring Knoblauch and the Collector Daily website for allowing me to publish the installation photographs in the posting.
Near the end of their time in Italy, Hujar and Paul Thek visited the catacombs maintained by monks of the Capuchin order in Sicily. Thek was fascinated by the site, which he described as a room “decorated with corpses”; soon after returning to New York, he would be making sculpture exploring the decay of the flesh and the body’s status as an object. The photographs Hujar made in the catacombs in, as he said, “about 20 minutes,” proved to be of outsize importance in his later work, forming the second half of his 1976 monograph, Portraits in Life and Death.
The group portrait is one of the most purely functional genres of photography: Creativity is stymied by the logistical challenge of attaining an exposure in which nobody blinks. Photographer Peter Hujar was attracted to the challenge. As seen in the markings on his contact sheets, he treated the group setting as a means of eliciting responses from selected individuals. In each frame of the eleven sheets in which Hujar portrayed those connected with the Stable Gallery, he drew squares to single out his former boyfriend, Joseph Raphael.
Large print label text
Hujar:Contact offers an unprecedented look into the life, times, and creative evolution of a master photographer. The exhibition features more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements from the Morgan’s Peter Hujar Collection, which includes over 5,700 contact sheets from throughout the artist’s career.
Peter Hujar (1934-1987) began filing contact sheets and assigning them job numbers at age twenty-one. His records make it possible to track his development – from two decades as a studio assistant (1955-1967), when he pushed himself to try work of every kind, into the late 1960s and his work as a freelancer in fashion, music, and advertising, through his mature period (1974-1987) as a fiercely independent and influential artist in the East Village.
Many of the contact sheets bear editing marks that indicate ideas about cropping and printing and contextualize the exposures Hujar ultimately decided to enlarge. The intense, interactive quality of his portrait work comes to life in contact sheets that read as intimate pictorial narratives, revealing the nature of his attention and the unique personality of each of his subjects. As Hujar matures and struggles, and as the character of his social world changes from the 1950s through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, his contact sheets tell the nuanced story of a lifetime, a community, and an era.
In October 1969 Hujar undertook a car trip to Pennsylvania and West Virginia with Jim Fouratt and the artist Ann Wilson. Wilson recalled gratefully that the journey was Hujar’s way of keeping her occupied after the sudden death of her husband, critic Gene Swenson, in a car crash. For Hujar, the purpose of the trip was making portraits of animals that he sought out along the way, including horses, sheep, and cattle. It would be another seven years before he pursued animal portraiture in depth.
The bond Hujar formed with Warhol “superstar” Jackie Curtis reflected, in part, their mutual rejection of familiar sexual identities. Curtis told The New York Times, “I’m not a boy, not a girl, not a faggot, not a drag queen, not a transsexual – just me, Jackie.”
This contact sheet comes from the session for a 1970 New Times magazine feature on New Yorkers who defined their historical moment. The print is from a separate session, which yielded a spread of full-page portraits of Curtis in issue six of Newspaper.
In November of 1971, the San Francisco troupe, the Cockettes, came to New York to perform at the Anderson Theatre. Peter Hujar photographed them in his Madison Square studio and on the street outside the theatre – solo, in pairs and trios, and in large groups. In all he shot over fifty rolls of film. Pictured here [below] is Fayette, one of the co-founders of the avant-garde experimental theatre troupe.
Many of these photographs ran in the final issue of Newspaper, which was devoted entirely to the group. Though the Cockettes’ shaggy performance style was roundly scorned by New York audiences, photographing them crystallised a theme – the stance of “genderfuck,” a madcap travesty of gender identities – that Hujar would explore in his work for the rest of his life.
At the turn of the 1970s, much of Peter Hujar’s paying work revolved around rock music publicity, including gigs ranging from concert coverage to record cover art to music magazine features. As documented in his contact sheets, Hujar frequently merged and swapped traditional gender codes in the presentation of the performers he photographed, such as Rick Derringer and Patti Smith pictured here.
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This spring, the Morgan Library & Museum presents Hujar:Contact, an exhibition exploring the life, times, and creative evolution of photographer Peter Hujar (1934 – 1987). On view from May 22 through October 25, 2026, the exhibition features more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements from the Morgan’s collection of Peter Hujar’s works.
Highlights include portraits of artists and performers such as Marsha P. Johnson, Jackie Curtis, Patti Smith, Candy Darling, John Zorn, and Ethyl Eichelberger, as well as Hujar’s creative collaborators and lovers, including Paul Thek, Joseph Raffael, and David Wojnarowicz. Hujar’s distinctive portraiture, alongside rare prints of his street photography, interiors, and landscapes, reveals the unflinching eye he cast upon a vast range of subjects.
In 2013, the Morgan acquired the 5,783 black-and-white contact sheets Hujar possessed at the time of his death, along with two notebooks, or “job books,” in which he recorded his photographic assignments and personal projects from 1954 until 1985. Together, these materials provide a detailed record of an artist who left no written reflection on his work, yet carefully preserved the traces of his decades-long photographic life. Hujar:Contact foregrounds the material processes that structured photographic practice in the era of film and chemical printing. Visitors to the exhibition will be transported to Hujar’s darkroom, invited to study these small images with the same attentiveness and care that Hujar himself brought to them.
“Following our 2018 exhibition Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, which explored the full length and breadth of Hujar’s artistic career for the first time, Hujar:Contact turns to his creative process,” said Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “This exhibition advances the Morgan’s commitment to collecting and interpreting contemporary photography and to broadening appreciation for a medium that is both immediate and reflective.”
The exhibition elevates the contact sheet, traditionally a working tool, into an art object worthy of close visual reading in its own right. Each sheet reproduces an entire roll of film, allowing viewers to follow Hujar’s eye through a series of exposures. Many of the contact sheets include Hujar’s own handwritten notes, marks, and annotations, which indicate his changing approach to cropping and printing and elucidate the editorial decisions behind each final image.
“Contact sheets reveal an intimate history of Hujar’s habits, inspirations, and happy accidents – the intricacies hidden behind a final print,” said Joel Smith, curator of the exhibition and Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography at the Morgan. “Hujar:Contact illuminates the physical process that was central to his artistic practice.”
Reproduced at large scale on the walls are dozens of pages from Hujar’s job books, which provide the closest thing to a chronological account of his career. The earliest surviving page dates to 1954, when Hujar was just beginning to photograph friends and loved ones in New York. Over the following decades, the notebooks grew into a numbered record of hundreds of shoots, following the artist from his job as a studio assistant in the 1950s to his work in fashion and music journalism in the late 1960s, and ultimately to the independent portrait practice that defined his mature work in downtown New York.
By the mid-1970s, Hujar had become a central figure in the cultural life of New York’s East Village. Working primarily with a medium-format camera that allowed him to maintain eye contact with his sitters, Hujar cultivated an atmosphere in which photographer and subject shaped the image together. Visitors will gain a vivid sense of this collaborative process through the presentation of contact sheets alongside never-before-exhibited prints, unveiling how individual portraits emerged from a give and-take process grounded in patience and mutual curiosity.
Hujar:Contact is organised by Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography.
The exhibition is accompanied by an eponymous catalogue that offers an authoritative and visually rich account of Peter Hujar’s creative process, featuring nearly five hundred reproductions of his contact sheets. Drawing from the Morgan Library & Museum’s extensive archive of more than five thousand original contact sheets and two job books created between 1954 and 1985, the publication provides an unprecedented look into the artist’s working methods.
Critical texts by Joel Smith establish a chronology of Hujar’s contact sheets, presenting a portrait of an artist developing, experimenting with, and refining his practice against the tumultuous cultural politics and sea changes of gay life conveyed by the words “Stonewall” and “AIDS.”
Throughout his career, Hujar recorded more than a thousand photo shoots in his job books. A complete transcription and annotation of these materials by Olivia McCall lends the volume unique scholarly value.
Published by the Morgan Library & Museum in association with MACK, the catalogue is available for pre-order in the Morgan Shop for $70.
In 1971 Hujar was introduced to theatre impresario Robert Wilson’s company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, through the involvement of Ann Wilson, Robyn Brentano, and other friends. His first photographs of the troupe record their ritual-like rehearsal of the “seven-part movement” that figured in the productions The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969) and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973). Hujar’s constant profile-view perspective lends the session’s contact sheets the hypnotic regularity of a score by Wilson’s frequent collaborator, Philip Glass.
As seen in the central frame of this contact sheet, Peter Hujar often turned the camera over to others, inviting them to take a picture of him. Because he rarely made prints of these frames, it is possible that the gesture was intended as much to ease others’ nervousness around the camera as to produce a portrait of himself.
The 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Fair – the forerunner of the Pride March, from which this contact sheet originates – was notable for Sylvia Rivera’s historic speech in Washington Square Park, in which she advocated for members of the gay community who were homeless or incarcerated.
Peter Hujar’s famous photograph, “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed,” [below] printed from the top-right frame marked with a dot, appeared in the New York Daily News shortly after her death in March 1974, and in several other publications soon thereafter. Perhaps due to this wide public circulation, Hujar excluded the image from his 1976 book “Portraits in Life and Death.”
Before checking into Cabrini Health Care Center for testing in September 1973, Warhol superstar Candy Darling asked Hujar to make a portrait “for my fans.” The contact sheet reveals the most iconic still of Candy lying languidly in bed, surrounded by movement, laughter, and theatricality.
Hujar later described their session as a kind of performance, recalling that Candy was “playing every death scene from every movie.” He mirrored this cinematic sensibility in his composition and printing process, shaping the final image so that the dreary details of the room—fluorescent light, hospital bedding, a single rose – are transformed into an icon reminiscent of Hollywood’s golden-age portraiture.
Man and Woman portrays Hujar’s friends Robyn Brentano and Rick Brintzenhofe in a room at the home of friends in Briarcliff Manor, New York. As Brentano recalls, she and Brintzenhofe were on the verge of a breakup at the time. Between them hangs a poster of the famous Unicorn in Captivity tapestry (1495-1505) at the Cloisters. Hujar’s symbolically staged scene is anomalous in his work of the time, bearing greater resemblance to his magazine images of a few years earlier.
Hujar’s move into a large, low-rent space at 189 Second Avenue in the 1970s coincided with his decision to give up paid work altogether as he began to pursue more meaningful personal projects. As if trumpeting his arrival at the loft, in this contact sheet Hujar frolics and salutes the camera.
Hujar would live and work in the loft for the remainder of his life until New Year’s Day in 1987, when he received a tragic AIDS diagnosis. He quit abruptly thereafter, and even declined to catch up on his job-book entries for the preceding year’s work. He passed away that November due to related complications.
On a few occasions Fran Lebowitz invited Hujar and Vince Aletti to visit her family home in Morristown, New Jersey, and the three of them stayed overnight. Once, Hujar photographed each of his friends in the beds where they had spent the previous night, Aletti in Fran’s bedroom and Fran in her sister’s. The diaristic nature of the exposures looks ahead to the work of Nan Goldin, which Hujar would point to in the 1980s as a compelling next stage in the medium’s evolution.
The first page of Peter Hujar’s second job book begins with the heading “FOR BOOK” and the names of several dozen people he photographed for what would become “Portraits in Life and Death” (1976). Hujar’s friend Robyn Brentano, fashion editor Diana Vreeland, and artist/writer Joe Brainard did not make the cut. Of the finished book, Hujar told an interviewer, “In a sense, I’m still a fashion photographer. These people are chic, but in a dark kind of way. Most of them are unknown or maybe known to just a few, but they have all been creative adventurers and possess a certain spirit.” Perhaps he ultimately decided that Vreeland, like Andy Warhol and model Lauren Hutton, was too “known” to fit in. Hujar also appears to have striven to represent variety in his subjects’ age, personal style, gender, vocation, and disposition.
Joe Brainard was an American artist and writer associated with the New York School. His prodigious and innovative body of work included assemblages, collages, drawing, and painting, as well as designs for book and album covers, theatrical sets and costumes.
Peter Hujar’s engagement with New York’s downtown arts and queer communities is reflected in his photographs of fellow artists, writers, and activists, including Marsha P. Johnson, pictured here. Johnson participated in the Stonewall uprising and became one of the figures most closely associated with the movement that emerged from it.
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1977-80: Recovery
The term “Recovery” aligns with a period of personal realignment and stabilizing focus following years of emotional, financial, and professional instability. During these years, Hujar established a more structured rhythm with his medium, producing intimate, deeply felt portraits of downtown cultural luminaries, friends, and chosen family.
In the early 1970s a former colleague of Hujar’s at Harold Krieger’s studio, Roy Hyrkin, moved with his family to a remote farming area in Orange County, New York. Hujar, who could not drive, visited them when he could get a ride. Roy Hyrkin recalls Hujar’s rare mood of “delight” upon returning from morning walks with ten-year-old Joseph to photograph animals, including the cows Joseph milked at the dairy next door. Farm animals had been a constant presence during Hujar’s childhood at his grandparents’ house in Trenton, New Jersey. Friends who saw him photograph animals recall that he spoke to them in the same manner he used during any portrait session with a person.
Among the ways that Hujar expanded his approach to portraiture was by zeroing in on parts of the body besides the face. In Paris for the opening of a gallery show of his work in 1980, he photographed the feet of the young fashion designer Pascal Humbert (misidentified in Hujar’s job book as “Imbert”), as well as close-ups of his face and scarred torso.
The defining relationship of Peter Hujar’s final years was with David Wojnarowicz. When they met, at the Bar on Second Avenue in January of 1981, Wojnarowicz was writing poetry and playing music, and Hujar encouraged him to focus on his visual art.
In his job book Hujar distinguishes between two early sessions, “David W #1” and “David W #2.” On the latter date (seen here), he used bounced light that emphasises the volume of Wojnarowicz’s features and hints at an inner life that was as important to the portraitist as his outward appearance.
The eyes dominate in Hujar’s portraits of artist Kiki Smith, in which he employs a softened version of the chiaroscuro lighting technique he evolved a few years earlier. A variant on this photograph is one of several portraits by Hujar, David Armstrong, and Nan Goldin that Cookie Mueller used for “before and after” illustrations in her book How to Get Rid of Pimples (1984), with hand-drawn dots added by the author to the “before” image of each sitter’s face.
Postindustrial Queens, windblown Caven Point, and burned-out, riot-torn Newark were places that appealed to Wojnarowicz’s and Hujar’s attunement to disaster. Their fatalism reflected the neglect and abuse each of them had known in childhood, as well as their consciousness of an AIDS crisis that only showed signs of deepening. Assigned in 1983 to make a cover photograph for the Village Voice about gay dread and mourning, Hujar had enlisted Wojnarowicz as his model. Their shared experience of abandoned locales was formative both for their work and for their deepening friendship.
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Woven throughout Peter Hujar’s photographs is a profound sense of fatality about the world. This bleakness in his art reflects both the abuse he faced as a child and his concern about the AIDS crisis which, at the time, only showed signs of worsening.
It was with this in mind that he set out with David Wojnarowicz, a creative he had taken on as mentee, to shoot a cover photograph for a Village Voice issue on gay dread and mourning. The pair visited several locations in post-industrial Queens, windblown Caven Point, and riot-torn Newark that appealed to their eye for disaster. Trips to abandoned locations like these proved to be formative for both their work and friendship alike.
Text from the Morgan Library & Museum Facebook page
By the time of his final exhibition in early 1986, Peter Hujar’s health was in decline. He continued working for the rest of the year, but upon receiving a diagnosis of AIDS in early 1987, he quit abruptly, even declining to catch up on his job-book entries for the previous year’s work. Therefore, his final finished images, including these sensitive portraits of composer John Zorn, are dateable to 1986 by the very absence of detailed information about them.
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Hujar:Contact book cover
“Less a monograph than an exposed nervous system: strips of images accumulating into something restless and alive, all hesitation, process, and thought still developing in the tray. … Across the pages of Hujar:Contact, [the images] become immersive. … the experience is less that of viewing discrete photographs than inhabiting the rhythm of Hujar’s looking.”
Marina Vitaglione, Blind Magazine
Hujar:Contact explores the Morgan Library & Museum’s extensive archive of original contact sheets and job books made by the beloved photographer Peter Hujar between 1954 and 1987, which come together to form an enthralling visual document of the artist’s creative process. Hujar’s empathetic eye focused in on varying subjects – crowds of protest, damaged relics, farm animals – but above all he was preoccupied with making portraits of the overlapping circles of artists, writers, and underground luminaries he moved within in New York. Accompanying critical texts by Joel Smith establish a chronology of Hujar’s contact sheets, presenting an artist developing, experimenting with, and refining his practice against the tumultuous cultural politics and sea changes of gay life conveyed by the words ‘Stonewall’ and ‘AIDS’.
Throughout his career Hujar recorded more than a thousand photo shoots in his job books. These documents, which are transcribed and annotated in Hujar:Contact, illuminate the contact sheets, rich in never-before-seen images as well as the earliest iterations of Hujar’s most iconic works, including portraits of Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling, Gary Indiana, Fran Lebowitz, and Paul Thek. This volume provides captivating insight into a master at work, forming an immersive chronicle of Hujar’s poignant efforts to connect, through photography, with the creative communities that defined his life, outlook, and art.
If someone asked me who the two living photographers that I would most like to meet were, one of them would be Wolfgang Tillmans … and the other would be Sally Mann. Both artists produce work that has a social conscience, social conscience being a person’s moral sense of right and wrong, viewed as acting as a guide to one’s behaviour. In both artists’ cases this social integrity acts as a guide in the production of their art.
In this latest exhibition on Mann’s complex body of work built on years of personal reflection, reading and research the title is instructive, Macula et materia, which can be variously translated from the Latin as stain and matter; stain and substance; stain and spirit or, more poetically, “the blemish and the essence”. Personally I like the last translation which is particularly pertinent for Mann’s work.
In an erudite but anonymous piece of writing “Sally Mann. Macula et Materia,” on the diChroma photography website (see below) the author grasps the essences embedded within Mann’s photography, the stain and spirit of her work, that is, blemishes, clefts, black orbs and fragments, traces of history rendered present in our collective consciousness: knowledge of history, place, war, segregation, slavery, racism:
“Here, in Virginia and the Deep South, history and human memory lie still smouldering in the depths of the earth. Sally Mann’s images are crystalline impressions, imprints bearing these deep truths that she brings up to our eyes. They will live on through the centuries, and enrich our collective memory.”
What Mann does so well is that she listens to the passing of time and then inscribes an ode to what remains, the tainted blemish of the past re-inscribed in her photographs as an essence before our eyes – essence being that spark of pure consciousness and awareness that grounds our place on this earth, the silent (still?), timeless presence that flows underneath all time, space, place.
Mann is attuned to these vibrations of history, energy and spirit. She has grounded herself and her family in the place of the American South. She knows the region intimately, much as I would hope to know the stories and history of the city of Melbourne where I live. Her roots are there and she draws sustenance and inspiration from its history, the region’s blemishes in the continuum.
As the exhibition guide observes,
“The American South, a region steeped in tradition and mythology, occupies a central place in her imagination… The landscape is never neutral; it is permeated by a complex collective memory.
One of the strengths of her work lies in the interplay between the intimate and the collective. The photographs of her children belong to the family sphere. However, they question universal themes such as childhood, vulnerability or identity construction. Similarly, the landscapes of Virginia allude to American national history, despite being linked to Mann’s personal history and sense of belonging to that territory. In this way, the intimate and the political are inextricably linked.”
In this sense “knowing your place” has a double meaning, both knowing the place where you live / accepting your position or social status without trying to change it or question authority. “Historically and socially, it implies that a person should remain submissive or compliant to superiors rather than speak out or challenge the system.” Thus place – both territory (intimate) and tyranny (political) – is pertinent in terms of the history of racism and subjugation in the American South. The intimate and political inextricably linked.
As I observed in an earlier piece of writing on the artist’s work, “Mann’s sense of fusedness with others, both alive and dead, now and then, and here and there, leads to a temporal complexity bound up with the notion of history and collective memory. How she iterates such concepts in her sensual photographs “with affection” is at the core of her art practice: the discontinuity of life in all its contexts, made eternal.”1
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“From low to high doth dissolution climb, And sink from high to low, along a scale Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail; A musical but melancholy chime, Which they can hear who meddle not with crime, Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care. Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear The longest date do melt like frosty rime, That in the morning whitened hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time.”
William Wordsworth “Mutability” Ecclesiastical Sketches 1822
“A few signs, cosmic convergences, emerge in Sally Mann’s images, distilled like sunspots; brief, bright disturbances that alter the permanence of things, piercing and destabilising their meaning. A dark gash in the trunk of a tree, a bite mark, black orbs in the shape of bullet holes that pierce the image against a battlefield backdrop -these vivid marks are redolent of the words written by William Faulkner in The Sound and The Fury (1929). They speak of dark visions and plumb the horrific remnants of the American Civil War, of the crimes and violence perpetrated against minorities, of Emmett Till’s martyrdom on the banks of the Tallahatchie River, the great burnt swamps of the South, of segregation, slavery and racism. Here, in Virginia and the Deep South, history and human memory lie still smouldering in the depths of the earth. Sally Mann’s images are crystalline impressions, imprints bearing these deep truths that she brings up to our eyes. They will live on through the centuries, and enrich our collective memory.”
Anonymous. “Sally Mann. Macula et Materia,” on the diChroma photography website Nd [Online] Cited 02/10/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation views of the exhibition Sally Mann. Macula et materia at Kutxa Fundazioa Tabakaleran, San Sebastián, Spain, July – October, 2026 showing in the bottom image at left, photographs from Sally Mann’s series Virginia; and at right, photographs from her series Immediate Family
Installation views of the exhibition Sally Mann. Macula et materia at Kutxa Fundazioa Tabakaleran, San Sebastián, Spain, July – October, 2026 showing in the bottom image photographs from Sally Mann’s series Faces
Installation view of the exhibition Sally Mann. Macula et materia at Kutxa Fundazioa Tabakaleran, San Sebastián, Spain, July – October, 2026 showing from left to right, Sally Mann’s Lisa and the dog (1983-1985, below); Jenny Hanging (1983-1985, below); and Cindy and the Dog Statue (1983-1985, below)
Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of the most important figures in contemporary American photography. Active since the late sixties, she has built up a consistent and demanding body of work that primarily focuses on her native region of the American South, which she continues to explore. She has received many awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work is now held in the collections of major international institutions.
