Exhibition: ‘The Intimate World of Josef Sudek’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 7th June – 25th September, 2016

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'St. Vitus cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic' c. 1926 from the exhibition 'The Intimate World of Josef Sudek' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, June - Sept, 2016

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
St. Vitus cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic
c. 1926
Silver gelatin print

A poetry of the everyday

Josef Sudek, a one-armed man lugging around a large format camera, is one of my top ten photographers of all time.

His photographs, sometimes surreal, always sensitive, have a profound sensibility that affect the soul. Melancholy and mysterious by turns, they investigate the inner life of objects which stand as metaphors for the inner life of the artist. A form of healing after his horrific injuries and the loss of his arm during the First World War, the photographs purportedly look outwards upon the world but are actually interior meditations on life, death and the nature of being. Light emerges from the darkness; understanding from tribulation; and Sudek, in Jungian terms, integrates his ego into his soul through the process of (photographic) individuation – whereby the personal and collective unconscious (his hurt and damage) are brought into consciousness (eg. by means of dreams, active imagination, or free association) to be assimilated into the whole personality. It is a completely natural process necessary for the integration of the psyche and, in Sudek’s life, was integral to his healing from the vicissitudes of war.

Using Pictorialism as the starting point for his exploration of the world, Sudek never abandons the creation of “atmosphere” in his photographs, even as the images become modernist, surrealist and offer a new way of seeing the world. Having myself photographed extensively at night, and from the interior of my flat, I can understand Sudek’s fascination with both locations: the quiet of night, the stillness, the clarity of vision and thought; the interior as exterior, the projection of interior thoughts onto an external surface reflected back into the camera lens. “Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.” Except the cloak of darkness is not impenetrable, as light cannot exist without darkness.

Pace, his photographs are breath / taking. They are exhalations of the spirit.

Sudek’s ability to transcend the literal, his ability to transform the objectal quality of photography ranks him as one of the top photographers of all time. He synthesises a poetry of objects, a poetry of the everyday, and projects the folds of his mind onto the visual field (through “tears” of condensation on the window, through labyrinths of paper and glass, such as in Labyrinth on my table, 1967, below). As a form of self-actualisation – the desire to become everything that one is capable of becoming – Sudek’s photographs interrogate that chthonic darkness that lurks in the heart of everyone of us, our dark night of the soul.

In that process of discovery (who am I, what kind of human being am I, how can I heal myself), he finds redemption.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects, to relate something mysterious: the seventh side of a dice. Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.”

Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek at Jeu de Paume

“The Intimate World of Josef Sudek”, exhibition at Jeu de Paume Paris, from 07 June 2016 until 25 September 2016

Entitled “The Intimate World of Josef Sudek”, this exhibition is the first of this scale to revisit the life and work of Josef Sudek (Kolin, 1896 – Prague, 1976) within its socio-geographical and historical context: Prague during the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when the Czech capital was a veritable hub of artistic activity.

The exhibition features a selection of 130 works spanning the totality of Sudek’s career, from 1920 to 1976, and allows the public to examine the extent to which his photography was a reflection of his personal relationship to the surrounding world. On display are works that are the result of Sudek’s photographic experiments carried out within the privacy of his own studio, images of the garden seen from his window, and photographs of adventures further afield. The artist enjoyed meandering through the streets of Prague and its surrounding suburbs, and made frequent excursions to the nearby countryside.

Sudek’s enduring fascination with light, and its absence, is at the root of some of the most haunting photographs of the twentieth century. Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.

Text from the Jeu de Paume Vimeo website

On display are works that are the result of Sudek’s photographic experiments carried out within the privacy of his own studio, images of the garden seen from his window, and photographs of adventures further afield. The artist enjoyed meandering through the streets of Prague and its surrounding suburbs, and made frequent excursions to the nearby countryside. Sudek’s enduring fascination with light, and its absence, is at the root of some of the most haunting photographs of the twentieth century. Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.

As a photographer, Sudek was particularly concerned with the quality of the photographic print, an essential component in terms of the expressive potential of an image. His mastery of the pigment printing process enabled him to produce highly atmospheric and evocative images, thereby reaping all of the reflective and descriptive power of the gelatin silver print. The exhibition presents work from Sudek’s early career, but also features photographs from a pivotal period of experimentation and innovation, beginning in the 1940s. Focusing on the technical and formal aspects of the medium of photography, Sudek created pigment prints, halftone prints, puridlos (photographs between two windows) and veteše (photographs inserted into old frames), techniques which allowed him to transform the objectal quality of photography.

