Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print
Wishing you all a happy festive season and a safe and Happy New Year.
Looking forward to more photographic explorations in 2026.
Thank you to all Art Blart readers for their support in 2025!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Curators: The exhibition is co-curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, and Deborah Willis, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University.
Thomas Ellis (American, 1963-2025)
The Game
1947
Gelatin silver print
21 x 31.8cm (8 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.)
Courtesy of the Darrel Ellis Estate, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Candice Madey, New York
Photo: Adam Reich
Thomas Sayers Ellis (October 5, 1963 – July 17, 2025) was an American poet, photographer, musician, bandleader and teacher.
“There’s nothing like a photograph for reminding you about difference. There it is. It stares you ineradicably in the face”
~ Professor Stuart Hall, 2008
This looks to be a “worthy” exhibition on photography and the Black Arts movement but without having seen it in person there is little specific comment I can make about the exhibition. However, some thoughts on the photographs in this posting are possible.
It is a joy for me to be able to learn more about an important area in photographic history, vis a vis “the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture.” (Text from the NGA website)
There are many photographers in the posting who I have never heard of before, whose work I have never seen, and I always like learning, for in learning you may gain some small amount of wisdom and appreciation of different cultures and points of view. I have added biographical information for each artist to their images where possible.
The photographs from the period 1955-1985 mark a shift away from an aesthetic and formalist way of looking at the image where the role of the photographer and the reception of the print was in its primacy (the 1950s-1960s) “towards a more polemical, critical and cultural analysis by Tagg, Sekul, Solomon-Godeau and others in the 1980s and 90s. These shifts from the pictorial to the political … decentre the photographer and bring into focus the photographed and viewing subjects…”1
In these photographs it is not so much the primacy of the artist, the aesthetics of the image, nor the photographs status as art objects, but the people within the images that are the focus of attention. They bring to the forefront of the viewer’s consciousness (or should do) the racial politics at work within photography in the context of discussions around race and representation and the ongoing legacies of Western imperialism.
The photographs demonstrate “that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography, and their effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.”2
They bring to light (aha!) “new ways of seeing that bring the Other into focus”, photographs that challenge us to acknowledge the structural racism that is embedded in daily life which produces adverse outcome for people of color. Through such an acknowledgement we may open up a personally and culturally transformative dialogic space, “a “space of possibilities” where participants listen, engage with, and even transcend their own viewpoints to see issues from multiple angles” – as there can never be a single view point when we “examine” social groups that are subaltern (groups that have been marginalised or oppressed).
From a distance this seems to be one of the problems of the exhibition. It’s all so worthy and righteous, full of the injustice of it all, and perhaps that’s as it should be for those were the times and the culture from which these photographs emerged. But I can’t help but get the feeling that this exhibition seems to feel and read more like a study in cultural anthropology, more a sociological statement than any celebration of Black history and culture from the period. Speaking from the standpoint of a white, middle class artist and writer, there seems to be little joy to be had here – to me one of the essential elements of Black culture, the joy of gospel, jazz, laughter, love – but I’m supposedly on the inside looking out (or is it the outside looking in!). Who am I to say.
What is undeniable is that, as Professor Stuart Hall so succinctly observes, there is nothing like a photograph to remind you of difference, to challenge your perceptions on how you view and interact with the world around you, to open up new ways of seeing. As such, the photographs in this exhibition may allow us deeper insight into the “conditions of our own becoming” (while human beings have agency, the circumstances under which they act and develop their humanity are largely shaped by existing material, social, and historical conditions that they did not choose) of the people that live around us, even as we acknowledge that there is no singular point of view, that cultural forms have no single determinate meaning, and that no one, and “no discipline, whether art- or photo-history, or ethnography or geography, speaks with a single voice.”1
Not one way of seeing, but multiple ways of seeing our fellow human beings.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Catherine De Lorenzo. “Oceanian imaginings in French photographic archives,” in History of Photography, Issue 2, Volume 28, 2004, pp. 137-184
2/ Text from the description of the book by Mark Sealy. Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019.
The book examines how Western photographic practice has been used as a tool for creating Eurocentric and violent visual regimes, and demands that we recognise and disrupt the ingrained racist ideologies that have tainted photography since its inception in 1839.
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.
“The work that was done by artists and photographers before, during, and after the Black Arts Movement establishes a strategy of community engagement. It is that engagement that allows communities to define themselves and also to engage people in new forms of looking.”
Co-curator Philip Brookman
Cultural forms set the wider terms of limitation and possibility for the (re)presentation of particularities and we have to understand how the latter are caught in the former in order to understand why such-and-such gets (re)presented in the way it does. Without understanding the way images function in terms of, say, narrative, genre or spectacle, we don’t really understand why they turn out the way they do.
Secondly, cultural forms do not have single determinate meanings – people make sense of them in different ways, according to the cultural (including sub-cultural) codes available to them. For instance, people do not necessarily read negative images of themselves as negative …
Richard Dyer. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993, pp.2-3
Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936)
Coltrane at the Gate
1961
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Charina Endowment Fund
Adger Cowans is a pioneering photographer and one of the founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective that played a key role in shaping Black photography in the 1960s and beyond.
In 1958 Cowans worked as an assistant to renowned photographer Gordon Parks. Throughout the 1960s Cowans became involved with influential groups associated with the Black Arts Movement, including Group 35 and Afri-COBRA, which he joined in 1968.
His photographic work spans a wide range of approaches and subjects, from street photography in Harlem to documenting major historical events like the rallies and the funeral of Malcolm X. He also captured iconic jazz musicians, including John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Frank Dandridge (American, b. 1938)
Blinded Birmingham Church Bombing survivor, Sarah Jean Collins, Birmingham, AL, 1963
“Clutching robe in hospital bed, Sarah Jean Collins was near bomb when it exploded in church. Her sister was killed. It will be weeks before she knows whether she can see again.”
September 27, 1963
Gelatin silver print
Overall: 35 x 50 cm (13 3/4 x 19 11/16 in.)
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
© Frank Dandridge
Photo: Frank Dandridge / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock
Frank Dandridge is a freelance photojournalist who worked mainly for Life Magazine in the 60’s. He covered numerous assignments, including, The Harlem Riots in 1964, Dr. King’s March on Washington, in 1963, and the terrible Birmingham Bombing in 1963. His photos also appeared in Look, Saturday Evening Post, Pageant, Paris Match, Good Housekeeping, Quick Magazine, the Canadian Film Board, Playboy, and many other national magazines. He won an Art Director’s Award for his photo essay, “The Two Faces of Harlem”, that appeared in Look magazine. His work included photographing many celebrities, including, Bobby Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, President Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jimmy Hoffa.
Text from the IMBd website
The photos that Frank Dandridge shot for LIFE magazine paint a vivid portrait of violence and race in 1960s America. He reported on riots in Harlem, in Watts, and in Newark,. He was in Selma, Alabama when Martin Luther King marched in the days immediately after Bloody Sunday. Dandridge’s most famous photo is of Sarah Collins, a 12-year-old girl whose eyes were in bandages after the bombing of a Sunday school class at the16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. That bombing killed four girls, including Collins’ sister, while wounding many others and leaving Collins blind in one eye. The image of Collins in her hospital bed made vivid for America the cruelty of this horrific bombing by four men who were members of a splinter group of the Klu Klux Klan.
Bill Syken. “Race in the 1960s: The Photography of Frank Dandridge,” on the LIFE website Nd [Online] Cited 26/11/2025
Frank Dandridge (American, b. 1938)
Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders watched President Lyndon B. Johnson speak on television
1965
Gelatin silver print
© Frank Dandridge
Photo: Frank Dandridge / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock
Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
Racism, when it is embedded in the structures, policies and practices of our social and political institutions can be termed “institutional”. Institutional racism, which will be described by the authors more fully below, is reflected in professional practice and working methods that result in racialized disparities. Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and political philosopher, stands out as one of the earliest academics to explore the nature of racism from a psychosocial perspective. Fanon (1967) talked of “vulgar racism in its biological form”, which was evident for several hundreds of years, being replaced in the mid-20th century by “more subtle forms” (p. 35). In a study of Fanon’s clinical psychology and social theories, McCulloch (1983) refers to this new racism as “cultural racism” – describing this as “a more sophisticated form [of racism] in which the object is no longer the physiology of the individual but the cultural style of a people” (p. 120). Cultural racism believes that the dominant group’s culture is superior to the seemingly “lower” minority groups.
Cultural racism champions the supremacy of cultures. Commonly, some version of European culture or, more specifically, white European culture, rather than the white “race” (Amin, 1989), thereby producing a situation of racism without “races” (Balibar, 1991). It was the American civil leaders Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Carmichael & Hamilton, 1967), who first described institutional racism:
It takes two, closely related forms … we call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals … the second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing acts … and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. (p. 2)
Institutional racism forms an array of broader structural racism processes “that exclude … substantial numbers of members of particular groups from significant participation in major social institutions” (Henry & Tator, 2005, p. 352). According to minority mental health models like the racism-induced reactive negative emotionality cycle (Lazaridou & Heinz, 2021), structural racism and institutional racism result in experiences of rejection and emotional alienation in public spaces for Black people and People of Color (Lentin, 2015).
Structural racism in employment, earnings and credit may mutually limit equal access to quality, affordable accommodation. However, when public spaces are sites of surveillance, intimidation and frequent hostility by the police or by ordinary citizens, then the structure of social situations, such as even leaving one’s house and speaking in public, are filled with stress, anxiety, and fear (Chou et al., 2012; Sibrava et al., 2013). There is pervasive evidence that structural racism has destructive impacts on the health and wellbeing of patients from minority groups, including migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (Alvarez et al., 2016; Bailey et al., 2017; Graham et al., 2016; Noh & Kaspar, 2003).
Felicia Lazaridou and Suman Fernando. “Deconstructing institutional racism and the social construction of whiteness: A strategy for professional competence training in culture and migration mental health,” in Transcult Psychiatry, 2022 Apr 4; 59(2), pp. 175-187.
Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 2025 – January 2026
James Barnor (Ghanaian, b. 1929)
Drum cover girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London
1966, printed 2023
Chromogenic print
29 × 29cm (11 7/16 × 11 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© James Barnor / Courtesy Galerie Clementine de la Feronnière
In the tradition of Black African photographers such as Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta and Sanlé Sory, Barnor’s photographs present people of all ages and all walks of life – whether in Accra, Ghana or in the suburbs of London, England – through direct and honest studio portraits or in more candid documents of the communities that surrounded him. …
Barnor’s photographs plant the seed of equality and happiness as a way of transmitting this knowledge to others. “He is a living archive, a link between the birth of photography in West Africa and the development of the discipline for the modern era.”2 It is his passion and feeling for the practice of photography, the stories that it tells and his engagement with the spirit of the people that he encounters – as a conversation between equals – that intuitively ground his work in the history of photography and the history of Black culture and makes them forever young.
Marcus Bunyan. “It’s late, but it’s better late than never,” on the Art Blart website October 17, 2021 [Online] Cited 26/11/2025
Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006)
Above this Earth, Games, Games
1968
Collage and acrylic on canvas
Overall: 114.3 x 114.3 cm (45 x 45 in.)
Collection of Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago
Photo: P.D. Young / Spektra Imaging
During the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, the prolific artist Ralph Arnold (1928-2006) made photocollages that appropriated and commented upon mass media portrayals of gender, sexuality, race and politics. Arnold’s complex visual arrangements of photography, painting and text were built upon his own multilayered identity as a black, gay veteran and prominent member of Chicago’s art community…
Text from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago
Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006)
Soul Box
1969
Assemblage with found objects and collage on Masonite
Framed: 71.1 x 56.8 x 14.9cm (28 x 22 3/8 x 5 7/8 in.)
Private collection of Courtney A. Moore
Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago
The first exhibition to consider photography’s impact on a cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.
Uniting around civil rights and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many visual artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers expressed hope and dignity through their art. These creative efforts became known as the Black Arts Movement.
Photography was central to the movement, attracting all kinds of artists – from street photographers and photojournalists to painters and graphic designers. This expansive exhibition presents 150 examples tracing the Black Arts Movement from its roots to its lingering impacts, from 1955 to 1985. Explore the bold vision shaped by generations of artists including Billy Abernathy, Romare Bearden, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Doris Derby, Emory Douglas, Barkley Hendricks, Barbara McCullough, Betye Saar, and Ming Smith.
Text from the NGA website
Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 investigates the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture. The Black Arts Movement was a uniquely American creative initiative, closely linked to the civil rights movement and comparable to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s in its impact. Through new institutions and publications, Black writers, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists explored ways their art could further the American civil rights movement and communicate messages of Black history and identity. Photography and the Black Arts Movement reveals how studio and street photographers, photojournalists, painters, conceptual artists, graphic designers, and community activists used photography to cut across traditional racial boundaries, express messages of empowerment, and advance social justice.
Bringing together some 150 works by more than 100 artists, Photography and the Black Arts Movement also includes objects from Africa, the Caribbean region, and Great Britain, representing artistic dialogues created through travel, migrations, and international engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the movement. Among the artists included are Billy Abernathy, Anthony Barboza, Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Ernest Cole, Adger Cowans, Roy DeCarava, Emory Douglas, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Samuel Fosso, Charles Gaines, Barkley Hendricks, Danny Lyon, Barbara McCullough, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Juan Sánchez, Coreen Simpson, Betye Saar, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems.
The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Text from the NGA website
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937)
During the summer of 1960, the elders of Orangeburg took to the streets as part of ongoing demonstrations and boycotts in support of civil rights. They are standing outside a segregated supermarket where they were allowed to shop but not sit down for lunch
1960, printed 2024
Inkjet print
37.3 x 55.9cm (14 11/16 x 22 in.)
Cecil J. Williams (born November 26, 1937) is an American photographer, publisher, author and inventor who is best known for his photographs documenting the civil rights movement in South Carolina.
He began his career at an early age, photographing wedding and family parties. He studied art at Claflin University, while also being a photographer for the university. …
At the age of 14, Williams was one of 25 photographers around the world freelancing for JET magazine. JET caught wind of the movement growing in Orangeburg. They needed an onsite correspondent for constant updates, and someone to document the events. The only time Williams’ work appeared on the cover of JET was his picture of Coretta Scott King speaking at the protest during the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike.
Williams has photographed significant desegregation efforts in South Carolina since the 1950s. Some of his most notable pictures are of the activity during the Briggs v. Elliott case in Summerton. It was the first of five desegregation cases pushing to integrate public schools in the United States. The five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case that declared that having “separate but equal” public schools for whites and blacks was unconstitutional.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937)
Clara White Mission, Jacksonville, Florida
1960s, printed 2024
Inkjet print
45.7 x 45.7cm (18 x 18 in.)
Bob Fletcher (American, b. 1938)
Placards of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner at a Demonstration on the boardwalk during the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey
1964
Gelatin silver print
33.97 × 22.86cm (13 3/8 × 9 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Anonymous gift
Robert E. “Bob” Fletcher is a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and educator. Born in 1938 in Detroit, Michigan, Fletcher majored in History and English at Fisk University and Wayne State University. In 1963, Fletcher became active in the civil rights movement, taking photographs for and administering the National Student Association’s Detroit Tutorial Program. After moving to New York City, he worked at the Harlem Education Project and set up a photographic workshop.
In the summer of 1964, Fletcher became a Freedom School teacher in Mississippi and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff as a photographer; he documented the Civil Rights Movement throughout the South, between 1964 and 1968. After returning to New York in 1969, Fletcher set up a photography workshop at the Henry Street Settlement, and taught photography at Antioch College and Brooklyn College Film Studio.
Text from the New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts website
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Ethel Sharrieff in Chicago
1963
Gelatin silver print
14.6 × 15.9cm (5 3/4 × 6 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Robert A. Sengstacke (American, 1943-2017)
Dr. Martin Luther King
January 1, 1965
Gelatin silver print
35.1 × 27.3cm (13 13/16 × 10 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke spent more than a half century photographing Chicago’s cultural and political landscape, most notably for the weekly newspaper the Chicago Defender, for which he also worked as an editor. The Defender was founded by Robert’s great-uncle Robert Sengstacke Abbott in 1905, and Robert’s father, John Sengstacke, ran the paper for nearly 60 years. In the mid-1950s, after attending Florida’s Bethune Cookman College, Bobby Sengstacke returned to Chicago and honed his skills with fellow photographers Billy (Fundi) Abernathy, Le Mont Mac Lemore, and Bob Black. In the years that followed, he became a member of a tight-knit network of South Side photojournalists who created intimate documents of Chicago’s Black community, from Civil Rights rallies led by Martin Luther King Jr. to the city’s lively entertainment scene.
Sengstacke was also a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), which brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.
Text from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022)
Member of Southern Media Photographing a Young Girl, Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi
1968
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of David Knaus
The photography of the US civil rights activist and academic Doris Derby … began through documenting the struggles of black people in the segregated south. However, rather than recording the dramatic events and protests of the nine years from her arrival in Mississippi from New York in 1963, Doris chose to capture the everyday human effort required to live through them.
She went into rural communities to witness the work of children in the fields and women living in wooden shacks trying to care for families. “They were looking to find some help, some way to get out of their horrible poverty and despair,” she said. …
Influenced both by the German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz, who was concerned with the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class, and the photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured the creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, she also took pictures of children in urban settings, of old and young people attending election events, and those working for the movement, among them the author Alice Walker.
Hannah Collins. “Doris Derby obituary,” on The Guardian website Wed 13 Apr 2022 [Online] Cited 26/11/2025
Darryl Cowherd (American, b. 1940)
Stokely Carmichael, Unknown Chicago Church
c. 1968
Gelatin silver print
24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
A key figure in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, Darryl Cowherd has enjoyed an extensive career ranging from photojournalism to broadcast television. At the age of 20, frustrated with work and school, Cowherd followed the advice of his mentor, Chicago-based photographer Robert Earl Wilson, who encouraged him to travel and photograph abroad. Cowherd had initially studied to become a doctor and then worked for the postal service, but neither role proved a lasting fit. After nearly four years in Europe, during which Cowherd honed his photography skills, he returned to Chicago in 1964 and began taking freelance photography assignments while working at a film processing lab. His return to Chicago coincided with the emergence of the Chicago Freedom Movement (1965-67) and the Black Arts Movement (most active in the years 1965-76). An active participant in both movements, Cowherd frequently photographed the activities surrounding them as they grew and gained momentum.
Cowherd was a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a collective that brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.
Text from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Hiram Maristany (American, 1945-2022)
Juan González, Minister of Information, in the doorway of the first office of the Young Lords
1969, printed 2021
Gelatin silver print
33 x 46cm (13 x 18 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Hiram Maristany
Hiram Sebastian Maristany was a Nuyorican American photographer, and director of El Museo del Barrio (a museum in NYC which specialises in Latin American and Caribbean art, with an emphasis on works from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York City) from 1975 to 1977. He was known for his association with, and documentation of, the Young Lords chapter in Harlem, which he co-founded in 1969.