From the outset, Sally Mann has been part of a photographic tradition that pays attention to the materiality of the medium and its place in history. Self-taught, she developed an early practice based on the use of large-format cameras, which demand patience, precision and technical rigour. This choice proved decisive, as it structures her relationship with time, her subjects and the landscape, imbuing her images with a particular density that is uniquely Mann’s.
The Macula et Materia exhibition at Kutxa Fundazioa Artegunea offers a journey through the major series that define her oeuvre. Among others, it brings together At Twelve (1983-1985), Immediate Family (1984-1994), landscapes of Virginia (1992-1996), Georgia (1996) and the Deep South (1998), as well as later works such as Faces (2004), Proud Flesh (2006-2015), Delta (2016), Platinum Stones (2022) and Goshen (2025). These series demonstrate the continuity of the artist’s concerns despite the apparent diversity of the themes addressed: childhood, family, landscape, historical memory, illness, decay and corporeality.
The creation of the At Twelve series represents one of the most significant moments in her career. Produced in her native region, it features portraits of twelve-year-old girls photographed in their everyday environments. The images explore the transition from childhood to adolescence, a time of instability and identity transformation, without any idealisation at all. Mann established here a working method based on collaboration with her models and the use of minimal staging, in which domestic or rural spaces play a defining role.
However, it is with Immediate Family that Sally Mann achieved international recognition and also media visibility marked by controversy. Produced over a period of ten years, the series documents the daily lives of her three children on the family property in Virginia. When the book was published in 1992, it sparked an intense debate in the United States because some critics considered it to be a transgression of social norms regarding the representation of childhood.
From the early 1990s onwards, Sally Mann shifted her focus to landscape photography without abandoning her concerns regarding history and time. The series dedicated to Virginia, Georgia and the Deep South mark a decisive turning point. In them, she photographed places associated with the American Civil War (1861-1865), slavery and racial segregation. Far from producing a strictly historical document, she offers a visual meditation on the persistence of the past in the landscape.
Human presence is often absent from these images, yet history inhabits them. Battlefields, swamps, rivers and forests are photographed as surfaces charged with memory. Mann occasionally uses antique processes, particularly wet collodion, a 19th-century technique that involves manually applying a chemical solution to a glass plate. The process, creating imperfections, fogging and alterations, enhances the material dimension of the image, establishing a direct link with the history of photography. Chemical accidents thus become an integral part of the work’s meaning, suggesting erosion, degradation and the fragility of traces.
The question of American history, particularly that of the South, is central to these works. The landscapes photographed are associated with episodes linked to violence. Rather than depicting these events directly, Sally Mann suggests their persistence through topography and light. Her approach therefore differs from traditional photojournalism or documentary photography, prioritising a form of visual meditation on the layers of the past.
This reflection on time continues in later works such as Faces and Proud Flesh. The first brings together a series of portraits in which the face is envisaged as a territory for recording time. Proud Flesh, images of her husband Larry Mann, who suffers from a Muscular Dystrophy, an untreatable muscle-wasting disease, explores the body’s progressive degeneration, physical fragility and the enduring nature of the marital bond. The body appears as a place where time is inscribed biologically, reminiscent of landscapes marked by history.
Through these different series, Sally Mann has created a body of work structured around several consistent themes: geographical roots in the American South, focus on the physical nature of the photographic medium, exploration of the relationship between personal memory and collective history and, finally, contemplation of the passage of time. Her use of antique photographic processes is far from merely an aesthetic choice, but part of an inquiry into photography as a trace.
The exhibition Macula et Materia highlights this coherence. By bringing together portraits, landscapes and studies of the body, it demonstrates that themes in Sally Mann’s work are not compartmentalised, but rather participate in a single enquiry into memory, transmission and disappearance. The American South is not merely a backdrop; it constitutes the historical and cultural context for which the artist constructs her work. The history of slavery, the Civil War and racial violence are present as a structural reality whose effects extend into the present day.
Consequently, Sally Mann’s work is framed within both an American photographic tradition – paying attention to landscape and national identity – and a personal inquiry into family, the body and loss. By articulating these dimensions, she creates work that questions the very conditions of visual memory: how can an image capture that which is no longer visible? How can time be inscribed onto a fixed surface?
More than a simple retrospective, Macula et Materia helps us understand the continuity of a trajectory spanning more than five decades. Rather than taking a strictly poetic or symbolic approach, Sally Mann’s work unfolds as a historical and material investigation of territory, the body and self-image.
Immediate Family: Childhood and Temporality
Between 1984 and 1994, Sally Mann created this series dedicated to her three children: Emmett, Jessie and Virginia. Taken in a rural setting, the photographs show the children playing, injured, pensive or absorbed in their activities. The series sparked significant controversy upon its publication, in some cases because of the childrens’ nudity, and in others because of the viewer’s feelings that the approach presented a problematic staging of childhood.
Nonetheless, beyond the controversy, the series belongs to a tradition of family portraiture, questioning the boundary between private life and public space. It also reflects on vulnerability, the construction of identity and family memory because the images do not necessarily resemble spontaneous family photographs, as they are carefully composed. The children often participated in the construction of the image, in some cases inspired by classical pictorial references.
Childhood is presented here as an intermediate stage, situated between freedom and the nascent awareness of finitude. The bodies are simultaneously powerful and fragile.
A fundamental aspect of this series is the suppression of contemporary temporal markers. Clothing, modern objects and period details are either absent or reduced to a minimum so that the images acquire a timeless quality, making the children seem as though they belong to an indeterminate, almost mythical time.
Photography here becomes a tool for suspending time. It captures a precise instant while simultaneously inscribing it within an extended duration. In Mann’s work, childhood is not merely a biological period; it is a symbolic territory.
Faces: Portraiture and Finitude
In 2004, Sally Mann began her Faces series, featuring intimate portraits of her adult children. The faces are framed closely, often bathed in soft light. Long exposure times produce a slight stillness and occasionally an opacity in the gaze.
Departing from the narrative energy of Immediate Family, these portraits introduce a more explicit reflection on the passage of time. The frontal presentation of the faces alludes to certain ancient traditions of funerary portraiture. The model’s fixed stare establishes a direct relationship with the viewer. The focus is no longer on capturing a moment of childhood, but on questioning the permanence of identity in the face of transformation.
Photography acts as a trace and paradoxical device in Faces: it captures while simultaneously pointing to future disappearance. The faces are recorded with almost sculptural precision, yet they are also subject to progressive alteration through changes in light and exposure time.
This theme would continue in the self-portraits Sally Mann produced later. The photographer’s aging body, in turn, becoming an object of exploration.
Proud Flesh: The Body and Illness
In the series Proud Flesh (2006-2015), Sally Mann photographed her husband, Larry Mann, who suffers from a degenerative muscular disease. The images show a body marked by the beginning of an inevitable and irreversible physical deterioration: muscle atrophy, fragility and loss of mobility.
Rather than adopting a clinical documentary approach, Mann treats the body with almost sculptural care. Light underscores volumes, folds and tensions. The illness is not aestheticised but integrated into a reflection on human vulnerability and dignity.
Materiality as Thought
One of Sally Mann’s key contributions is the importance she places on photographic matter. Chemical runoff, stains and alterations are not defects to be corrected. They are part of the work’s meaning.
Using antique processes such as wet collodion acts in favour of the work, reinforcing the image’s materiality, underlining the material and unstable nature of photography. Chemical alterations become visible signs of time in action. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, her work reveals cycles: birth, transformation, disappearance. Each image captures a moment while simultaneously reminding us that all presence is transient. It questions the memory inscribed in places and bodies, transforming photography into a means of reflecting on the human condition. Photography somehow ceases to be merely a record of reality and becomes a physical object subject to chemical processes, accidents and imperfection.
This approach aligns her work with a pictorial tradition in which the material trace – the brushstroke, the drip, the impasto – is an integral part of the work. Sally Mann’s work therefore belongs to a photographic tradition that transcends mere representation.
The Influence of the American South
The American South, a region steeped in tradition and mythology, occupies a central place in her imagination. This duality is evident in Sally Mann’s work: natural beauty and historical violence coexist. The landscape is never neutral; it is permeated by a complex collective memory.
One of the strengths of her work lies in the interplay between the intimate and the collective. The photographs of her children belong to the family sphere. However, they question universal themes such as childhood, vulnerability or identity construction. Similarly, the landscapes of Virginia allude to American national history, despite being linked to Mann’s personal history and sense of belonging to that territory. In this way, the intimate and the political are inextricably linked.
Sally Mann does not seek to illustrate a historical or theoretical discourse. She creates open images, inviting meditative interpretation. Each image is the result of a lengthy and arduous process. This temporal aspect of production is reflected in how the images are perceived: viewers are invited to look slowly.
Sally Mann’s work explores the relationship between time, memory and matter. Through landscapes of the American South, the faces of her children, her husband’s ailing body or her self-portraits, she examines human fragility and the enduring nature of traces.
Goshen: The Zero Degree of Color
In the Goshen series (2025), Sally Mann quite literally pushes color to its furthest limits, even to its ultimate point of exhaustion and extinction. Here, color survives only as the residual idea of itself, a kind of afterimage or lingering trace.
The images of these abandoned places are haunted by the lives that once inhabited them. Everything seems to be slowly drained of its narrative substance, as though subjected to a silent hemorrhage. Nothing happens; things remain suspended, floating, in a state of dissolution.
The texture and almost pointillist density of the images evoke both the earliest autochromes and Turner’s Pictures of Nothing: matter held in suspension, atmosphere, the density of air, the vibration of light. Barely an oscillation. Color is out of breath; it fades away without the slightest regret.
Reality appears sparingly before gradually withdrawing, and the image slowly slips toward a form of abstraction, ultimately resolving into a nearly monochrome image of faintly tinted white. The imperceptible final breath of color inevitably recalls the paintings of Robert Ryman, where the erased trace of a former image still persists.
It is here that Mann reaches the zero degree of color.
“While the photographs in this posting portray the cultures and communities associated with mining, the industries, towns and cities, the people and the landscapes what they don’t account for is the ongoing physical, psychological and emotional scars that the results of mining leave behind.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 23rd May – 23rd August, 2026
C0-curators: Diane Waggoner, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art and Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at Milwaukee Art Museum
Mining helps improve our lives in so many ways and yet the harm it causes the planet, the severe environmental degradation, indigenous dispossession and systemic violence associated with resource extraction is undeniable.
The phrase “the rape of the earth” “characterises the literal carving up of the landscape. Large-scale operations – such as open-cut mining – strip topsoil, destroy ecosystems, pollute water tables, and leave irreversible physical scars on the terrain. Indigenous groups, such as the Sámi feminists against mining in Sábme, use the phrase to describe how mining fractures the sacred, interdependent web of connection between land, humans, and nonhuman lifeworlds.” (Google AI)
The interdependent web of connection between land, humans and nonhuman lifeworlds running beneath the surface, hidden from view, that life force of the world and the cosmos that is so violently ruptured in the mining process.
While the photographs in this posting portray the cultures and communities associated with mining, the industries, towns and cities, the people and the landscapes what they don’t account for is the ongoing physical, psychological and emotional scars that the results of mining leave behind. Scars that riddle the earth’s surface as much as they do the minds of the people that love this planet as a holistic entity. You only have to look at Zig Jackson, Rising Buffalo’s photograph Indian Man at Kennecott Copper Mine, Tooele, Utah (2004, above) to understand what I mean.
When it’s all too late only then will we have realised what we have lost.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
. Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art, Washington for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer (American) Portrait of a California gold miner with pick and shovel c. 1855 Quarter-plate daguerreotype Plate (quarter): 4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in. (10.8 x 8.26cm) Case (tray): 4 11/16 x 3 5/8 x 3/8 in. (11.91 x 9.22 x 0.97cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Environmental impacts of mining
The environmental impacts of mining are significant. Establishing mining sites requires an enormous amount of construction, which often causes deforestation and loss of wildlife habitats and biodiversity.
Surface mines, which require the use of explosives and heavy machinery to expose materials near the earth’s surface, cause massive canyon-sized holes in the land and lead to soil erosion and degradation around surrounding areas. Mountaintop removal mining, a method of coal mining, uses explosives to blast the entire top of a mountain.
Surface mines create a huge amount of waste materials. Mines release harmful substances into the air and water, and can cause serious health issues if inhaled or consumed. Mines also release acidic water, which can kill marine life and make freshwater unsuitable for drinking. Underground mining produces fewer waste materials than surface mines, but they are risky for mine workers.
The mining industry emits carbon via transportation and energy use, and produces fossil fuels – the largest source of carbon emissions in the world.
Even after mines are decommissioned, they continue to impact the environment. Acid mine drainage occurs after mines have been abandoned, and results in heavy metals entering water systems and harming the plants, animals and humans that consume it.
Social impacts of mining
Mining can create employment opportunities, boost economies and provide investment for local development projects. However, mining operations that don’t respect human rights or protect the environment can cause significant harm to surrounding communities.
American 19th Century Shipping Oil – Story Farm 1860s-1870s Stereoscopic albumen silver print Image/sheet: 7.94 × 14.92cm (3 1/8 × 5 7/8 in.) Mount: 8.73 × 17.46cm (3 7/16 × 6 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon Public domain
James F. Ryder (American, 1826-1904) Atlantic & Great Western Railway 1862 Albumen print Image/sheet: 18.8 x 23.7cm (7 3/8 x 9 5/16 in.) Mount: 25.3 x 32.4cm (9 15/16 x 12 3/4 in.) Mat: 14 x 18 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Public domain
Thomas H. Johnson (American, b. 1821 – d. ?) Gibson’s Breaker, Rushdale, Del. & Hudson Canal Co., c. 1863-1865 Albumen print Image/sheet: 30.7 x 41cm (12 1/16 x 16 1/8 in.) Mount: 44.3 x 53cm (17 7/16 x 20 7/8 in.) Mat: 20 x 26 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Public domain
Thomas H. Johnson (American, b. 1821 – d. ?) Birdsey Breaker, Archbald, Del. & Hudson Canal Co., 1863-1865 Albumen print Image/sheet: 30.6 x 40.8cm (12 1/16 x 16 1/16 in.) Mount: 45.4 x 55.6cm (17 7/8 x 21 7/8 in.) Mat: 20 x 26 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Public domain
Andrew Joseph Russell (American, 1829-1902) Valley of Bitter Creek from Coal Mine 1867-1869 Albumen silver print 22.86 x 29.53cm (9 x 11 5/8 in.) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Union Pacific Railroad Company
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Savage Mine, Curtis Shaft, Virginia City, Nevada 1868 albumen silver print Image: 14.45 x 19.53cm (5 11/16 x 7 11/16 in.) Sheet: 19.53 x 26.83cm (7 11/16 x 10 9/16 in.) Mount: 31.75 x 37.78cm (12 1/2 x 14 7/8 in.) Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
Timothy O’Sullivan photographed men preparing to descend 900 feet into the mine.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Comstock Mine, Virginia City, Nevada 1868 Albumen print Image: 18.89 x 13.49cm (7 7/16 x 5 5/16 in.) Sheet: 18.26 x 26.99cm (7 3/16 x 10 5/8 in.) Mount: 31.59 x 37.31cm (12 7/16 x 14 11/16 in.) Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
O’Sullivan used a magnesium flash to illuminate a miner wielding an axe underground.
Thomas Houseworth (American, 1828-1916) Hydraulic Mining – Behind the Pipes, in the Kennebunk Claim, Birchville, Nevada County c. 1868-1869 Stereoscopic albumen prints Image: 7.9 x 20.6cm (3 1/8 x 8 1/8 in.) Sheet: 8.9 x 17.5cm (3 1/2 x 6 7/8 in.) Wikipedia Commons Public domain
B.F. Childs (American, 1841-1921) New York, Iron Mine [Michigan] c. 1871-1876 Stereoscopic albumen print Image: 7.9 x 15.9cm (3 1/8 x 6 1/4 in.) Sheet: 8.7 x 17.5cm (3 7/16 x 6 7/8 in.) Collection of Leonard A. Walle
Brainard F. Childs photographed a man outside an iron mine in Michigan. He’s dwarfed by its dark and cavernous entrance.
Brainard Fermont Childs (1841-1921) was an American 19th-century photographer best known for his studio portraits and stereoviews documenting the Great Lakes region, particularly Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Operating the Child’s Art Gallery in Marquette, Michigan, he captured extensive regional landscapes, scenes of early mining and shipping on Lake Superior, and local Ojibwe life. Today, many of his surviving albumen prints and glass-plate negatives are preserved in historical collections, including the British Museum.
Google AI
B.F. Childs (American, 1841-1921) Down the Franklin Tramroad c. 1867-1868 Stereoscopic albumen prints Image: 7.5 x 16.2cm (2 15/16 x 6 3/8 in.) Sheet: 8.3 x 17.2cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.) Collection of Leonard A. Walle
Dependent on precious metals from its inception, photography has always been intertwined with the natural resources that are fundamental to modern industrialised life. Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography is the first exhibition to exclusively examine how photographers from the mid-19th century to today have powerfully captured the effects of resource extraction on the land and communities of the United States. Featuring some 150 photographs that span 185 years, this exhibition focuses especially on the subterranean removal of the minerals and fossil fuels that power this country’s economy and industry. Together, these works demonstrate how photographers have drawn on changing technology and unique visual strategies to rise to the challenge of picturing these colossal industries.
Made for a variety of purposes, ranging from commercial boosterism and celebration of technical advancement to social documentation and community activism, the pictures in the exhibition shed light on how photography has revealed the costs of extraction and who benefits from its success. Divided into six broad, chronological sections that contextualise the complex history of photography and extraction, from daguerreotypes of the Gold Rush to large-scale, immersive photographs made in the last decade, Beneath the Surface highlights how artists have used photography to explore the relationship between extraction, society, and the environment.
This exhibition is curated by Diane Waggoner, curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art, and Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum.
The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, in collaboration with the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Malakoff Diggins, North Bloomfield, Nevada County [California] 1871 Albumen print Image: 41.59 x 54.61cm (16 3/8 x 21 1/2 in.) Mount: 55.88 x 71.12cm (22 x 28 in.) Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
F. Jay Haynes (American, 1853-1921) Granite Silver Mine, Montana c. 1880 Albumen print Image: 42.7 x 54.5cm (16 13/16 x 21 7/16 in.) Sheet: 43 x 54.9cm (16 15/16 x 21 5/8 in.) Mat: 22 x 28 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of the UBS Art Collection Public domain
Originally a studio photographer from the North Dakota Territory, Haynes spent most of his career documenting in pictures the development of the western territories. Commissioned in 1876 to make views along the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad, he traveled through the West until 1905, working in a railroad car equipped as both gallery and darkroom. Besides photographing spectacular views of natural scenery, Haynes produced an extensive record of the modification of the landscape by raliroad and industry.
On an 1881 trip to the newly created Yellowstone Park, via the new line of his railroad company employer, Haynes decided to pursue a commercial concession as park photographer. In 1884 he opened a studio and photography gallery in Yellowstone, selling to tourists prints of the park’s natural wonders, such as the Lone Star Geyser Cone. For more than thirty years Haynes served as the official photographer of Yellowstone National Park.
Merry A. Foresta American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996) on the Smithsonian American Art Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 21/07/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
West & Waddell (American, Bradford, Pennsylvania, active 1880s) Flowing Well 1880s Stereoscopic albumen silver prints National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon Public domain
Photographs of oil derricks document the rush that followed the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859.
William H. Rau (American, 1855-1920) South Plainfield Coal Storage, capacity 100,000 tons c. 1890 Albumen print Image: 43.5 x 52.1cm (17 1/8 x 20 1/2 in.) Collection of Paul Sack
Lewis Wickes Hine (American, 1874-1940) “A lonely job.” Willie Bryden, a nipper, 13 yrs old, Pittston, Pa., 1911 Gelatin silver print Image: 11.43 x 13.49cm (4 1/2 x 5 5/16 in.) Milwaukee Art Museum Gift of Robert Mann
Frank J. Schlueter (American, 1874-1972) Goose Creek, Tex. oil field 1917 Gelatin silver print, panorama Sheet: 19.6 x 150.3cm (7 11/16 x 59 3/16 in.) Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Public domain
Schlueter photographed the quickly growing Houston region in the first half of the twentieth century, retiring in 1964. Schlueter’s work was used by early oil producers in the region to document and promote their work
The National Gallery of Art presents Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, the first exhibition to exclusively examine the relationship between resource extraction and American photography throughout its history. Spanning nearly 200 years, the exhibition examines how photographers have approached the challenge of capturing the significant but often hidden processes and impacts of the extraction of minerals, coal, and fossil fuels and its associated industries.
Featuring 150 photographs by more than 100 artists, including Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Dorothea Lange, David Maisel, Gordon Parks, Mitch Epstein, Carleton Watkins, Will Wilson, and more, Beneath the Surface reveals how generations of photographers have utilised evolving technologies and distinctive visual strategies to document the industries that power and shape modern life. Beneath the Surface will be on view at the National Gallery of Art from May 23 to August 23, 2026, before travelling to the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.
“As a defining visual medium of our modern age, photography is an essential tool to capture and communicate our shared history,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “Beneath the Surface brings together a dynamic range of works to shed light on the medium’s intersections with a shaping force in American history and industry.”
The featured works, many of which are drawn from the National Gallery’s significant photography collection, span early daguerreotypes from the time of the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s to pictures of rapid industrialisation in the 20th century and contemporary photographs produced at an immense scale. This expansive selection traces the layered history of extraction and how artists have used photography as a lens through which to communicate the industry’s relationship with society and the natural world.