The loss of his right arm during the First World War and the difficulties he now encountered in transporting his view camera did not dampen his passion for photography. Sudek’s studio window became an object of abiding fascination – rather like the surface of a canvas – reflecting moments of exquisite tenderness and hope when a flowering branch brushed against its pane, or of poignant melancholy when he observed the world beyond his window transformed by the playful infinity of mist. His room with a view allowed him to capture, on film, his love of Prague. His photographs demonstrate both a precision and a depth of feeling, fitting odes to the rich history and architectural complexity of the Czech capital.

Like many artists of his generation marked by their experience of war, Sudek expresses a particularly acute awareness of the dark and tormented aspects of human existence – feelings that would inspire some of his most melancholy and most moving pictures. A photograph taken at night, through the glass pane of his window, shows a city plunged into darkness during the Occupation of the Second World War, and communicates a sentiment of unspeakable despair – a dramatic illustration of Sudek’s technical ability to transcend the literal.

The first part of the exhibition features images that herald the photographer’s later work, showing his early landscapes, portraits of fellow patients at Invalidovna, the Prague hospice for war invalids like Sudek, his hesitant foray into modernism, and his interior shots of St. Vitus Cathedral. Through images that recount the narrative of his life, the viewer gains access to Sudek’s inner world, and an insight into his immediate environment, the views and objects he loved, his studio and garden. His endless walks in Prague found expression in the views of the city and its surroundings, as well as in photographs of its more sordid “suburbs”, a subject explored by other Prague artists. The eastern and northern areas of Bohemia, the Beskid Mountains and the Mionší forest were other destinations close to the photographer’s heart. The exhibition “The Intimate World of Josef Sudek” provides a fascinating panorama of the work of this unique artist.

Text from the Jeu de Paume website

Beginnings

Sudek’s first photographic prints – small and largely assembled in albums – were mainly views of the countryside taken along the Elbe River when he travelled from Prague to Kolín to visit his mother between 1916 and 1922.

Using processes such as gelatin silver and bromoil he showed a talent for printing his pictures in a style that favoured soft edges and broad swathes of tone. Here Sudek was not so much studying the effects of light as he was observing the conventions of Pictorialism, a photography movement that straddled the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, and was based on a strong Romantic ethos. Pictorialist photographers enhanced atmospheric effects with such processes as carbon and gum bichromate. Sudek began using the carbon process regularly and in a personally expressive manner in the late 1940s.

His Invalidovna and St. Vitus Cathedral series in Prague, begun in the first half of the 1920s, show him exploring interior spaces where light emphasises both the profane and the sacred. The play of bands of sunlight and darkness is a central feature of the composition and, indeed, of the life of the photograph.

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Dimanche après-midi à l’île Kolín [Sunday afternoon at Kolín island]
c. 1922-1926
Gelatin silver print
28.4 × 28.7cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Achat, 2000
© Succession de Josef Sudek

“… [Sudek] referred to photography as meteorology to describe the significance of the atmosphere, and how a photographer must predict the right conditions for photographing and enlarging prints. His work became sharper with richer tones, and his compositions became more illusive. The foregrounds and backgrounds of his photographs, particularly in his “Window” series began to oscillate. These achievements were perhaps made more attainable by his focus on inanimate objects over which he had more control than living things. Most of his cityscapes became deserted, as he directed his camera at statues or replaced what would have been a living subject with such emulative sculptures.

In effect, Sudek’s substitution of the inanimate for the animate brought the objects he photographed to life in his mind. He called the enormous decaying trees in the woods of Bohemia “sleeping giants” and would take portraits of masks and statuary heads, transforming them into frozen, worn grotesqueries. His personification of objects is even more vivid in his studio photography, particularly after 1939, the oncoming of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Prague. As the city was oppressed by German troops, the artist retreated into his studio and insulated himself sentimentally with still lifes. To an interviewer, he explained, “I love the life of objects. When the children go to bed, the objects come to life. I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects.” He devoted endless hours to arranging and photographing the everyday – apples, eggs, bread, and shells – and special objects given to him by friends, such as feathers, spectacles, and watches, which he called “remembrances” of that person. A photograph from his series “Remembrances of Architect Rothmayer, Mr. Magician,” for example, portrays objects respectfully placed in a row on a desk, as if artifacts from an archeological site, from which the history of a life or character of a man could be divined.

“Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations,” Sudek said, “so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.” This statement is perhaps telling of Sudek’s relationship to death and life, as a result of the loss of his arm and the manner in which he suffered the loss. In the 1963 film, “Zit Svuj Zivot” (Living Your Life), a documentary portrait of Sudek by Evald Strom, we see a sensitive man describing his efforts to photograph the reality of the objects around him, not as if he were bringing the objects to life, but as if it was his purpose to represent the lives of objects as they truly are. Of the image of a vase of wildflowers, he says “This is a photograph of wildflowers, my attempt to photograph wildflowers,” and of an old lamp, “This is a celebrated lamp; it holds a lot of memories.””