Juan González was a co-founder of the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican rights organisation in New York City, where he helped lead the group in protests for social justice. The Young Lords fought for better healthcare, education, and city services, and against police abuse and Puerto Rico’s colonial status. Following his work with the Young Lords, González became a celebrated journalist, co-hosting Democracy Now! and writing for the New York Daily News.
Texts from the Wikipedia website
Poet Larry Neal, who coined the term Black Arts Movement, described it as “a cultural revolution in art and ideas.” This movement included poets, playwrights, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, and painters. They came together to make art that advanced civil rights and celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.
This cultural revolution shook up the art world in the 1950s and ’60s. It embodied the struggle for self-determination championed by global freedom movements. New collectives, workshops, and collaborations emerged. Creatives made art that promoted Black dignity, hope, and freedom. They asked, how could art inspire social and political change? And what would it look like?
Photography was a driving force from the beginning, playing a critical role as both a communications tool and art form. Learn more about the movement and photography’s part in it – major themes in our exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985.
Our exhibition begins in 1955, more than a decade before Larry Neal named the Black Arts Movement. That year, several events – and photographs of those events – helped catalyse the civil rights movement.
In September, Jet magazine was one of several publications that printed open-casket photographs of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi. Those disturbing images were seen across the country, including by a woman in Montgomery, Alabama: Rosa Parks. That December, Parks sat in the front, “white only” section of a segregated bus. The driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused. As she later recounted, Emmett Till was on her mind in that moment.
Parks, in turn, was photographed sitting at the front of the segregated bus. Those images, and others like them, brought widespread awareness to the struggles for equal rights. Organisations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) encouraged photography of their marches, demonstrations, and acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. SNCC even taught some members to use a camera. Lifelong activist Maria Varela became a SNCC photographer after recognising the need for more images of Black life to support the movement.
The beginning of the Black Arts Movement is often pinned to poet, playwright, and writer Amiri Baraka founding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood in 1965. Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde were among the many writers and poets active in the movement. Some collaborated with visual artists, even forming collectives such as the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago.
OBAC writers, scholars, painters, and photographers collaborated to create the Wall of Respect community mural in 1967. It commemorated key figures in African American history, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Muhammad Ali, and Nina Simone. The mural was like a two-story collage that covered the facade of a building in the city’s South Side neighbourhood. It incorporated paintings by several artists alongside mounted photographs by Roy Lewis and Darryl Cowherd. At the centre was Amiri Baraka’s poem “SOS,” which opens, “Calling all black people.” The mural was demolished in 1972, but photographs by Roy Lewis and Robert Sengstacke continue to spread its message.
Music was an equally important part of the Black Arts Movement. Musicians John Coltrane and Sun Ra both performed at a fundraiser for Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. Their experimental and expressive jazz inspired Black Arts Movement writers and artists.
In Coltrane at the Gate, photographer Adger Cowans depicted the saxophonist’s energy. Ming Smith captured the magic of a Sun Ra performance. For his homage to saxophonist Charlie Parker (who was commonly known as “Bird”), painter Raymond Saunders embraced the spontaneous spirit of jazz. Saunders collaged a newsprint photograph below the word “bird” written in a chalk-like white script.
The Black Arts Movement celebrated the “beauty and goodness of being Black,” as Larry Neal put it. Photographer Kwame Brathwaite helped popularise the phrase “Black is beautiful.” Brathwaite was a pioneer of uplifting Black identity. He helped found groups that challenged conventional standards of beauty and celebrated African heritage. They organised fashion shows, created “Black is beautiful” products, and operated a photography studio.
In Untitled (Portrait, Reels as Necklace), Brathwaite adorned the model with a necklace made from film developing reels to “expose” her beauty. More than a decade later, Carla Williams created a self-portrait that echoed Brathwaite’s work. Showing herself in curlers, Williams challenged popular notions of beauty.
Small collectives of visual artists and photographers came together around the principles of the Black Arts Movement. In New York, the Kamoinge Workshop photography collective met regularly to critique each other’s work, debate photography’s purpose and aesthetics, and share tips. They created a space for their art by developing their own portfolios and exhibitions. The workshop also produced the groundbreaking Black Photographers Annual between 1973 and 1980.
A group of Chicago artists formed AfriCOBRA. The collective’s founders defined their own aesthetic principles, aimed at creating “images that jar the senses and cause movement” and “images designed for mass production.”
The Black Arts Movement made an impact beyond the United States. In Great Britain, Raphael Albert organised and photographed Black beauty pageants in London. James Barnor focused on style, migration, and Black city life in London and in Accra, Ghana. Horace Ové photographed the British Black Power Movement. He also captured scenes of the West African and West Indian communities in London, like his Walking Proud, Notting Hill Carnival.
Samuel Fosso opened his first photography studio in Bangui, Central African Republic, at age 13. After finishing with clients, Fosso would use his studio to experiment with self-portraits. He wore an array of costumes and adopted personas, often taking inspiration from the pictures of Black Americans he saw in magazines shared by American Peace Corps volunteers.
By the end of the 1970s, the literary arm of the Black Arts Movement had waned, but a new generation of artists and photographers carried on its spirit. Coming out of art school, photographers such as Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson explored more personal, metaphorical, and conceptual ideas.
In her Family Pictures and Stories series, Weems made her own family the subjects. The intimate photographs presented a counterargument to claims that many Black Americans faced poverty and struggle as a result of weak family structures. Weems paired the photographs with brief stories about each family member.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Herbert Randall (American, b. 1936)
Untitled (Bed-Stuy, New York)
c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
22.8 x 15.6cm (9 x 6 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2022.89.1
© Herbert Randall
Herbert Eugene Randall, Jr. is an American photographer who had documented the effects of the Civil Rights Movement. Randall is of Shinnecock, African-American and West Indian ancestry.
Randall studied photography under Harold Feinstein in 1957. From 1958 to 1966, he worked as a freelance photographer for various media organizations. His photographs were used by the Associated Press, United Press International, Black Star, various television stations, and other American and foreign publications. Randall was also a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African-American photographers, in New York City in 1963.
In 1964, Sanford R. Leigh, the Director of Mississippi Freedom Summer’s Hattiesburg project, persuaded Randall to photograph the effects of the Civil Rights Movement in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Randall had a Whitney Fellowship for that year, and had been looking for a project. He spent the entire summer photographing solely in Hattiesburg, among the African-American community and among the volunteers in area projects such as the Freedom Schools, Voter Registration, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party campaign.
Only five of Randall’s photographs were published in the summer of 1964. One seen worldwide was the bloodied, concussed Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, head of a prominent Cleveland congregation and former conscientious objector to World War II. However, most of his photographs sat in a file at the Shinnecock Reservation, on Long Island, New York.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Billy Abernathy (Fundi) (American, 1939-2016)
Mother’s Day from the series “Born Hip”
1962
gelatin silver print
17.5 x 13.3cm (6 7/8 x 5 1/4 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Illinois Arts Council
Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY
Photographer Billy (Fundi) Abernathy was known for creating images that defined Black confidence, elegance, and style. This work extended to his collaborations with his wife, Sylvia (Laini) Abernathy, with whom he designed album covers for Delmark Records in the 1960s. Around that time, the poet and author Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) encountered Abernathy’s photographs of Chicago and proposed a book project that would combine his poetry with Abernathy’s images. The resulting collaboration, In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style), was designed by Laini and published in 1970. In 1971 the New York Times hailed the book as “an example of the new direction that black art is taking.”
Text from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998)
A television playing coverage of James Baldwin at the March for Freedom and Jobs in Washington, DC
1963/2025
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
African American artist Charles “Teenie” Harris, captured “the essence of daily African-American life in the 20th century. For more than 40 years, Harris – as lead photographer of the influential Pittsburgh Courier newspaper – took almost 80,000 pictures of people from all walks: presidents, housewives, sports stars, babies, civil rights leaders and even cross-dressing drag queens.”
See the Art Blart posting on the exhibition Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 2011 – April 2012
Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)
Untitled (Playground) from the “Playground Series”
c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
25.7 x 19.1cm (10 1/8 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee
In 1953, he enrolled at the historically Black college in Petersburg, which was not far from his hometown of Richmond. He began working as a reporter for the school paper, and during that time Draper’s father, who was an amateur photographer himself, sent Louis his first camera. By 1956, Draper’s title at the paper had changed to cameraman. After his revelatory first experience with The Family of Man, a catalogue that accompanied the 1955 photography exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, he decided to leave school during his final semester and move to New York City to become a photographer. Once there, Draper enrolled in a photography workshop led by Harold Feinstein, and was mentored by W. Eugene Smith, one of the most prominent American photojournalists.
In 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, Draper became a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York-based collective of Black photographers. Workshop members met regularly to discuss one another’s work, produced group portfolios, exhibitions, and publications, and mentored young people all over the city. Draper emerged as one of the group’s teachers, which began his long career as an educator (he worked in numerous teaching roles, including at Pratt Institute and Mercer County Community College). The collective aimed to “create the kind of images of our communities that spoke of the truth we’d witnessed and that countered the untruths we’d all seen in mainline publications.” Kamoinge members wanted to avoid the racial stereotypes prevalent in the media and the violence that was typical of journalistic coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, working instead to represent their communities in a positive light.
Jane Pierce, Carl Jacobs Foundation Research Assistant, Department of Photography, “Louis Draper,” on the MoMA website 2021 [Online] Cited 27/11/2025
Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)
Untitled (Santos) from the “Playground Series”
1967
Gelatin silver print
32.9 x 22.8cm (12 15/16 x 9 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
© Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee
Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922-2007)
I Am A Man, Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee
March 28, 1968
Gelatin silver print
19 × 32.6cm (7 1/2 × 12 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Photojournalist Ernest C. Withers was born on August 7, 1922, in Memphis, Tennessee. Withers got his start as a military photographer while serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Upon returning to a segregated Memphis after the war, Withers chose photography as his profession.
In the 1950s, Withers helped spur the movement for equal rights with a self-published photo pamphlet on the Emmitt Till murder. Over the next two decades, Withers formed close personal relationships with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and James Meredith. Withers’s pictures of key civil rights events from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the strike of Memphis sanitation workers are historic. Indeed, Withers was often the only photographer to record these scenes, many of which were not yet of interest to the mainstream press.
Withers photographed more than the southern Civil Rights Movement. Whether Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and other Negro League baseball players, or those jazz and blues musicians who frequented Memphis’ Beale Street, Withers photographed the famous and not-so famous. Withers’s collection includes pictures of early performances of Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.
Text from The History Makers website
Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)
Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi
July 1971
Gelatin silver print
21.5 x 29.2cm (8 7/16 x 11 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee
Never-before-seen photographs alongside images of cultural icons reveal the medium’s central role during a pivotal era of creative expression
The National Gallery of Art presents Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985, an exhibition exploring the work of American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora photographers in developing and fostering a distinctly Black visual culture and identity. The first presentation to investigate photography’s role in the Black Arts Movement, a creative initiative comparable to the Harlem Renaissance in its scope and impact, which evolved concurrently to the civil rights and international freedom movements, the exhibition reveals how artists developed strategies to engage communities and encourage self-representation in media, laying a foundation for socially engaged art practices that continue today. Photography and the Black Arts Movement will be on view in the West Building from September 21, 2025, to January 11, 2026, before traveling to California and Mississippi.
Photography and the Black Arts Movement brings together approximately 150 works spanning photography, video, collage, painting, installation, and other photo-based media, some of which have rarely or never been on view. Among the over 100 artists included in the exhibition are Billy Abernathy (Fundi), Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Charles Gaines, James E. Hinton, Danny Lyon, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Nellie Mae Rowe, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.
This expansive selection of work showcases the broad cultural exchange between writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and other visual artists of many backgrounds, who came together during the turbulent decades of the mid-20th century to grapple with social and political changes, the pursuit of civil rights, and the emergence of the Pan-African movement through art. The exhibition also includes art from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain to contextualize the global engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the Black Arts Movement.
“Working on many fronts – literature, poetry, jazz and new music, painting, sculpture, performance, film, and photography – African American artists associated with the Black Arts Movement expressed and exchanged their ideas through publications, organisations, museums, galleries, community centres, theatres, murals, street art, and emerging academic programs. While focusing on African American photography in the United States, the exhibition also includes works by artists from many communities to consider the extensive interchange between North American artists and the African diaspora. The exhibition looks at the important connections between America’s focus on civil rights and the emerging cultural movements that enriched the dialog,” said Philip Brookman, cocurator of the exhibition and consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art.
“Photography and photographic images were crucial in defining and giving expression to the Black Arts Movement and the civil rights movement. By merging the social concerns and aesthetics of the period, Black artists and photographers were defining a Black aesthetic while expanding conversations around community building and public history,” said Deborah Willis, guest cocurator, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. “The artists and their subjects helped to preserve compelling visual responses to this turbulent time and their images reflect their pride and determination.”
The exhibition draws significantly from the National Gallery’s collection – including more than 50 newly acquired works by Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, Louis Draper, Ray Francis, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Horace Ové, Jamel Shabazz, Malik Sidibé, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others – and from lenders in the US, Great Britain, and Canada. Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 presents the cultural and political titans of the era, including civil rights leaders, artists, and musicians, as well as everyday people, scenes of daily life, and fashion and commercial photography. Structured around nine thematic sections – including explorations of the self, community, fashion and beauty, the media, and ritual – the exhibition weaves a holistic vision of the period and its cultural impact.
Among the works in the first section of the exhibition is a collage by Romare Bearden, 110th Street Harlem Blues (1972). A dynamic mixture of painted paper and photographs, the work illustrates the ongoing vitality of Harlem’s community, echoing the vibrancy and social content of the Harlem Renaissance, which Bearden was exposed to in his early life. Moving into the section titled Picturing the Self / Picturing the Movement, self-portraits by Coreen Simpson, Alex Harsley, and Barkley L. Hendricks underscore a central theme of the exhibition: artists asserting their presence within the broader narrative of the movement and the era, along with the importance of self-representation in their art. A highlight of Representing the Community – a section filled with everyday scenes of people at work and at rest – is Ralph Arnold’s Soul Box (1969), a mixed-media assemblage of found objects and collage, serving as a time capsule that captures stories of the Black Arts Movement.
Photographs were a crucial tool used to communicate the events of the civil rights movement to a national audience. Artists and news media understood the power of photographs to address inequality and advocate for civil and human rights, and some works in the exhibition are by photojournalists who captured the speeches, marches, and sit-ins that defined the era. A rarely seen 1965 photograph by Frank Dandridge captures Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. watching President Lyndon B. Johnson’s televised address following the Selma, Alabama, marches – events that would ultimately lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Depicting Dr. King in a private, domestic moment, the image underscores not just the personal gravity of the moment but the television’s growing role in shaping public understanding of the era’s historic events. One of several works featured in the In the News section, it reflects how photographers responded to the shifting landscape of news media – from still photography to the rise of television.
The Black Arts Movement was instrumental in reshaping fashion, advertising, and media as tools of self-representation and cultural empowerment. A Kraft Foods advertisement (1977), photographed by Barbara DuMetz and featuring a young Black girl holding her doll, illustrates how the movement prompted advertisers to engage Black audiences more thoughtfully by hiring Black photographers and models in their campaigns. It is among the highlights of the Fashioning the Self section, along with an editorial photograph by Kwame Brathwaite, the photographer who helped coin the “Black is Beautiful” movement, and many depictions of women in beauty shops, showing the importance of these spaces to forming identity and community.
The exhibition’s concluding section, Transformations in Art and Culture, reflects a shift in the Black Arts Movement’s purpose – from its earlier focus on civil rights to a younger generation’s engagement with more historical and conceptual ideas, while still drawing on the movement’s visual language. Highlights include multimedia and time-based works by Ulysses Jenkins, Charles Gaines, and Lorna Simpson, which explore new and experimental ways to explore Black identity.
Published in association with Yale University Press, the fully illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition examines the vital role photography played in the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, which brought together writers, filmmakers, and artists as they explored ways of using art to advance civil rights and Black self-determination. Edited by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, with a preface by Angela Y. Davis and contributions by Makeda Best, Margo Natalie Crawford, Romi Crawford, Cheryl Finley, Sarah Lewis, and Audrey Sands, this book reveals how photographs operated across art, community building, journalism, and political messaging to contribute to the development of a distinctly Black art and culture. Essays by these distinguished scholars focus on topics such as women and the movement, community, activism, and Black photojournalism, and consider the complex connections between American artists and the African diaspora, and the dynamic interchange of Pan-African ideas that propelled the movement.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art
Harry Adams (American, 1918-1985)
Protest Car, Los Angeles
1962, printed 2024
Inkjet print
27.5 x 35.4 cm (11 x 13 15/16 in.)
Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, California State University, Northridge, Harry Adams Archive
© Harry Adams. All rights reserved and protected.
Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge
Harry Adams, also known as “One Shot Harry,” was one of the best-known members of the Los Angeles African American community. Having access to the city’s inner circle, he became known for his images of politicians, entertainers, and society figures. Adams worked as a freelancer for the California Eagle and Los Angeles Sentinel for 35 years and had a number of churches and lawyers as clients. His collection is particularly rich in its documentation of African American social life including images of social organisations, churches, schools, civil rights organisations, protests and cultural events. …
The collection of images for the period 1950-1985 is rich in its depiction of the unique lives of African Americans in and around the Los Angeles area. There are many images of important black political leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm X, and many others.
Text from the California State University Northridge website
Raphael Albert (British born Grenada, 1939-2009)
Beauty Salon, London
c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
27.3 x 27.3cm (10 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.)
Collection of Autograph, London
© Raphael Albert
Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, the cultural promoter, entrepreneur and photographer Raphael Albert organised and documented numerous black beauty pageants and other cultural events in London. His long and successful career as a promoter and chronicler of pageants included the establishment of Miss Black and Beautiful, Miss West Indies in Great Britain, and Miss Grenada.
These competitions celebrated the global ‘Black is Beautiful’ aesthetic in a local west London context: paired with the obligatory bathing costumes and high heels, Albert’s contestants often sported large Afro hairstyles, inventing and reinventing themselves on stage while articulating a particular and multifaceted black femininity as part of a widely contested and ambiguous cultural performance.
Text from the Autograph website
Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Handcuffed blacks were arrested for being in white area illegally
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 24.5 x 16.5 cm (9 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2022.102.2
© Ernest Cole / Magnum Photos
~ Exhibition: ‘Ernest Cole: House of Bondage’ at Foam, Amsterdam, January – June 2023
~ Text/Exhibition: “Ernest Cole: Journeys through Photojournalism, Social Documentary Photography and Art,” on the exhibition ‘Ernest Cole Photographer’ at The Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, April – July 2013
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Newsman Being Frisked at Muslim Rally in Chicago
1963, printed 1997
Gelatin silver print
47.3 x 33.7cm (18 5/8 x 13 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
~ Text/Exhibition: “Visible Man / Invisible photographer” on the exhibition Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 2022 – January 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks and “The Atmosphere of Crime”‘ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, February 2021 ongoing
~ Photographs: Gordon Parks “The Atmosphere of Crime”, 1957 February 2020
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, July – November 2019
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January – September 2015
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Segregation Story’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 2014 – June 2015
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument’ at The New Orleans Museum of Art, September 2013 – January 2014
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: 100 Moments’ at New York State Museum, January – May 2013
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Centennial’ at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, February – April 2013
~ Exhibition: ‘Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks’ at the Phoenix Art Museum, August – November 2011
Herman Howard (American, 1942-1980)
Sweet as a Peach, Harlem, New York City
1963
Gelatin silver print
16 x 23.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969)
View of the crowd as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses civil rights demonstrators at 40th Street and Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia
August 3, 1965
Gelatin silver print
24.8 x 19.7cm (9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.)