“Photography itself is dependent on precious metals for its very existence, from the light sensitivity of silver in early processes to the copper of contemporary digital-camera batteries. At the same time, it has been the principal visual medium employed to depict extractive industries, evolving alongside the expansion of mining on an industrial scale since the 19th century,” said Diane Waggoner, co-curator of the exhibition and curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. “Beneath the Surface unites photographs made for a variety of purposes, from explicitly promotional and commercial uses to documentation efforts and socially engaged activism, shedding light on both the rewards and costs of resource extraction.”
The exhibition orients visitors with an introductory gallery displaying contemporary work, foregrounding themes relevant to the current moment and providing a critical framework for understanding the six broad, chronological sections that follow. Viewers will encounter works not only by historical photographers recognised for their work in capturing mining, drilling, and industrial subjects, such as Carleton Watkins, Margaret Bourke-White, Marion Post Wolcott, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, but also by less expected practitioners Florence Kemmler, Alma Lavenson, and Mary Morris. The exhibition includes works by contemporary photographers Edward Burtynsky, Binh Danh, Terry Evans, Victoria Sambunaris, and Cara Romero, among others.
“For almost two centuries photographers have played a central role in public understanding of resource extraction, drawing on a succession of technologies and strategies to capture activities that enable modern life but resist portrayal,” said Kristen Gaylord, co-curator of the exhibition and Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at Milwaukee Art Museum. “This exhibition demonstrates how, time and again, photographers have creatively pushed against the medium’s boundaries in a quest to impart the enormity of the country’s extractive activities and their effects.”
Beneath the Surface centres on the challenges artists face in capturing the colossal scale of extraction and its far-reaching impacts on communities and the environment. It also reveals the inventive strategies they have employed to depict this subject. The works on view reflect the full breadth of the medium, spanning landscapes, portraits of workers and panoramas of affected communities, photobooks, aerial imagery, analog and digital collage, camera-less photography, historical processes, narrative and performance work, and pictures that otherwise harness photography to communicate the scope of these industries.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art
Florence Kemmler (American, 1900-1972) Oil Drums c. 1929 Chlorobromide print Image: 26.67 x 34.61cm (10 1/2 x 13 5/8 in.) Mat: 18 x 22 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
The husband-and-wife team of Roland E. Schneider (1884-1934), and Florence B. Kemmler (1900-1972), were internationally exhibited salon photographers whose beautifully rendered works straddle both Pictorialist and modernist sensibilities. The San Diego couple worked together using the same 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 Graflex cameras and identical printing and mounting techniques. Nearly all their photographs were contact printed on warm, brownish black-toned chlorobromide papers.
Alma Lavenson (American, 1897-1989) Tanks, Standard Oil Company 1931 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 24 x 18.4cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/4 in.) Mat: 20 x 16 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington The Marvin Breckinridge Patterson Fund for Photography
In 1930 she was introduced to Adams, Cunningham and Weston by art collector Albert Bender. Bender also wrote Lavenson a letter of introduction to give to Edward Weston. Two years later she was invited to participate in the famous Group f/64 show at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, although there is some uncertainty about whether she should actually be called a “member” of Group f/64, given her association with Pictorialism. The announcement for the show at the de Young Museum listed seven photographers in Group f/64 and said “From time to time various other photographers will be asked to display their work with Group f/64. Those invited for the first showing are: Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Brett Weston.” However, in 1934 the group posted a notice in Camera Craft magazine that said “The F:64 group includes in its membership such well known names as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, John Paul Edwards, Imogene [sic] Cunningham, Consuela [sic] Kanaga and several others.” Lavenson was not mentioned by name in that notice, but her name is always listed as being associated with the group because of her place in the first exhibition. She was included in an exhibition of photography “by members and associates of Group f.64” held at Gallery 210, Lucas Hall, University of Missouri, St. Louis, Apr. 3-30, 1978.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 1936 Gelatin silver print mounted on paperboard Sheet (trimmed to image): 19 x 23.8cm (7 1/2 x 9 3/8 in.) Support: 45.7 x 37.6cm (18 x 14 13/16 in.) Mat: 16 x 20 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Mary and David Robinson
In 1936, Walker Evans captured several iconic photographs in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, during his landmark documentary work for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration. His lens famously depicted the stark juxtapositions of the city’s industrial boom, highlighting steel mills looming over residential neighbourhoods and graveyards, as well as scenes of local auto graveyards.
Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985) Copper Pit, Ruth, Nevada 1940 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.13 x 18.73cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.) Sheet: 25.4 x 20.32cm (10 x 8 in.) Mat: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Black Dog Collection
Born in New York City in 1915, Arthur Rothstein showed an early interest in photography. While studying at Columbia University, he met economics instructor Roy Stryker, who would later establish the photographic section of the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) in Washington, DC. Appreciating Rothstein’s technical proficiency and enthusiasm for photography, Stryker hired him in 1935 as the first staff photographer for the FSA. Praised for the directness and immediacy of his imagery, Rothstein produced notable photographic series on farming communities in the Midwestern Dust Bowl. After leaving the FSA in 1940, Rothstein took a position as photographer for Look magazine; he remained there until 1971, ultimately serving as the magazine’s director of photography.
Text from the International Center of Photography website
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Butte, Montana. Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Train of fifty-ton cars of copper ore leaving mines at Butte for smelter at Anaconda Montana 1942 Gelatin silver print Mount: 29.21 x 24.29cm (11 1/2 x 9 9/16 in.) Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Public domain
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Crude oil, fuel oil, gas oil, range oil and gasoline pipelines leading from the waterfront to the Everett Refinery. Everett, Massachusetts, May 1944 c. 1944 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 35.9 x 27.8cm (14 1/8 x 10 15/16 in.) Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Courtesy of Exxon Mobil Corporation
Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) Doris McKinney with Her Two Sons, Republic Steel 1987 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.1 x 17.7cm (7 1/8 x 6 15/16 in.) Sheet: 25.2 x 20.3cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.) Mat: 14 x 16 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Pierre Cremieux and Denise Jarvinen
Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) Mining Exploration near Carson City, Nevada 1988 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.5 x 25cm (9 5/8 x 9 13/16 in.) Sheet: 27.7 x 35.5cm (10 7/8 x 14 in.) Mat: 16 x 18 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Jane P. Watkins
Photographing American Mining and Energy
Elizabeth Fortune
For nearly two centuries, American photography and the mining of valuable natural resources have been deeply intertwined.
Introduced in 1839, photography premiered less than a decade before successive metal mining booms transformed the landscape and demographics of the American West. Emerging extractive industries hired photographers to promote their operations and attract investors and workers.
Since photography’s inception, artists have used a range of techniques and formats to depict resource extraction like coal mining and oil drilling, which often occurs in remote locations, sometimes underground. Their aims and attitudes range from enthusiastic boosterism to impassioned critique. Together, these photographers’ works unearth and make visible the history of industrial mining and its continued impact on our everyday lives and the American landscape.
Daguerreotypes
After the 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California, hundreds of thousands of aspiring miners flocked to the West Coast. Posed with tools of his trade, this miner was one of many who sat for a daguerreotype to memorialise their quest for precious metals.
The mining of silver, copper, and mercury was essential for the creation of daguerreotypes: the process produces a unique image on a highly polished silver-coated copper plate.
Stereographs
Photographers took advantage of the stereograph to make immersive scenes of resource extraction. A popular photographic format from the mid-1850s to the early 1900s, the stereograph features two pictures of the same subject taken about 2 1/2 inches apart, roughly the distance between our eyes. When seen through a stereoscope viewer, the two pictures appear to combine into a three-dimensional image (the equivalent of early 3D glasses).
Photographers were dispatched across the country and American territories to document places of interest. Sites of resource extraction were a particular draw. The discovery and mining of oil, gold, silver, and other materials excited many with the promise of prosperity and beckoned fortune seekers to these burgeoning industries.
Commissions and Surveys
Mining companies, as well as related businesses like railroads, commissioned early photographers to document industrial infrastructure as a way to mark technological advancements and to attract investors.
The Delaware and Hudson Railroad and Canal Company hired Thomas H. Johnson to photograph the expansion of their coal mining operations in northeastern Pennsylvania These “breakers” broke coal into fragments and sorted them by size.
Government-sponsored surveys presented other opportunities for nineteenth-century photographers to travel across the country and document mining sites. While on a geological survey in 1868, Timothy O’Sullivan photographed silver mining at the Comstock Lode in Nevada. There, he produced some of the first subterranean photographs.
Panoramas
The enormous scale demanded by resource extraction calls for a grand mode of representation. The panorama, derived from the Greek words for “complete” and “view,” is an ideal format. Its size and breadth can accommodate the vastness of industrial enterprises.
Frank Schlueter’s 1917 panoramic photograph, taken at Goose Creek, Texas, captures men and horses working alongside huge oil derricks, some so tall they extend beyond the picture frame. In 1901, oil was discovered at Spindletop along the Gulf Coast of Texas, which ushered in the modern petroleum industry and the Texas oil boom. Seeking business as a photographer, Schlueter opened a nearby studio and began accepting commissions for pictures of oil fields.
A century later, Indigenous photographer Lewis deSoto (Cahuilla) used the panoramic format to show power generation in California. Here, a picturesque coastline is dotted with palm trees and people enjoying the sunny Southern California day. In the distance rises the Encina Power Station, which permanently closed in 2018. The panorama’s wide vista reveals the looming presence of industry in even the most scenic of places.
The title refers to Carlsbad, the current name of the city where the beach is located, and Payómkawichum, the name Native Americans of the area call themselves. deSoto invokes the Indigenous name to link industrial power generation with the ancestral power imbued in the land.
Modernist Forms
Modernist photographers, with their interest in abstract shapes and daring camera angles, found a fitting subject in the sharp geometric forms of industrial facilities and machinery.
In the late 1920s, Margaret Bourke-White spent several months photographing inside the Otis Steel Company in Cleveland, Ohio. She called the evenings spent at the factory “a photographic paradise.” Bourke-White’s picture of glowing molten metal celebrates what she deemed the “beauty waiting to be discovered” at the plant.
In 1944, Gordon Parks joined a group of photographers hired by Standard Oil New Jersey to promote the company’s role in supporting the war effort. In Parks’s dynamic composition, orderly rows of cylindrical pipes converge at the horizon line, carrying oil to the Everett Finery in Massachusetts. Plumes of white steam hover over the refinery, suggesting a constant churn of manpower and machinery.
Aerial Views
Adopting a bird’s-eye view has allowed photographers to record the extent of resource extraction and the way it has marked our landscape. Photographers can also bypass access restrictions to industrial sites by flying overhead with a plane or drone. From the sky, a paradox emerges: although we can see more from a distance, the elevation skews scale and at times heightens the aesthetic appeal of earthbound places.
Taken from a helicopter, Emmet Gowin’s picture of a mining exploration near Carson City, Nevada, reveals an elaborate pattern of topographical scars. Gowin acknowledged the distorting effect of viewing industrial sites from the sky, remarking, “From the air it seemed like everything I was seeing was miraculous.”
Photographer Will Wilson (Diné) used a drone to capture this aerial view of pearl and copper hued remediation ponds that hold residual waste from uranium mining. Located in northwest New Mexico on the lands of the Navajo Nation, Church Rock Mill is the site of the largest radioactive spill in American history. The radioactive waste poses risks to nearby communities and ecosystems. By surveilling the remediation ponds from above, Wilson calls attention to these hazardous sites.
Portraits
Pictures of laborers in extractive industries spotlight those who power our nation. Sometimes operating in high-risk environments, these workers feed important supply chains. Portrait photographers foreground the humanity of their subjects and individualise the massive workforce supporting our industrial economy.
From 1979 to 1985, Richard Avedon traveled across 17 American states to photograph working-class Americans for his portrait project In the American West. Coal miners and oil field workers were among his most frequent subjects. Avedon is known for his portraits of celebrities and politicians, but here he elevates each worker to a vaunted status.
Tom Stroud, an oil field worker from Velma, Oklahoma, stands before Avedon’s signature white backdrop and looks directly at the camera. His skin, clothing, and helmet are splotched with mud and oil (Avedon preferred to photograph subjects at the end of their shifts). The portrait’s large size – about five feet tall by four feet wide – gives monumental status to Stroud and his labor.
Large-Scale Color Photographs
At first glance, the tidy yards, pristine garden shed, and welcoming patio furniture form an idyllic suburban scene. But in the distance, massive smokestacks and a cooling tower overtake the hazy gray sky.
Mitch Epstein’s mammoth picture records the looming presence of the Amos Coal Power Plant in Raymond City, West Virginia. The exceptional size (62 x 80 inches) of Epstein’s composition places us within a serene neighbourhood dominated by the coal industry. Its monumental scale confronts us with the immensity of extractive operations and the impact these industries have on the lands and people of the United States.
This presentation draws from the National Gallery of Art Library collections. It looks at how artists use photobooks to reveal the impact of the energy industry on the American landscape and people.
In conjunction with Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, the National Gallery of Art Library presents an installation of 25 books and 2 zines examining how photographers use photobooks to document the impact of energy extraction, production, and circulation on the American landscape and its communities.
The books and zines on view illustrate complex narratives about how America is powered today, revealing the visual strategies and design decisions contemporary photographers use to contextualise and share their work. In the library reading room adjacent to the exhibition area, additional photobooks are available for visitors to browse.
Books offer a different experience than seeing images on a wall or your social media feed. Complex stories are told when photos join text, other printed elements, and even the book binding. Come explore a wide-ranging selection of photobooks by contemporary photographers – then handle more examples in our reading room.
Curated by Yuri Long, special collections librarian at the National Gallery, this installation is on view from May 25 through August 21, 2026, in the East Building Library Atrium from 11.00 am to 4.30 pm, Monday through Friday, except federal holidays.
Andrew Borowiec (American, b. 1956) Blast Furnace, Cleveland 2016 Inkjet print Image: 67.95 x 101.6cm (26 3/4 x 40 in.) Sheet: 80.01 x 111.76cm (31 1/2 x 44 in.) Mat: 32 3/4 x 46 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Charina Endowment Fund
Will Wilson (Diné) (b. 1969) Shiprock Disposal Site, Shiprock, Navajo Nation, 36. 769690596277414 N / -108. 68547605691704 W 2020 Inkjet print Image: 60.96 x 121.92cm (24 x 48 in.) Sheet: 94.62 x 109.22cm (37 1/4 x 43 in.) Back mat: 35 15/16 x 43 1/2 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington Charina Endowment Fund in memory of Robert B. Menschel Courtesy of the artist and www.dineconnect.org
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
I read a comment about the exhibition On the Street Where I Live: Viva Gibb at the City Gallery, Melbourne on Instagram the other day. It described the exhibition as “charming”.
What does that mean? charming… it’s almost as bad as calling an artist’s work “nice”. I’m sure if someone called my work “charming” I would take a turn and I think that Viva Gibb would be rolling in her grave if she heard the comment.
Let us be clear. Viva Gibb’s 1970s-1980s social documentary portraits of the people of inner city Melbourne (specifically North and West Melbourne) centred around her studio in Capel Street are direct, tough, intimate, compassionate, empathetic, feminist, political (in a socialist sense) and strongly humanist photographs of the people of her neighbourhoods and the working class suburbs in which they lived. Everyday people, human dignity, and social connection.
Through “mid or long shots, with the subject captured in relation to their environment,” Gibb’s photographs picture the day-to-day lives of the people that surrounded her, people that she had a connection with and wanted to photograph. As she said, “I only ask them for a photograph if I am interested in that person, if there is something in the whole story about them.”
Gibb photographed the people of these suburbs, people who formed countercultural communities of artists and intellectuals, cafe owners and customers, butchers and bakers, the old, the young, punks, dating couples and the homeless. She photographed facets of their life revealing within the images their innate dignity (every person has high value and deep worth simply because they are human), often using a multi-image convention to capture their essence, returning to photograph them over an extended time period. She built a relationship with people for however short or long a time in order to tell their story.
“The people in my photographs are those who have survived at all odds – socially, racially, and economically – in our essentially bourgeois society; the lonely man next door, the old people who have lived in the area all their lives and are threatened with eviction, the homeless man whose only dream is to have a room of his own.”
Through her photographs we can feel the transformation of a moment into a story unfolded by observation.
As Walker Evans observed, “Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.”
The defining of observation full and felt. There goes Viva…
In one sense the hang of the exhibition, in photo cloud form, emphasises the interconnectedness of all people and all things within these communities, but conversely the viewer can become overwhelmed by the amount of photographs. Collectively, they become more of a sociological project rather than photographs with an individual aura. It is only when one stops and slows down and contemplates the individual portraits does one begin to admire the majesty of Gibb’s achievement.
Using a Rolleiflex medium-format camera for most of her portraiture so that she could look down into the camera while having a direct relationship to the person being photographed (not a camera held to the eye) one can see how, as James McArdle observes, she built the trust of the person being photographed. “… one can see how Viva is standing above her camera or beside it, in eye contact with her subject, perhaps talking to them, calmly or animatedly depending on the reaction desired, as she presses the shutter.”
Much like Diane Arbus using a Rolleiflex in New York, here in Gibb’s photographs there is a direct engagement with the reality of the world. This is never more evident than in my favourite part of the exhibition, her personal photo albums: The Street Where I Live 1974-1978; Boppin’ in West Melbourne; West Melb. 1980-1985; Those were the days my friend (below).
In the small photographs stuck into personal photo albums we can viscerally feel the power and intimacy of Gibb’s passion project. We can observe in the sequencing of images of the city, houses, streets, businesses and people, how she created stories about the people and places for which she cared dearly. And her love of dogs! Always people with dogs – Amelia and the new puppy; Betty and her dogs, Stanley St. Here, no overblown gigantic photographs that have no need to be that big, that have no presence, instead powerful, intimate photographs of a Melbourne now vanished from our sight through gentrification.
I remember coming to live in Melbourne in the mid-1980s from England and these suburbs, these characters, were still alive and present. No longer. While community groups tried to protect their suburbs and ways of life at the time, and the heritage buildings survived, council auctioned off the properties it had accumulated. “Most residents, unable to afford their properties, were forced to move on.” Caring communities built up over decades were destroyed.
Much the same is happening in contemporary Melbourne suburbs with the destruction of long standing community housing throughout the city. Under the guise of modernisation and money, and the increase in high density living in the city, communities are being torn apart with little or no recourse for low income human beings or their wishes. Public housing blocks are being torn down all over the city, the land given by the government to private developers for “mixed housing development” which combines private market-rate homes with affordable or social housing. Except social housing only ever makes up about 20% of the project. As usual it’s all about the money, ignoring the fact that it is destroying communities that have been there for decades. Shame on councils, supposed community housing associations and unscrupulous developers (please see Marcus Bunyan. “Frederick Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972),” on the Art Blart website, 23rd February, 2024; and Rachael Dexter. “Developer quietly guts ‘affordable’ housing promise in northern suburbs,” on The Age website, March 3, 2026 [Online] both cited 24/07/2026).
This brings me to the title of this piece of text taken from the front of Gibb’s photo album West Melb. 1980-1985: “Please handle with care -” followed by the admonishment “these photos are delicate”. These words can serve as metaphor for the de/generations of society that Gibb photographed and the subsequent loss of culture and community … a process that is only increasing today. While Gibb was “deeply aware, socially engaged and heartfelt” in her interactions with community and the stories she was telling – and this passion is embodied, embedded in her images – her photos are, still, delicate as she states, much like the lives of the people and communities depicted in them. Human beings need nature and nurture surrounding them, not huge four wheel drives, grand designs and high density living where you don’t even know your neighbour.
Caring for the counterculture, caring for the people around you, is a sign of a robust, flourishing society. Gibb’s tangible photographs convince us that such a proposition is true.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. If you would like to know about the history, cultural and political background of this inspirational artist please read my friend James McArdle’s in depth research on Viva Gibb in the text “Stance,” on the On This Date In Photography website, March 19, 2026.
PPS. I love how people are smiling in the photographs!
Many thankx to the City Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I don’t really deal with people I don’t know… I only ask them for a photograph if I am interested in that person, if there is something in the whole story about them.”
Viva Gibb
“The people in my photographs are those who have survived at all odds – socially, racially, and economically – in our essentially bourgeois society; the lonely man next door, the old people who have lived in the area all their lives and are threatened with eviction, the homeless man whose only dream is to have a room of his own. In photographing the commonplace of the apparently trivial event of a woman holding her baby or a man standing in front of his home, I can see the transformation of a moment into a story unfolded by observation; the little dog by her side, the tender way the man puts his hand on her shoulder, the expression in her eyes, the garden, the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the city skyscrapers in the background and the traffic zooming past. The details fit together like pieces of a jigsaw, presenting a story of a lifetime and a constant reminder of the fragility of life itself. As an individual and an artist I can only hope to present a reality other than that presented by TV and the media. I believe that with humanity, compassion, and a re-examination of past values we can counter the destructive forces that threaten the very existence of a living environment on this earth.”
Viva Gibb, “In the Land of the Living (1981),” in Virginia Coventry (ed.), The Critical Distance: work with photography, politics, writing, exh. cat., Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1986, p. 92 quoted in Smith, Savannah; Garner, Helen; Maddison, Ruth (2026). On the streets where I live : Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne. Melbourne, Vic.: City of Melbourne, p. 15. Exhibition catalogue
“Gibb’s sympathetic representation of the urban environment was undergirded by her socio-political beliefs and compassionate worldview. She was alive to the forces of change impacting the lives of those around her and fiercely critical of one social class or race dominating another. Gibb was increasingly angered by wealth and expansion being valued at the expense of all else. She was troubled by environmental degradation and was an animal welfare advocate – a vegetarian from the age of 16 and a vegan later in life. She was also deeply concerned about the treatment and deprivations of First Nations people and the plight of those establishing new lives in Australia.”