Ashley Booth Klein, “Josef Sudek and The Life of Objects,” in Obelisk Vol. 2 Issue 1, Winter 2015 [Online] Cited 18/09/2016. No longer available online

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Rue de Prague
1924
Gelatin silver print
8.3 × 8.2cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Portrait de mon ami Funke [Portrait of my friend Funke]
1924
Gelatin silver print
28.5 × 22.6cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Achat, 1985
© Succession de Josef Sudek

“Josef Sudek: The World at My Window” is the first exhibition in France since 1988 to cover Sudek’s entire career and spotlight the different phases of his work. Coming in the wake of several exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume devoted to Eastern European photographers of the early twentieth century, among them André Kertész and Francois Kollar, this one comprises some 130 vintage prints by the Czech artist. Bringing to bear a vision at once subjective and timeless, Sudek captures the ongoing changes in Prague’s natural world and landscapes.

His early profession as a bookbinder came to an abrupt halt when he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in Bohemia and sent to the Italian front. After the First World War he came back to Prague wounded; the loss of his right arm meant abandoning bookbinding, and he turned to photography. After revisiting the battlefield in Italy once more he returned, in despair, to Prague: “I found the place,” he recounted, “but my arm wasn’t there. Since then I’ve never gone anywhere. I didn’t find what I was looking for.”

A study grant enabled him to train at the state-run school of graphic arts in Prague, where he mixed with practitioners of Pictorialism, a photographic movement aiming at achieving colour and texture effects similar to those of painting. He started concentrating on architectural details, always waiting until the light was absolutely perfect. Little by little he gave up the Pictorialist ambiences of his views of St Vitus’s cathedral, opting for a pure, straightforward approach which the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz summed up as “maximum detail for maximum simplification”.

During the Second World War Sudek began photographing the window giving onto his garden, the result being the celebrated Window of My Studio series. He then shifted his focus to the accumulated jumble of objects in the studio, producing a further series titled Labyrinths. Light was an inexhaustible theme in his work, orchestrating the seasons, making the invisible visible and transporting us into another world. As if to escape the leaden context of the War and then of Communism, Sudek took refuge in music, especially that of his compatriot Leoš Janáček. A true music lover, he gradually built up a substantial collection of recordings which he played to his friends during improvised concerts in his studio.

The second half of his career saw Sudek abandon photography’s traditional subjects as he explored the outskirts of Prague with his black view camera on his shoulder. Known as “the poet of Prague”, he became an emblematic figure in the Czech capital. Discreet and solitary, he gradually withdrew from the city’s art scene, leaving his studio only to prowl the streets at night with his imagination as his guide.

Sudek’s photographs rarely include people; his focus was more on empty urban and rural spaces. Fascinated by the streets of Prague, the city’s deserted parks and public gardens, and the wooded Bohemian landscapes his mastery of light rendered sublime, he preferred the un-enlarged contact print as a means of preserving all the detail and authenticity of the places he roamed through. His work moved towards experiments with light. In photographs shot through with simplicity and sensitivity, Sudek foregrounds a kind of poetry of the everyday, using the interplay of light and shade to achieve a kind of fluctuation between interior and exterior.

Text from Jeu de Paume

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
La Fenêtre de mon atelier [The window of my studio]
c. 1940-1948
Gelatin silver print
17 × 11.2cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
La Fenêtre de mon atelier [The window of my studio]
c. 1940-1954
Gelatin silver print
22.9 × 16.8cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
La Fenêtre de mon atelier [The window of my studio]
c. 1940-1950
Gelatin silver print
28.1 × 22.9cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

The world from my window

Sudek was not content with making single, unrelated images. He generally worked in projects or series, creating extended visual explorations of the phenomena and scenes he viewed – often from the closed window of his studio, which separated his private studio-home from the exterior world. In the series From My Window it was the endlessly varying states of transformation of droplets of water that he watched streaming down his windowpane. His images invite us to contemplate, with great fascination, the physical cycles of water and the phenomenon of rivulets coursing down a surface – like human tears. Reminding us even of [Paul] Verlaine’s “There is weeping in my heart like the rain upon the city…” Sometimes the melancholy mood of these images is leavened by a rose in a vase on the windowsill or tendrils of leaves announcing the arrival of spring.

There is weeping in my heart
like the rain falling on the town.
What is this languor
that pervades my heart?

Oh the patter of the rain
on the ground and the roofs!
For a heart growing weary
oh the song of the rain!

There is weeping without cause
in this disheartened heart.
What! No betrayal?
There’s no reason for this grief.