John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries
John W. Mosley (May 19, 1907 – October 1, 1969) was a self-taught photojournalist who extensively documented the everyday activities of the African-American community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for more than 30 years, a period including both World War II and the civil rights movement. His work was published widely in newspapers and magazines including The Philadelphia Tribune, The Pittsburgh Courier and Jet magazine.
Mosley has been called a “cultural warrior” for preserving a record of African-American life in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, one which combats “negative stereotypes and false interpretations of African-American history and culture”. …
Mosley flourished in his career as a photographer from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was known to photograph as many as four events a day, seven days a week. He traveled around Philadelphia on public transit, carrying his cameras and other equipment.
Mosley shot in black and white film. He used a large-format Graflex Speed Graphic camera. and a medium-format Rollieflex.
Proud of his heritage, Mosley chose to portray the black community positively at family, social, and cultural events that were part of daily life. He photographed individuals and families at weddings, picnics, churches, segregated beaches, sporting events, concerts, galas, and civil rights protests. During a time of racism and segregation, he emphasised the achievements of black celebrities, athletes, and political leaders.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Moneta Sleet Jr. (American, 1926-1996)
Two Teenaged Supporters of the Selma March
1965, printed c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
43.3 x 29.5cm (17 1/16 x 11 5/8 in.)
Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of the Johnson Publishing Company
© Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Made possible by the Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution
“During the Civil Rights Movement, I was a participant just like everybody else. I just happened to be there with my camera, and I felt and firmly believed that my mission was to photograph and show the side of it that was the right side.”
~ Moneta Sleet Jr.
During Sleet’s 41 years at Ebony, he worked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s side for 13 years, capturing historical moments of the civil rights movement.
Sleet began working for Ebony magazine in 1955. Over the next 41 years, he captured photos of young Muhammad Ali, Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Jomo Kenyatta, former ambassador Andrew Young in a blue leather jacket and jeans in his office at the United Nations, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Liberia’s William Tubman and Billie Holiday. He gained the affection and esteem of many civil rights leaders, many of whom called on him by name. When Coretta Scott King found out that no African American photographers had been assigned to cover her husband’s funeral service, she demanded that Sleet be a part of the press pool. If he was not, she threatened to bar all photographers from the service. Besides his photo of Coretta Scott King, he also captured grieving widow Betty Shabazz at the funeral of her husband Malcolm X.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Untitled (Charles Peaker Street Speaker, head of ANPM, after Carlos Cooks passed away, on 125th Street)
c. 1968, printed 2016
Inkjet print
37.2 x 37.2 cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Black Is Beautiful.
From Marcus Garvey to the Black Panther Party, these three words powered the political dreams and material possibilities of generations of Black people living in the United States. Over the course of seven decades, the recently departed photographer Kwame Brathwaite constructed a glorious visual lexicon to articulate a Pan-Africanist argument. Whether through his rhythmic documentation of the jazz scene in Harlem and the Bronx, or his cofounding of the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Brathwaite positioned photography at the nexus of Black artistic, political, and musical expression. Moving between concert halls and boxing rings, portrait studios and protest movement scenes – his Hasselblad in hand – Brathwaite chronicled self-determination and creativity that celebrated Blackness in all of its forms. Each of his photographs brims with bombastic flare and undeniable elegance. Their narrative potential is still transfixing.
“Black Is Beautiful was my directive,” Brathwaite said. “It was a time when people were protesting injustices related to race, class, and human rights around the globe. 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. A luta continua, a vitória é certa – the struggle continues, victory is certain.”
Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Esther Adler, Roxana Marcoci, Marilyn Nance, David Hartt, Michael Famighetti. “Remembering Kwame Brathwaite (1938-2023),” on the MoMA website, Dec 26, 2023 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025
Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022)
Black-owned Grocery Store, Sunday, Mileston, Mississippi
1968
Gelatin silver print
21.9 x 32.7cm (8 5/8 x 12 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of David Knaus
© Doris A. Derby
While the Black Arts Movement is generally pegged to the 1960s and ’70s, the point of departure for Willis and Brookman was the work of photographer Roy DeCarava, who in 1955, on the cusp of the civil rights movement, released a book titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life. The book featured portraits of Black life in Harlem activated by a fictitious character named Mary Bradley, a narrative invention of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes.
In the book, Sister Mary’s musings unfold within DeCarava’s photographic landscape. The exhibition includes an image from the book featuring bassist Edna Smith, whose face is partially illuminated by a single light in the distance. Her downward gaze conveys a sense of somberness that’s echoed by the shadows that surround her, while the single glint of light coming off her wristwatch draws attention to the bass like the beacon from a lighthouse.
Published decades following the Harlem Renaissance, one year after Brown v. Board of Education and months after the murder of Emmitt Till, DeCarava’s book came at a critical moment in art history, a time when photography became more broadly recognised as fine art through groundbreaking exhibitions like “The Family of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art, also in 1955. With that recognition, Black artists seized an opportunity to compose compelling visual narratives. “The collaboration between Langston Hughes and Roy De Carava was influential for so many photographers and artists, in part because De Carava and Hughes were looking at their respective communities, and they put together a story that was looking inward,” says Brookman.
Colony Little. “A Show at the National Gallery Highlights the Role of Photography in the Black Arts Movement,” on the ARTnews website November 20, 2025 [Online] Cited 24/11/2025
Ray Francis (American, 1937-2006)
Genie
1971
Gelatin silver print
13.97 × 17.78cm (5 1/2 × 7 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Ray Francis was a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop. He received his first camera in 1952, at the age of 15. In 1961 he met Louis Draper, with whom he formed Group 35. In 1963 Group 35 merged with other photographers to create Kamoinge, where Francis contributed significantly by creating a darkroom for the group and working as a photo editor for the Black Photographers Annual.
His photographic work spanned still life, portraiture, and landscape, often using dramatic light and shadow, influenced by Johannes Vermeer’s use of composition. Francis also made contributions as an educator, teaching at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood Youth Corps (1966–1969) and later serving as director of the New York City Board of Education’s photography program for Intermediate School 201 from 1970 to 1974.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Untitled (Portrait, Reels as Necklace)
c. 1972, printed later
Inkjet print
74.93 × 74.93cm (29 1/2 × 29 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Funds from Renée Harbers Liddell and Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Kwame Brathwaite
Kwame Brathwaite, [was] a photographer, musician and African American activist who was a unique politico-aesthete. With his brother Elombe Brath, he virtually invented the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” in the 1960s by photographing the Grandassa Models in Harlem: young African American women who became the sensational template for beauty, doing away with the usual cosmetic products and the usual white standard of femininity.
Black Is Beautiful became a radical rallying cry, an inspired three-word prose poem and manifesto for change. Simply to assert that black people were beautiful was a liberating force in art, politics and culture, and Brathwaite became a part of Black power’s pan-Africanist movement by photographing Muhammad Ali before his Rumble in the Jungle fight in Zaire in 1974. He was the exclusive photographer for the Jackson 5’s African tour, and became the house photographer for the Apollo theatre, building an amazing archive of black musicians, and with Elombe was the driving force behind bringing Nelson Mandela to speak in Harlem.
Peter Bradshaw. “Black Is Beautiful: The Kwame Brathwaite Story – exhilarating record of game-changing photographer,” on The Guardian website Fri 10 Oct 2025 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025
Romare Bearden (American, 1911-1988)
110th Street Harlem Blues
1972
Collage
© Romare Bearden Foundation
African-American artist, activist, and writer Romare Bearden was close friends with film producer and photographer Sam Shaw, and he often drew inspiration from Shaw’s creative projects. The portraits incorporated into this collage feature outtakes of extras from a movie Shaw may have documented as set photographer.
Bearden’s work reflects his improvisational approach to his practice. He considered his process akin to that of jazz and blues composers. Starting with an open mind, he would let an idea evolve spontaneously. “You have to begin somewhere,” he once said, “so you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way.”
Text from the Fraenkel Gallery Facebook page via DC Gallery, New York
Other works of art in the show are a testament to the medium’s lasting influence on established visual artists. Among these was Romare Bearden, who in the mid-1960s began exploring photographic collage; it would become an art form he used to create his most influential works. “Romare Bearden has always been integral to understanding the Black Arts Movement,” says Brookman. “By using photographs in his collages, he makes a direct connection between photography in all of its forms and the Black Arts Movement. That was something I had not seen or thought a lot about before, how much photography is incorporated into his visual art, including painting, during that time.”
Colony Little. “A Show at the National Gallery Highlights the Role of Photography in the Black Arts Movement,” on the ARTnews website November 20, 2025 [Online] Cited 24/11/2025
Chester Higgins (American, b. 1946)
Father prays over son on Osu Beach, Accra, Ghana
1973
Gelatin silver print
22.8 x 34cm (9 x 13 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Chester Higgins. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery
Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
The Blues Singer, Harlem, NY
1976
Gelatin silver print
22.1 x 32.7 cm (8 11/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Charina Endowment Fund in memory of Robert B. Menschel
~ Text/Exhibition: “Street cred,” on the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at Denver Art Museum, November 2024 – May 2025
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April – July 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey: An American Project’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April – October 2021
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey: An American Project’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 2020 – March 2021
Barbara DuMetz (American, b. 1947)
Kraft Foods advertisement
1977
Barbara DuMetz (born 1947) is an American photographer and pioneer in the field of commercial photography. She began working in Los Angeles as a commercial photographer in the 1970s, when very few women had established and maintained successful careers in the field, especially African-American women. Over the course of her career, “she made a major contribution to diversifying the landscape of images that defined pop culture in the United States.”
DuMetz is known for her work with African-American celebrities, corporations and images of everyday life in African-American communities. …
DuMetz has been a professional photographer for more than four decades. Over the course of her career, she has produced award-winning images for advertising agencies including Burrell Advertising, J. P. Martin Associates and InterNorth Corporation. Her photographs have appeared in African-American publications including Black Enterprise, Ebony, Essence, Jet and The Crisis. She has taken commercial photographs for corporations including The Coca-Cola Company, Delta Air Lines and McDonald’s Corporation.
DuMetz ran and maintained three different photography studios located in the Los Angeles area where she was contracted by department stores, record companies, graphic design studios, advertising agencies, public relations firms, film production companies, actors and business professionals. DuMetz’s has shot photo layouts of celebrities and artists and personalities including Maya Angelou, Ernie Barnes, Bernie Casey, Pam Grier, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Quincy Jones, Samella Lewis, Ed McMahan, Thelonious Monk, Lou Rawls, Della Reese, Richard Roundtree, Betye Saar, Charles Wilbert White, and Nancy Wilson. Her show The Creators: Photographic Images of Literary, Music and Visual Artists, at the Southwest Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2015, included images of over two dozen African-American artists whom she has photographed.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Ming Smith (American, b. 1947)
Sun Ra Space II, New York, New York
1978
Gelatin silver print
15.24 × 22.4cm (6 × 8 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Charina Endowment Fund
“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”
“My work as a photographer was to record, culturally, the period of time in which I lived – and I recorded it as an artist.”
“Oh no, it’s all discovery, it’s all improvisation. It’s like when jazz musicians solo. They improvise, and photography is definitely that, for me.”
“Whether I’m photographing a person on the street, someone I know, or on an assignment, I’m doing it because I admire them. I like the sense of exchange – they’re giving and I’m taking, but I’m also giving them something back. There were certain people who would understand what I was looking for and would try to give me a photograph by posing. Whatever I’m shooting, whether it’s a portrait or a place, my intention is to capture the feeling I have about that exchange and that energy.”
Ming Smith
Coreen Simpson (American, b. 1942)
Self-Portrait
1978
Gelatin silver print
21.6 x 16.8cm (8 1/2 x 6 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Coreen Simpson
Simpson’s career launched when she became editor for Unique New York magazine in 1980, and she began photographing to illustrate her articles. She then became a freelance fashion photographer for the Village Voice and the Amsterdam News in the early 1980s, and covered many African-American cultural and political events in the mid-1980s. She is also noted for her studies of Harlem nightlife. She constructed a portable studio and brought it to clubs in downtown Manhattan, barbershops in Harlem, and braiding salons in Queens. Her work’s ability to present a wide variety of subjects with “depth of character and dignity” has been compared to that of Diane Arbus and Weegee.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Simpson became a photographer after noticing that she could make better images than the ones used to illustrate her stories as a freelance lifestyle writer. She took the chance to start creating the images she wanted to see. In 1976, she contacted her friend Walter Johnson, a street photographer who worked at a photo lab in Manhattan, with whom she had been acquainted from her modeling days, and asked if he could teach her how to use a camera. He showed her how to use it, and as soon as she got a hold of it, she became unstoppable.
She argues that great images are the key to having a successful published story. “You have to feel good about yourself, and good about the article that you’re presenting to the public,” she says. “So what makes it good? It’s the visuals. The visuals make it good.”
Briana Ellis-Gibbs. “Photographer Coreen Simpson’s illustrious career capturing Toni Morrison and Muhammad Ali: ‘I’ve never gotten bored’,” on The Guardian website Tue 21 Oct 2025 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944)
Grace Jones, New York City
1970s
Gelatin silver print
27 × 23.7cm (10 5/8 × 9 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anthony Barboza (born 1944 in New Bedford, Massachusetts) is a photographer, historian, artist and writer. With roots originating from Cape Verde, and work that began in commercial art more than forty years ago, Barboza’s artistic talents and successful career helped him to cross over and pursue his passions in the fine arts where he continues to contribute to the American art scene.
Barboza has a prolific and wide range of both traditional and innovative works inspired by African-American thought, which have been exhibited in public and private galleries, and prestigious museums and educational institutions worldwide. He is well known for his photographic work of jazz musicians from the 1970s – ’80s. Many of these works are in his book Black Borders, published in 1980 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In an article printed in 1984 in The City Sun, he said, “When I do a portrait, I’m doing a photograph of how that person feels to me; how I feel about the person, not how they look. I find that in order for the portraits to work, they have to make a mental connection as well as an emotional one. When they do that, I know I have it.” Many of his photographs achieve his signature effect through the careful use of lighting and shadows, manipulation of the backdrop, measured adjustments to shutter speeds, composition, and many other techniques and mediums at his command.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Nellie Mae Rowe (American, 1900-1982)
God Loves Us All
1978
Marker on silver gelatin print
15.9 x 29.2cm (6 1/4 x 11 1/2 in.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment and the American Women’s History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by theSmithsonian American Women’s History Initiative
© 2025 Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Nellie Mae Rowe was born in Georgia, in the last year of the nineteenth century – to a once-enslaved father and mother born the year of Emancipation. Rowe laboured as a child, married young, was widowed twice, and worked much of her adult life as a uniformed “domestic” in white households. Although her early life was shaped by segregation and oppression, Rowe’s desire to define herself sparked a joyful and colourful body of art that suffused her home and yard. This undeniable and contagious positivity made Rowe one of the first Black self-taught women to be celebrated for her art.
Rowe saw art-making as a God-given way to convey gratitude and recover a girlhood lost to labor and poverty. She transformed her property into an enriched realm she called her “Playhouse,” embellished with artworks and found objects that brought a heightened animation to her surroundings. Amid a society that rarely featured Black women in works of art and cast them as demeaning stereotypes in popular culture, Rowe took control of the narrative. She depicted friends, neighbours, and herself in drawings and hand-coloured photographs, confident images of Black beauty and free-spirited joy. In a radical act of reclamation, she crafted a world where cultural pride, personal style, and a bit of the unexpected embody the richness of life.
(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)
Text from the Smithsonian American Art Museum website
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Mom at Work
1978-1984
Gelatin silver print
60.96 × 92.71cm (24 × 36 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
~ Exhibition: ‘Carrie Mae Weems. The Heart of the Matter’ at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, April – September, 2025
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April – July 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video’ at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, January – May 2014
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (American, b. 1951)
Jake with His Boat Arriving on Daufuskie’s Shore, Daufuskie Island, South Carolina
1978, printed 2007
Gelatin silver print
31.1 x 46.6cm (12 1/4 x 18 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Funds from Diana and Mallory Walker
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951, USA) is an American photographer, photojournalist and AIDS activist. Beginning photography at the age of 18, she trained with American street photographer Garry Winogrand before graduating from the Cooper Union School of Art with a BFA in 1975, completing a year of independent photographic study in West Africa. Her 1977 photograph ‘Black Man, White Woman, Johannesburg, South Africa’ emblematised the visual narrative of apartheid at that time, recalling the institutionalised racism Jeanne had herself experienced as an African-American photographer.
Jeanne’s experience in South Africa informed her later work, encouraging her to focus on the contemporary experience of Blackness through humanist street photography. More recently, her photobook Daddy and Me: A Photo Story of Arthur Ashe and His Daughter, Camera (1993), which captures the last year of her husband Arthur Ashe’s life, has been praised as a sensitive record of family and mortality which demystifies AIDS. Following the tragedy of Ashe’s death, Jeanne has become a spokesperson for further AIDS research.
Text from the Hundred Heroines website
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017)
Self-Portrait with Red Sweater
1980, printed 2023
Chromogenic print
24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017) was an American painter and photographer who revolutionised portraiture through his realist and post-modern oil paintings of Black Americans living in urban areas, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hendricks’ depictions of the Black figure exude attitude and style. The artist culled subjects for his hagiographic portraits from sartorially minded friends and acquaintances he encountered around the world, including travels to Jamaica, his hometown of Philadelphia, and Connecticut where he last lived and worked. He applied intense focus to his subjects while painting, allowing him to capture their unique personalities. Steeped in pop culture and balanced with exquisite detail, the cast of characters in Hendricks’ work inhabits an unconventional realism united by painterly mastery.
While the directness of his subjects’ gaze could be piercing, Hendricks invoked humour through the titling of his pieces, mitigating the gravity of the message and allowing for an opening into the work. His paintings are distinctly of their time, grounded in the style of their contemporary present, and simultaneously emphatically timeless. They are a direct engagement with art history, the tradition of portraiture, and a confrontation of institutional portrayal of the black subject.
Hendricks was first a photographer before taking up painting. Beyond his portraiture, he also made distinct works on paper and painted landscapes and still lifes, including an early series of Basketball paintings that explored abstraction and colour theory. Throughout his career, Hendricks refused to be boxed into a medium, and his practice is commanding, bold, and without limitations to media or form.
Text from the Jack Shainman website
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Miles Davis
1981
Gelatin silver print
22.9 x 34.1cm (9 x 13 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Carla Williams (American, b. 1965)
Untitled (curlers) #1.2
1984-1985
Gelatin silver print
27.31 × 34.93cm (10 3/4 × 13 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Los Angeles native Carla Williams is a photographer and curator known for her exploration of identity, race, gender, and representation.