Smith, Savannah; Garner, Helen; Maddison, Ruth (2026). On the streets where I live : Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne. Melbourne, Vic.: City of Melbourne, p. 14. Exhibition catalogue
Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne is an important record of an inner urban area during a transformative moment in Melbourne’s history. On the city’s streets, radical countercultural ideals for a progressive society flourished through the activism of young people, while at the same time another chapter of the city’s history would close. In the 1970s and 1980s, amid the gentrification of the inner suburbs, West Melbourne flew under the radar for longer than most. It provided a countercultural community, which included artists and intellectuals, with low-cost space in which to live and work. Gibb’s house and studio were central to this community, a ‘social hub’ for ‘artists of all kinds, from the Pram Factory or the nascent Circus Oz’.10 For a period, they lived alongside longtime residents of the semi-industrial suburb. West Melbourne’s proximity to the railway, the docks and CBD meant it had been home to many working-class and migrant people who laboured in nearby industries or at Queen Victoria Market. Gibb’s photographs capture this amalgamated community – old and new – at this precise moment in time.
Capel Street was a focal point in this story of inner-suburban transformation. Many dilapidated properties in the area were leased out by Melbourne City Council following their acquisition ahead of the proposed redevelopment of the Queen Victoria Market. Gibb herself had moved to Capel Street as a council tenant. When the market redevelopment was abandoned in 1976, council’s continued property acquisition caused alarm among residents and business owners alike regarding the undisclosed intentions for the area. In response, the Capel Street and Peel Street Action Group was formed, of which Gibb was an active member. The group’s two concerns were the conservation of the Victorian-era terraces and cottages and compulsory eviction of long-term residents. Many of the heritage buildings survived, but the group was ultimately unsuccessful in protecting the community. Council began auctioning off the properties in December 1990. Most residents, unable to afford their properties, were forced to move on. …
Viva Gibb’s photographs express the sophisticated practice of an artist who cared deeply for her community and the world at large. Through her work we come to know a vibrant group of individuals, captured in their day-to-day lives. Her photographs are an important historical and cultural record that reminds us of the importance of people in our city’s history and future. But these images also offer a glimpse of Viva herself and her unique perspective on the world: her genuine compassion and affection for people, for animals and for the environment. Viva’s portrait of North and West Melbourne is distinctively hers – deeply aware, socially engaged and heartfelt.
10/ Niels Hutchison, ‘Appendix Five: Interview with Niels Hutchison, 13 February 2019’, in Jean Ely (ed.), Preserving Melbourne’s Colonial Past: Capel Street West Melbourne, 2019, p. 60
Smith, Savannah; Garner, Helen; Maddison, Ruth (2026). On the streets where I live : Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne. Melbourne, Vic.: City of Melbourne, pp. 16-17. Exhibition catalogue
Viva Gibb was a part of the group of ‘northside’ social documentary photographers of the 1970s and 1980s (Ruth Maddison, Ponch Hawkes, Micky Allan, Helen Grace). She documented the suburbs of North and West Melbourne – where she lived – creating a distinctive, sympathetic portrait of her community during a transformative period in Melbourne’s history.
The exhibition has come about following a major donation of over 200 of Gibb’s photographs made to the Melbourne Art Trust in 2025, and will be the largest display of her work in over 30 years. The show features more than 250 images, including the artist’s photo albums. We have also published a small catalogue for the exhibition, which includes reflections written by Ruth Maddison and Helen Garner.
Text from the City Gallery website
“[Gibb] worked with a Rolleiflex medium-format camera for most of her portraiture, and a large-format 4 x 5-inch Graflex Speed Graphic press camera, tools that supported her patience and purpose, and built the trust of the person being photographed. The use of both offsets that sense of being scrutinised directly by the photographer that is imposed by an eye-level viewfinder or reflex camera, and one can see how Viva is standing above her camera or beside it, in eye contact with her subject, perhaps talking to them, calmly or animatedly depending on the reaction desired, as she presses the shutter.”
Associate Professor James McArdle. “Stance,” on the On This Date In Photography website, March 19, 2026 [Online] Cited 06/07/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
In 2025, Melbourne Art Trust acquired a major donation by artist and social-documentary photographer Viva Jillian Gibb (1945-2017). Generously made by the artist’s children, Sybil Gibb and Rupert Duffy, it comprises more than 200 silver gelatin photographs taken between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. On the street where I live showcases works from this donation, alongside several prints and photo albums loaned from the artist’s family. Taking its title from one of these albums, the exhibition re-examines this period of Gibb’s practice, reintroducing an artist whose vast body of work has largely lain dormant for three decades.
Born in Bobinawarrah, Victoria, Gibb was first and foremost an artist. She was unwavering in her pursuit of this. She undertook a diploma of art at Wangaratta Technical College (1961-65); moved to Melbourne to study painting at the National Gallery Art School (1965-68); and studied printmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA; 1973-74). Photography became the focus of her practice only after her postgraduate study.
Moving to West Melbourne in 1975, Gibb quickly established her first dedicated darkroom at 72 Capel Street. Her technical printmaking skills carried over to photography’s hands-on processes. She had an array of photographic papers, often shooting to print on a particular paper. Her son Rupert recalls, “she knew exactly how black she wanted her blacks to be and how bright her highlights were and knew her exposures so well that she was rarely wasteful with film’.1 She worked with a Rolleiflex medium-format camera and a large-format 4 x 5” Graflex Speed Graphic press camera.
The community of North and West Melbourne was Gibb’s foremost subject between the mid-1970s and early 1990s. Her sustained documentation of those living and working in this area remains unmatched. The prolific nature of her practice is evident in the number of photographs – more than 250 – on display in this exhibition, a small fraction of the work she produced.
In the late 1980s, Gibb’s commitment to social justice led her to South Africa, where she documented people’s lives in towns and villages under apartheid. She also travelled to Hong Kong and China, photographing markets and sacred sites for a series titled Of Gods and Animals, which commented on the contrast between spiritual traditions and lived realities.
Returning to Australia, Gibb noted the lack of photographic training opportunities for Aboriginal women. In response, she approached the Victorian Women’s Trust for funding to facilitate a photography cadetship program. The first recipients of these funded cadetships were Maree Clarke and Kim Kruger.
Gibb began what would become her last photographic series in the 1990s. The Way: Religious Ceremonies in Victoria documented the ceremonies and events of multicultural communities. She wanted to draw attention to the historical significance of these events, especially for migrants, who she saw as having managed, against great odds, to maintain their cultural practices in Australia.
The premature end of Gibb’s practice, around 2000, was likely brought about by the digital turn in photography, changes to which she never adapted. She kept photographically documenting her friends and family but returned to painting until she passed away in 2017.
From her first solo exhibition in 1978, Gibb’s work was exhibited throughout the 1980s, including at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and National Gallery of Australia. Today, her photographs are held in significant public collections across the country. In 2019, the Museum of Australian Photography was the first public gallery to show her work in more than 30 years. On the street where I live builds on this, situating Gibb’s work in relation to her contemporaries and the broader social, political and cultural context of the time.
Text from Smith, Savannah; Garner, Helen; Maddison, Ruth (2026). On the streets where I live: Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne. Melbourne, Vic.: City of Melbourne, pp. 6-7. Exhibition catalogue
Work and Life
At the Studio
North Melbourne
Hawke Street
Victoria Street
Installation views of the exhibition On the Street Where I Live: Viva Gibb at the City Gallery, Melbourne, March – August, 2026 Photos: Tobias Titz
The rehabilitation of Gibb’s reputation has come in two stages, each through a different institutional imperative. The first was the 2019 donation by her children, Sybil Gibb and Rupert Duffy, of a significant body of work to the Monash Gallery of Art (now the Museum of Australian Photography, or MAPh). This gift – silver gelatin prints from the West and North Melbourne years – led directly to A Place in Time: Photographs by Viva Gibb, which opened at MAPh in July 2019. It was, as the institution noted, the first public gallery showing of her work in more than thirty years. MAPh’s interest was in photography’s history: Gibb as a figure in Australian documentary practice, her technical mastery of the silver gelatin print, her place in the feminist photography network of the 1970s and ’80s.
The second act of institutional recognition came in 2025, when Sybil and Rupert donated over 200 silver gelatin prints to the Melbourne Art Trust – managed by the City of Melbourne’s Art and Heritage Collection. This donation, which came about through a stroke of chance (a separate donor mentioned Sybil Gibb to curator Savannah Smith, who then made contact), led to On the Street Where I Live: Viva Gibb’s Portrait of North and West Melbourne, which opened at City Gallery in Melbourne Town Hall on 12 March 2026 and runs until 7 August.
The City of Melbourne’s interest is civic and historical: Gibb’s photographs are a record of what West Melbourne was before gentrification arrived, before council auctioned off the properties it had accumulated, before the working-class and migrant community was priced out and dispersed. The exhibition is partly an act of municipal memory – an acknowledgement of what was lost when, in Gibb’s own words, “all those interesting faces which told a story” were gone.
These are not contradictory interests, but distinct, and reveal how photographic reputations may be restored: through the convergence of estate generosity, curatorial initiative, and institutional need. The photographs remain the same; what changed was who needed them, and why.
Associate Professor James McArdle. “Stance,” on the On This Date In Photography website, March 19, 2026 [Online] Cited 06/07/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Viva Gibb albums
Installation view of the exhibition On the Street Where I Live: Viva Gibb at the City Gallery, Melbourne, March – August, 2026 showing Viva Gibb’s photo albums in a display case Photos: Tobias Titz
The Street Where I Live 1974-1978 photo album
The Street Where I Live photo album
Boppin’ in West Melbourne photo album
West Melb. 1980-1985 photo album
Those were the days my friend photo album
City Gallery Enter via Customer Service City Gallery 110 Swanston St Melbourne 3000
“This is where I think that Siskind was less than happy with the results of his documentary photographs – that they weren’t giving him what he wanted out of his art: that interface of the image and imagination.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
July 2026
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Boys in Empty Tenement c. 1935 Gelatin silver print
Image and imagination
I always find it fascinating to view the first few years of an artist’s journey, the golden path they take, for it more than likely informs all that is to come.
In the greatest abstract expressionist photographer the world has known, Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991), his starting point was as a straight documentary photographer, a member of the New York Photo League, a “left-leaning documentary collective, which prioritised using photography to advocate for social change.”
Using a large format camera and tripod Siskind, for his photo project Harlem Document, captured “the vibrancy, harsh realities, and daily life of the Black community in Harlem” – images which had their roots in American social documentary photography of the period and photographers such as Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and the photographers of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) government program (1935-1944) which documented the struggles of rural Americans during the Great Depression.
As I have written in a 2023 text titled “Transcending reality”, “To my mind American photographers of the 1930s took photographs not only to document but also to honor what was greater and more interesting than they were. Not as a melding of reality-dream … but as an exploration of what is possible through the interface of the image and imagination, the interface as Ansel Adams put it “between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself”.”
This is where I think that Siskind was less than happy with the results of his documentary photographs – that they weren’t giving him what he wanted out of his art: that interface of the image and imagination.
“In working from the documentary approach, I had always tried to find what kind of meaning you could get in a picture of that kind, and was beginning to feel that I was not getting it. I felt I wasn’t getting anything really personal, really powerful and special…. My documentary pictures were very quiet and very formal.”1
Moving into the 1940s Siskind began experimenting with more abstract compositions (with their link to Abstract Expressionist painting). Evidence of this reorientation in his image making can already be seen in some of the documentary photographs in this posting. For example, the photographs Facades (1938, below) and Harlem (1938, below) both propose the flattening of the photographic surface with an interest in the geometry and abstraction of form – circle, oblong, square, diagonal, curve, line – within the pictorial plane, but with an attendant emphasis on light, texture and tone.
“Though he did not create the lines, shapes, rhythms and patterns in his images, he nonetheless expressed the lyricism of their relationships by harmoniously arriving at the perfect composition. And though his abstract photographs possessed undeniable content, he subverted that content by offering new interpretive possibilities based on the feelings the images conveyed.”2
Image and imagination.
Thus, Siskind was intelligent enough, was aware and informed enough, of his feelings towards the world and the cultural developments around him to approach a crossroads in his development as an artist, to recognise, that is the key word, to recognise the path he needed, he wanted to take.
And so we are forever grateful to have his abstract expressionist photographs that his spirit guided him towards, photographs that may also light our own path.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I have added relevant information on Siskind’s art practice, theatres, and ballrooms where possible and I have also included an extract from Gordon Parks’ forward to Siskind’s book Harlem Document.
1/ Jaromir Stephany unpublished interview with Aaron Siskind, February 1963. This interview is in the private papers of Jaormir Stephany quoted in Marcia Battle. “Harlem: A Document,” in Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990, pp. 4-6
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Photography has tremendous social value. Upon the photographer rests the responsibility and duty of recording a true image of the world as it is today. Moreover, he must not only show us how we live, but indicate the logical development of our lives.”
Photo Notes, newsletter of the Photo League, August 1938
Aaron Siskind’s photographs from 1935-1940 form the core of the Harlem Document, a landmark sociological and visual study commissioned by the New York Photo League. Siskind headed the Feature Group of this radical, left-leaning documentary collective, which prioritised using photography to advocate for social change. The images capture the vibrancy, harsh realities, and daily life of the Black community in Harlem during the Great Depression.
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Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Kitchen Scene 1937 Gelatin silver print
From 1937 to 1944, Siskind took pictures in and around Harlem – of its businesses, domestic interiors, religious and social organisations, and nightlife. He did so as a member of the New York Photo League – a documentary photography collective with roots in radical leftist politics – and in collaboration with journalist and sociologist Michael Carter and other photographers as part of a cultural study of Harlem. In 1981 fifty-two of Siskind’s images were published in the book Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940 alongside first-person interviews conducted in the late 1930s by writers employed by the Federal Writers Project, including novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison.
MoMA Gallery label from 2024
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Apollo Theater 1937 Gelatin silver print
Apollo Theater
Since opening its doors in 1914 and introducing the first Amateur Night contests in 1934, The Apollo has played a major role in the emergence of jazz, swing, bebop, R&B, gospel, blues, and soul – all quintessentially American music genres. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Sammy Davis Jr., James Brown, Gladys Knight, Luther Vandross, D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, and countless others began their road to stardom on the Apollo stage. Today, The Apollo is a respected nonprofit presenting concerts, theatrical and dance performances, film screenings, educational programs, and community outreach programs.
The neoclassical theater known today as The Apollo’s Historic Theater was designed by George Keister and first owned by Sidney Cohen. In 1914, Benjamin Hurtig and Harry Seamon obtained a thirty-year lease on the newly constructed theater, calling it Hurtig and Seamon’s New Burlesque Theater. Like many American theaters during this time, African-Americans were not allowed to attend as patrons or to perform.
In 1933, Fiorello La Guardia, who would later become New York City’s Mayor, began a campaign against burlesque, and Hurtig & Seamon’s was one of many theaters that would close down. Cohen reopened the building as the 125th Street Apollo Theatre in 1934 with his partner, Morris Sussman, serving as manager. Cohen and Sussman changed the format of the shows from burlesque to variety revues and redirected their marketing attention to the growing African-American community in Harlem.
Frank Schiffman and Leo Brecher took over The Apollo in 1935. The Schiffman and Brecher families would operate the Theater until the late 1970s. The Apollo reopened briefly in 1978 under new management then closed again in November 1979. In 1981, it was purchased by Percy Sutton, a prominent lawyer, politician, media and technology executive, and a group of private investors. Under Sutton’s ownership, the Theater was equipped with a recording and television studio.
Text from the Apollo Theater website. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Lady In Kitchen 1937 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind’s artistic trajectory parallels broader shifts within mid-20th-century American photography. In the 1930s he cut his teeth as a documentary photographer affiliated with the Workers Film and Photo League, an artists’ cooperative that strove to advance progressive political causes. The following decade saw him turn away from studies of society. For the remainder of his career, he created still lifes that aimed to articulate interior states through near-abstract visual fields. Of this dramatic shift in his practice, the artist said, “For some reason or other there was in me the desire to see the world clean and fresh and alive.”1
Siskind’s documentary work was carefully planned and researched in advance. He honed this approach at the Film and Photo League, which he joined in 1933, only three years after receiving his first camera as a honeymoon gift. Among this community of photographers and filmmakers – many of them, like Siskind, the New York-born children of Jewish immigrants – he found technical guidance and critical feedback. When the League’s photographers broke from its filmmakers to establish the standalone Photo League in 1936, Siskind helped form its Feature Group, a unit dedicated to creating photo essays like those appearing in LIFE magazine and being produced by the Farm Security Administration. Collaborative at its core, the Feature Group prioritised the free exchange of ideas: each project began with a discussion of how to approach photographing its subject and ended with the group assessing their effort collectively. “We discovered a relationship between the clarity of one’s thought and feeling and the clarity of picture-making,” Siskind recalled of these formative dialogues.2
Of the many projects the Feature Group completed during Siskind’s four years of leadership, its most extended and ambitious was Harlem Document. This expansive cultural study of Harlem, undertaken between 1937 and 1940 in close consultation with the sociologist Michael Carter, originally aimed to produce a photographically illustrated book authored by Carter. Although the publication never materialised, Siskind’s photographs for Harlem Document indicate the project’s ambitious scope, depicting street life, domestic interiors, and gathering spots ranging from churches to dance halls to theaters.
Samuel Allen, Curatorial Assistant, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, 2025 on the MoMA website [Online] Cited 14/07/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
1/ Aaron Siskind, “The Drama of Objects,” Minicam Photography 8, no. 9 (June 1945), 23.
The Lafayette Theatre (1912–1951), known locally as “the House Beautiful”, was one of the most famous theaters in the Harlem neighbourhood of Manhattan in New York City. It was an entertainment venue located at 132nd Street and 7th Avenue. The first major theatre in New York to desegregate, in its early history the theatre was home to the African American repertory theatre company the Lafayette Players. This group was originally founded by Anita Bush as Anita Bush Stock Company in 1914 and became a part of the Lafayette Theatre in 1916 when the theatre bought the stock company. The Lafayette Players was a successful company from the 1910s through the 1930s; after which the company floundered. In 1951 the theatre closed and was sold to the Williams Institutional Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The structure was demolished in 2013.
Aaron Siskind’s Harlem document, a mirror of my own past, speaks explicitly for itself. It is an ongoing memory of black people living in crowded kitchenettes; suffering the loneliness of rented bedrooms; prating in leftover churches, and grasping a patch of happiness whenever and wherever they could find it. It is a nostalgic look at a kind of past that threatens to hang around Harlem for a long time to come – to doom it to further frustration and unrest. Those same tenements that once imprisoned me are still there, refusing to crumble, holding other restless black boys for sentence without trial.
I remember swarms of slow-moving people, moving close together up on Lenox Avenue – past child shacks, rib joints, funeral parlours and storefront churches- knowing one another but seldom bothering to speak. A city of blackness crammed inside a white city where, when you walked our the door, you became a stranger. …
Harlem has meant a lot of things to a lot of people. For me, in those days, it meant hunger, cultural devastation, unrequited longing and disillusionment. To others it was the swinging, exciting capitol of the entire Black world, the exotic Mecca of melting music, good times and dancing feet. Yet, for some, it was a sanctuary where loftier dreams were fostered; where now and then some of those dreams were realised, but where mostly they were hopelessly spent. To just about everyone who has worked in the vital processes of its survival, whose life has been textured by its tradition, Harlem is a place that won’t give up. Wobbly now under the impact of the past decades, its history mirror those problems its mother country once endured.
Extract from Gordon Parks. “Foreword,” in Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Street Scene 1937 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Wishing Tree 1937 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Church Interior 1938 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind’s interest in photography developed after his experiences with both music and poetry when he was an English teacher in the New York public school system. His early pictures were said to have been attempts at transferring musical and poetic concepts into images.2 Later, as a young adult, Siskind did everything from making political speeches on soapboxes in Manhattan to becoming a member of the Junior Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL).3
A friend gave Siskind his first camera in 1930. He soon discovered his attraction for the instrument, and almost simultaneously he discovered and joined the Photo league. At the League he found people who shared his political and social concerns and who were capable and willing to discuss technical information about photography. Many of the members were children of Jewish immigrants and most, like Siskind, were well educated. Their exhibited images documented illiteracy, discrimination, and poverty and called for social reforms on behalf of the working classes. Before joining the League, Siskind had already photographed some of the poverty-stricken areas of Manhattan and was searching for reaction and criticism to these pictures. …
As a photographer Siskind explored symbols and metaphors to create a visual relationship that balanced aesthetic concerns with social documents. Throughout his career the contrast of subject and symbol have dominated. …
With his work in Harlem Siskind’s style may have been changing. “In working from the documentary approach, I had always tried to find what kind of meaning you could get in a picture of that kind, and was beginning to feel that I was not getting it. I felt I wasn’t getting anything really personal, really powerful and special…. My documentary picture were very quiet and very formal.”4
Extract from Marcia Battle. “Harlem: A Document,” in Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990, pp. 4-6. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
2/ Carl Chiarenza, Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors (Little, Brown and Co.,), 6.
3/ Carl Chiarenza, “Form and Content in the Early Work of Aaron Siskind,” The Massachusetts Review 19:4 (Winter 1978): 810.
4/ Jaromir Stephany unpublished interview with Aaron Siskind, February 1963. This interview is in the private papers of Jaormir Stephany.
The “Savoy Dancers” refer to the pioneering African American dancers who developed the Lindy Hop and other swing dances at the legendary Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, New York. Open from 1926 to 1958, the integrated ballroom housed iconic performers like Frankie Manning and Norma Miller who defined the “home of happy feet”.
These legendary dancers revolutionised social dancing by bringing athleticism, airborne aerials, and improvisational jazz styling to the Lindy Hop. Their legacy continues to thrive through modern swing dance communities and archival footage preserved in documentaries like The Spirit Moves.
About the Savoy Ballroom
From 1926 to 1958, the Savoy Ballroom stood at 596 Lenox Avenue as one of the first racially integrated public spaces in the United States. Its 10,000-square-foot, spring-loaded dance floor welcomed thousands nightly and launched a global dance phenomenon. The Savoy hosted legendary artists including Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie, cementing its place at the heart of Harlem’s cultural history.
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) St. Joseph’s House – The Catholic Worker Movement c. 1939 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Grocery Store 1940 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Lady and Lamp 1940 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Street Scene 1940 Gelatin silver print
Aaron Siskind (American, 1902-1991) Watermelon Man 1940 Gelatin silver print
“There is something so infectious and engaging about these photographs, something that draws you into the transformative freedom of African identities.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Curator: Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, with the assistance of Chiara M. Mannarino, Curatorial Assistant, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography
Air Afrique DJIMA RECORDS 1969 Vinyl 45tour Mono 7 1/16 x 7 1/16″ (18 x 18cm) Air Afrique Collective, courtesy of Lamine Diaoune, Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, Djiby Kebe, Jeremy Konko
Of being and becoming
Why do I love African photography so much after the “winds of decolonial change” swept through the continent which “saw the disintegration of colonial territories and the formation of transnational solidarity across the African continent and diaspora.”
Firstly, I love the vibrancy present in photographs of everyday life – at the club, with friends, dancing, drinking. I love the hairstyles, I love the fabrics, I love the way people are proud of themselves and their cultural heritage. Joy, love, exuberance, passion. There is something so infectious and engaging about these photographs, something that draws you into the transformative freedom of African identities.
Secondly, I love the studio photographs that enable the sitter to dream the great dreams of life, to imagine who they want to be before the camera. Here, in a symbiotic relationship between the photographer and the sitter, the “studio becomes a kind of imaginative enterprise. You can go and be who you are, or you can go and be who you want to be.” In Sanlé Sory’s studio his “portraits made possible a particular process of being and becoming for his sitters. He reflected the ideas that they wanted to communicate – whether to friends, lovers, strangers, or themselves.” (Gallery label) The resulting portrait made the sitter feel connected to a cosmopolitan world. Both a world of dreams and aspirations and Africans’ lived experiences and realities.
Thirdly, I love how the photographer turns the camera towards himself, conceptually enacting in a staged theatricality of becoming, envisioning himself as different personalities through the act of constructing identities. Heroes, travellers, intellectuals, philosophers and, in Samuel Fosso’s case, prominent figures from 20th-century Pan-African liberation and American civil rights movements. African spirits and activists, intellectuals, and political leaders who fought for Black emancipation across the globe.
Pan-African modes of image-making after the end of colonisation open up, as curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo so eloquently states, “dazzling modes of Pan-African possibility” where everything is possible in every/body. There is no wringing of the hands here, no use of colonial photographs rehashed for contemporary consumption, just a joy, joy, joy in present and future becoming.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Imagination is a Magic carpet Upon which we may soar To distant lands and climes And even go beyond the moon To any planet in the sky If we came from nowhere here Why can’t we go somewhere there?
. Sun Ra, “Imagination,” 1970
The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination showcases how photographic portraits fuel ideas of Pan-African subjectivity and solidarity. On view from December 14, 2025, through July 25, 2026, the exhibition considers the transatlantic call and response that constructed Africa as a political idea, due to the “winds of decolonial change” that swept the African continent in tandem with the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Ideas of Africa is the third exhibition organised at The Museum of Modern Art in celebration of the 2019 gift of modern and contemporary African art from prolific collector Jean Pigozzi. The exhibition features core works from this gift, alongside a selection of recent acquisitions and key loans.
Text from The Museum of Modern Art website
Air Afrique Balafon No. 1 1964 Magazine, softcover 10 5/8 x 8 1/4″ (27 x 21cm) Air Afrique Collective, courtesy of Lamine Diaoune, Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, Djiby Kebe, Jeremy Konko
From 1961 to 2002, Air Afrique served as the official transnational carrier for francophone West and Central Africa, providing regular jet service throughout the continent and internationally. The airline was also deeply committed to the production of Pan-African arts and culture. It funded vinyl records, published books on African history, and produced the in-flight magazine Balafon, which reported on events across Africa and beyond. Twenty years after the airline shuttered, a Paris-based artist collective formed to revitalise the spirit of Air Afrique through design collaborations, film programs, and a magazine. Their collection of archival ephemera, on view here, comprises gifts and purchases from former Air Afrique staff.
Inspired by the international activities of Air Afrique, both past and present, this reading table presents issues of the airline’s in-flight magazine, Balafon, one of which features a portrait of the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé on its cover. This table also includes a selection of photobooks, catalogues, and scholarly publications, celebrating the circulation of images and ideas in Africa during the decolonial era. These books are additionally available to browse within the gallery, offering further directions for reading, thinking, dreaming, and imagining.
Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025
Air Afrique Balafon No. 3 1965 Magazine, softcover 10 5/8 x 8 1/4″ (27 x 21cm) Air Afrique Collective, courtesy of Lamine Diaoune, Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, Djiby Kebe, Jeremy Konko
Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at right two Untitled photographs from the series African Spirits (2008, below) by Samuel Fosso (French and Central African born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Samuel Fosso (French and Central African born Cameroon, b. 1962) Untitled from the series African Spirits 2008 Gelatin silver print 64 1/8 x 48 1/16″ (162.8 x 122cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Family of Man Fund
Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at left photographs by Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1923-2001); and at right, two Untitled photographs from the series African Spirits (2008, below) by Samuel Fosso (French and Central African born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Samuel Fosso (French and Central African born Cameroon, b. 1962) Untitled from the series African Spirits 2008 Gelatin silver print 64 1/8 x 48 1/16″ (162.8 x 122cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Family of Man Fund
Artist, Silvia Rosi:African Spirit is a series of self-portraits where Fosso transforms himself into key figures of the Pan-African liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s.
I’m Silvia Rosi. I’m an artist working with photography and moving image.
Samuel Fosso started his career taking portraits of people in the studio, where there was always this act of constructing identities through props, poses, and the photographer’s imagination. At the end of each workday, Fosso would turn the camera toward himself.
In this series, he recreates these iconic photographs, taking on the faces of Angela Davis, of Martin Luther King, while at the same time remaining himself. For me, there’s this sense of recognition but also his own presence makes us question what it means to embody these figures.
The lighting and the poses and the composition echo this studio portrait tradition, but there’s always an element of theatricality that keeps you aware of the labor of becoming someone else. He neutralises the scene, removing the backdrop, and we’re forced to look at the subject that we have in front.
Turning the camera inwards can be really revolutionary. I think that’s something that deeply resonates with me, this idea of being in charge of my own representation and giving yourself complexity through images.
Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing five Untitled photographs from the series African Spirits (2008) by Samuel Fosso (French and Central African born Cameroon, b. 1962)
The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationshowcases how photographic portraits fuel ideas of Pan-African subjectivity and solidarity. On view from December 14, 2025, through July 25, 2026, the exhibition considers the transatlantic call and response that constructed Africa as a political idea, due to the “winds of decolonial change” that swept the African continent in tandem with the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Ideas of Africa is the third exhibition organised at The Museum of Modern Art in celebration of the 2019 gift of modern and contemporary African art from prolific collector Jean Pigozzi. The exhibition features core works from this gift, alongside a selection of recent acquisitions and key loans. Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination is organised by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, with the assistance of Chiara M. Mannarino, Curatorial Assistant, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography.
Conceptually influenced by The Idea of Africa, a landmark publication by the late philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe (1941-2025), the exhibition brings together works by 20th-century photographers such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Jean Depara, Sanlé Sory, and Ambroise Ngaimoko, who worked across key urban centers in West and Central Africa during the “golden age of African portraiture.” Images by James Barnor and Kwame Brathwaite illuminate Pan-African modes of image-making across the African diaspora. Works by contemporary artists of African descent, including Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, alongside ephemera selected from the archive of the artist collective Air Afrique, embody the physical circulation of these ideas across space and time.
“As we continue to witness transformative shifts in the global geopolitical order, it is instructive to revisit a moment in history that saw the disintegration of colonial territories and the formation of transnational solidarity across the African continent and diaspora. This exhibition locates dazzling modes of Pan-African possibility in images made by inventive photographers who registered and beckoned in new worlds,” says Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Ideas of Africa features a reading room as a tribute to the aspirations of knowledge production and the proliferation of the photographic image in print media during the decolonial era. In the reading room, visitors can access a selection of historical and contemporary photobooks and publications.
On the occasion of the exhibition, MoMA is publishing a richly illustrated catalogue featuring a lead essay by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, contributions by poet Momtaza Mehri and film programmer Yasmina Price, and reproductions of key texts by Brent Hayes Edwards and V. Y. Mudimbe. 140 pages, 105 color illustrations. Hardcover, $50. ISBN: 978-1-63345-171-1.
Press release from The Museum of Modern Art
Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at left, Malick Sidibé Nuit de Noël (Happy Club) [Christmas Eve] (1963, below); and at second left, Malick Sidibé Regardez-Moi [Look at Me!] (1962, below)
Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016) Nuit de Noël (Happy Club) [Christmas Eve] 1963 (printed January 2006) Gelatin silver print Image: 39 x 39″ (99 x 99.1cm) Sheet: 47 1/4 x 47 1/4″ (120 x 120cm) Frame: 53 9/16 x 53 9/16″ (136 x 136cm) Courtesy The Walther Collection, New York / Neu-Ulm
Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016) Regardez-Moi [Look at Me!] 1962 (printed January 2006) Gelatin silver print Image: 39 3/8 x 39″ (100 x 99cm) Sheet: 47 1/4 x 47 1/4″ (120 x 120cm) Frame: 52 3/16 x 52 3/16 x 1″ (132.5 x 132.5 x 2.5cm) Courtesy The Walther Collection, New York / Neu-Ulm
Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936–2016) Boxeur (Boxer) 1966 Gelatin silver print Image: 16 15/16 x 16 15/16″ (43 x 43 cm) Frame: 27 9/16 x 27 9/16 x 9/16″ (70 x 70 x 1.5cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection
For Sidibé, the roving “eye of Bamako,” the city was his studio. Active during the 1960s and ’70s, Sidibé shot on 35mm film and often printed proofs of the exposures he took at weekend parties. He arranged them sequentially on pastel cardstock and displayed them at his studio so that clients might purchase souvenirs of their exploits. Sidibé’s images of youth culture emphatically pushed back against Mali’s normative state attitudes and expectations of decorum. Revelling in effusive gestures and strong poses, he deftly photographed a community full of elegance, style, and sensational flair that staked its claim on a connection to a global African Diaspora.
Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025
Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016) Nuit du 10 octobre 1970 (Night of October 10, 1970) 1970 Twenty-two gelatin silver prints mounted on paper 12 3/4 x 19 3/4″ (32.4 x 50.2cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Judith and Wm. Brian Little Fund
Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016) Untitled July 28, 1973 Twenty-four gelatin silver prints mounted on paper 12 3/4 x 19 3/4″ (32.4 x 50.2cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Judith and Wm. Brian Little Fund
“This wind of change blowing through Africa … is no ordinary wind,” wrote Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1963. “It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand.” In the 1960s, independence movements swept across the African continent, resulting in the disintegration of colonial territories. These transformative struggles coincided with an exhilarating campaign for civil rights in the United States, forging a transatlantic call-and-response that established “Africa” as a political idea.
Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination examines the role of portrait photography within this emerging sense of Pan-Africanism. It unites portraits by mid-century photographers from across West and Central Africa and works by contemporary artists of African descent, illuminating different modes of image making and forms of transnational solidarity. As the art historian Kobena Mercer has argued, “‘Africa’ has never been a static entity, confined to the boundaries of geography, but has always had a diasporic dimension.” Embedded within the exhibition is a reading room featuring a selection of photobooks, alongside archival ephemera from the Paris-based collective Air Afrique. Following in the wake of the eponymous international airline, the group has continued the circulation of Pan-African culture and ideas into the present day.
Conceptually influenced by the late philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe’s book The Idea of Africa (1994), in which he exposes Western views of Africa as politicised constructions, this exhibition demonstrates how African photographers grappled with Africa as a political idea in their own ways. Presenting subjects for whom the personal was undeniably political, their images assert photography’s unique potential to creatively reflect our surroundings and beckon new worlds. At a time when profound shifts are once again transforming the global geopolitical order, Ideas of Africa attests to the enduring relevance of these themes.
Gallery text from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025
Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at left the work of Silvia Rosi (below); and at right, Njideka Akunyili Crosby And We Begin to Let Go (2013, below)
Silvia Rosi (Togolese and Italian, b. 1992) Disintegrata di profilo (Disintegrated in Profile) 2024 Inkjet print 31 1/2 x 31 1/2″ (80 x 80cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Carl Jacobs Fund
Rosi has said, “I’m not just performing, but reflecting on history.” Through photographic self-portraits, the artist examines personal, familial, and national narratives of migration, memory, and belonging. Deeply informed by the history of West African studio portraiture, Rosi’s images elegantly synthesise the formal strategies of mid-century African photographers, including many of those represented in this exhibition. Rosi often reenacts moments from her family’s past. Disintegrated Waiting, for instance, recalls when her mother first arrived in Italy from Togo. “She once said, ‘I used to be integrated, now I’m disintegrated,'” the artist shared. “To me this phrase is … an expression of the experience of diaspora.”
Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025
Silvia Rosi (Togolese and Italian, b. 1992) Sposa italiana disintegrata (Disintegrated Italian Wife) 2024 Inkjet print 31 1/2 x 31 1/2″ (80 x 80cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Carl Jacobs Fund
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (Nigerian, born 1983) And We Begin to Let Go 2013 Acrylic, acetone transfers, charcoal, pastel, marble dust, and collage on paper Sheet: 84 x 105″ (213.4 x 266.7cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Promised gift of Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine Farley
Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby moved to the US at the age of 17 (after winning the green card lottery in her home town) to train as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and, later, Yale University. Here, as in many of her portraits, Crosby gives an intimate portrayal of her interracial marriage and day-to-day life in America. She combines photo-transfer processes with painting and collaged fabrics, fusing Nigerian and American materials, images, and cultural traditions.
In her practice, Akunyili Crosby meditates on familial life within a transcultural context. Her large-scale compositions of everyday domestic scenes synthesise drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography. And We Begin to Let Go depicts the artist and her husband, who leans over her shoulder. To make it, Akunyili Crosby drew from Nigerian print media publications and her family’s photographic archive. She united these images’ varied photographic textures through the same formal treatment: acetone transfer, a printmaking technique through which a printed image is transferred onto another surface using an acetone solvent. Images of smiling faces, elaborate coifs, and patterned clothing suffuse the picture plane, accruing on the surfaces this marital encounter.
Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025
Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at left, Njideka Akunyili Crosby And We Begin to Let Go (2013, above); and at centre, Kwame Brathwaite Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs) (1964-1968, below)
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023) Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs) 1964-1968 Inkjet print, printed 2024 30 x 30″ (76.2 x 76.2cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on Photography Fund
Brathwaite, for whom photography functioned at the nexus of Black artistic, political, and cultural expression, rhythmically documented jazz scenes in Harlem and the Bronx. In 1956 he cofounded the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS) in the South Bronx, where he made structured portraits of the Grandassa Models, a group of women who were part of the Black Is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and ’70s. “Black Is Beautiful was my directive … It was a time when people were protesting injustices related to race, class, and human rights around the globe,” Brathwaite said. “I focused on perfecting my craft so that I could use my gift to inspire thought, relay ideas, and tell stories of our struggle, our work, our liberation. … Oppression still exists today, and we must keep fighting, keep on pushing until we are free.”
Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023) Untitled (Nomsa with Earrings) 1964-1968 Inkjet print, printed 2024 15 x 15″ (38.1 x 38.1cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on Photography Fund
Felix Akinniran Olunloyo (Nigerian) Untitled c. 1950-1970 Gelatin silver print 5 1/2 x 3 9/16″ (13.9 x 9cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi
Felix Akinniran Olunloyo (Nigerian) Untitled c. 1950-1970 Gelatin silver print 5 1/2 x 3 9/16″ (13.9 x 9cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi
Oumar Ka (Senegalese, 1930-2020) Untitled (Two Women with Thatched Roof House) 1959-1968 Gelatin silver print, printed 2024 17 × 17″ (43.2 × 43.2 cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi in honor of Darren Walker
Historian, Giulia Paoletti: Getting a portrait done was a serious business, because this single portrait would circulate and stand for this person.
My name is Giulia Paoletti, and I am a researcher on photography and modern art in Africa.
In 1959, Oumar Ka met a photographer who gave him a camera, so he learned by himself. Photography in Senegal was extremely popular. Dozens and dozens of studios existed. But he started going from village to village taking portraits, and then he would go home, develop the negatives, and return the following week with the prints. So, you meet his sitters by their own home, in towns, sometimes in this open landscape. And that is a major distinction from other photographers who worked in a studio.
In this photograph, we see two young women in matching outfits, posing for the camera against a white backdrop attached to this thatched-roof house. The landscape, the architecture, the sky – this is part of who they are and how they want to be perceived. They’re young, they’re serious, they’re confident.
As Senegal is shifting from a colonised place to an independent country, these are sitters that are making visible their experience of modernisation, which looked very different from the experience if someone lived in the capital city. There is often this tendency to flatten what is African modernity, and instead it’s important to show the variety of experiences and subjects at the time.
Sanlé Sory (Burkinabé, b. 1943) L’Intellectuel (The Intellectual) 1970-85 Gelatin silver print 8 1/8 x 8 1/8″ (20.6 x 20.6cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on Photography Fund
“Everyone chooses what they want in photography,” Sory once said. First opening his studio, Volta Photo, in Bobo-Dioulasso, Upper Volta (present-day Burkina Faso), in 1960, Sory organised bals poussières (or “dust balls,” named after the dirt clouds that dancers kicked up) in the fields of the nearby Kou Valley. The sound of his Multiblitz flash accompanied the percussion at parties, setting an elusive tone for his reportage de nuit (nighttime journalism). At Volta Photo, Sory’s portraits made possible a particular process of being and becoming for his sitters. He reflected the ideas that they wanted to communicate – whether to friends, lovers, strangers, or themselves.
Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025
Sanlé Sory (Burkinabé, b. 1943) Le Voyageur (The Traveller) 1970-1985 Gelatin silver print 8 1/8 x 8 1/8″ (20.6 x 20.6cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on Photography Fund
Historian, Antawan I. Byrd: One of the fundamental principles of studio portraiture, especially as it developed in West Africa, is that the studio becomes a kind of imaginative enterprise. You can go and be who you are, or you can go and be who you want to be.
Hello, I’m Antawan I. Byrd. I am a curator, and my research focuses on photography in West Africa during the mid-20th century.
Sanlé Sory opened up his own photography studio in Bobo-Dioulasso, one of the major cities in present-day Burkina Faso. This is a time right after independence, in 1960, and so there is this sense of optimism and hope about the sovereign nation.
Sory once remarked, “Fun is central to my work.” I think he’s speaking about the dynamics of collaboration. Oftentimes, clients would line up outside of the studio, and Sory would have a sort of menu that they can choose from. They could point and say, “Sory, I’d like this portrait here, and I’d like to pose with that prop there.”
Here we’re looking at six portraits, and they’re assuming different personalities. There’s one figure who appears as the intellectual, reading a newspaper. Another figure standing powerfully with his hands in the air as if he’s a boxer. There’s another wielding a Air Afrique briefcase, suggesting that he is a traveller.
When we think about the studio as a kind of imaginative space, it’s possible that the figure with the briefcase has just come back from a trip. But it’s entirely possible that he’s never left Bobo-Dioulasso at all, and holding that briefcase is a way to signal his ambition to travel.
J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930-2014) Brush Eko Bridge 1973 Two gelatin silver prints Each 11 x 8″ (27.9 x 20.3cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Family of Man Fund
In 1968 Ojeikere embarked on a monumental project to document the myriad hairstyles worn by women across a newly independent Nigeria. Over the next seven years, he amassed more than one thousand photographs. Together, these rigorously composed images form a portrait of a nation undergoing social and physical transformation – with feminine beauty standards providing the ultimate symbol. In Brush Eko Bridge, clean lines appear across a woman’s carefully parted scalp, her hair threaded to sculptural effect. In profile her hairdo evokes the highways and architectural developments that were then populating the Lagos skyline.
Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025
Historian, Antawan I. Byrd: The hairstyles project is often described as Ojeikere’s most ambitious body of work, and it’s a body of work that he pursued over nearly half a century.
My name’s Antawan Byrd. I’m an art historian and curator based in Chicago.
J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere evolved as a photographer alongside major political shifts in Nigerian history. 1960 is when the country attains independence from British rule. Ojeikere began to attend many of the festivals that were celebrating traditional culture. Hair design was coming back into fashion after a long period of being regarded as retrograde by the colonial government. It was at one of those festivals that he began to make his earliest images of Nigerian hairstyles.
He was so fascinated by the nuances of the designs as you encounter them from different angles. Some of the hair designs are straightforward cornrow styles, whereas others are realised through the use of thread that’s been wrapped around strands of hair.
Many of the hair designs carry references to contemporary bridges and buildings in terms of their architectural design. That’s in part because after independence, the nation is being built, the skyline is being built, the hairstyles are being built. And so I think for Ojeikere, he was conscious of the multiplicity of changes that were happening. It’s simultaneously about hair and the tradition of hair, and yet it’s also about architecture and commerce and trade.
James Barnor (Ghanaian, born 1929) Ever Young Studio, Accra c. 1954-1959 Gelatin silver print, printed 2018-20 9 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (24.1 x 24.1cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Acquired through the generosity of Heidi and Richard Rieger
Artist, James Barnor: Everything that happened in Accra passed through my street, and I call myself Lucky Jim. Anything that was happening, I was there.
I’m James Barnor. I was born on the 6th of June 1929. I had witnessed photography from a very small age because my mother’s brother was a professional photographer. My cousin was practicing in Accra, in Ghana. Because it was in the family, I must have thought, “Ah, this is something I could do in the future.”