She first encountered photography in 1983 during her sophomore year at Princeton University, studying under Emmet Gowin. Her early work in self-portraiture began at Princeton, where she used the large-format camera to explore her own image. The focus of renewed scholarship, these works reflected on the lack of visibility of African American women in photographic history. Williams earned an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico in 1991, where her thesis project focused on the themes of self-representation and identity. After graduating, she worked as a curator of photography at institutions in Los Angeles and New York.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954)
Mixed Statement
1984
Oil and metallic paint, pencil, colored pencil, oil pastel, marker, paper money, fabric, thread, leaves, painted, printed, torn, and cut-and-pasted coloured paper, and gelatin silver prints on canvas, 3 panels
137.16 x 243.84cm (54 x 96 in.)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Harry Torczyner (by exchange), 2024
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
Juan Sánchez, the influential Nuyorican visual artist, teacher, writer, and curator once declared “Political art is a medium used as a weapon to hopefully recapture or regain the positive energy of celebration – to regain the goodness of humanity.” Sánchez, the child of Puerto Rican immigrants, was born and raised in Brooklyn. Encompassing a variety of mediums and techniques, including collage, painting, printmaking, photography, and video, his work is informed by his activism and engagement with issues of colonialism and its legacy, race, class, cultural identity, equality, social justice, and self-determination. At the same time, he has maintained a consistent focus on communities, families, and both personal and political histories in his work.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
Opening hours:
Daily 10.00am – 5.00pm
An exhibition by Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in cooperation with the Bernd & Hilla Becher Studio, Düsseldorf
Anonyme Skulpturen. Eine Typologie technischer Bauten, Düsseldorf: Art-Press
Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Buildings, Düsseldorf: Art-Press
1970 (Buchcover)
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
When we think about the most influential photographers of the first five decades of the 20th century we conjure up names such as Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, László Moholy-Nagy, Dorothea Lange, and Berenice Abbott, to name just a few – and by influential, I mean those photographers that altered the intensification of the medium – the conceptualisation, creation, veracity, meaning and reception of the image.
In the last 50 years of the 20th century there are less of these medium-shifting artists that have really made a difference. Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander are the two that readily spring to mind. And then there are the Bechers, Bernd & Hilla Becher. These German photographers changed the course of contemporary photographic practice, their conceptual art / objective photographic raison d’être still embedded at the heart of fine art photography today.
But, as I have argued elsewhere, their typologies and grids, their topographic state, their same same photographs and perspectives of industrial sculptures and landscapes are anything but objective. Their pictorial grammar, underlaid by a conceptual approach to subject matter, continuously reflected in the systematics of capture and display (the juxtaposition of works together), is constantly undermined by the ghost in the machine – those viral codes of mutation and difference which cannot be controlled.
While they professed to “eschew entirely entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion,” every photograph they took involves a subjective point of view, an element of uniqueness and beauty that can never be repeated.
“Despite protestations to the contrary (appeals to the objectivity of the image, eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion; the rigorous frontality of the individual images giving them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopaedic richness) these are subjective images for all their objective desire. The paradox is the more a photographer strives for objectivity, the more ego drops away, the more the work becomes their own: subjective, beautiful, emotive.
Even though the Bechers’ demonstrate great photographic restraint with regard to documenting the object, the documentary gaze is always corrupted / mutated / distorted by personal interpretation: where to position the camera, what to include or exclude, how to interpret the context of place, how to crop or print the image, and how to display the image, in grids, sequences or singularly. In other words there are always multiple (con)texts to which artists conform or transgress. What makes great photographers, such as Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, August Sander and the Bechers, is the idiosyncratic “nature” of their vision: how Atget places his large view camera – at that particular height and angle to the subject – leaves an indelible feeling that only he could have made that image, to reveal the magic of that space in a photograph. It is their personal, unique thumbprint, recognisable in an instant. So it is with the Bechers.”1
For a deeper dive into the work of the Bechers, please see my text “Ghosts in the machine,” on the exhibition Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July – November, 2022.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Marcus Bunyan text on the exhibition Bernd and Hilla Becher: Mines and Mills – Industrial Landscapes at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, November 2011 – February 2012 [Online] Cited 05/12/2025
Many thankx to Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007)
Mudersbach
1950s
Watercolour
35.5 x 59.9cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Bernd Becher’s Calatayud 1956 (below)
Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007)
Calatayud
1956
Aquatint on laid paper
20.8 x 44.0cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007)
Grube Eisernhardter Tiefbau, Eisern, D (Eisernhardter Tiefbau mine, Eisern, Germany)
1955/56
Pencil on paper
42.0 x 56.5cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Hilla Becher’s Untitled (Makroaufnahme von Schaum) (Macro shot of foam) c. 1960
Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Untitled (Makroaufnahme von Schaum) (Macro shot of foam)
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print
38.9 x 19.4cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Hilla Becher (née Wobeser) discovered photography as a teenager. Her mother had trained as a photographer at the Lette Verein in Berlin and supported her daughter’s interest. Accordingly, from 1951 to 1953, Hilla completed an apprenticeship as a photographer at the Walter Eichgrün studio in her hometown of Potsdam. In 1953, the family fled East Germany, and Hilla continued her career in West Germany. For example, in 1957 she worked at the Troost advertising agency in Düsseldorf, where she also met Bernd Becher.
The photograph shown above belongs to a series of surface and structural studies from around 1960. Nothing is known about the exact context of the photographs; however, their stylistic affinity to the “Subjective Photography” movement, which gained influence from the early 1950s onward, is interesting. Distortion techniques were an important tool in “Subjective Photography,” and Hilla Becher’s macro photographs utilise extreme proximity to the subject as a means of creating a sense of alienation.
Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Die Photographische Sammlung Instagram page
Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Meeresschnecke (Venuskamm) (Sea snail (Venus comb))
1960s
Gelatin silver print
39.6 x 30cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Pflanzenstudie, Photogramme (Plant study, photograms)
1960s
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Pflanzenstudie, Photogramme (Plant study, photograms)
1960s
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
An exhibition of Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in cooperation with the Bernd & Hilla Becher Studio, Düsseldorf
The artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931-2007/1934-2015) has written photographic history. With their joint work, which they developed from 1959 until the 2000s on the basis of an almost uninterrupted photographic activity in the industrial regions of Germany, the Benelux countries, Great Britain, France, Italy, the USA and Canada, they created a new artistically motivated documentary style.
For the first time in Europe, this exhibition will present the methodological and thematic range of their oeuvre in great detail with over 300 original black and white photographs and other exhibits by the artist couple. In the individual sections, almost all of Becher’s found subjects can be located in a compilation and sequencing largely determined by themselves. Photographs of landscapes, winding towers, blast furnaces, cooling towers, gas tanks or even views of entire collieries etc. are considered her trademark. The juxtaposition of the groups of works authentically conveys the pictorial grammar developed by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their continuously reflected systematics and conceptual approach.
The exhibits come from the Bernd and Hilla Becher Archive in Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur and the Bernd & Hilla Becher Studio, Düsseldorf, in collaboration with Max Becher under the supervision of the Bernd & Hilla Becher Estate. There are also loans from Sprüth Magers and the LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn.
The publication accompanying the exhibition will be published by Schirmer / Mosel Verlag, with texts by Max Becher, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Marianne Kapfer and Urs Stahel.
Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne website
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photograph Kühlturm (Cooling tower) 1962, “Mont-Cenis” mine, Herne, Ruhr area 1965 (below)
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Kühlturm (Cooling tower) 1962, “Mont-Cenis” mine, Herne, Ruhr area
1965
Gelatin silver print
40.3 x 31.5cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
We have dedicated an entire room of our current exhibition to the group of “Anonymous Sculptures.” With this series of images, Bernd and Hilla Becher defined the building types that were important to them, such as cooling towers. The fundamental principle of the comparability of the motifs was introduced, and the work on publications, so crucial to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s artistic output, was also initiated.
You can trace the artists’ approach using 41 photographs that exemplify the building types presented in seven chapters of the 1970 publication “Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Structures.” An exhibition at the Düsseldorf Municipal Art Gallery preceded the book in 1969 [see the book cover at the top of the posting].
The term “Anonymous Sculptures” establishes a link to conceptual art. This connection between Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work and the visual arts was important for their subsequent work and its presentation in museums and galleries.
Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Die Photographische Sammlung Instagram page
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Seven Sisters Pit, South Wales, GB
1966
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln, 2025
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Gasbehälter (Gas container) 1886 Tyldesley near Manchester, UK
1966
Gelatin silver print
30.4 x 41.5cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Förderturm (Conveyor tower) 1958 “Graf Bismarck” mine, Gelsenkirchen, Ruhr area
1967
Gelatin silver print
40.3 x 31.1cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Hochofen (Blast furnace) c. 1930, Blast furnace plant, Esch, Luxembourg
1969
Gelatin silver print
40.4 x 31.5 cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Hochspannungsmast, Düsseldorf, D (High-voltage pylon, Düsseldorf, Germany)
1969
4 gelatin silver prints
Each approx. 41.3 x 30.4cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Giebelseiten Fachwerk, Siegerland D (Gable sides half-timbered, Siegerland D)
1959-1973
15 gelatin silver prints
Each approx. 40 x 31cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen und Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
The first subjects Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed on their nearly fifty-year journey to documenting industrial buildings were half-timbered houses in the Siegerland region. For Bernd Becher, it was natural to photograph these “poor people’s houses,” as Hilla called them, from his childhood and youth. For the film “The Photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher,” we attempted to identify the Bechers’ subjects using the book “Siegerland Half-Timbered Houses” by Schirmer/Mosel. We asked locals and showed them the book. Although the Bechers provided the exact address of each house, they were often unrecognisable. Many, being drafty and cold, had been clad with asbestos cement, thus obscuring their exposed timber framing. Their original appearance is preserved only in the Bechers’ photographs.
Text from the Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Facebook page
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Bottrop, D
1976
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln, 2025
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Fördertürme (Winding towers)
1966-1979
12 gelatin silver print
Each approx. 41 x 31cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
auf der Grube Ensdorf, Saarland (at the Ensdorf mine, Saarland)
1979
Gelatin silver print
12 x 14.1cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
The artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931-2007/1934-2015) set a benchmark in the history of photography with their work. Beginning in 1959, they collaborated almost continuously for decades on a joint oeuvre, developed across Germany, the Benelux countries, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the United States, and Canada. Their artistic style, characterised by a precise, documentary visual language and methodical systematisation, resonated significantly with movements such as Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. Against the backdrop of New Objectivity and inspired by 19th-century documentary photography, they created a visual grammar whose influence remains palpable in contemporary photography.
For the first time in Europe, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur presents an extensive retrospective featuring over 300 original black-and-white photographs and complementary exhibits, showcasing the formal and thematic breadth and depth of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work. The exhibition centers on the themes and methods developed by the Bechers: consistent methodical approaches to the photographic motif that evolved and were variably applied over decades. The exhibition explores how these methods emerged, how they developed, and how they reflected the Bechers’ perspective on the different shapes, functions, and integration of industrial buildings into the landscape.
Rare early works from both artists – created between the 1950s and 1970s – are on view, many for the first time. These pieces provide insight into the evolution of their shared aesthetic.
Room 2 is dedicated to the book Anonyme Skulpturen. Eine Typologie technischer Bauten (Anonymous Sculptures. A Typology of Technical Constructions), 1970, considered the foundation of their work. This publication systematically catalogued industrial structures and remains a key reference point. Quoted texts on the function of the objects and original prints illuminate its significance within their oeuvre.
Industrial Landscapes and photographs of entire sites form another focus and demonstrate that the Bechers did not merely document isolated buildings, but also functional and spatial relationships. Featured works include views of the Zollern 2 coal mine in Dortmund (published 1977) and the Ewald Fortsetzung mine in Recklinghausen (1982-1985).
The exhibition also includes “portraits” of residential and settlement houses from the Ruhr region – especially from the post-war era – reflecting the everyday life and environment of industrial workers. A framework house from the Siegerland region is used to show how a single subject can take on different meanings depending on presentation and context.
“Sequences” or “unfoldings” are illustrated using various building groups, presenting structures from multiple perspectives, so that a sculptural image of the motifs is created.
Lastly, the exhibition presents typologies – photographic series of coal bunkers, grain silos, winding and water towers, blast furnaces, and cooling towers. These highlight how the Bechers used specific representational strategies, systematic arrangement, and variation to achieve artistic expression. Created between the 1960s and early 2000s across different countries, the works powerfully demonstrate the visual grammar developed by the Bechers.
A kind of “cinematic epilogue” is provided by a video created by Max Becher, who accompanied his parents on a work trip to Ohio in 1987, offering an evocative glimpse into their working process.
The works are drawn from the Bernd and Hilla Becher Archive at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur and the Bernd & Hilla Becher Studio in Düsseldorf, directed by Max Becher. Additional loans are provided by Sprüth Magers and the LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn.
A catalogue will accompany the exhibition, published by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, Munich, with texts by Max Becher, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Marianne Kapfer, and Urs Stahel. (Will be released in early November.)
Press release from Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Essen-Schönebeck, D
1981
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Wassertürme, USA (Water towers, USA)
1974-1983
Gelatin silver prints
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln, 2025
Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007)
Untitled (Water tower, Béziers, Hérault, F)
c. 1984
Ink on paper
9 x 5.1cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln, 20255
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Wassertürme (Water tower)
1960s-1980s
Drawings with felt-tip pen, pencil, ballpoint pen on cardboard, paper, index cards
Various sizes around 10.5 x 8.5cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Walker Evans (United States of America 1903-1975)
Graveyard and steel mill, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
1935
Gelatin silver print
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing at left Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photograph Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA 1986 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photograph Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA 1986 (below)
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
1986
Gelatin silver print
46.7 x 60cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
With their blast furnaces, chimneys, pipes, and conveyor belts, steelworks are less buildings than gigantic machines. They are among the most imposing industrial structures that Bernd and Hilla Becher have photographed since the late 1950s. Anatomically speaking, blast furnaces are like a body without skin, the artist couple wrote in 1990: excessively high temperatures, too much pressure, too many gases make cladding the steel shell impossible; they are nothing but function. In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the enormous work practically hangs over the town. Photographed from an elevated vantage point (similar to the one Walker Evans had chosen in 1935), the blast furnaces, houses, and the cemetery – work, life, death – are compressed into an inescapable proximity. Space compressed, time compressed.
Dr. Maria Müller-Schareck, art historian and member of the PS/SK management team
Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Die Photographische Sammlung Instagram page
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Förderturm, Schacht 2 (Winding tower, shaft 2)
1982
6 gelatin silver prints,
Each approx. 40 x 31cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Installation views of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Zeche Ewald Fortsetzung, Kühlturm/-türme (Ewald mine continuation, cooling tower(s)) 1985 (below)
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Zeche Ewald Fortsetzung, Kühlturm/-türme (Ewald mine continuation, cooling tower(s))
1985
5 gelatin silver prints
Each approx. 40.0 x 31.0cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Over the course of their artistic career, Bernd and Hilla Becher documented approximately 200 industrial sites, including the Ewald Fortsetzung coal mine in Recklinghausen, which we are featuring in our exhibition.
These documentations are based on systematic walks through the industrial sites and surrounding areas. A panoramic photograph, often central to each site, provides an overview of the grounds and allows the individual buildings to be located and understood in relation to one another.
The subsequent photographs portray the individual building types, in this case, two cooling towers. The five images in this group clearly demonstrate how Bernd and Hilla Becher approach their subject, photographing the building from different sides and perspectives, and highlighting a specific detail. The aim of this approach was to depict the industrial buildings in a way that is both technically clear and aesthetically pleasing.
Text from the SK Stiftung Kultur Die Photographische Sammlung Instagram page
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Kühltürme (Cooling towers)
1964-1993
9 gelatin silver prints
Each approx. 41 x 31cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Kies- und Schotterwerk, Oberbüren/St. Gallen, CH (Gravel and crushed stone works, Oberbüren/St. Gallen, CH)
2001
3 gelatin silver print
Each approx. 30 x 40cm
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Sprüth Magers
Installation view of the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne September, 2025 – February, 2026
Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method book cover
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Cologne
Phone: +49 221/888 95 300
Opening hours: Daily (except Wednesdays): 2pm – 7pm
Curator: Joshua Chuang
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt’s photographs from 1938-1940 are some of the earliest of her artistic career. “Her interest in photography blossomed when, aged 18, and having dropped out of high school, she began working in the darkroom of a commercial portrait photographer.”1
At the age of 23 she bought a secondhand Leica camera and walked the streets of New York – mainly Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Bronx and Spanish Harlem – observing the social interactions of children and adults in this teeming metropolis. But she was not a flâneuse,2 strolling around the city observing but not interacting with her surroundings … she was fully engaged in the activity of the city.
What amazes me is that her vision as an artist was so well (in)formed at such a young age. And that the concerns and investigations into the nature of play, love and life in New York as a young, strong, independent “New Woman” remained constant throughout her life and decades long photographic career.
In her photographs there is an (in)direct engagement with the people that surrounded her (in her early works “she often hid her camera under her coat to capture candid, unnoticed moments on the streets”), an exchange of energy from the photographer to the subject and back through the camera onto the film… evidencing a generosity of spirit on the part of the artist towards her subjects. Here there is no pressing the camera into the face of the victim a la Garry Winogrand to evince a reaction, but a genuine sense of compassion and empathy towards the people who live in the great city of New York.
Influenced by social realism and the idea the photography could be an agent for change, avant-garde European film, surrealism and contemporaneous dance and theatre Levitt, “decided I should take pictures of working-class people and contribute to the movements,” Levitt later said of that time. “And then I saw pictures of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson and realised that photography could be an art – and that made me ambitious.”1
Levitt’s photographs are performative and theatrical, an engagement between artist, subject and viewer in the cause of art. “In her photographs, she presents the street as an almost theatrical landscape where the smallest interactions and gestures are incredibly resonant.”1
Levitt was not interested in concept nor didactic narrative. She was interested in the presence of the image before you … in just what you see.
As with any great art, the artist that produced it (even as she is ambitious) seems to be without ego. She lets the picture and the emotions tell the story without the shadow of the artist getting in the way (unlike much contemporary art and photography). For the work of art to have value in itself.
Thus, her photographs speak to us directly, or not at all.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Sean O’Hagan. “Helen Levitt: the most celebrated, least known photographer of her time,” on The Guardian website Sun 3 Oct 2021 [Online] Cited 28/11/2025
2/ “The flâneuse is not a female flâneur, but she is a version of the flâneur. She does not experience the city in the same way as he does. It is hard to define the archetype of the flâneuse, because the flâneur himself consists of paradoxes and many subcategories. Key concepts for flâneur and flâneuse are the amount of spare time, the aesthetic detachment towards objects, crowd and sceneries they see and their ambiguity about it.”