Portraiture was number one. People are more important than places. I love people. ’53, I got a studio and I called it Ever Young. I thought about making people young, or even [laughs] better than they were before.
My sister was a nurse, and so I knew some nurses, and Evelyn was at the nursing training college. This is a portrait that I took of her. I had so many different backgrounds. And this was actually drawn on the wall. This is a sky. You can see the clouds. When I look at the different tones, from the white highlight to the black of the hair, it’s so very nice. This is a picture that I like very much.
I’m lucky to be alive and to be telling the story about my work. The inspiration that people get from my work will carry on and inspire others to develop their own way. The future is going to be grander because of photography.
James Barnor (Ghanaian, b. 1929) Portrait of Evelyn Abbew, Ever Young Studio, Accra c. 1954-1959 Gelatin silver print, printed 2018-2020 9 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (24.1 x 24.1cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Acquired through the generosity of Ruth Nordenbrook
Jean Depara (Congolese born Angola, 1928-1997) Un Jazzeur (Jazzman) 1960 Gelatin silver print, printed later 23 x 19″ (58.4 x 48.3cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi
Historian, Sandrine Colard: Depara’s images, when you look at them, you see mostly people partying at nighttime or in his studio. So you don’t directly see people articulating a political discourse, but their bodies are.
My name is Sandrine Colard, and I’m a historian of African art and photography.
Jean Depara was living in Léopoldville, which will become Kinshasa. It was the capital of the Belgian Congo, seen as a very modern city for Africa at that time.
This is a portrait of a Black man in a suit and tie. The way the arms of this man are folded upon themselves – he’s touching himself in a delicate way. Under a colonial system, Black men are seen as a workforce. Your body is to be put into service of colonial power, and so the very fact of dressing up, this delicate relationship to his own body – for pleasure, enjoyment, beauty – is just something that’s radically opposing the construction of Black masculinity in the colonial Congo.
The fact that it’s also entitled Jazzeur makes a connection with music. Jazz is a diasporic language throughout the world, and a musician is definitely not someone who is enlisted into the colonial economy. All of that together, I would say, is really a sort of different portrait being constructed for Congolese masculinity at that time.
Jean Depara (Congolese, born Angola, 1928-1997) Una Moziki c. 1960 Gelatin silver print, printed later 23 x 19″ (58.4 x 48.3cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi
Jean Depara (Congolese, born Angola, 1928-1997) Le Progrès (The Progress) 1975 Gelatin silver print, printed later 15 3/4 x 11 13/16″ (40 x 30cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi
Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1923-2001) Untitled 1954 Gelatin silver print, printed later 46 15/16 x 65 7/8″ (119.2 x 167.3cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi
Introduction
Curator, Oluremi C. Onabanjo: I’m Oluremi Onabanjo. I’m the Peter Schub Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.
This exhibition includes some of the most iconic image-makers working across cities in West and Central Africa, at a moment when the continent was transitioning from European colonial powers to independent nations run by Africans themselves. Within this context, people are really interested in what it means to be themselves. What are the dreams you have, the places you want to go? How do you see yourself? Photographic portraits are the perfect way to wrestle with these questions.
And that’s important for understanding the great Seydou Keïta, who was working in Bamako, in French Sudan, but which became, in 1960, an independent Mali. People who came to Keïta’s studio were interested in being seen as connected to a cosmopolitan world. Keïta was extremely proud of making people look beautiful. He used sunlight for all of his photographs. He had a number of props – watches, radios, rings – to gesture to their investment in this global imaginary that they are constructing with Keïta.
With this exhibition, I encourage you to really think about how a portrait is made. These are deliberately constructed compositions, and when we are attentive to those moves, we might see things anew.
Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1923-2001) Untitled (Bamako) 1956-1957 Gelatin silver print, printed 1997 15 9/16 x 22 1/8″ (39.5 x 56.2cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Family of Man Fund
Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1923-2001) Untitled 1956 Modern gelatin silver print Image: 22 3/8 x 15 11/16″ (56.8 x 39.8cm) Frame: 30 3/16 x 23 7/16″ (76.7 x 59.6cm) Sheet: 23 7/8 x 19 15/16″ (60.7 x 50.7cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection
Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination catalogue cover
Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (Catalan: Marià Fortuny i Marsal, pronounced [məɾi a fuɾˈtuɲ i məɾ’sal]; June 11, 1838 – November 21, 1874) was a Spanish painter known for works focusing on Romantic fascination with Orientalist themes, historicist genre painting, and military painting of Spanish imperial expansion.
On the music of artists
What a fascinating group of photographs that picture how (mainly male) Spanish artists liked to see themselves in the 19th century and early 20th century.
“From the photographic corpus preserved in the Museum’s collections, a visual narrative of the artist in their personal and professional life is constructed, thus highlighting the importance of photography as an instrument of visibility, permanence, and legitimacy.” (Museo Nacional Del Prado)
Not only do we have the photographic corpus but we have the corpus, the body, of the artist, resplendent in all their finery, positioned and posed in their workspaces, “carefully constructed environments for the viewer’s gaze”, historic tableaux vivant which emphasise their social standing, their power and prestige.
While the photographs “depict alternative scenarios of creation and social interaction, broadening the traditional notion of the studio and recalling the diverse contexts in which artistic activity developed” (Museo Nacional Del Prado), they capture in a visual language the formal social rituals which accompanied the production of art, status, and self-representation.
“Portraiture, in particular, became a powerful tool. Carefully staged poses, symbolic objects, and profession-specific clothing allowed artists to shape how they were perceived. These were not casual snapshots – they were deliberate constructions of identity.” (Press release from the Museo Nacional del Prado)
This is the image they chose to portray to the world, many surrounded by the fruits of their creativity, antiques, objets d’art, and the trappings of wealth and prosperity.
Two things strike me.
The first is the visual feast that was the artist’s studio compared to today’s minimalist “white cube” galleries and studios, especially in photographs such as Federico de Madrazo’s studio in Madrid (1893, below) and Luis de Madrazo’s studio in Madrid (1885-1895, below) both by unknown photographers. The artist’s inhabit the space, it is their “habitas” – in Spanish and Portuguese, habitas is the second-person singular present indicative of the verbs habitar (Spanish) and habitar (Portuguese), which also translates to “you live” or “you inhabit.” And so in these photographs the artist inhabits the constructed space, and all these years later we observe this habitation, this creative habitation. You live / you inhabit.
Of particular interest are the two spheres hitched to a pulley system in both photographs. These classic plaster spheres (sometimes called a form sphere or sight-size sphere) – of which I had no previous knowledge – were vital in 19th-century academic painting, which heavily emphasised chiaroscuro, and served as a painter’s ‘dynamic light meter’. As the illumination from the studio skylight constantly shifted with the time and weather, the sphere offered the purest representation of the three-dimensional ‘five tonal values’ – such as highlights and the terminator line (the boundary that separates the directly illuminated side of a 3D object from the side in shadow). It allowed painters to easily reference and calibrate real-time lighting ratios at any moment, ensuring that the lighting logic across the entire painting remained precise and perfectly consistent. Through the pulley and counterweight system clearly visible in the images, painters could adjust the height of the sphere at any time to align it perfectly with models in various poses or specific objects. This allowed them to simulate specific light angles in real-time and from all angles, providing a precise reference for light and shadow. (Various sources)
I find this so fascinating, the correlation between “dynamic light meter” in painting – using the sphere – and the “dynamic light meter” in photography using the mirror of the camera, f stops and shutter speeds (depth of field), in camera metering or hand held spot meters.
We can also posit a correlation from the “five tonal values” in painting (highlight, light/halftone, terminator (core shadow), reflected light, cast shadow) to the innate understanding of the modulation of light and use of chiaroscuro by 19th century photographers (who were often painters transferring their talents to a different medium) through the apparatus of the camera – which eventually led to the development of Ansel Adams Zone system: zone 1 (black) through zone 5 (Kodak mid-grey) to zone 10 (white).
The second thing that strikes me about the exhibition which may just be a small point, but it’s important to me, because words matter.
The English version of the title for this exhibition on the Museo Nacional del Prado website is The artist’s world through the camera. The Spanish title for the exhibition is El universo del artista ante la cámara which means, literally, The Artist’s Universe Before the Camera, and indeed the press release titles the exhibition thus in English.
In the English title (on the website) the artist’s lives in a self-contained world (an entire realm created within a subject), and this world view is “seen” through the camera, is captured by the camera in its entirety from one point of view. In the Spanish title on the other hand, the artist’s universe – as the sum of, the totality of, their life, experiences, and thoughts, the interaction of the physical with the spiritual and thought with reality – is laid bare before the camera.
There is a great difference between a self-contained world, constrained and captured by the camera from one point of view, and a fluid, gestational engagement between the energy of the artist, his universal spirit, his habitation and the camera.
A small point but so very vital to our understanding of these photographs.
I have added bibliographic information for the artists where possible.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museo Nacional del Prado for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The artist’s universe before the camera”, by Beatriz Sánchez Torija
Lecture “The Artist’s Universe Before the Camera” given by Beatriz Sánchez Torija (Department of Conservation of Drawings, Prints and Photographs, Museo Nacional del Prado) on May 12, 2026.
In Spanish (use subtitles to translate to English)
The arrival of photography in the 19th century gave rise to an unprecedented and extraordinarily effective way of representing reality. Artists quickly grasped the potential of this new discipline and used it as a tool to capture their image, record their work environment, and document both the creative processes and the final results of their works. From the photographic corpus preserved in the Museum’s collections, a visual narrative of the artist in their personal and professional life is constructed, thus highlighting the importance of photography as an instrument of visibility, permanence, and legitimacy.
Portraiture was one of the first genres adopted by the photographic medium. Through carefully studied poses, specific clothing, or attributes inherent to their profession, artists codified a public image that defined both their individuality and their membership in a professional collective. The camera captured painters, sculptors, and creators from various disciplines, both individually and in groups, highlighting the bonds of sociability, learning, and mutual recognition that structured the artistic world of the time. The presence of women artists in this collection also allows us to see their gradual entry into the professional sphere and their active participation in these processes of self-representation.
Creative spaces constitute another major focus of the discourse, understood not only as physical environments but also as symbolic extensions of artistic practice. Studios, workshops, and other workspaces appear photographed as settings for experimentation, reflection, and production, but also as carefully constructed environments for the viewer’s gaze. In them, the viewer accesses a universe where the works – in different stages of execution – coexist with the props, materials, and visual references characteristic of these spaces.
The images also depict alternative scenarios of creation and social interaction, broadening the traditional notion of the studio and recalling the diverse contexts in which artistic activity developed between the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The setting is a rooftop space – sometimes referred to in contemporary texts as a ‘glass hut’ – in which a gallery of portraits has been arranged to make best use of the light. The group’s devotion to the fine arts is emphasised by a sculpture and several paintbrushes visible in the foreground.
Initially Mr. Martínez, who is none other than Ángel Alonso Martínez (1825-1868), and later under the name of Alonso Martínez and his brother (other sources say that his brother-in-law), the studio maintained an important commercial activity specialized in the realization of high quality portraits, whose objective clientele was formed by the highest layers of society.
Marcus: There is a little cartoon drawing two thirds of the way up on the left hand side of Raimundo de Madrazo. He can be seen seventh from the left in the top row.
The advent of photography in the 19th century marked the birth of a new artistic discipline and paved the way for an unprecedented and remarkably effective method of representing reality. Artists rapidly grasped the scope of this transformation: they portrayed themselves (alone or with colleagues), documented their work spaces, and made the effort to graphically record both their creative processes and the final materialisation of their works.
Based on the holdings of the Museo del Prado, specifically the archives of Luis and Federico de Madrazo, Dióscoro Puebla, Rafael Rocafull, Cecilio Pla, Agustín Querol, Miguel Blay, Fernanda Francés and Manuel González Santos, the exhibition brings together photographs by renowned professionals alongside other anonymous and possibly amateur creations. Created using a range of techniques and formats, taken as a whole this group of images makes it possible to trace a visual map of the presence of artists in their domestic contexts, studios and various spaces of social interaction and learning, as well as in alternative creative settings, such as the evocative Patio de las Doncellas in the Real Alcázar in Seville.
The exhibition is intended as a tribute to the male and female creators who were active in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with a particular acknowledgement of those who understood photography as a privileged medium for ensuring the preservation of their image and artistic practice over time.
During his stay in Madrid, between 1858 and 1860, the English diplomat John Savile Lumley (1818-1896) spent time with Valentín Carderera, Federico and Luis de Madrazo, and purchased a number of works by Goya and Velázquez. A keen amateur painter himself, he is shown in this studio portrait with the characteristic tools of the trade: palette, paintbrushes and a mahlstick.
Georges Jean Penabert (1825-1903) was a French photographer. He lived in 1869 at 31 Passage du Havre in the 9th arrondissement in Paris. His declared profession for that year was a trader (photographer). Penabert began ihis activity in 1858 in Paris, under the name Penabert et Cie; he practiced at various addresses: 46 rue Basse du Rempart, 31 passage of Le Havre around 1864, 36/38 passage of Le Havre in 1875. He opened two branches, 587 Broadway in New York and 108 Calle de la Havana in Cuba. He became associated with Charles DeForest Fredricks (1823-1894) and his work was awarded a Silver Medal at the Paris World Fair in 1889. Georges Penabert died in Paris in the 11th district on December 27, 1903, at age 78.
Study of Altobelli and Molins Spanish Artists in Rome 1861 Prado National Museum
The study of Altobelli and Molins centres on the influential 19th-century Italian photography studio founded by Gioacchino Altobelli and Pompeo Molins. Operating in Rome between approximately 1858 and 1865, the duo is highly regarded for pioneering the wet-collodion process to capture architectural views, landscapes, and daily life in Italy.
Study of Altobelli and Molins Spanish Artists in Rome (detail) 1861 Prado National Museum
Rafael Rocafull y Monfort (Cádiz, 1825 – h. 1903) was a Spanish photographer and painter.
He began his artistic training at the School of Fine Arts of Cadiz and made different pictorial works of costume themes throughout his life, although he also practiced portraiture and landscape. He participated in the fine arts exhibition that was held in the city of Cadiz in 1854, obtaining a silver medal, and in which it took place in Jerez de la Frontera in 1858. Some of his canvases are: Sacra familia, San Antonio, Ángel de la Guarda, El Prisisinero de la Bastille, Cuatro cuadros sobre Cuatro Stations and Una aldeana.
He was also one of the pioneers of photography in Spain, he made numerous portraits, including the series Academics, dedicated to members of the Academy of Fine Arts of Cadiz of which he was a member. He also published albums with collections of photographs dedicated to several Spanish cities, such as Córdoba and Seville. His shots of the city of Cadiz are fundamental to know the evolution of the city’s image In the second half of the 19th century.
He served as director of the Museum of Painting of Cadiz and was even interested in political issues, being appointed on two occasions councilor of the City of Cadiz. It is believed that he moved out of his hometown in 1902, at the age of 77, ignoring the exact date and place where his death took place. Many of his pictorial works currently belong to private collections, such as the one entitled Aldeanos en una taberna (Bellver Collection of Seville).
Text from the Wikipedia website translated from the Spanish by Google Translate
In 1870, Mariano Fortuny and Cecilia de Madrazo took up residence in Granada, where their son Mariano was born the following year. To celebrate the recent birth, several friends and family members visited the couple in the summer of 1871, a gathering immortalised in this photograph, taken in the Alhambra.
Background and Context
In the summer of 1871, the painter Mariano Fortuny and his wife Cecilia de Madrazo were living in Granada, having taken up residence there the previous year. To celebrate the recent birth of their son, Mariano Fortuny and Madrazo, several family members and friends traveled south to visit the couple. This monumental photograph immortalizes the occasion, showcasing the distinguished figures posed in the serene and highly ornamented courtyard.
Key Figures in the Photograph
The gathering features several prominent figures of 19th-century Spanish art, including:
~ Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz: The patriarch of the family and renowned portraitist, who traveled from Madrid to visit his daughter and meet his new grandson. ~ Mariano Fortuny y Marsal: The celebrated Catalan painter and son-in-law to Federico. ~ Cecilia de Madrazo y Garreta: Mariano’s wife.Isabel de Madrazo y Garreta: Cecilia’s sister. ~ Martín Rico Ortega: A close family friend and notable landscape painter. ~ María Luisa Fortuny y Madrazo: The young daughter of Mariano and Cecilia.
Text from the Museo del Prado website
Charles Mauzaisse was a French painter and the son of a painter. He emigrated to Spain in 1857 and signed the visitors’ log at the Alhambra on the 29th of January. After a peripatetic period traveling through southern Spain, he settled in Granada permanently, becoming one of the city’s few foreigners to become a local professional photographer. As a portrait photographer, he offered his clientele their likenesses on oilcloth, paper, glass, and ivory. He soon expanded his repertoire to views of the city and its architectural monuments, especially the Alhambra, catering to foreign visitors’ whims and custom requests and the booming tourist trade. In 1862, he returned from a visit to France with the latest advances in the photographic field.
From this date to the beginning of the 1880s, he made many photographs. However, their dispersal has left scant remnants in public collections. The Royal Palace in Madrid owns an album with 40 of Mauzaisse’s photos. He dedicated it to María de las Mercedes de Orleans y Bórbon on her marriage in 1878 to King Alfonso XII of Spain. Mauzaisse’s photography conjoined with his activity as a painter. Art deeply entered him as the son of Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse (1784-1844), a prolific if minor French artist. By 1870, Charles established himself as a painter as well as a photographer in the Alhambra. He reportedly maintained close contact with French artists like Henry Regnault (1843-1871), whom he entertained on his way to Morocco. Recent research has shown that Gustave Doré used photos by Mauzaisse as the basis for his engraved illustrations in several publications.
In July 1871, Mauzaisse photographed the Fortuny-Madrazo family in the Alhambra when they gathered in Granada to celebrate the birth of Fortuny’s son, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo. Unfortunately, Charles Mauzaisse may have died in the cholera epidemic that swept through Andalucía in 1885.
The Museo del Prado has opened a new exhibition that turns the lens toward artists themselves, revealing how photography transformed not only how they were seen, but how they chose to present their world.
Titled “The artist’s universe through the camera,” the exhibition offers a compelling journey through the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century – an era when photography was rapidly reshaping artistic identity.
Rather than focusing solely on finished artworks, the show brings visitors behind the scenes. Through portraits, studio views, and process images, it reveals artists at work, at rest, and in moments of self-reflection – capturing a more intimate and human side of artistic creation.
Photography enters the studio
When photography emerged in the 19th century, it offered something entirely new: the ability to capture reality with striking precision. Artists quickly embraced it.
They posed for portraits – alone or alongside peers – documented their studios, and even recorded the step-by-step evolution of their works. What had once been invisible or fleeting became permanent.
Portraiture, in particular, became a powerful tool. Carefully staged poses, symbolic objects, and profession-specific clothing allowed artists to shape how they were perceived. These were not casual snapshots – they were deliberate constructions of identity.
A social ritual and a visual language
By the late 1800s, visiting a photography studio had become a social event. These spaces – often located on upper floors with large windows to capture natural light – were as much about performance as documentation.
New formats such as:
~ Carte de visite ~ Promenade cards ~ Paris cards
made portrait photography more accessible and widely circulated. Meanwhile, larger formats were used for group portraits, celebrating artistic circles, collaborations, and milestones.
The exhibition shows how these images became a shared visual language – one that blended art, status, and self-presentation.
Inside the artist’s world
At the heart of the exhibition is the artist’s studio – not just as a workspace, but as a symbol.
Studios were places where:
~ Ideas took shape ~ Teaching and collaboration happened ~ Collections of objects, artworks, and memories accumulated
In many cases, they resembled cabinets of curiosities, filled with both finished works and sources of inspiration.
The exhibition takes visitors into these spaces, from the refined studios of Madrid and Paris to evocative settings like the Royal Alcázar of Seville.
From masters to lesser-known voices
Drawing from the Prado’s own archives, the exhibition brings together photographs linked to artists such as Federico de Madrazo, Miguel Blay, Cecilio Pla, and others – alongside anonymous and possibly amateur images.
This mix gives the show a refreshing depth. It doesn’t just highlight well-known figures; it captures a broader artistic ecosystem, including students, collaborators, and everyday moments in creative life.
One of the most compelling aspects is the attention given to women artists and students, whose presence in studios became increasingly visible during this period. Their inclusion adds an important layer to the narrative of artistic modernity.
Capturing the creative process
Beyond portraits and studio scenes, the exhibition also documents the making of art itself.
Visitors can follow the evolution of certain works step by step – most notably in the case of sculptor Miguel Blay, whose monument to Mariano Moreno is traced through various stages of creation.
These images reveal something rarely seen: the labour, experimentation, and transformation behind finished masterpieces.
A story of technique and transformation
The exhibition also highlights the evolution of photographic processes, from early albumen prints to more advanced techniques like platinum printing, autochrome, and gelatin prints.
Each method reflects not only technological innovation but also changing artistic sensibilities. Together, they tell a story of how photography and art developed side by side, influencing one another.
A lasting legacy
Ultimately, “The artist’s universe through the camera” is more than a historical survey – it’s a reminder of how artists adapted to a new medium that would forever change their relationship with the public.
Photography allowed them to control their image, document their work, and preserve their legacy in ways that had never been possible before.
And today, those images offer us a rare and intimate glimpse into their world.
Debas settled in Spain in the 1870s, and started his professional career in Madrid with his brother Edgardo Debas, also a photographer by profession. They set up a studio at 22, Calle del Príncipe, under the trade name of Fotografía Parisiense Debas Hermanos. After several years of working together, they went their separate ways. On 30th March 1875, King Alfonso XII granted Fernando the title of chamber photographer, as well as permission to use the royal coat of arms on his establishment’s displays and invoices. From that date onwards, and in the same studio, he styled himself as “First Photographer to His Majesty the King and the Princess of Asturias”. In 1877 he collaborated with two other renowned professional photographers, Jean Laurent and Alfredo Esperón, to create the album of photographs of the National Wine Exhibition held in Madrid the same year.
In 1878, he opened a branch in Valladolid with great commercial success. From 1883 onwards, he styled himself at his new gallery at 31, Calle de Alcalá as “Photographer to Their Majesties, and Their Royal Highnesses, the Princess of Asturias and the Infantas.” Debas’ studio had become one of the most famous of its generation, frequented by numerous politicians, military officers, intellectuals and other personalities of the time. The painter from Seville and founding member of the Free Academy of Fine Arts of Seville, Enrique Rumoroso, collaborated with Fernando Debas as an illuminator. His works include the album of photographs of the masked ball held on 25th February 1884 at the palace of the Duke and Duchess of Fernán Núñez. From 1884 onwards, he also worked for the magazine La Ilustración and, from 1896, for Nuevo Mundo.
The enormous prestige enjoyed by Debas’ establishment made him one of the most favourite photographers of the Royal Family; he held a virtual monopoly on palace photography during the Restoration and the Regency of Maria Christina. The documents in the Palace Archive attest to Debas’ connections with the Royal Household from 1875 until 1900, having taken the official portraits of Alfonso XII and of the early years of Alfonso XIII, as well as of each member of the family, their travels, leisure and entertainment.
Debas became the first photographer to show this new side of the royal family, previously unknown due to the limitations of photography. His first portraits still follow the fin-de-siècle photography formats, in response to the card-making fever of the times, and are arranged formally as required by studio portraiture back then, often with palace furnishings and accessory furniture, essential to create the most appropriate settings. Patrimonio Nacional holds nearly three hundred photographs by him, some of them bound in exquisite albums by Schropp.
Anonymous text from the Real Academia de la Historia website found in English as “Debas, Fernando,” on the Galeria de las Colecciones Reales website Nd [Online] Cited 30/06/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Fernanda Frances Arribas (1862−1939) was a Spanish painter. She is known for still lifes and flower paintings. She taught at the Escuela de Artes y Oficinos in Madrid, and at the Escuela del Hogar in Madrid.
Fernanda Frances Arribas (Spanish, 1862−1939) Vase of Lilacs c. 1890 Oil on canvas Height: 118.8 cm Width: 47 cm Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado Acquired by the State for the Museo Nacional de Pintura y Escultura (Museo del Prado), 1890; Museo de Arte Moderno, 1896-1971
A painter and teacher, Fernanda Francés enjoyed success and public recognition in the Spain of the Restoration. Specialising in flower painting and still lifes, and supported by clear critical acclaim, she won a second-class medal for this work at the 1890 National Exhibition. The profound realism of her art attracted a broad private clientele who kept her works in demand for several decades.
G. Navarro, Carlos, Invitadas. Fragmentos sobre mujeres, ideología y artes plásticas en España (1833-1931), Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2020, p.332 No. 92 on the Museo Nacional Del Prado website
Pedro Edgardo Debas (Moulins, France, May 23, 1845 – Madrid, December 28, 1891). He was a photographer whose professional life took place in Madrid, where he began with his brother Fernando Debas. He specialised in portraits as well as collaborating with the illustrated press of the late nineteenth century, such as the Spanish and American Enlightenment and the nobles of the time. He settled in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and had his apogee period between the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century. He died on December 28, 1891. His widow Antonia Coronado took charge of the studio for at least the next ten years until in 1902 the photographer Pedro Calvet kept the studio and its entire photographic collection.
Text from the Wikipedia website translated from the Spanish by Google Translate
Jaume Morera i Galícia (Spanish, 1854-1927) was a Catalan landscape painter.
Agustín Lhardy Garrigues (Spanish, 1848-1918) Disciple of Carlos de Haes and student of the Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. For his pictorial work he won some awards at the national exhibitions of Fine Arts. An emaling copy of a landscape of his master earned him the second engraving medal at the National Exhibition of 1904, an example that connects him with the French reproduction engraving of the last quarter of the s. XIX, dedicated to interpreting contemporary painting. The first engraving medal was not obtained until the 1912 Exhibition for a set of prints engraved with etching. Lhardy was the disciple who most directly followed Haes’ line, both in the theme and in the practice of the technique, although he frequently used resins, gining his compositions a great pictorial effect. He worked copper sheets larger than Haes
In the latter half of the 19th century, artistic practice moved beyond the traditional confines of the studio and expanded into new creative realms. Photography documented these outdoor forays, capturing the artist at work; at the same time, the setting itself – monument, city or landscape – gradually assumed greater prominence.
The photographer was Emilio Beauchy Cano (1849-1931), active in Seville between active 1881 and 1908.
Emilio Beauchy Cano (Seville, September 20, 1849 – Seville, January 15, 1931) was a Spanish photographer. Belonging to a family of photographers, he developed his work in Andalusia, and especially in Seville. He is considered one of the first Spanish photojournalists. His photographs, many of them marketed in albums, spread the image of Andalusia from the end of the 19th century.
Federico de Madrazo (1815-1894) lived and worked in the former Calle de la Greda, now named Calle de Los Madrazo. The photograph shows the interior of his studio, with its furniture, stove and imposing globe; visible artworks include an unfinished portrait of Cánovas del Castillo, which the artist kept until his death, and now belongs to the Museo del Prado (P007063).
The painter Vicente Palmaroli (1834-1896) directed the Spanish Academy in Rome between 1883 and 1891, and the Museo del Prado from 1894 until his death. For this portrait by Manuel Alviach, he opted for a large-format photograph, designed to be framed or displayed, rather than a painted likeness.
This portrait of Vicente Palmaroli made by the photographer Manuel Alviach (1846-1924) is a large albumen copy, mounted on a second cardboard support, which has a dedicatory inscription in the handwriting of the sitter: “to my dear Vicentín his father / Vicente. Madrid April 1894.” In the year in which the photograph is dated, the artist began his career as director of the Prado Museum and was photographed by one of the most famous professionals of the time, who had his studio in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. Upon losing her father so prematurely, Carlota Rosales lived protected and educated by Vicente Palmaroli, who raised her as if she were his own daughter. He only had one son – Vicente Palmaroli Reboulet – who, upon his death, left all his assets to Carlota, whom he considered his sister, and this is the reason why the photograph of Vicente (father) dedicated to Vicentín (son) was in the possession of the descendants of Rosales’ daughter.
Sánchez Torija, Beatriz, ‘Varios autores. Dibujos y fotografías que pertenecieron a Carlota Rosales, segunda mitad del siglo XIX’. En: Memoria de Actividades 2022, Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, 2023, p.154-157 on the Museo del Prado website translated from the Spanish by Google Translate
Manuel Alviach (Caspe (Zaragoza), 1845 – Madrid, 1924) Photographer. One of the best-known portrait photographers in late 19th-century Madrid. He worked as an assistant in Napoleon’s studio – specifically as a “portrait photographer’s assistant” – in Barcelona in 1862, and is later documented in Girona as well. In the 1870s, he settled in Madrid and, in 1872, opened a studio at Puerta del Sol 14, which he kept in operation until at least 1900. Alviach was part of the editorial board of the photographic magazine “Daguerre. Society of Established Photographers,” which also featured contributions from other important photographers of that era.
Information taken from the Census-Guide of Archives of Spain and Latin America of the Ministry of Culture and the Clifford Directory. Portal of 19th-Century Photographers in Spain.
This is one of a set of photographs – part of the Prado’s collection – showing the interior of the studio set up by Luis de Madrazo (1825-1897) at his home in Calle Caballero de Gracia, in Madrid. The painter’s tools are placed in the foreground, while the rear wall is taken by a number of paintings. Chief among these – due to its large format – is Jesus appears to the Holy Women; a preparatory sketch for the picture leans against the wall beneath the painting.
Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz (9 February 1815 – 10 June 1894) was a Spanish painter. …
While decorating the palace of Vista Alegre he took up portraiture. In 1832 he went to Paris, where he studied under Franz Winterhalter, and painted portraits of Baron Taylor and Ingres. In 1837 he was commissioned to produce a picture for the gallery at Versailles, and painted “Godfrey de Bouillon proclaimed King of Jerusalem”. The artist then returned to Rome, where he worked at various subjects, sacred and profane. Then he painted Maria Christina in the Dress of a Nun by the Bedside of Ferdinand III (1843), Queen Isabella, The Duchess of Medinaceli, and The Countess de Vilches (1845-47), besides a number of portraits of the Spanish aristocracy, some of which were sent to the exhibition of 1855.
He received the Legion of Honour in 1846. He was made a corresponding member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts on 10 December 1853, and in 1873, on the death of Schnorr, the painter, he was chosen foreign member. Three years after his father left office, he also became Director of the Museo del Prado and president of the Academy of San Fernando. He originated in Spain the production of art reviews and journals, such as El Artista, El Renacimiento, and El Semanario pintoresco. He died in Madrid.
His brother, Luis de Madrazo, was also known as a painter, chiefly by his Burial of Saint Cecilia (1855). Federico’s best-known pupils were his sons, Raimundo and Ricardo.
Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (Málaga, 1828 – Mondragón, Guipúzcoa, 1897) was an historian and politician. He is depicted three-quarter length and seated and is framed by a curtain on the left and, possibly, a statue of Pallas Athena on the right. As it is unfinished, the painter’s work method can be appreciated. He applied the colours over a generalised layer of grey, which provides it with the warm tonality of most of his portraits.
Since 2009, Room 60 at the Museo del Prado – relabelled “Open Warehouse” in 2026 – has been designed as a space for displaying the museum’s 19th century holdings as part of the permanent collection.
It has hosted small-scale exhibition projects spanning a range of perspectives: monographic shows highlighting artists such as Aureliano de Beruete, Miguel Blay, Rogelio de Egusquiza, Antonio María Esquivel, Federico de Madrazo, Jenaro Pérez Villaamil, Francisco Pradilla, Eduardo Rosales, Joaquín Sorolla and José de Madrazo (drawings); displays addressing specific techniques, including watercolours and Japanese prints; presentations linked to donations, such as the Rudolf Gerstenmaier bequest; and surveys dealing with particular themes, for example religious painting and child portraits.
Photography, while playing a part in some of these projects and recently taking centre stage in The Prado multiplied: Photography as shared Memory, again provides the core focus for The Artist’s World through the Camera, an exhibition devoted to the artists’ images and their creative spaces.
The advent of the new art of photography in the 19th century paved the way for an unprecedented and extraordinarily effective means of representing reality. Artists were quick to grasp the potential of this transformation: they photographed themselves both alone and in company, documented their workspaces and kept a careful visual record both of the creative process and of the completed oeuvre.
One of the earliest genres favoured by photography was the portrait, regarded not just as a record of identity and an affirmation of one’s own image but also as proof of the sitter’s social status. Through carefully considered poses, and using attributes intended to define the subject, as well as appropriate professional attire, the photographers – and the sitters themselves – constructed a visual language that enabled them to project the desired image.
In the latter half of the 19th century, visiting a photographer’s studio to have one’s portrait taken was a social event. Portrait studios – sometimes referred to as “glass cabins” in contemporary texts – were generally situated on the upper floors of buildings, and featured large windows to ensure plenty of natural light. They soon proliferated in cities, where they prompted growing competition, leading to the emergence of various kinds of specialist studios and a gradual fall in prices.
Smaller photograph formats – the carte de visite, the promenade card and the Paris card – were mainly intended for individual portraits, while larger formats provided the ideal solution for group compositions.
The group portraits in this exhibition focus on membership of a professional body or on the celebration of a particularly important event. The careful composition of the pictures – as well as press advertisements and notes on the back of the cardboard supports – indicate that some of the photographers showcased here had trained in the fine arts; this undoubtedly facilitated their dealings with other professional artists.
Drawing on the Museo del Prado’s holdings, including the archives of numerous artists – among them Luis and Federico de Madrazo, Dióscoro Puebla, Rafael Rocafull, Cecilio Pla, Agustín Querol, Miguel Blay, Fernanda Francés and Manuel González Santos – this exhibition brings together photographs both by leading professionals and by anonymous, possibly amateur photographers. This collection of prints, produced using a whole range of techniques and formats, allows us to visually chart the artist’s presence in his studio, in various social and educational spaces and in alternative creative settings, such as the evocative Patio de las Doncellas at the Real Alcázar in Seville.
Artists’ studios are spaces fraught with symbolic significance, where inspiration, careful observation and creation converge within a single creative process. The venues pictured here provided the setting not just for the production of art but also for social gatherings, for tuition and even – at times –for a veritable cabinet of curiosities, in which works of art were displayed alongside antiques and collectors’ items, as in Mariano Fortuny’s famous atelier in Rome.
Studios tended to be spacious rooms, designed to house significant collections of works – particularly bulky in the case of sculptures – as well as furniture, an area set aside for the models and their props, and the tools of the artist’s trade. Added to all this was an assortment of the artist’s personal keepsakes, mementoes of his life and career, which helped to heighten his prestige.
In this context, the portraits of painters such as Raimundo de Madrazo in his Paris studio or Luis Sainz at the Casa de los Estudios in Madrid, and of sculptors like Aniceto Marinas accompanied by his models, Mariano Benlliure with the writer Federico García Sanchiz and Agustín Querol proudly posing beside a detail from his allegory of the Arts for the pediment of the National Library, offer a glimpse into the creative world of their studios.
Special mention should be made of the portrait of María Luisa de la Riva in her Paris studio, which, together with pictures of some female students in classes taught by Cecilio Pla – including Carolina del Castillo – and by Manuel González Santos, testifies to the increasingly common presence of women in these creative spaces.
The selected photographs also chart the various stages in the creation of a single work of art, particularly well documented in cases such as the sculpture for the monument to Mariano Moreno, by Miguel Blay, commissioned in 1909 by the National Commission for the Centenary of Argentine Independence.
The exhibition The Artist’s World through the Camera pays tribute to the creative careers of those men and women who, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, recognised photography as the ideal medium for ensuring a lasting record of their image and their artistic practice.
Rather than “a distinguished amateur painter,” as she was described by the writer Manuel Ossorio y Bernard in 1883, María Luisa de la Riva was – as she herself stated in some of her letters – a “professional painter who works for a living,” with a long and successful career. She is pictured here, at the age of 41, in her studio, surrounded by her works and the props used in some of her compositions.
Luisa de la Riva was a Spanish painter specialising in still life and flower paintings. She was an honorary member of the Sociedad de Amigos del País in Santiago de Compostela and a member of the Society of Artists in Berlin and Vienna. She was awarded the Palm of the French Academy and the Order of the Nischam Yfttikai of Tunisia. She studied with sculptor Mariano Bellver and painter Antonio Pérez Rubio.
She participated in numerous exhibitions and contests, receiving an honorable mention at the National Exhibitions of Fine Arts in 1887 and 1895. She won third medals in the 1897 and 1901 exhibitions for her paintings titled “Uvas de España” and “Frutas de verano,” and a second medal in the 1920 edition for “Uvas y granadas.” Additionally, she was awarded a third medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 and at the Universal Exposition in Barcelona in 1898
Balbás Ibañez, Mª S. in Enciclopedia del Museo Nacional del Prado, 2006, vol. V, p. 1880 on the Museum del Prado website
“These pieces, which are at last leaving my studio, form the pediment for the National Library and Museum, a commission I won in the ’92 competition. I think it may be put up in a few days’ time.” With these words, published in the magazine Vida Galante in 1902, Agustín Querol announced the completion of one of his landmark works, beside which he proudly posed.
Conde de Polentinos typically refers to Aurelio de Colmenares y Orgaz (1873–1947), a Spanish aristocrat, historian, and renowned pioneer of stereoscopic photography (3D photography). He extensively documented Spanish heritage, landscapes, and society in the early 20th century.
He shot nearly 10,000 glass plate photographs between 1894 and 1931, which capture everything from architectural heritage to daily social customs and landscapes.
Text from the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultura de Espana website
Agustí Querol Subirats (Agustín Querol) (Spanish, 1860-1909) was a Spanish sculptor, born in Tortosa, Catalonia, Spain. Born to a poor family, the son of a baker, Querol was educated under Ramon Cerveto Bestraten (1829–1906). At the age of 18, he left his job at his father’s bakery and moved to Barcelona, where he worked as an apprentice at the studios of Domingo Talarn and of the Vallmitjana Brothers. He also attended sculpture classes at the Escola Provincial de Belles Arts (called colloquially “la Llotja”). He studied dissection and anatomy at the Hospital de la Santa Creu in Barcelona, then won a scholarship to study in Rome.
Based in Madrid from 1890, he was responsible for many monuments, sculptures, and project proposals through much of the Spanish-speaking world. Querol’s work is characterised by the same romantic style, fluid modelling, wealth of detail and technical skill as his French fin de siècle contemporaries like Jules Dalou, but Querol’s work is even more dynamic and profuse. The pediment for the Biblioteca Nacional de España, for instance, is crowded with 19 separate figures. All of his major designs are equally busy.
Emilio Sala y Francés (20 January 1850 – 14 April 1910) was a Spanish painter, primarily of female portraits.
He was born in Alcoy to a family of merchants. His first studies were at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos de Valencia with Plácido Francés y Pascual, his cousin. In 1871, he had his first public showing at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and won First Prize there in 1878. He also opened a studio in Madrid and took part in decorating the Anglada and Mazarredo palaces, the ceilings of the Café de Fornos (now gone), and the Cantina Americana.
In 1885, after failing to receive a Professorship at the “School of Arts and Crafts”, he applied for and received a fellowship to study at the Spanish Academy in Rome but, two years later, was granted leave to study in Paris instead. At the Exposition Universelle (1889) he presented his now-famous painting Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, only to discover that the French public apparently no longer appreciated historical works, so he presented it in Spain, where it was better received. In 1890, perhaps as a result of this experience, he abandoned that subject in favor of genre scenes, landscapes, and illustrating.
In 1896, he returned to Spain, where he married and reopened his studio. Many of his works appeared in the magazine Blanco y Negro. He also illustrated some of the Episodios Nacionales of Benito Pérez Galdós. and created decorations for the palace of the Infanta Isabella, which were highly praised. Overall, however, his portraits stand out.
In 1906, he once again applied for an academic position, this time at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, and was rejected in favour of Ramón Menéndez Pidal. As compensation, the school created a chair in the “Theory and Esthetics of Color” especially for him. He held that post until his death, from heart failure, in 1910 in Madrid. Among his many honors are the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabel the Catholic and the Cross of the Order of St. Michael (Bavaria), presented at an exhibition in Munich in 1885.
Cecilio Plá is depicted in his studio on Calle Carranza, surrounded by his work tools. He is accompanied by Mariano Miguel González (1885-1954), one of his pupils who also helped him as an assistant teacher. Both are portrayed next to one of the canvases intended for the Royal Hall of the Casino de Madrid, a work in which Cecilio Plá was assisted by his pupil, who was the artistic director of the Madrid-produced magazine Por esos mundos. On the lower right-hand side Cecilio Plá’s sketch is discernible, with the grid still visible and from which the painter made the large composition for the Casino. The latter occupies most of the photograph.
In January 1909, Emilio Sala was commissioned to produce these paintings. Sala developed a complete iconographic plan for the ceiling of the Royal Hall. However, he was unable to complete it, as he died suddenly on 14 April 1910. Plá, who must have been very familiar with the project, continued with the commission using some sketches left by his mentor. All of the panels are canvases attached to the wall and, although they were completed by two different artists, upon entering the Royal Hall the viewer perceives an entirely coherent decorative programme.
Cecilio Plá y Gallardo (22 November 1860 – 4 August 1934) was a Spanish painter and illustrator.
Cecilio Plá was born in Valencia. As a child, he studied music at the Escuela de Artesanos de Valencia [es], in accordance with the wishes of his father, who was the bandleader and arranger for the Teatro Principal. Later, he followed his own desires to be an artist and continued his studies at the Instituto San Pablo and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos. After winning a silver medal at the Exposición de Valencia in 1879, he moved to Madrid with a friend, where he entered the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, becoming a student of Emilio Sala.
The following year, after travelling through Portugal, France and Italy, he settled in Rome. From there, he sent home numerous works, mostly in the Costumbrismo genre, which showed the influence of Marià Fortuny. Some were shown at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts, winning medals in 1884 and 1887 for paintings on Italian subjects. He received many more medals over the next two decades, including a Medal of Honor at the Exposition Universelle (1900). From 1893 to 1910, he drew illustrations for several periodicals, including La Ilustración Española y Americana, and Blanco y Negro.
In 1910, he began his career as a teacher at the Academy of San Fernando, succeeding Sala in the Chair of “Color Aesthetics and Painting Procedures”, which he held until his retirement in 1931. He was named an Academician in 1924. His dedication to teaching drastically reduced his artistic output. Juan Gris was, perhaps, his best-known student. He also published a “Pictorial Art Primer”.
In addition to his paintings and drawings, he worked on many public projects, completing the work begun by Sala at the Casino de Madrid and providing decorations for the Círculo de Bellas Artes. He died in Madrid, aged 73.
The Barcelona workshop headed by Manuel Morales was responsible for casting Mariano Moreno’s sculpture in bronze, while Federico Bechini’s workshop – also in Barcelona – was entrusted with the stone carving and assembly of the pedestal. The photograph shows the various pieces being worked and fitted prior to packing for dispatch to Argentina.
Miguel Blay y Fàbregas (in Catalan, Miquel Blay i Fàbregas) (8 October 1866, Olot – 22 January 1936, Madrid) was a Spanish sculptor.
Museo Nacional Del Prado Paseo del Prado, s/n, 28014 Madrid, Spain
” … the human body does not exist and is not understandable apart from the ‘social construction of reality’.” ~ Ted Polhemus
“Hence all of us, in modern social conditions, live as though surrounded by mirrors; in these we search for the appearance of an unblemished, socially valued self.” ~ Anthony Giddens
Embodiment is the fundamental condition we share.