Akkelies van Nes and Tra My Nguyen. “Gender Differences in the Urban Environment: The flâneur and flâneuse of the 21st Century,” in Daniel Koch, Lars Marcus and Jesper Steen (eds.,). Proceedings of the 7th International Space Syntax Symposium. Stockholm: KTH, 2009
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See the second, larger posting on this exhibition with many more photographs when it was shown at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.
“Levitt was part of a highly intellectual cultural and political milieu in New York in the 1930s and her photography reflected her deep interest in surrealism, cinema, leftwing politics and the new ideas that were then emerging about the role of the body in art.”
Walter Moser, curator
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
![Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' [113th Street] c. 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/levitt-new-york-113th-street-c.-1938.jpg "Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' [113th Street] c. 1938")
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (1913-2009) began photographing the streets of New York, her hometown, in the late 1930s, focusing mainly on poor neighbourhoods such as Hispanic Harlem and the Lower East Side, where the street clearly takes center stage as the setting for everyday life. Her camera was directed mainly at children and their games in the streets. These scenes of children occupy a central place in a body of work that, as a whole, captivates us with its ability to transform everyday scenes into images that convey all the emotion, mystery, and humour that life can contain, and with which the viewer establishes an immediate connection even though they lack an explicit narrative. Her work soon gained the recognition it deserved, and in 1943 the MoMA in New York organised her first solo exhibition (Photographs of Children).
Later in her career, she also became closely interested in film and colour photography. In 1948, she collaborated on the documentary The Quiet One and co-directed In the Street, another documentary about the streets of Hispanic Harlem. Both titles were highly influential in the subsequent evolution of documentary filmmaking by artists such as Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol.
After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 to explore chromatic techniques, she began experimenting with colour photography, a medium in which she would also develop pioneering work.
A socially committed artist, Levitt was one of the first women to forge a professional career in photography. This exhibition is the first to be based on her entire body of work and archives, which have only recently been made available to the public.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Dedicated full-time to her artistic activities, the photographer Helen Levitt (New York, 1913-2009) did not begin to gain public recognition until relatively late in life. Although her name has always been associated with “street photography,” as it was precisely the streets of her native city that provided the context for the production of her images, throughout her career Levitt made forays into film, visited other countries such as Mexico, and also focused on colour photography. Her images, almost invariably ambiguous and mysterious although not necessarily at first glance, are also characterised by their spontaneity, warmth and sensitivity. The movements and gestures of the figures captured by her lens and the communication between them transcend that inclination to “photograph children” which many critics pointed out after her first exhibition at the MoMA in 1943, entitled Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children.
Levitt’s work as a whole goes far beyond the latter aspect, revealing her acceptance of the pleasures, terrors and complexity of existence at all ages, traits often overlooked by the viewer when immersed in the harsh reality of the urban landscape. The exhibition, the first to be devoted to the artist on the basis of the entirety of her work and archives, which have only recently become available for study, offers a broad overview of Levitt’s career through nine sections and around 220 photographs. It includes previously unexhibited images, as well as work produced in Mexico in 1941 and a large proportion of the artist’s work in colour, which she explored from the 1950s onward. It also features her film In the Street, directed by Levitt in collaboration with Janice Loeb and James Agee, and a projection of her colour slides.
Born in Brooklyn to a Russian-Jewish family, Helen Levitt dropped out of high school early and began her photography training in a Bronx studio. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, she pursued independent photography, capturing everyday life in New York neighbourhoods between 1938 and 1942. Her first solo exhibition was at the MoMA in 1943. She also experimented with film, making In the Street, and with colour photography, which gained her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. Levitt continued to work intermittently,
exploring new settings such as the subway and rural areas. Her creative output is recognised for its ability to capture moments of human connection in complex urban environments.
Helen Levitt’s images possess a mysterious quality that transforms them into true visual enigmas. Her unique and highly perceptive gaze turns everyday scenes into compositions that are hard to define, creating an immediate connection with the viewer even when there is no clear narrative to explain them.
Helen Levitt was one of the first women to make her way in the world of photography, especially in the field of street photography. She always avoided constructing an explicit narrative in her images and preferred not to talk about them. Far from diminishing its value, that decision is one of the key traits that make her work so interesting. Despite this characteristic of reserve, Levitt’s photographs connect with the viewer through the universal emotions they convey.
Text from Fundación MAPFRE
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Mexico City
c. 1941
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1945
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Helen Levitt (1913-2009) became a photographer in the mid-1930s after meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson and seeing his radical new pictures made with a discreet, handheld camera. By the end of the decade, she had developed a unique sensibility, one informed by Surrealism and a love of avant-garde cinema but focused on the interactions of ordinary people in the streets, sidewalks, stoops, and vacant lots of her native city.
Grounded in gritty realism but brimming with subversive humor, mischief, and pathos, Levitt’s pictures are openended and enigmatic, concealing as much as they reveal. Her uncanny photographs of urban children and their games brought Levitt early renown even as she remained attentive to the quiet gestures and movements of a broader swath of humanity observed with her 35mm Leica, especially in Spanish Harlem, where the activity of everyday life often spilled out of doors.
Following a months long foray in Mexico City, Levitt began to work in filmmaking, leading to a long hiatus in her photographic activity. In 1959, advances in the sensitivity colour film spurred her to take to the streets again with her Leica. She continued to photograph in color throughout the 1970s, reverting to black-and-white film for a series of pictures taken in the New York City subway. Levitt continued to photograph intermittently until the early 1990s, when she became known as the “unofficial poet laureate” of New York and her oeuvre universally acknowledged as one of the most timeless and affecting in the history of the medium.
Only a few examples survive from Levitt’s first year using a Leica camera. Amid the backdrop of the Great Depression, her pictures of lone figures hunched over or lying on the ground appear documentary in their impulse, while other depictions of people in urban surroundings are notably more ambivalent in their view.
In 1937, while employed by the Federal Art Project to teach at a public school in East (Spanish) Harlem, Levitt noticed the many chalk drawings and messages illicitly scrawled by children on streets and buildings on her way to work, and began to document them in all their variety, innocence, and vulgarity. She sometimes also portrayed the artists themselves posing next to their ephemeral interventions.
Around 1938, on the advice of Walker Evans, Levitt began to use a right-angle viewfinder, a device that allowed her to face one direction while pointing her camera in another. This was particularly effective in recording the uninhibited interactions of the “gypsy” families prevalent in Spanish Harlem and Yorkville. Drawn to their way of life, she also borrowed Evans’s 4 x 5-inch view camera and tripod to make portraits of “gypsy” children in their homes.
By 1940 Levitt had established her terrain, subject, and approach. In a rare statement, she later described her intent “to seize upon and record those apparently accidental disarrangements that nevertheless and in seeming contradiction provide a more intense apperception of reality.” Uninterested in portraying New York City as a bustling metropolis, Levitt instead saw it as
an environment whose “size and varied character constantly forces into the open material for my camera.” The working class, immigrant neighbourhoods she frequented – where adults chatted on stoops, mothers and children leaned out of windows, and children were left to their own devices – proved to be an especially fertile ground for her work.
In 1941, again inspired by Cartier-Bresson’s example, Levitt, a reluctant traveler, went to Mexico City with a friend to photograph there. Initially struggling with the challenge of working in new environment, she was eventually able to find her artistic footing, producing a body of work that at once acknowledged rawer social realities while locating a subtle lyricism unique to the city and its people. It would be her only trip abroad.
Upon her return to New York City, Levitt picked up where she left off, picking up on more sober themes of melancholy, alienation, and what she referred to as “the deep repressions of the unyoung.” After having photographed for a decade, Levitt collaborated with her friend, the writer and critic James Agee, to edit and sequence a book of her New York photographs. Envisioning the project as an urban counterpart to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his 1941 collaboration with Walker Evans, Agee wrote an extensive essay to accompany Levitt’s pictures that heralded their lyric qualities, the sum of which presented “unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto.” After a series of setbacks, the book, eventually given the title A Way of Seeing, was not published until nearly two decades later in 1965.
In the mid-1940s, along with her friend and patron, Janice Loeb, Levitt began to shoot footage around New York City with a home movie camera. They were joined by James Agee, who encouraged them to conceive of an experimental project that would serve as a cinematic extension of Levitt’s still photographs. This led the three of them to collaborate on the pioneering short film that was first screened in 1949 and then released in 1952 under the title In the Street, a forerunner of the cinéma verité style. By the end of the 1940s and for the next two decades, filmmaking became Levitt’s primary occupation.
In 1959, Levitt was granted a Guggenheim fellowship to experiment with “the latest techniques in colour photography.” Her Leica loaded with colour slide film, she walked some of the same streets she had frequented in the 30s and 40s, newly attentive to the chromatic character of her compositions. After the bulk of her slides were stolen by a burglar in 1970, Levitt redoubled her efforts, photographing throughout the decade with renewed zeal, developing an intuitive system of colour that was at once transporting and transparent. In 1974, a continuous projection of forty of Levitt’s slides were featured at MoMA in New York, after which she began to realise select images as dye transfer prints.
Around the same time, Levitt also decided to revisit the subterranean theatre of New York City subway as a site to make pictures, having served as a decoy for Walker Evans’s subway project work more than three decades earlier. With her subjects largely stationary in train cars and platforms, Levitt attended to the nuances of expression and gesture, recording quiet dramas amid unflattering light and cramped quarters.
From the 1980s onwards, Levitt continued to photograph, but only intermittently, working mainly in black and white, both in the city and outside it.
Text from Fundación MAPFRE
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1975
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1982
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
Nd
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
1971
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
1976
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne
Fundación MAPFRE
KBr Photography Center
Avenida Litoral, 30 – 08005 Barcelona
Phone: +34 93 272 31 80 (Attention only during the opening hours of the exhibition hall)
Opening hours:
Mondays (except holidays): Closed
Tuesday to Sundays (and holidays): 11am – 7pm
Curator: Clément Chéroux, Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Sandra Bennett, twelve year old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, August 23, 1980
1980
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
This is a magnificent exhibition of the 103 photographs that form American photographer Richard Avedon’s series and subsequent book of the same name, In The American West 1984.
“Avedon spent the next six years, from 1979 to 1984, traveling to 189 towns in 17 states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming – and even up into Canada. He conducted 752 sittings, exposing 17,000 sheets of film through his large-format view camera.”1
“For five years, Avedon photographed miners, drovers, showmen, vendors, and vagabonds, alone or in small groups, in front of his view camera against a white background that enhanced their features, postures, and expressions. He thus created a striking portrait of this region and its residents, a departure from traditional representations and glorifications of the myth of the American West.”2
Using relatively small reference prints (40 x 50cm) not originally intended for exhibition made by the photographer at the time to produce the prints for his book, the hanging of this exhibition “on the line”, “follows the book, from the first to the last image… The blank pages are represented on the wall by a gap equivalent to the width of a frame, like a half-space. We have thus reproduced the rhythm of someone leafing through the book. We can see through this that Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel (1924-1984), artistic director, have constructed the rhythm of these images in a very precise manner”3, one which follows “the dynamics of the photograph on the page, and the inter-relationships, scaling and sequencing of groups of photographs.”
Breaking with the code of social documentary photography, Avedon brings to this project all his undoubted skill as a New York fashion photographer, reassigned to the artistic sphere: clarity of purpose, simplicity of representation, aesthetic beauty, clinical detail and contextless backgrounds.
While there is a long history of the use of plain backgrounds in portrait photography dating back to the infancy of the medium, Avedon was one of the first to employ such a technique in contemporary (I’d like to say postmodern) photo-portraits, where the subject is disassociated from their location, job, culture and is posed by the director of the theatrical show.
Over the five years of the project, Avedon worked closely with his subjects, often advertising for people to be photographed, street-casting his sitters, paying them for their time and providing prints of the resultant photographs. He or one of his assistants “took a Polaroid photograph of each of the models intended to pose. Clément Chéroux (curator of the exhibition) notes that, “Comparing these polaroids with Avedon’s portraits shows his ability to transcend the appearance of his models.”4
During the photographic sessions Avedon shot not from behind his camera but to the side, like the director of a play in rehearsal, front of stage. “He had a strong connection with his subjects, mimicking their position, and asking them to respond to a very small gesture by showing himself moving in one direction or another, and I think a lot of the work is in this relationship that he was establishing with the subject. Photographic literature usually focuses on the framing, the composition, but for me, this kind of interaction he was able to develop with the subject is where the work is, where he’s transforming the people that he met into a Richard Avedon photograph.”5
“A conductor of his own composition, Richard Avedon was able to weave an unparalleled fusional relationship with his models, while implacably directing them through his gaze, gestures or voice.”6
Thus, through his imagination, his direction and his creative experience Avedon conjured a subjective view of the American West every bit as much as myth as those cowboys in John Wayne movies, a kind of counter-mythology undercutting the eulogising of the American West, but a staged, fabricated, youthful, desolate, mysterious mythology none the less – a series which captures the ethos of the era (global recession, disease, dis/ease) counter to the one hoped for, “representing a sad, unsmiling America, which does not correspond to the one dreamed of.”7
Think that damned foreigner Robert Frank and his book The Americans, pointing the bone at the belly of the United States of America, holding a mirror up to their reflection8 and they certainly not liking what they saw. Indeed Avedon, while American and respectful of his subjects, could be seen as an interloper from New York exposing through his photographs the underbelly of this vast country colonised through divine providence and Manifest Destiny.
Avedon, while undercutting the myth of the American West through his storytelling, doesn’t seek to document, exploit or misrepresent his subjects, but to subjectively present them as on a theatrical set devoid of scenery – where their very appearance becomes scene / seen. As he himself said, “My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”
“Richard Avedon showed his own America, those we do not see, those we pass by without pausing, those who do the work, those who make America work.”9
Neither the series nor the exhibition are without fault, however.
While I believe that Avedon’s exceptional magnum opus In The American West has become one of the truly iconic photographic portrait series of the 20th century it can also be seen as problematic, not in the photographic sense, but in the sense that the photographs did not reflect the diverse reality of the West’s population. While the series may be Avedon’s subjective mythologising of the American West some people, myself included, find the lack of representation of Black Americans, Asian Americans and other ethnicities that have been integral to the development of the American West a point of contention. Are they not those that also do the work, those who also make America work, as much as those Avedon chose to photograph? Indeed there is a “significant demographic blind spot” in the whole series…
The other blind spot is the inability of commentators such as myself to publish some of the preparatory Polaroids that Avedon and his assistants took before posing his subjects. I asked the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for some of the Polaroids to illustrate this posting and they said that none were available. Since the exhibition promotes the presence of these unpublished documents and the curator Clément Chéroux notes their importance for their ability to compare them with Avedon’s finished portraits, showing “his ability to transcend the appearance of his models,” they become vital to understanding Avedon’s creative process … and it would have been great to see the visualisation of his subjects from beginning to end.
Examples of these Polaroids are rare online but some can be seen in the article “Before And After: Polaroids then Magic from Richard Avedon, In the American West,” on the Flashbak website June 9, 2025.
Finally, in the juxtaposition of Polaroid and finished portrait we can begin to perceive the magical transformation and artistry and humanism of the man, Avedon, as he visualises his ode to the American West, composing his subjects so that they engage with the viewer directly from the photographic frame – the dynamics of the photographs creating iconic images of memorable characters, collectively constructing the rhythm of these images (from dark to light, from sublime to industrial) into an unforgettable sequence of photographs.
Bravo Richard Avedon!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 1,254
1/ Text from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art website [Online] Cited 10/10/2025
2/ Text from the YouTube website translated from the French by Google Translate [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
3/ Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025
4/ Karen Strike. “Before And After: Polaroids then Magic from Richard Avedon, In the American West,” on the Flashbak website June 9, 2025 [Online] Cited 10/10/2025
5/ Clément Chéroux quoted in Christina Cacouris. “Richard Avedon’s Rugged American West Comes to Paris,” on the Aperture website, June 26, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
6/ Justine Grosset. “Richard Avedon, In the American West,” on the Phototrend website May 5, 2025 [Online] Cited 10/10/2025
7/ Nathalie Dassa, op.cit.,
8/ Holding a mirror up to their reflection, i.e. to hold something up to scrutiny, to reveal an unpleasant truth, or to show something for what it truly is, often with the intent of providing insight or understanding.
9/ Nathalie Dassa, op.cit.,
Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson 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 think the West in these portraits is any more accurate than John Wayne’s West.”
Richard Avedon at the exhibition opening in 1985
“Avedon’s most compelling photographs are about performance – his performance as well as his subjects’ – and depend on the engagement of their personalities. For this reason it is difficult to separate the photographer from the man. Indeed it is partly owing to the ineluctable presence of Avedon’s own psychology that his portraits transcend the mainstream of cultural history.”
Anonymous. “Body of Evidence,” on the Frieze website, 06 March 1994 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
“Listen carefully to the stories of others and they may tell us something of ourselves. The story of any person exists first in the mind of its teller, perpetually renewing itself as, like smoke in wind, it is constantly shaped and reshaped in the flux of daily life. Narratives constructed from various facts, memories and rumours are added to, subtracted from, come together and fall apart in a continuous reassembling of experience and imagination. The human mind is a place where fact meets fiction, where reality and fantasy mingle easily and endlessly with fabrication, half-truths and invention. As they say, looking at something is no guarantee you will actually see it.”
Glenn Busch from A Man Holds A Fish 2024
To mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Avedon’s iconic work, In The American West, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents, from April 30 to October 12, 2025, in collaboration with the Richard Avedon Foundation, an exceptional exhibition entirely dedicated to this iconic series.
Between 1979 and 1984, at the request of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Avedon traveled the American West and photographed more than 1,000 of its inhabitants. For five years, Avedon photographed miners, drovers, showmen, vendors, and vagabonds, alone or in small groups, in front of his view camera against a white background that enhanced their features, postures, and expressions.
He thus created a striking portrait of this region and its residents, a departure from traditional representations and glorifications of the myth of the American West. The sheer power of the 103 works that make up the final series and the book of the same name make In The American West a pivotal moment in Avedon’s work and a major milestone in the history of photographic portraiture.
The exhibition presented at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson from April 30 to October 12, 2025, displays for the very first time in Europe all the images that appear in the original work, accompanied by previously unpublished documents.
Text from the YouTube website translated from the French by Google Translate [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
Richard Avedon photographing for In The American West
“We have some testimonies about the way that Avedon was working, and we know that he was not behind his camera, he was standing next to it. He had a strong connection with his subjects, mimicking their position, and asking them to respond to a very small gesture by showing himself moving in one direction or another, and I think a lot of the work is in this relationship that he was establishing with the subject. Photographic literature usually focuses on the framing, the composition, but for me, this kind of interaction he was able to develop with the subject is where the work is, where he’s transforming the people that he met into a Richard Avedon photograph.”
Clément Chéroux quoted in Christina Cacouris. “Richard Avedon’s Rugged American West Comes to Paris,” on the Aperture website, June 26, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
Installation view of the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West‘ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025
“The hanging follows the book, from the first to the last image,” explains Clément Chéroux. “The blank pages are represented on the wall by a gap equivalent to the width of a frame, like a half-space. We have thus reproduced the rhythm of someone leafing through the book. We can see through this that Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel (1924-1984), artistic director, have constructed the rhythm of these images in a very precise manner.”
Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025
“Here, the works are displayed throughout the building in classic fashion – in a single line – and in unusually small formats (40 × 50 centimetres). “These are the reference prints, made by the photographer at the time, to produce the prints for his book and the enlargements shown in his exhibitions,” explained Clément Chéroux, the foundation’s director. These prints were not intended for exhibition, but nonetheless their remarkable quality allows the public − for the first time in Europe − to discover this exceptional work in its entirety.”
Claire Guillot. “Richard Avedon’s photographs of the American West at Paris’s Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,” on the Le Monde website, August 13, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
Installation views of the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West‘ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025
To mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Avedon’s iconic work In the American West, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, in collaboration with the Richard Avedon Foundation, presents an exclusive exhibition focused on this emblematic series.
Between 1979 and 1984, commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Avedon traveled across the American West to photograph over 1,000 of its inhabitants. For five years, Avedon photographed miners, herdsmen, showmen, salesmen and transient people, amongst others with rich histories, alone or in small groups, before his camera, against a white background that enhanced their features, postures and expressions, for a striking portrait of the territory and its residents, in stark contrast to traditional depictions and glorifications of the legend of the American West. The force of the 103 works that compose the book makes In the American West a pivotal event in Avedon’s career, and a milestone in the history of photographic portraits.
For the first time in Europe, the exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents the whole series of images included in the original publication, while also showcasing the stages of its production and reception. The exhibition includes a full selection of engravers prints, which served as reference materials for both the exhibition and the 1985 book, as well as previously unpublished documents, such as preparatory Polaroids, test prints annotated by the photographer, and correspondence between the artist and his models.
To mark this anniversary, Abrams, the book’s original publisher, is reissuing the long out-of-print book.
Richard Avedon was born to parents of Russian Jewish heritage in New York City. As a boy, he learned photography, joining the YMHA Camera Club at the age of twelve. Avedon joined the armed forces in 1942 during World War II, serving as Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the Merchant Marine. Making identification portraits of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex twin lens camera – a gift from his father – Avedon advanced his technical knowledge of the medium and began to develop a dynamic style. After two years of service he left the Merchant Marine to work as a photographer, making fashion images and studying with art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School for Social Research.
In 1945, Avedon set up his own studio and worked as a freelance photographer for various magazines. He quickly became the preeminent photographer used by Harper’s Bazaar.
From the beginning, Avedon made portraits for editorial publication as well: in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, in Theater Arts, and in Life and Look magazines. From the outset, he was fascinated by photography’s capacity for suggesting the personality and evoking the life of his subjects. Only rarely did he idealize people; instead, he presented the face as a kind of landscape, with total clarity.
Avedon continued to make portraiture and fashion photography for magazine publications throughout his career. After parting ways with Harper’s Bazaar in 1965, he began a long-term relationship with Vogue that continued through 1988. In later years, he established formidable creative partnerships with the French publication Egoiste, and with The New Yorker. In the pages of these periodicals, Avedon reinvigorated his formalist style, investing his imagery with dynamism and theatricality. In addition, he supported his studio by making innovative advertising work for print and broadcast – defining the look of brands like Calvin Klein, Versace, and Revlon.
As his reputation grew and his signature aesthetic evolved, Avedon remained dedicated to extended portraiture projects as a means for exploring cultural, political, and personal concerns. In 1963-1964, he examined the civil rights movement in the American South. During the Vietnam War, he photographed students, countercultural artists and activists, and victims of the war, both in the United States and in Vietnam. In 1976, on a commission for Rolling Stone magazine, he produced The Family, a composite portrait of the American power elite at the time of the country’s Bicentennial election.
In 1985, Avedon created his magnum opus – In the American West. He portrayed members of the working class: butchers, coal miners, convicts, and waitresses, all photographed with precisionist detail, using the large format camera and plain white backdrop characteristic of his mature style. Despite their apparent minimalism and objectivism, however, Avedon emphasised that these portraits were not to be regarded as simple records of people; rather, he said, “the moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.”
Richard Avedon’s acclaimed work In the American West was first published in 1985 by American publishing house Abrams. For its 40th anniversary, Abrams is republishing the work in its original format.
Text from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Roger Tims, Jim Duncan, Leonard Markley, Don Belak, coal miners, Reliance, Wyoming, August 29, 1979
1979
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
“This was the beginning of his emblematic project “In the American West” that took him across 17 US states, where he photographed nearly 1,000 people from 1979 to 1984 and revealed a poor, hardworking America, far removed from the clichés and the myth of the glorious American West. He carried out this series with neither sociological intent nor a concern for objectivity. “This is a fictional West,” he said. “I don’t think the West of these portraits is any more conclusive than the West of John Wayne.””
Claire Guillot. “Richard Avedon’s photographs of the American West at Paris’s Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,” on the Le Monde website, August 13, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981
1981
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
“He needed to create disjunctions,” says Clément Chéroux. “The beekeeper remains a great image of the 20th century. After placing an ad, he chose this man suffering from alopecia, who no longer had any hair, no eyebrows. He took him to an entomologist who covered him with queen pheromones to attract bees. Through this staging, he wanted to make the audience understand that nothing is more complex than simplicity.”
Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025
“The subjective part of the project is clear. And most of the photographs were from encounters where he photographed people he met as they were. He also stated very clearly that a few photographs were set up, and the photograph of the Bee Man is a good example of that. He first published an advertisement in the American Bee Journal to find the type of person he was interested in – we have the advertisement in the exhibition, we found the original magazine where it was published. So, he looked for that person and made some drawings in preparation for the shoot. He clearly had a dream of a specific image that he wanted to realize. And he made clear that he wanted to have this photograph to show the subjective part of the project, that it was not exclusively a documentary project. I think the Bee Man shows us that there isn’t truth on one side and fiction on the other. It’s much more complex.” …
“Just before the Bee Man, we have the coal miners, these very strong dark images and then suddenly you have the white body of Ronald Fisher with all these little bees. We wanted to respect this in the exhibition, the sense that it was not just a collection of twentieth-century photographs of Americans, but it was a group of images, a full sentence.”
Clément Chéroux quoted in Christina Cacouris. “Richard Avedon’s Rugged American West Comes to Paris,” on the Aperture website, June 26, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
David Beason, shipping clerk, Denver, Colorado, July 25, 1981
1981
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
“The year after [Glenn Busch’s] Working Men was published came fashion photographer Richard Avedon‘s In the American West (New York: Abrams, 1985), the consistent theme of which, as Richard Bolton in Afterimage argues, sees “human experience as manifested in [no]thing but style,” a quality, less sombre, but equally arch, exoticising and stereotyping that is found also in the Small Trades studio series of 1950-51 by Irving Penn.”
James McArdle. “October 8: Prosopography,” on the On This Date In Photography website 08/10/2025 [Online] Cited 08/10/2025
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Jesse Kleinsasser, pig man, Hutterite Colony, Harlowton, Montana, June 23, 1983
1983
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Ruby Mercer, publicist, Frontier Days, Cheyenne, Wyoming, July 31, 1982
1982
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
“Avedon was aware of the subjectivity of what he presents. He was also very familiar with art history and pictorial references, such as those of Rembrandt. He made carcasses of sheep and cattle appear like hallucinations among the workers. His photography is therefore no more objective than that of John Wayne’s westerns. And that is what he had been criticised for: representing a sad, unsmiling America, which does not correspond to the one dreamed of. These are the people that Walker Evans and the traveling photographers sought out during the conquest of the West. He demonstrated this paradox. And this is the term Roland Barthes uses for him: the paradox of all great art. Richard Avedon showed his own America, those we do not see, those we pass by without pausing, those who do the work, those who make America work.”
Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Petra Alvarado, factory worker, on her birthday, El Paso, Texas, April 22, 1982
1982
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Boyd Fortin, thirteen year old rattlesnake skinner, Sweetwater, Texas, March 10, 1979
1979
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Avedon took this portrait in 1979 in Texas during the annual snake hunt in the small town of Sweetwater.
The portraits from In the American West may not be romantic images – no pomp and circumstance – but they are dignified. Coal miners, cotton farmers, and cowboys stand tall and proud. Avedon worked quickly, street-casting his subjects alongside his assistant Laura Wilson, setting up white paper backdrops and shooting instinctively. Post-production was another matter entirely: Chéroux’s exhibition showcases the meticulous care that went into each print, with Avedon’s instructions for dodging and burning scrawled across pictures.
Christina Cacouris. “Richard Avedon’s Rugged American West Comes to Paris,” on the Aperture website, June 26, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Richard Garber, drifter, Interstate 15, Provo, Utah, August 20, 1980
1980
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Blue Cloud Wright, slaughterhouse worker, Omaha, Nebraska, August 10, 1979
1979
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Cover of Richard Avedon’s book In The American West
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday
11am – 7pm
Closed on Mondays
Curators: Catlin Langford with Christopher Sutherland and Jessie Norman (Metro Auto Photo)
Installation view of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This is one of the most joyous photography exhibitions that I have seen in a very long time.
The exhibition “introduces us to Alan Adler (2932-2024), who while little known, was the oldest and longest serving photobooth technician in the world… For over 50 years, Adler maintained a fleet of photobooths across Melbourne / Narrm, most notably the site at Flinders Street Station.”
Through the strip self-portraits Adler took while servicing and then testing the photobooths that he operated in Melbourne, Australia we become immersed in an archive of his world, the exhibition becoming a joyous ode to a man who devoted his life to photography (not in the traditional sense): in turns humorous and historical, a travelogue, his travelogue, through time and space.
We see Adler growing older and ageing; we see historic events such as the COVID pandemic with him wearing a mask; we see him travelling the world to picture other photobooths in situ; we see him goofing and performing for the camera; and we see the people he met along the way. I particularly like the photograph of Adler having his photo taken on the “Photo Ride: Take “5” with Chuckie” where he imitates the smile of his fellow traveller (see below)
The exhibition is also historical – there is a short section on the history of the photobooth – contemporary – there are contemporary works by Australian artists who use the photobooth as the basis for their art – and lost and found – where “lost” photobooth strips that Adler diligently collected in the hope of one day reuniting them with their owner are displayed.
There is an absolutely wonderful video by Christopher Sutherland titled Alan (extract below) which gives you good insight into the man. He seems part magician, keeping those old photobooths going, and part artist – Adler’s workshop reminding me so much of the basement of the American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972, see photo below) where he used to keep all the treasures he scavenged from around New York that he used to make his magical boxes. Adler’s photobooths were his magical boxes kept going by his bits and pieces, booths of happiness and memories, tales of a life in portraits.
In this exhibition the spirit of this man shines through in gloriously irreverent black and white and colour self-portraits, and fun, adventurous photographs from overseas. One of the best pure photography exhibitions I have seen this year.
What a life, well honoured.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Christopher Sutherland (Australian)
Alan (extract)
2025-ongoing
Digital film
This is part of an ongoing film project by Christopher Sutherland on Alan Adler, which began in 2018 when they first met.
Cornell’s basement studio, 3708 Utopia Parkway, Flushing, New York, 1964
Collection Duff Murphy and Janice Miyahira
© Terry Schutté
Installation views of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits introduces us to Alan Adler (1932-2024), who while little known, was the oldest and longest serving photobooth technician in the world.
For over 50 years, Adler maintained a fleet of photobooths across Melbourne / Narrm, most notably the site at Flinders Street Station. As part of his weekly service, he would take a strip of test shots, now forming an extraordinary visual archive of over a thousand self-portraits.
Adler’s story shows a fascinating dedication to repetitious image making and is supported by the artworks of Melbourne creatives who have passionately used his photobooths.
Marking 100 years of the photobooth, Auto-Photo is one of many worldwide events that celebrate the centenary and reflect on the significance of this analogue machine.
Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits features Adler’s extensive archive, alongside additional exhibits and works of art from the collections of Katherine Griffiths, Mark Holsworth, Kyle Archie Knight, Ruth O’Leary, Nicky Makin, Jesse Marlow, Brian Meacham, Metro Auto Photo, Patrick Pound and Joshua Smith.
Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits is a Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) exhibition, presented in partnership with RMIT Culture.
Text from the RMIT Gallery website
Installation views of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
RMIT Gallery
344 Swanston St,
Melbourne VIC 3000
Opening hours:
11am – 5pm Tuesday to Friday
12pm – 4pm Saturday
Closed on public and University holidays
Postmortem curators: Monica Leoni, Elisabeth Sciarretta with Laura Gasparini and Michael G. Jacob
Attraverso la luce curators: Monica Leoni, Elisabeth Sciarretta with Laura Gasparini
“When I am dead and in my grave
And all my bones are rotten.
When this you see remember me
Lest I should be forgotten.”
This is the first posting on Art Blart on the phenomenon of postmortem photography for exhibitions on this subject are few and far between.
Any photograph is a “little death” which “refers to the concept of “la petite mort” or “the little death,” a French idiom and euphemism for the momentary loss of consciousness or breath, often associated with orgasm, but also used to describe the act of freezing a moment in time through photography. This concept suggests that photography, by capturing a specific moment, essentially stops time and thus, in a way, creates a small, contained death of that moment.” (Google AI Overview)
All photographs (and especially postmortem photography where the deceased are memorialised through images) can be seen as “memento mori”, a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die,” reminding us that of the impermanence of life – for photographs “capture a moment in time, forever preserving a fleeting instant and highlighting the passage of time and the inevitability of death.” (Google AI Overview)
As Susan Sontag observed, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” (On Photography)
Victorians were faced with the vicissitudes of fortune, and death at any age was a common occurrence due to illness with no antibiotics available to treat the many lethal diseases. They became stoic in the face of the impermanence of life, stoic in the face of death and through photography, sought to record into permanence the likenesses of the departed (the beloved), so that they could remember and honour them. Photographs thus became symbols of mortality which encouraged reflection on the meaning and fleetingness of life…
But unlike a photographic self-portrait, where a human looks at their image (in which they are dead) which reminds them about their physical death in the future, an anterior future of which death is the stake (and the prick of discovery of this equivalence)1 – in postmortem photography the little death and the actual death are as one for the anterior future can never be viewed by the subject of the photograph (they are dead), a separation only revived in the heart and mind of another.
Through postmortem photography the deceased live in an interstitial space, forever brought back to life in the eyes of the viewer as we reawaken and reactivate their spirit in the world. I was once here and I am again. Remember me.
Thus the euphemism “sleeping” is appropriate (sleeping beauty awakened once more with a kiss), as the viewer transcends time bringing past dead back into living world – where past, present and future coalesce into single point in time – their death and our death connected through the gaze and the knowledge of our discontinuity. Eons contracted into an eternal moment.2
In this expanded-specific moment in time, through an awareness of our own dis/continuity, what we are doing is talking about something that is remarkable. We are moving towards a language that defines the human condition…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire), Section 39, 1980
2/ Marcus Bunyan. “This is not my favourite photograph,” part of What makes a great photograph? at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Wednesday 5th December 2012 [Online] Cited 27/06/2025
Many thankx to the Biblioteca Panizzi and Michael G. Jacob 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)
A sleeping man
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping man (detail)
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector
Una esposizione dedicata alla collezione di Michael G. Jacob, alla riscoperta della fotografia “post mortem”: la realizzazione di immagini commemorative di familiari defunti per genitori, amici e parenti era un aspetto significativo del lavoro quotidiano di molti studi fotografici vittoriani.
An exhibition dedicated to the collection of Michael G. Jacob, to the rediscovery of “post mortem” photography: the creation of commemorative images of deceased family members for parents, friends and relatives was a significant aspect of the daily work of many Victorian photographic studios.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping girl
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
A woman with long fingernails, bured teeth & cut flowers
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
A woman with long fingernails, bured teeth & cut flowers (detail)
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
Young girl holding a daguerrotype
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector
L’esposizione dedicata alla collezione di Michael G. Jacob alla riscoperta della fotografia “post mortem” nell’epoca vittoriana, ha l’intento di illustrare il legame di affezione e rispetto di quella cultura che indusse i vivi a ricordare i propri defunti, analizzando come, dopo gli anni Quaranta del XIX secolo, la fotografia sia diventata centrale anche nel modo di sentire e vivere il lutto.
La pratica di raffigurare il volto del defunto è antichissima e la fotografia si innesta in questa tradizione, modificando il modo di vivere e comunicare il lutto. Come tutte le tradizioni più o meno radicate, anche nella colta ed evoluta Europa le esequie e il lutto seguono consuetudini e usanze che si sono perdute o modificate nel tempo. Il galateo del lutto, in epoca vittoriana, è uno degli aspetti per noi meno comprensibili ma più affascinanti, i cui codici, nel tempo, sono andati perduti o si sono radicalmente trasformati.
I rituali funebri, così come venivano concepiti dai vittoriani, si manifestavano in comportamenti, abbigliamento e usanze che spesso appaiono eccessivi per la sensibilità moderna e hanno oggi bisogno di essere decodificati per comprenderne la vasta iconografia. L’antropologia e la sociologia ci hanno spiegato quali reazioni emotive e formali l’essere umano ha avuto nel corso del tempo di fronte alla morte e al corpo dei defunti, indotte dalla cultura a cui apparteniamo, mentre la fotografia contribuisce sostanzialmente a documentare questa cultura del lutto.
The exhibition dedicated to the Michael G. Jacob collection and the rediscovery of “post mortem” photography in the Victorian era, aims to illustrate the bond of affection and respect of that culture that induced the living to remember their dead, analysing how, after the 1840s, photography also became central to the way of feeling and experiencing mourning.
The practice of depicting the face of the deceased is very ancient and photography is grafted onto this tradition, modifying the way of experiencing and communicating mourning. Like all more or less rooted traditions, even in cultured and evolved Europe, funerals and mourning follow customs and habits that have been lost or modified over time. The etiquette of mourning, in the Victorian era, is one of the aspects that is least comprehensible to us but most fascinating, whose codes, over time, have been lost or have radically transformed.
Funeral rituals, as conceived by the Victorians, manifested themselves in behaviors, clothing and customs that often seem excessive for modern sensibilities and today need to be decoded to understand their vast iconography. Anthropology and sociology have explained to us what emotional and formal reactions human beings have had over time in front of death and the body of the deceased, induced by the culture to which we belong, while photography contributes substantially to documenting this culture of mourning.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
Unknown photographer (American)
A mother, daughter and dead infant
c. 1848
Daguerreotype retouched in colour
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
A family group
1853
Daguerreotype
Date in handwritten characters on the lower edge of the daguerreotype: “July 15 1853”
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
A family group (detail)
1853
Daguerreotype
Date in handwritten characters on the lower edge of the daguerreotype: “July 15 1853”
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
Sleeping baby
c. 1860
Ambrotype
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
Sleeping baby (detail)
c. 1860
Ambrotype
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
A Sleeping child
c. 1860
Ferrotype
Title given by the collector
In occasione di Fotografia Europea, la Biblioteca Panizzi propone una mostra dedicata ai primi 20 anni della fotografia nelle collezioni della Fototeca attraverso l’esposizione di fotografie su carta salata, albumine, e dagherrotipi, tra cui la prestigiosa collezione di Michael G. Jacob.