~ Embodiment refers to the representation or expression of an abstract idea, quality, or feeling in a tangible, visible, or physical form. It describes a person, action, or object that perfectly exemplifies a concept. (Cambridge Dictionary)
~ At its core, the word stems from the root “embody,” meaning “to give a body to”. Philosophically, it refers to the condition of a subject (like a person) inhabiting or being associated with a physical form. (Oxford Academic)
Giving form to the intangible
~ Embodiment links together both broadly cultural and circumstantial usages, the body taking on its meaning at the intersection of narrative, culture, and social interaction… Nowadays, with the current interest in lived experience and embodiment, we assume that some level of cultural meaning is implied in pre-reflection as well. (Cambridge English Corpus)
~ Pre-reflection describes an implicit, automatic awareness that accompanies human experience before you pause to consciously analyse or think about what you are doing. It is an unmediated, “in-the-moment” state of being. (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy)
~ In continental philosophy – most notably the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl – pre-reflective consciousness is the immediate, tacit knowledge that an experience is happening to you.
When you are in the zone, as the energy flows through you, in the background you are implicitly aware of taking a photograph – but not in a reflective state, “I have taken a photograph”.
For me, there is a union of mindfulness, body, subject, camera – a seeming suspension of time and space – which may lead to a “revelatio”, a revelation of spirit, a pulling back of the curtain to reveal what is beyond. As a good friend and fellow photographer Frank Vic observes, “To emerge from “the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence” is to let go of the photographer’s intense desire for control and egoistic attachment. Only by facing the subject with an attitude of utmost humility is it possible for the lens to capture a truly objective and sacred “revelation”.”
In modern psychology, the pre-reflective unconscious refers to how your personal history, organising principles, and mental schemas shape your experience without you actively noticing it (Encyclopaedia.com). Thus, it is how unconsciously aware you are of your surroundings, how informed you are through your conversations and reading, how attuned you are to the energy of the body and the world – that directs your gaze.
Some pertinent quotations below.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. The exhibition is divided into four interesting thematic sections – Surface Tension; Kinetic Beauty; Know Thyself; Enduring. Such a pity there are not more photographs to illustrate the many ideas contained within each section.
Many thankx to the Phoenix Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one’s reason, is possible only if one has achieved and attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.”
Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, p. 120.
” … the human body does not exist and is not understandable apart from the ‘social construction of reality’. Our bodies and our perception of them constitute an important part of our socio-cultural heritage. They are not simply objects which we inherit at birth, but are socialized (enculturated) throughout life and this process of collectively sanctioned bodily modification may serve as an important instrument for our socialization (enculturation) in a more general sense. That is, in learning to have a body, we also begin to learn about our ‘social body’ – our society.”
Ted Polhemus. Social Aspects of the Human Body. Penguin: Harmonsworth, 1978, p. 21 quoted in Morag MacSween. Anorexic Bodies: A Feminist and Sociological Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa. London: Routledge, 1993, p. 115.
“Consumer capitalism, with its efforts to standardise consumption and to shape tastes through advertising, plays a basic role in furthering narcissism. The idea of generating an educated and discerning public has long since succumbed to the pervasiveness of consumerism, which is a ‘society dominated by appearances’. Consumption addresses the alienated qualities of modern social life and claims to be their solution: it promises the very things the narcissist desires – attractiveness, beauty and personal popularity – through the consumption of the ‘right’ kinds of goods and services. Hence all of us, in modern social conditions, live as though surrounded by mirrors; in these we search for the appearance of an unblemished, socially valued self.”
Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. California: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 172.
Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing Claire A. Warden’s photograph Genetics Nd (above) from the series Mimesis (2015-ongoing)
Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body
Each of us moves through the world in a body. Though we are marked by differences in our appearances, abilities, and lived experience, embodiment is the fundamental condition we share. Our bodies both empower and limit us: these vessels hold our joy and suffering, our pleasure and pain. They withstand pressure, scrutiny, and change. Through our bodies we confront the edges of our strength, what is in our control and what is not, and the gaps between how we see ourself and how we are perceived. Bodies are sites of contradiction.
Spanning 150 years of images making, and spotlighting several Arizona based artists, this exhibition explores how artists use photography to grapple with bodily existence in all its dimensionality. The camera is a powerful tool for taking an unflinching look at ourselves and others: examining the body’s surface and physicality, suspending its form in motion, and considering how it bears traces of all we endure, from birth to death and everything in between. As a time-based medium, photography is uniquely poised to incrementally record our continuous physical transformation.
Wall text from the exhibition (in the image above)
Mimesis is an ongoing series of large-scale cameraless, abstract photographs that explore identity, representation, resistance, and Opacity.
Mimesis is an ongoing series that engages identity, representation, and language through abstraction and experimental image-making. The creation of this work comes at a time when the struggle to accept the unfamiliar or unkown is pervasive in American culture. When looking at much of my work, the urge to ask “what is it?” echoes the question, “what are you?” – a question directed to me countless times as a person of colour with a diverse ethnocultural heritage and one I increasingly tend to resist. That resistance carries through the work as resistance to definition as well as the hegemonic gaze and, instead, emphasizes Opacity and illegibility. These concepts, informed by anti-essentialism and decolonial theory, ultimately make way for my experimental image-making practice as mode to subvert the problematics of representation in photography, particularly in addressing experiences had by people of color.
For this reason, I believe it is important to know that the Mimesis series is photographic – cameraless photographs – and that I developed a cameraless process that uses saliva to break down the emulsion of film. What is left is metallic silver and my biologic matter – thus exploring photographic materiality, identity formation, and illegibility. These works of self-portraiture do not show a viewer what I look like but are built from my DNA and shaped by my experiences.
Text from the PhMuseum website. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
About the exhibition
Drawn primarily from the collections of the Center for Creative Photography and Phoenix Art Museum, Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body showcases a wide range of historical and contemporary works that explore the ways photographers have represented the human figure and bodily experiences of movement, aging, disability, and more.
Featured works demonstrate how artists have grappled with physicality, dimension, beauty, form, and the politics of the body in the landscape and urban environment. Subjects are presented in the context of growing older, sports, and abstraction, offering audiences the opportunity to consider the body’s ability to morph and bear traces of lived experiences.
Text from the Phoenix Art Museum website
Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at right, Richard Avedon Esther Blackmon, sideshow performer, Sidney, Iowa, August 12, 1979 (1979, below)
Surface Tension
How much can you learn about another person by looking at them? Our bodies are the interface between ourselves and the world, but there is often a gap between our exterior presentation and our inner lives. A photograph grants us the license to study someone’s appearance longer than is socially acceptable during real-time interactions, though the viewer must still draw conclusions from what is outwardly visible.
The photographs in this section probe this tension between exteriority and interiority, showcasing what is lost and gained in translating the body’s physicality in the flat plane of an image. By abstracting the body, photographs can help us see the human form anew. Many of these pictures show how skin signifies aesthetic, cultural, and social meanings, even functioning as a canvas for self-expression.
Wall text from the exhibition
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004) Esther Blackmon, sideshow performer, Sidney, Iowa, August 12, 1979 (installation view) 1979 Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Richard Avedon Archive Gift of the artist
Photographs of people can both exploit and empower. The power dynamic of a portrait involves not only the interaction between the photographer and subject, but also the viewer’s projections, assumptions and interpretation. Resisting others’ projections of shame about her appearance, Esther Blackmon proclaimed: “I live a normal and happy life.” Born in North Carolina, Blackmon (1926-2003) lived with a hereditary skin disease called ichthyosis which caused dryness and baldness. This unique aspect of her phenotype earned her the nickname “The Alligator Girl.” Actively participating in the carnival industry for 56 years, Blackmon regarded herself with pride. “People born unusual are not freaks … I’d say they are very special people.”
Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at left, Leon Borensztein Woman with Tattoo, San Francisco (1984, below); at second left bottom, Stephen Marc, Untitled (2017, below); and at third right bottom, Diane Arbus Tattooed Man at a Carnival, Md. (1970, below)
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Tattooed Man at a Carnival, Md. 1970 Gelatin silver print
Kinetic Beauty
Athletic pursuits are one form of human achievement. Photographs of the body in motion attest to a fascination with witnessing bodies at the threshold of their physical limits, accomplishing seemingly superhuman feats or embodying physical ideals. These images simultaneously chart another set of limits; the evolution of photographic technology itself. Some pictures are from an athletic context and some are not, but all arrest fluid, operatic movements of the body in a way that was previously inaccessible to real-time vision. Shutter speeds reached 1/1000th of a second by the end of the 19th century and continued to shorten, enabling photographers to dissect instantaneous components of complex motions. “Seeing” faster than the eye can perceive, the camera revealed new dimensions of bodily grace, strength, and power.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at top left, Charles “Teenie” Harris New York Cubans (1941, below); at bottom left, Eadweard J. Muybridge Animal Locomotion, Plate 521: A: Walking, B: Ascending a Step, C: Throwing the Disc, D: Using a Shovel, E: Using a Pick, 1884-85 (1887, below); at second left, Harold Edgerton Golf Drive by Densmore Shute, 1938 (1938, below); at centre left, Terrell Groggins Gabriels and Shields Square Up Round 1 (2018, below); at centre right, Walter Iooss Michael Jordan, Phoenix at Chicago, 1933 (1933, below); and at far right, Robert Mapplethorpe Lisa Lyon (1983)
Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998) New York Cubans 1941 Gelatin silver print
New York Cubans baseball player Horacio Martinez leaping above third base at Forbes Field
Eadweard J. Muybridge (English, 1830-1904) Animal Locomotion, Plate 521: A: Walking, B: Ascending a Step, C: Throwing the Disc, D: Using a Shovel, E: Using a Pick, 1884-85 1887 Collotype Center for Creative Photography University of Arizona: Purchase
Eadweard J. Muybridge (English, 1830-1904) Animal Locomotion, Plate 521: A: Walking, B: Ascending a Step, C: Throwing the Disc, D: Using a Shovel, E: Using a Pick, 1884-85 (details) 1887 Collotype Center for Creative Photography University of Arizona: Purchase
This winter, Phoenix Art Museum presents Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body, an exploration of the ways in which photographers across history have represented and reckoned with the human body and its associated dimensionality, evolution, and politicization. Drawn primarily from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, along with select works from the PhxArt Collection and those by Arizona- based contemporary artists, the exhibition showcases more than 80 wide-ranging works that contend with the body’s form, physicality, and limits. Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body will be on view at PhxArt from January 24, 2026, through June 28, 2026.
“Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body offers a view into the human experience that is both compelling and relatable,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “From sports imagery and self-portraiture to abstract compositions, this exhibition considers all aspects of the body in every stage of evolution. We are excited to once again work with the Center for Creative Photography to present a captivating collection of photographic works, shown in conversation with new acquisitions to the Phoenix Art Museum Collection by contemporary voices.”
Spanning works captured from the 19th century through the present, Muscle Memory offers a compelling look at the dynamism of the human body with works by artists such as:
John Gutmann • Richard Avedon • Brian Weil • Lauren Greenfield • Rosalind Fox Solomon • Anne Noggle • Frances Murray • Walter Iooss • Diane Arbus • Manuel Álvarez Bravo • Imogen Cunningham • Arno Rafael Minkkinen • Roy DeCarava • Harold Edgerton • Aaron Siskind • Charles “Teenie” Harris • W. Eugene Smith • Leon Borensztein • Jan Groover • Ittetsu Morishita • John Coplans • Robert Mapplethorpe • Eadweard J. Muybridge • Graciela Iturbide • Barbara Crane • Nan Goldin • William Camargo • Marcus Chormicle • Mehrdad Mirzaie • Claire A. Warden • Zhang Huan
The exhibition’s works are presented across four thematic sections that offer varying views on embodiment and how our bodies at once empower and limit us. Surface Tension considers skin as a surface and what is possible to know about a person by looking at them, including how a subject’s outward appearance can exist in tension with their interiority. Works in this section by artists such as Diane Arbus and John Gutmann spotlight individuals who have changed their outward appearance with tattoos, makeup, and other markings, exploring the human impulse to use the body as a canvas for personal expression.
Kinetic Beauty features the body in motion, with a specific focus on sports imagery. It explores how bodies interact and take shape in athletic settings, particularly those that require high levels of physical performance, endurance, and even contortion. Works in this section include images of bodybuilders by Robert Mapplethorpe and Brian Weil and a photograph by Walter Iooss featuring Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, as well as abstract studies of bodily motion associated with physical training, strength, and aspiration.
Know Thyself highlights the work of photographers who have used the medium of photography, often in the form of serial self-portraiture, to grapple with issues of aging, beauty standards, and self-image. Featured artists in this section include John Coplans, Lauren Greenfield, Anne Noggle, and Rosalind Fox Solomon.
Enduring presents works by Nan Goldin, Ittetsu Morishita, Marcus Chormicle, and others depicting the body as witness and at its physical limits, whether due to physical exertion, illness, injury, or even death and absence, prompting viewers to consider the concepts of endurance and survival.
“Muscle Memory invites audiences to consider the body’s ability to morph in response to and bear traces of lived experience, while also discovering how photographers have used the medium as a tool for self- knowledge and exploration,” said Emilia Mickevicius, the Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography at Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography. “Works by living Arizona-based artists Claire A. Warden, Mehrdad Mirzaie, Marcus Chormicle, and Anh-Thuy Nguyen infuse the presentation with contemporary perspectives on the body’s legibility, how it holds memory, and how it becomes a site of negotiation between selves and others, both extending and departing from the concerns of the historical works in the exhibition.”
Press release from the Phoenix Art Museum
Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at left, Robert Mapplethorpe Lisa Lyon (1983); and at second right, a group of photographs by John Coplans
Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at right, a group of photographs by John Coplans
John Coplans (British, 1920-2003) Self-portrait (Back with arms above) 1984 Gelatin silver print
John Coplans (British, 1920-2003) Feet, Frontal 1984 Gelatin silver print
Know Thyself
From toxic beauty standards to agism, pressures to conform, and the pathologising of non-formative identities and lifestyles, cultural messaging interrupts the journey to self-acceptance. The pictures in this section speak to finding a home in one’s body and moving between comfort and discomfort along the way. A particular focus here is serial self-portraiture where photographers train the lens on their own bodies as they reckon with aging. Facing themselves with tender curiosity and vulnerability, they wield the camera as a tool of self-knowledge, confronting their mortality and even revealing in erotic joy. Their pictures suggest the transformative power being seen on one’s own terms.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing photographs by Rosalind Fox Solomon
Rosalind Fox Solomon described photography as a way of “talking about myself.” For five decades Solomon traversed continents documenting expressions of joy, suffering and spirituality across cultures. Simultaneously, she maintained a consistent practice of self-portraiture. In these pictures Solomon looks frankly at her aging body and evolving self, conveying both empathy and self-estrangement. Photographs of nude older women are still taboo today – a product of a culture that values youth as well as images that are conventionally “flattering” – but Solomon’s photographs suggest the power in embracing and representing what is real.
As the saying goes, “the body keeps the score.” The photographs in this gallery explore how the body holds memory. Outwardly visible marks like scars and wrinkles are testaments to what we have survived, traces of time that resonate with the nurture of photographic images. No matter how strong or fortunate we are, each of us must sustain wounds visible and invisible, go through cycles of suffering and healing, and eventually experience death. We also inherit not only physical characteristics but also stories and trauma from our ancestors. The pictures here are reminders of our bodily fragility, but they also brim with aliveness, inspiring reverence for all that human beings have endured across generations.
William Camargo (American, b. 1989) As Far As I Can Get in 10 Seconds From The Swapmeet Parking Lot to the Liquor Store After Divola 2020 Inkjet print 22 x 18 in.
Installation view of the exhibition Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, January – June, 2026 showing at left, Roy DeCarava Force, New York (1963, below); at centre, George Dureau Wilbert with Hook (Nd, below); and at second right, William Camargo As Far As I Can Get in 10 Seconds From The Swapmeet Parking Lot to the Liquor Store After Divola (2020, above)
Roy DeCarava (American, 1919-2009) Force, New York 1963 Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography University of Arizona: Purchase
A woman being arrested at a New York protest
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014) Wilbert with Hook Nd Gelatin silver print
Large format camera Front on, realist, sharply defined objective documentary photographs of architectural structures of the urban landscape In series
In reality:
Structures cut from the fabric of existence Isolated by the subjective eye of the photographer and the lens of the camera What to include or exclude
(In the contemporary photographs of the spaces in the posting, the shops are surrounded by trees and vegetation, they have transformed from kiosk to shuttered shop, from boutique to florist: the architecture remains but traces of previous incarnations are visible only in these photographs. Nothing is permanent except change).
In the photographs of kiosks, corner shops and industrial gates, it is the minutiae of existence (not as mere decoration) that gives these supposedly objective photographs their subjective power. For example, “the photo Trinkhalle, Köln-Nippes – with its ice cream and newspaper advertisements and vending machines for chewing gum and cigarettes” is more than amusing and engaging – it depicts vital, archaeological evidence of the transitory nature of human existence in the pyschogeography of the urbanscape.1
In Ronkholz’ photographs of the terrain (from the Latin terra, earth/land) of the city, her exploration of urban environments emphasises interpersonal connections to places – and testify “to social, cultural, and economic change and shows how people shape the world around them.” (Press release)
This is the fluid boundary that these photographs so beautifully and incisively depict: the interface between architecture and human, between order (form/surface) and chaos (placement of insolent signs), between utopian perfection and dystopian unruliness – the one coexistent with the other.
This confluence of pattern and randomness, objective and subjective, is what gives these photographs of the everyday a lasting significance.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Guy Debord (November 1956). “Theory of the Dérive”. Les Lèvres Nues (9). Translated by Ken Knabb.
Many thankx to Huis Marseille, Amsterdam for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sankt-Franziskus-Straße 104-107 Düsseldorf
Installation views of the exhibition Designed World: Through the Eyes of Tata Ronkholz (1940-1997) at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, February – June, 2026
Installation views of the exhibition Designed World: Through the Eyes of Tata Ronkholz (1940-1997) at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, February – June, 2026
Installation view of the exhibition Designed World: Through the Eyes of Tata Ronkholz (1940-1997) at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, February – June, 2026 showing at left, Tata Ronkholz’s Düsseldorf Harbor (1980)
Tata Ronkholz was one of the first students in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s famous photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her fellow students included Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, all of whom became artists of world renown. Oddly enough Tata Ronkholz’ work is only now receiving the same international acclaim. The retrospective Designed World: Through the Eyes of Tata Ronkholz (1940-1997), on show at Huis Marseille from 14 February until 21 June 2026, is the first large-scale tribute to this many-sided artist.
Objective-documentary photography
Tata Ronkholz was a photographer, product designer, and interior architect. Her photographic series lie within the tradition of objective, documentary photography, a tradition which was decisively shaped by the artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like theirs, Ronkholz’ work is characterised by clear compositions, a serial approach, and a documentary focus on architectural structures and everyday architectures. Using a large-format camera she produced sharply defined and realistic photographs in which the subject matter, rather than the individual style of the artist, takes centre stage. Her work is predominantly in black and white, although colour images also appear, demonstrating her ambition to engage with the artistic colour photography that emerged in Germany during the 1970s and ’80s, following the example set by the New Color Photography introduced by the American photographers Stephen Shore and William Eggleston.
Kiosks and corner shops
Tata Ronkholz became known for her appealing series of kiosks (Trinkhallen) and small shops that capture typical moments of urban everyday culture. These were photographed between 1977 and 1985, particularly in neighbourhoods of Cologne and Düsseldorf, in the Ruhr area, as well as in Leverkusen and Krefeld. For example, the photo Trinkhalle, Köln-Nippes – with its ice cream and newspaper advertisements and vending machines for chewing gum and cigarettes – is as amusing and engaging as Boutique, Köln-Mülheim in which, according to the store sign, alongside clothing records were also for sale. The photographs illustrate the extent to which product offerings, decoration, and advertising in public spaces has been transformed. Tata Ronkholz’ choice of subject means that her work indirectly testifies to social, cultural, and economic change and shows how people shape the world around them.
Industrial gates
Another significant series is dedicated to industrial gates, photographed between 1977 and 1985. The sober black-and-white images of these gates, with their grids and frameworks, offer glimpses into the interiors of industrial areas. In the photographs the gates function as interfaces between private and public space, between interior and exterior, and between activity and calm. Their aesthetic, reminiscent of abstract artworks, imbues the everyday with a new significance.
Collaboration with Thomas Struth
In 1979 Ronkholz, together with her fellow student Thomas Struth, began work on an impressive documentary series on Düsseldorf’s Rheinhafen. The project originated from the planned redevelopment of this historic harbour area – a site that, in its original form, was considered an industrial area of significant urban historical and architectural importance. Together they set out to document the harbour in its entirety, capturing its historic buildings, technical installations, and operational structures. In carefully composed images they recorded façades, interiors, silos, warehouses, crane structures, and harbour basins, before these elements partially disappeared or were fundamentally altered during the restructuring.
Tata Ronkholz as product designer
Between 1961 and 1965 Ronkholz studied at the Werkkunstschule Krefeld (an academy of applied art) with a focus on furniture design, and subsequently worked as a freelance designer until 1977. The exhibition also explores this aspect of Ronkholz’ oeuvre, including depictions of geometrically shaped furniture and lighting fixtures as well as designs for office and cafeteria furniture. Ronkholz’ designs are characterised by clear forms and functional elegance. Finally, the retrospective also presents early photographs of architectural forms created in 1975/76 in Italy and France, revealing her strong affinity for aspects of the ‘designed world’ across different areas of life.
Ronkholz’ estate, acquired in 2011 by VAN HAM Art Estate in Cologne, forms the basis of the exhibition alongside the holdings of Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf. Significant contributions have also been made from the in-house collections of Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – who also curated the exhibition – and through loans from private collections.
Book
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Tata Ronkholz: Gestaltete Welt. Eine Retropektive (2025, Schirmer/Mosel Verlag GmbH), with texts in German and English. It is available from the Huis Marseille museum shop (€49.90).
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