On the occasion of Fotografia Europea, the Panizzi Library presents an exhibition dedicated to the first 20 years of photography in the collections of the Photo Library through the display of photographs on salted paper, albumen, and daguerreotypes, including the prestigious collection of Michael G. Jacob.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
John Brown
Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1848
3 Daguerreotypes
John Brown
Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1848
Daguerreotype
John Brown
Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1848
Daguerreotype
John Brown
Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1848
Daguerreotype
La mostra presenta un percorso attraverso rari esempi di fotografie su carta salata e numerosi dagherrotipi, ambrotipi, ferrotipi e album delle collezioni della Fototeca della Bibliotecca Panizzi. Una narrazione, quindi, che ci portera indietro nel tempo, agli anni pionieristici della sperimentazione sceintifica attraverso la luce, la chimica e la trasformazione di materiali quali l’argento, per arrivare ali’arte del ritratto e del paesaggio e giungere a quel’oggetto di culto che e stata la fotografia delle origini.
The exhibition presents a journey through rare examples of photographs on salted paper and numerous daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, ferrotypes and albums from the collections of the Photo Library of the Panizzi Library. A narrative, therefore, that will take us back in time, to the pioneering years of scientific experimentation through light, chemistry and the transformation of materials such as silver, to arrive at the art of portraiture and landscape and reach that cult object that was the photography of the origins.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
Unknown photographer (American)
Dead child in his mother’s arms
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
Unknown photographer (American)
Girl holding a flower
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
Unknown photographer (American)
Freckled girl with daguerreotype
c. 1850
Daguerreotype retouched in colour
Unknown photographer (American)
Tinted woman
c. 1850
Daguerreotype retouched in colour
Unknown photographer (American)
Portrait of mother with child
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
La magia della luce è stata per secoli oggetto di importanti studi scientifici, ma ha affascinato anche e soprattutto il mondo dell’arte, oltre che la cultura popolare. La fotografia, attraverso i vari procedimenti storici, si inserisce in questo capitolo della storia visuale, intrecciandosi con arte, scienza e tecnologia, unite alla passione comune per la nascita di un nuovo e accattivante linguaggio. La mostra presenta un percorso attraverso gli esemplari che appartengono alla collezione di Michael G. Jacob, ultima acquisita grazie alla generosa donazione di questo importante collezionista e studioso, insieme a rari esempi di fotografie su carta salata e numerosi dagherrotipi, ambrotipi, ferrotipi e album delle collezioni della Fototeca della Biblioteca Panizzi. Una narrazione, quindi, che ci porterà indietro nel tempo, agli anni pionieristici della sperimentazione scientifica attraverso la luce, la chimica e la trasformazione di materiali quali l’argento, per arrivare all’arte del ritratto e del paesaggio e giungere a quell’oggetto di culto che è stata la fotografia delle origini.
The magic of light has been the subject of important scientific studies for centuries, but it has also fascinated the world of art, as well as popular culture. Photography, through its various historical processes, fits into this chapter of visual history, intertwining with art, science and technology, combined with a shared passion for the birth of a new and captivating language. The exhibition presents a journey through the specimens that belong to the collection of Michael G. Jacob, the last acquired thanks to the generous donation of this important collector and scholar, together with rare examples of photographs on salted paper and numerous daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, ferrotypes and albums from the collections of the Photo Library of the Panizzi Library. A narrative, therefore, that will take us back in time, to the pioneering years of scientific experimentation through light, chemistry and the transformation of materials such as silver, to arrive at the art of portraiture and landscape and reach that cult object that was early photography.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
Unknown photographer (American)
Coach in park
c. 1860
Ambrotype
Unknown photographer (American)
Portrait of women
c. 1860
Ferrotype
Unknown photographer (American)
Double vignette friends
c. 1860
Ferrotype
Unknown photographer (American)
Well dressed lady
c. 1880
Ambrotype
Biblioteca Panizzi
Via Luigi Carlo Farini, 3,
42121 Reggio Emilia RE, Italy
Opening hours:
Monday – Saturday, 9am – 7pm
Curators: Dennis Bell, founder of the Bob Mizer Foundation, and De Kwok, Head of Public Programming
*PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
~ Honesty
~ ~ Integrity
~ ~ ~ Dignity
~ ~ ~ ~ Vulnerability
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Respect
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Love
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Friendship
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Sexuality
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Strength
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Beauty
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Form
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Humanism
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Identity
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Personality
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Presence
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Intimacy
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Nude
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Empathy
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Revelation
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Spirit
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Truth
I’ve been wanting to do a posting on the magnificent New Orleans photographer George Dureau’s work for a long while but because there are so few exhibitions of his photographs I have never had the opportunity – until now.
It’s a great pity that his work is not as recognised as that of his contemporaries, Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. Indeed, you can still pick up an original Dureau in the secondhand art market for around $500 whereas Mapplethorpe’s photographs run into the many thousands.
His photographs are not romantic, certainly not sentimental. He was fascinated by the people he photographed, their truth. These are the stories he conceptualised, posed, lit and photographed, stories that emerged from his imagination, that revealed surprising things about his subjects.
Unlike the clinical formalism of Mapplethorpe, Dureau worked with a poetry that was always present. Indeed, there is something so eloquent and sincere about his photographs for in them the artist draws (Dureau was also a painter) the mysteries of the soul of his subjects.
Dureau’s response to the world and the photographs that emanate from that engagement are humanist in the best sense of the word, revealing his subjects in a direct way that emphasises an individual’s dignity, worth and capacity for self-realisation.
Thus, I feel his photographs are a celebration not just of the human form but more importantly, of the human spirit.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Dennis Bell, Corbin Crable and the Bob Mizer Foundation for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I live a warm, involved humanist sort of life. There are lots of people passing through it. I have exciting experiences and learn things about people. They always go into my art. I cannot have an experience and it not go into my art.”
George Dureau
John H. Lawrence, HNOC emeritus director of museum programs and himself a fine-art photographer, said Dureau’s portraits reveal a tangible intimacy between photographer and subject.
“George respected the people he asked to sit for him,” said Lawrence. “I don’t say that from a knowledge, just from what the photographs show. The direct stare into the camera, it may have been at George’s direction. Even with the gaze directed in that fashion, you don’t get the kind of quality you see in these portraits unless there is a mutual respect between the photographer and the subject. There is a vibe there that is based on these two people having respect for each other as the photograph is made.”
John H. Lawrence quoted in Dave Walker. “The Intimate Eye of George Dureau,” on The Historic New Orleans Collection website, December 31, 2021 [Online] Cited 20/06/2025
This exhibition presents 25 evocative black-and-white portraits by George Dureau, capturing the resilience and vulnerability of his subjects – from athletes to marginalised individuals – against the vibrant cultural backdrop of New Orleans, where beauty and humanity converge in transformative ways.
Installation view of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco showing Dureau’s photograph Craig Blanchette, 1992
Installation views of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco showing Dureau’s photograph John Slate, Nd
Installation view of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco
Installation views of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco
The Bob Mizer Foundation proudly presents Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form, an exhibition showcasing 25 evocative black-and-white portraits by the acclaimed New Orleans artist George Dureau. This compelling collection captures the resilience, vulnerability, and individuality of Dureau’s subjects, spanning athletes, performers, and marginalised individuals.
Dureau’s photography transcends traditional portraiture, blending classical composition with the rich cultural spirit of New Orleans. His intimate works explore themes of identity and dignity, transforming vulnerabilities into powerful symbols of humanity’s resilience. The photographs invite viewers to reimagine beauty as inclusive, diverse, and multifaceted.
“George Dureau’s work is a testament to his unique ability to celebrate the human form while challenging societal norms,” says Den Bell, founder of the Bob Mizer Foundation. “His portraits honour the individuality of his subjects while weaving in the vibrancy of New Orleans, making his work timeless and deeply impactful.”
“Dureau photographed people with kindness and sympathy,” added Mizer Foundation’s Head of Programming, De Kwok, “It has been said that his subject matter became a member of his extended family and you can clearly see that in the way his camera lovingly captured them.”
The exhibition will be on view from March 6 to June 28, 2025, at the Bob Mizer Foundation’s Main Gallery. An opening reception will be held on March 6 from 6.00 pm – 8.30 pm, providing an opportunity to explore the works and celebrate Dureau’s extraordinary legacy.
A celebrated figure in the art world, George Dureau (1930-2014) was renowned for his black-and-white photography and classical paintings. Rooted in the rich cultural heritage of New Orleans, Dureau’s art challenges conventions and highlights the resilience of the human spirit. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inspire audiences with its profound emotional depth and technical mastery.
Text from the Bob Mizer Foundation website
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Wilbert with Hook
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
20 x 16 inches
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
B.J. Robinson
1995
Vintage silver gelatin print
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Troy Brown “For Tennessee”
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled (Sonny Singleton)
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
This exhibition highlights the remarkable artistry of George Dureau through 25 compelling black-and-white portraits that showcase his unique vision. Created during the 1970s and 1980s, these photographs transcend traditional boundaries, blending classical composition with an unflinching exploration of the human experience. Dureau’s subjects – athletes, performers, friends, and individuals often marginalised by society – are elevated to iconic status through his lens.
The images reveal a profound empathy and an unshakable belief in the inherent dignity of every individual. With a studio rooted in the vibrant cultural milieu of New Orleans, Dureau captured not only the physical form but also the spirit of his subjects, transforming their vulnerabilities into striking symbols of resilience and humanity. His work redefines beauty as inclusive and multifaceted, challenging societal norms and inviting reflection on identity, strength, and community.
This exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form presents 25 photographs by one of New Orleans’ most celebrated artists. Dureau’s black-and-white portraits, taken primarily during the 1970s and 1980s, capture the raw beauty, strength, and vulnerability of his subjects. Known for his classical approach and profound empathy, Dureau’s work invites us to confront traditional notions of beauty, body, and identity while celebrating the richness of the human experience.
George Dureau’s intimate portraits are both timeless and grounded in the rich cultural tapestry of New Orleans. His subjects include athletes, performers, friends, and marginalised individuals – including amputees and people with disabilities – rendered with dignity and compassion. Through his lens, Dureau elevates these figures to monumental status, echoing the grandeur of classical sculpture and Renaissance painting. His compositions emphasize the interplay of light and shadow, underscoring the sculptural quality of the human form.
One cannot discuss Dureau’s photography without acknowledging his connection to the city of New Orleans. His studio in the French Quarter became a space of artistic exploration, where he cultivated a dynamic and diverse community. This exhibition captures the spirit of that time and place, highlighting the distinct cultural influences that informed his work. The city’s unique blend of European, African, and Creole traditions provided a fertile ground for Dureau’s creativity, inspiring him to blend the classical and contemporary, the local and the universal.
Dureau’s photographs are celebrated not only for their technical mastery but also for their emotional depth. His subjects often meet the camera’s gaze directly, creating a sense of intimacy and trust. This rapport between artist and subject is palpable, revealing layers of vulnerability and strength. By choosing subjects who were often overlooked or marginalised, Dureau challenges societal norms and compels viewers to reconsider preconceived notions of worth and beauty.
This exhibition also explores the parallels between Dureau’s work and that of his contemporary, Robert Mapplethorpe. While the two artists shared a fascination with the human form and the dramatic use of black-and-white photography, their approaches diverged in significant ways. Dureau’s images are imbued with warmth and humanity that reflect his deep connection to his subjects. Unlike Mapplethorpe, who often sought a polished and idealised aesthetic, Dureau embraced imperfection and individuality, resulting in portraits that are as soulful as they are striking.
Among the works on display are several of Dureau’s most iconic images. Craig Blanchette, 1992 (above) captures a young man with a disarming gaze, his body framed in chiaroscuro that highlights his muscular form and absence of legs. The image challenges the viewer to see beyond the physical difference, emphasising Craig’s confidence and vitality. Similarly, Roosevelt Singleton features a subject with dwarfism, his ethereal presence heightened by the soft, diffused light. These works exemplify Dureau’s ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, presenting his subjects as both individuals and archetypes.
Dureau’s artistry extends beyond the purely visual. His photographs resonate with themes of resilience, identity, and community. They ask us to confront the complexities of human existence and to celebrate the diversity of the human condition. By placing marginalised individuals at the forefront of his work, Dureau not only elevates their stories but also reflects the universal truths of vulnerability and strength that connect us all.
This exhibition offers viewers the opportunity to engage with Dureau’s legacy in a deeply personal way. Each photograph serves as a testament to the power of art to reveal the unseen, to challenge the status quo, and to inspire empathy. Through his lens, Dureau reminds us that every individual – regardless of their physical appearance or societal status – possesses inherent dignity and beauty.
The 31 photographs selected for this show represent the breadth and depth of Dureau’s oeuvre. From tender portraits of friends to bold explorations of the male nude, the images on display capture the full spectrum of his artistic vision. Each piece is a study in contrasts: light and shadow, strength and vulnerability, individuality and universality. Together, they form a cohesive narrative that celebrates the complexity of the human experience.
George Dureau’s work has left an indelible mark on the world of photography and beyond. His ability to see and celebrate the humanity in every subject has cemented his place as a true visionary. This exhibition, Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form, invites you to step into his world – a world where beauty is redefined, where differences are celebrated, and where the human spirit shines through in every frame.
As you explore these images, consider the stories they tell and the questions they pose. How do we define beauty? What does it mean to see and be seen? And how can art challenge us to look beyond the surface and connect with the essence of another human being? In celebrating the life and work of George Dureau, we celebrate the power of art to transform, to inspire, and to unite us all.
Press release from the Bob Mizer Foundation
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
B.J. Robinson
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled (Bob Lang)
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
Bob Mizer Foundation
920 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA
Opening hours:
Tues – Sat 12 – 6pm
Curator: Shoair Mavlian, the Director of The Photographers’ Gallery
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Opticians, London, 1975
1975
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
I absolutely adore these Peter Mitchell 1970s colour photographs made from Hasselblad two and a quarter square negatives.
There is something so …. well, British about them.
The wit, the humour (pigeons sitting outside the racing pigeon shop), the stiff upper lip, the carry on regardless, the working class pantomime of life and death – the public commission flats where people formed caring communities that were destroyed through redevelopment – the integrity of an existence that has largely come and gone pictured with warmth and empathy.
The people, growing up during the Second World War the privations of which lasted well into the 1950s, now during a period of change in the 1970s standing behind the fish ‘n chip counter wondering where their lives had gone and how they had got there, but still with that British sense of spirit and grit.
Peter Mitchell, “a chaser of a disappearing world” pictures these “goners” – buildings, people (and a way of life) near the end of existence soon to be demolished – in an almost painterly manner.
His use of colour, perspective and form is very fine. Witness, the flow of the photograph ‘Edna, George & Pat, H.E. Greenwood Butcher, Waterloo Road, Leeds, 1977’ (below) as, in the shot, the camera allows the eye to pan from one vanishing point at left to the other at right, with the patchwork of colours and panels of the building creating an almost Mondrian-like texture – blue to black to beige to white sign to pale blue to yellow to green to pale green, surmounted by the dark blue of the threatening sky highlighting the jagged form of the building. Superb.
My favourite photograph in the posting is The Chair, Priestly House Interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978 (below). This photograph is from what I believe to be Mitchell’s strongest body of work on the demolition of the Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds. ‘One of those doomed deserts was Quarry Hill flats, irresistible both as a symbol of the fate of all architecture and of the great clock in the heavens signalling everybody’s life span’ (Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website)
A drab, beige, wallpapered room with double aspect window, an art deco chair with mirror reflecting nothing, an electrical socket, a ceiling light sprouting malignant plant and trapped in the window panes, little birds fluttering against their capture, trapped forever inside an abandoned flat, this abandoned life.
Yes, there’s a sense of nostalgia and melancholy in these photographs but their restrained, formal, representation of life does much to ennoble the people and buildings contained within them which, through osmosis, ennobles the mind of the viewer.
As I myself sense the great clock in the heavens signalling my life span, the pleasure and comfort I get from feeling the spirit of Peter Mitchell’s photographs is immeasurable.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mrs Clayton and Mrs Collins, summer 1974
1974
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mr and Mrs Hudson, Newsagents, Seacroft, Leeds, 1974
1974
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
‘Mr and Mrs Hudson in Seacroft Green, Leeds. I took this photograph on the 14 August 1974 at about 11am. I like the way the ladder is propping up the shop. They had just moved into a new shop on the same spot, with the church getting a facelift to match’
Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mrs. McArthy & her daughter, Sangley Road, Catford, London, 1975
1975
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Kingston Racing Motors, Olinda Terrace, Leeds 1975
1975
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Is the man with the wrench a mechanic? Why is the woman with the clapped-out Porsche looking so naughty? Will James C Gallagher, whose business it is, always have his back to the camera? And after painting the wall, why did Barry have to leave Leeds? The council demolished the lot shortly after this snap.
Text from The Guardian website
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Two anonymous ladies, Tivoli Cinema, Acre Road from Sisson’s Lane, Leeds, 1976
1976
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Sir Yank’s Records (& Heavy Disco), Gathorne Street, Leeds 1976
1976
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Concorde Wallpaper, Devon Road, 1970s
1970s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Alea Stony Rock, Westlock Grove, 1970s
1970s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Beetham’s, Church Street, Leeds, 1970s
1970s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
A retrospective of work by one of the leading early colour photographers of the 20th century opens this March at The Photographers’ Gallery.
Peter Mitchell (b. 1943, UK) is widely regarded as one of the most important early colour photographers of the 1970s and 1980s. A powerful storyteller and social historian, Mitchell’s photography unfolds a longstanding and poetic connection with Leeds. He has chronicled the people and fortunes of the city with warmth and familiarity for over 40 years.
Described as ‘a narrator of who we were, a chaser of a disappearing world’ (Val Williams), his work reveals his love, and at times quirky, off-beat vision, of the people and changing face of Leeds.
The retrospective explores the breadth of Mitchell’s photographic practice. It brings together his famous series ‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’, which imagines England as seen through the eyes of an alien from Mars, demolished flats, shopkeepers and their shops, and boarded-up and disused buildings, as well as his portraits of scarecrows. The exhibition marks a return to The Photographers’ Gallery for Mitchell – he first exhibited at the Gallery in 1984.
A chronicler of a changing city, he said of his work photographing the demise of the iconic Quarry Hills Estate in Leeds, ‘I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping.’
Calling himself ‘a man of the pavement’, Mitchell continues to regularly walk the streets of Leeds to photograph his beloved hometown today.
Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever will include rarely seen works from Mitchell’s own collection, personal ephemera and found objects.
Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever is in collaboration with Leeds Art Gallery. Nothing Lasts Forever, published by RRB Photobooks, is available now.
Peter Mitchell was born in Manchester in 1943. He studied at Hornsey College of Art in London, then moved north to look for work and never left. Living and working in Leeds for much of his life, Mitchell treats his surrounding with a unique sense of care. An essential part of the colour documentary scene in the 1970s and 80s, Mitchell’s landmark show A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission at Impressions Gallery in York in 1979 was the first colour photography show in the UK.
Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Ready mixed Concrete Ltd., Elland Road, Leeds, 1977
1977
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Edna, George & Pat, H.E. Greenwood Butcher, Waterloo Road, Leeds, 1977
1977
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
‘How many Aunties?’, Back Hares Mount, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Sir Yank’s Heavy Disco, Harehills Avenue, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Priestly House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Kitson House telephone, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
‘It was obvious to me that they were something special. York House was one side of the football pitch, Thoresby House opposite’
Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Garden of Rest, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Thoresby House, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
‘I photograph dying buildings and Quarry Hill was terminal by the time I got to it. Times change and I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping’
Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Nielson House interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Chair, Priestly House Interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
‘One of those doomed deserts was Quarry Hill flats, irresistible both as a symbol of the fate of all architecture and of the great clock in the heavens signalling everybody’s life span’
Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Abandoned car, Wright House, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Frances Gaven. Leeds, 1979
1979
From A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Francis Craven on Woodhouse Moor, Leeds in April 1979. He’d built this apparition himself but was having trouble with its arms – the pulleys had given out
Text from the Guardian website
Peter Mitchell’s A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission features photos and portraits, taken in Leeds in the 1970s. The pictures show the traditional urban landscape presented on a background of space charts, the concept being that an alien has landed from Mars and is wandering around Leeds with a degree of surprise and puzzlement.
In the Earthly vernacular these photographs are of Nowheresville. Yet, for some people, they are the centre of the universe. Usually they call it Home.
Text from the Martin Parr Foundation website [Online] Cited 25/05/2025
Mitchell’s series documents backstreets, corner shops, factories, churches and cemeteries in Leeds and Sheffield, as well as other locations in Cumbria and London, building a compelling picture of these cities during the late 1970s. Many of the portraits show the city inhabitants standing outside their homes or places of work. Equal attention is paid to the entirety of the setting, the figures often appearing dwarfed in the composition by their surroundings. The majority of the subjects gaze directly at the camera adopting stiff, frontal poses giving the images a formal impression and sense of stillness. Describing the distinctive style and subject matter of the photographs, historian David Mellor has commented, ‘it is as if Alan Bennett had met Diane Arbus in an urban picaresque’ (Mellor 2005, accessed 12 June 2017).
Ruins, crumbling facades, abandoned shops and cemeteries punctuate the series, pointing to themes of life, death, memory and loss. For example, Mitchell’s pictures includes shots of Mrs Lee’s dress shop – which burnt down the day after closure – a decayed synagogue and a defunct station in Sheffield, where the trains pass through but never stop. The 1970s were a time of great change in Britain as it struggled with widespread social unrest as well as the collapse of heavy industries. Commenting on this aspect of the series, Mellor noted, ‘NASA’s 1976 Viking Landers were a triumph of robotics, of remote sensing and imaging – that very culture of digitised information which was to supplant the manual world of industrial era Leeds.’ (Ibid.)
Text is a crucial element in Mitchell’s work, and each image in this series is accompanied by a caption to be displayed alongside. These idiosyncratic snippets of text are excerpted from Mitchell’s diary, and range from deadpan descriptions of place, to short anecdotes and humorous musings. Historian Val Williams has likened the artist’s distinctive combination of photography and text across his different bodies of work to the Situationist writing of the French theorist Guy Debord. …
Mitchell’s work occupies an important position within the history of colour photography specifically. He was photographing in colour at a time when black and white was the predominate medium for documentary photography in Britain, and before colour photography was fully embraced by museum collections. His work thus evidences an alternate history of colour photography distinct from the predominant narrative of the emergence of colour photography in the United States in the work of photographers such as William Eggleston (born 1939) and Stephen Shore (born 1947).
Sarah Allen
June 2016
Collection text on the Tate website [Online] Cited 24/05/2025
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Max Babbin, Vulcan Street, Leeds, 1979
1979
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
ABC (Aerated Bread Company offices), Camden Road, London, 1979
1979
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Old Kent Road, London, 1979
1979
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
His early photographs were made in the 1970s and 80s, when he was working as a truck driver. His vantage point removed him from the immediacy of the street, and he developed his distinctive graphic framing of the buildings and landscapes, which reveal the layers of urban and social history
Text from The Guardian website
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mr Costas, Stroud Green Road, London, 1979
1979
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Mr Costas on Stroud Green Road, London in May 1979. He was thinking to himself: ‘If only this was Athens instead of Finsbury Park’
Text from The Guardian website
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Nosey ‘Twat, Sackville Street, Leeds, 1980s
1980s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Kirkstall Road, Leeds, 1980s
1980s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Francis Gavan, Ghost Train Ride, Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, Spring 1986
1986
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Racing Pigeon Shop (ii), Blake Grove, Leeds, Summer 2009
2009
C-print
© Peter Mitchell
John Murray owned the Racing Pigeon Shop and remembers “great times” on Blake Grove.
The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW
Opening hours:
Mon – Wed: 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday – Friday: 10.00 – 20.00
Saturday: 10.00 – 18.00
Sunday: 11.00 – 18.00
Curator: Jan Tichy
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Roof of the Atelier-House, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
I love Bauhaus design and photographs of the Bauhaus School and these are excellent photographs of both by Lucia Moholy: powerful, graphic, minimalist, modernist, echoing the ethos of the school itself. The strong portraits are pretty damn good as well…
It’s interesting to note then that Moholy was not particularly enamoured of this new modernist vision: “From her diaries, we know that Moholy didn’t like living in Dessau and her photos of the school, which are very alluring, also hint at her despair and dislike of being there.”
Then to learn that Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School, “had taken the negatives with him when he emigrated to the USA via London leading to years of negotiation with lawyers to get the negatives back.”
Why would you take the negatives of another artist, use them without credit and then refuse to give them back for many years without lawyers being involved? It’s incredible what human beings especially males will do (power and control), all because Gropius found the images useful for him to use! (see below)
While it is wonderful to be able to publish the first posting on Art Blart on the artist, I wish galleries and museums would stop making claims such as, Moholy “was one of the 20th century’s most internationally recognised and important female photographers.”
Let’s be frank: she wasn’t, not anywhere close.
Even in Europe in the 1930s we think of Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Ilse Bing, Edith Tudor-Hart, Dora Maar etc etc… without even considering American female photographers of the era, or indeed the rest of the century. Today, many have more significance in the history of photography than Lucia Moholy ever will have.
This is in no way denigrating her work at all which I like tremendously, but just to assert that statements not thought through by marketing and media departments may come back to bite you on the arse.
Best just to say that Lucia Moholy was an accomplished artist who made focused, thoughtful, beautiful photographs of an era now nearly a century past. What more do you need to say.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“In 1938, while Moholy lived in London, Walter Gropius used about fifty of Moholy’s images from the Bauhaus years – from her negatives that he still had in his possession – in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, without giving her any credit. …
Gropius had been using her photographs without crediting her. She repeatedly reached out to Gropius to reclaim her images and he would continuously protest. Moholy resorted to hiring a lawyer to retrieve her work.
Some relevant letters between Walter Gropius and Lucia Moholy are displayed on the website 99% Invisible. Moholy stated, “These negatives are irreplaceable documents which could be extremely useful, now more than ever” to which Gropius replied, “[…] long years ago in Berlin, you gave all these negatives to me. You will imagine that these photographs are extremely useful to me and that I have continuously made use of them; so I hope you will not deprive me of them.” Lucia Moholy responded, “Surely you did not expect me to delay my departure in order to draw up a formal contract stipulating date and conditions of return? No formal agreement could have carried more weight than our friendship. It is a friendship I have always relied on, and which, also, I am now invoking.“
Moholy did not get physical possession of her original material until 1957, but even then she only could recover a portion of them, 230 out of the 560 Bauhaus-era negatives she took, while 330 negatives, according to Moholy’s own card catalogue, are still missing.”
Anonymous. “Lucia Moholy,” on the Wikipedia website [Onloine] Cited 30/05/2025
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Workshop wing, design by Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau
around 1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Lucia Moholy (1894-1989) was one of the 20th century’s most internationally recognised and important female photographers. Her architectural photographs and portraits from her years at the Bauhaus in Dessau, which have become icons of photographic history, still shape how that institution is perceived today. However, Moholy was not just a photographer, but also an art historian, critic, writer and archivist; she described herself as a ‘documentalist’ and made a name for herself in the field of information science.
The exhibition Lucia Moholy – Exposures is the first to show the broad scope of her work from the 1910s to the 1970s. Her photographic oeuvre is presented together with numerous documents, some of them newly discovered, which shed light on Moholy’s role in the avant-garde during the interwar period, as well as her youth in Prague, her editorial work in Germany, her activity as a portraitist in London, and her involvement with early microfilm technology in England and Turkey.
Finally, the exhibition also invites visitors to encounter Lucia Moholy in the context of Zurich, where she spent the last thirty years of her life. During that time, she also maintained a relationship with the then fledgling Fotostiftung Schweiz, which today is home to a large collection of her photographs.
Text from the Fotostiftung Schweiz website
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Gropius House in Dessau
1925
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
“This street view of Gropius’s house in Dessau is glimpsed through a line of birch trees that conjures a feeling of entrapment, almost like prison bars. It reinforces this sense of being fenced in or fenced off – a feature of many of Moholy’s images of the Masters’ Houses, which provided accommodation for Bauhaus teachers.
“The photograph really captures the modernist style of Gropius’s buildings, with the rectilinear geometric shapes and the dark windows inserted into the white facades. While living in Dessau, Moholy’s relationship with Gropius and his wife Isa was amiable and continued to be so when the Gropiuses emigrated to the United States.
“It was only in the 1950s, when she learned how the negatives she left behind in Berlin in 1933 had been used to build the legacy of the school without her knowledge, that the relationship turned sour and she engaged a lawyer to help her recover the images.”
Meghan Forbes, co-curator of the exhibition when it was at Kunsthalle Praha quoted in Alyn Griffiths. “Lucia Moholy’s photographs provide a different perspective on the Bauhaus,” on the Dezeen website, 9th August, 2024 [Online] Cited 10/05/2025
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Workshop wing from south-west, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Bauhaus Dessau: Workshop building from the southwest
c. 1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Workshop wing of the Bauhaus Building in Dessau
c. 1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
“To me, this photograph of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building with a muddy, unpaved road in the foreground shows the messier, dirtier aspects of constructing a new modernist vision. From her diaries, we know that Moholy didn’t like living in Dessau and her photos of the school, which are very alluring, also hint at her despair and dislike of being there.
“Moholy’s photographs documenting the Bauhaus buildings and design objects already appeared – with and without credits – in books at the time, as well as in the popular press. In the 1950s, she discovered that at least 40 of her images were used in the catalogue of the seminal 1938 Bauhaus exhibition held at MoMA in New York.
“It kickstarted a life-long campaign of letter-writing to try to obtain both the possession of her glass negatives from the Bauhaus years and appropriate author credit and compensation for the publication of her images.”
Meghan Forbes, co-curator of the exhibition when it was at Kunsthalle Praha quoted in Alyn Griffiths. “Lucia Moholy’s photographs provide a different perspective on the Bauhaus,” on the Dezeen website, 9th August, 2024 [Online] Cited 10/05/2025
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Dining room Moholy-Nagy, Meistersiedlung Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
In the exhibition Lucia Moholy – Exposures, Fotostiftung Schweiz is honouring the oeuvre of a versatile 20th-century pioneer. The famous Bauhaus photographs taken by Lucia Moholy (1894-1989) still shape how that institution is seen today. She also left a significant legacy via her work as an art historian, critic, writer and microfilm expert. The exhibition shines a spotlight on this long-underestimated figure, who spent the last 30 years of her life in Zollikon, near Zurich.
Lucia Moholy – Exposures presents, for the first time, the full breadth of her work from the 1910s to the 1970s. Photographs, letters, diaries, publications and microfilms are shown, spread across three exhibition rooms. The focus is on key periods of her life: her youth in Prague, her time at the Bauhaus, her exile in London and her pioneering work on microfilm technology. One point of emphasis is her connection with Zurich and with Fotostiftung Schweiz, which holds many of her images. Works by the contemporary Czech artist and curatorJan Tichy will also be on display. The exhibition is realised in cooperation with Kunsthalle Praha.
Lucia Moholy left Prague in 1915 to work for various German publishers. In Berlin, she met Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, whom she married in 1921. Together, they explored new reproduction technologies and the possibilities of the photogram. When Moholy-Nagy was appointed as a master at the Bauhaus, Moholy accompanied him and began to take photographs: Between 1923 and 1928, she documented Bauhaus design objects and Walter Gropius’s famous Dessau buildings. Her clearly composed shots still characterise the visual legacy of that institution to this day. Moholy’s portraits of Bauhaus figures like Anni Albers, Walter Gropius and Florence Henri are particularly impressive, and have been made central to the exhibition.
In 1928, Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and moved to Berlin, where they soon separated. Moholy took charge of the photography class at Johannes Itten’s art school, while simultaneously trying her hand at photojournalism. Her flight from the Nazis in 1933 took her to London. There, she opened a photo studio and wrote the bestseller A Hundred Years of Photography, 1839-1939. After her studio was destroyed by bombing in 1940, she turned to microfilm technology. She founded her own documentation service and set up a microfilm centre in Ankara as a UNESCO expert.
After the end of the Second World War, Moholy noticed many of her Bauhaus photographs appearing in newly released publications. After extensive research, she eventually learnt that Walter Gropius had taken the negatives with him when he emigrated to the USA via London. It was not until 1957, after years of legal negotiations, that Lucia Moholy was able to get a large number of her negatives back, which are now in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.
Moholy moved to Zurich in 1959. Here, she wrote about Zurich exhibitions for English magazines and was a prominent figure on the art scene. During the 1970s and 1980s, interest in Moholy’s photographic works finally grew. They were shown in exhibitions and published in magazines. In 1981, a solo exhibition was held in her honour at Gallery Ziegler in Zurich. Four years later, her first monograph was published, with in-depth analysis of her work by art historian Rolf Sachsse. Moreover, two founding members of Fotostiftung Schweiz, Rosellina Burri-Bischof and Walter Binder, maintained contact with Lucia Moholy. Thanks to a purchase and a donation from Moholy’s estate, Fotostiftung Schweiz now holds 146 of her prints, which can be accessed via the Online Image Archive and constitute the largest collection outside the Bauhaus Archive.
The exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz is supplemented with contemporary works by the artist and curator Jan Tichy, who has been engaging with Moholy’s legacy for almost 20 years. His microfilm installation can be seen in the passage leading to the photo library. In addition, contemporary video works, installations and photographs are being shown at oxyd-Kunsträume from the 7th of February to the 2nd of March 2025, including the impressive Installation no. 30 (Lucia), for which Tichy arranges and illuminates 330 glass plates in the size of the original negatives. Set up in a dark room, the installation creates a fleeting and fragile memorial to an important protagonist of the 20th century.
Lucia Moholy – Exposures is a Kunsthalle Praha exhibition project, organised in cooperation with Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, and the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin.
Press release from Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Metal workshop, design by Marianne Brandt, Bauhaus Dessau
1924
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
“Marianne Brandt is a really important Bauhaus designer who ended up living in East Germany in relative obscurity, although her work is now also receiving due attention. The somewhat static composition of the two objects side by side is dynamised by the diagonals produced by the larger vessel’s slender spout and the decision to slant in the ashtray’s top, emphasizing the use value.
“It also shows how Moholy played with reflective surfaces when photographing metal objects, evoking the work of Florence Henri who was at the Bauhaus at the same time. Henri was known for capturing her own portrait as she played with glass and metal in her photographs.
“We can also occasionally catch a glimpse of Moholy in some of her metal studies. But in other instances, she focuses on highlighting the lustrous quality of the objects in isolation. These images of metal objects are perhaps the best-known of her Bauhaus product photographs. But she also took pictures of pieces made from ceramics or wood that indicate the evolution of design thinking at the school.”
Meghan Forbes, co-curator of the exhibition when it was at Kunsthalle Praha quoted in Alyn Griffiths. “Lucia Moholy’s photographs provide a different perspective on the Bauhaus,” on the Dezeen website, 9th August, 2024 [Online] Cited 10/05/2025
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Edith Tschichold, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© ProLitteris, Zürich
Edith Tschichold was the wife of Bauhaus typographer and graphic designer Jan Tschichold (German, 1905-1986)
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
László Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
~ European art research tour exhibition: ‘László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929’ at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, August – September 2019, posted November 2020
~ Exhibition: ‘Moholy-Nagy: Future Present’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February – June 2017
~ Exhibition: ‘Moholy-Nagy: Future Present’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, May – September 2016
~ Exhibition: ‘László Moholy-Nagy. The Art of Light’ at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, June – September 2011
~ Exhibition: ‘László Moholy-Nagy – Art of Light’ at Martin Gropius-Bau, Berlin, November 2010 – January 2011
~ Exhibition: ‘László Moholy-Nagy
Retrospective’ at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, October 2009 – February 2010
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Ingeborg Lebert
1927
Gelatin silver print
22 x 29.8cm
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Lou Scheper
1927
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp née Hermine Luise Berkenkamp (German, 1901-1976) was a painter, colour designer, the avant-garde author of children’s books, fairy-tale illustrator and costume designer.
More information on the Wikipedia website
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Florence Henri, Bauhaus Dessau
1927
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
“Henri’s sophisticated, avante-garde, sculptural compositions have an almost ‘being there’ presence: a structured awareness of a way of looking at the world, a world in which the artist questions reality. She confronts the borders of an empirical reality (captured by a machine, the camera) through collage and mirrors, in order to take a leap of faith towards some form of transcendence of the real. Here she confronts the limitless freedom of creativity, of composition, to go beyond objectivity and science, to experience Existenz (Jaspers) – the realm of authentic being.*
These photographs are her experience of being in the world, of Henri observing the breath of being – the breath of herself, the breath of the objects and a meditation on those objects. There is a stillness here, an eloquence of construction and observation that goes beyond the mortal life of the thing itself. That is how these photographs seem to me to live in the world. I may be completely wrong, I probably am completely wrong – but that is how these images feel to me: a view, a perspective, the artist as prospector searching for a new way of authentically living in the world.”
Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Florence Henri. Compositions at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, March – September 2014
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Gypsy, Jugoslavia
1930-1931
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Ruth Fry
1936
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Anna Ruth Fry (British , 1878-1962), usually known as Ruth Fry, was a Quaker writer, pacifist and peace activist.
More information on the Wikipedia website
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Emma, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, London
1937
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich
Hans Peter Klauser (Swiss, 1910-1989)
Lucia Moholy in her studio in Zollikon
1972
© Hans Peter Klauser/Fotostiftung Schweiz
Hans Peter Klauser (Swiss, 1910-1989)
Lucia Moholy in her studio in Zollikon
1972
© Hans Peter Klauser/Fotostiftung Schweiz
Fotostiftung Schweiz
Grüzenstrasse 45
CH-8400 Winterthur (Zürich)
Phone: +41 52 234 10 30
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm
Wednesday 11am – 8pm
Closed on Mondays
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.