Truly the worst pain
is not knowing why,
without love or hatred,
my heart feels so much pain.

Paul Verlaine. “Il pleure dans mon coeur”

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Quatre saisons: l’été [Four seasons: summer]
c. 1940-1954
From the series “La Fenêtre de mon atelier” [The window of my studio]
Gelatin silver print
22.6 × 17.1cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
La Dernière Rose [The Last Rose]
1956
Gelatin silver print
28.2 x 23.2cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession Josef Sudek

Night walks

Sudek’s preoccupation with darkness dates to the Nazi Occupation of Prague from March 1939 until the end of the war. Experiencing his city plunged into nights of enforced darkness Sudek explored the absence of light in his pictures. We know that this was more than a technical exercise, for he wrote “Memories” and “Restless Night” on the verso of one nocturnal photograph dated 1943.

The curfews imposed on citizens at the time made it unlikely that Sudek ventured out into the city after dark during wartime. Neither agile nor inconspicuous with his large-format camera slung over his increasingly hunched back, Sudek would have risked his life had he done so. The small courtyard of his studio on Ujezd street was hidden from the road, however, and one or two lights in neighbouring apartments served as beacons. Well after sundown he would photograph the syncopated play of blurs of light against the wall of impenetrable blackness.

The spirit of place

Sudek visited and photographed places that held either personal or spiritual significance for him: the landscape along the Elbe River, Invalidovna, St. Vitus Cathedral, his studio, Prague’s complex streets and open squares, the majestic Prague Castle, the city’s surrounds, and Frenštát pod Radhoštĕm where he spent summers with friends. Hukvaldy, home of Leoš Janaček, the composer whose music he loved, was a particularly favoured haunt. This was true also of the ancient Mionší Forest where he navigated his way through dense brush and forests by way of shortcuts that he created and playfully named. The Beskid Mountains also served as spiritual retreat. Although he was an urbanite in many respects, Sudek’s love of nature and sense of despair for its desecration is strongly expressed in Sad Landscapes, his series of images made in the Most region where industrialisation ravaged the countryside in the 1950s.

The life of objects

Sudek collected everything. Today he would be known as a hoarder. But his obsession served him well, for out of the chaos of his small studio and living spaces he carefully selected a variety of these objects to photograph. From delicate feathers to crumpled paper and tinfoil, multi-faceted drinking glasses, flowers, fruit, seashells, envelopes, flasks, frames, prisms, candelabras, string and shoe moulds, the subjects ranged from the mundane to the exotic. Once chosen, the set-up was lovingly composed – often in subtly changed configurations with other objects – and carefully lit before being memorialised in either pigment or gelatin silver prints.

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Le Jardin Royal [The Royal Garden]
c. 1940-1946
Procédé pigmentaire au papier charbon [Carbon pigment on paper]
16.1 × 11.7cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Prague pendant la nuit [Prague at night]
1950
Gelatin silver print
22.8 × 29cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Prague pendant la nuit [Prague at night]
c. 1950-1959
Gelatin silver print
12 × 16.7cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Prague pendant la nuit [Prague at night]
c. 1950-1959
Gelatin silver print
12.2 × 17.3cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Le Jardin de Rothmayer [The Rothmayer Garden]
1954-1959
Gelatin silver print
16.9 × 22.9cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Entitled “The Intimate World of Josef Sudek”, this exhibition is the first of this scale to revisit the life and work of Josef Sudek (Kolín, 1896 – Prague, 1976) within its socio-geographical and historical context: Prague during the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when the Czech capital was a veritable hub of artistic activity. The exhibition features a selection of 130 works spanning the totality of Sudek’s career, from 1920 to 1976, and allows the public to examine the extent to which his photography was a reflection of his personal relationship to the surrounding world. On display are works that are the result of Sudek’s photographic experiments carried out within the privacy of his own studio, images of the garden seen from his window, and photographs of adventures further afield. The artist enjoyed meandering through the streets of Prague and its surrounding suburbs, and made frequent excursions to the nearby countryside. Sudek’s enduring fascination with light, and its absence, is at the root of some of the most haunting photographs of the twentieth century. Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.

The exhibition presents work from Sudek’s early career, but also features photographs from a pivotal period of experimentation and innovation, beginning in the 1940s. Focusing on the technical and formal aspects of the medium of photography, Sudek created pigment prints, halftone prints, puridlos (photographs between two windows) and veteše (photographs inserted into old frames), techniques which allowed him to transform the objectal quality of photography. The loss of his right arm during the First World War and the difficulties he now encountered in transporting his view camera did not dampen his passion for photography.

Sudek’s studio window became an object of abiding fascination – rather like the surface of a canvas – reflecting moments of exquisite tenderness and hope when a flowering branch brushed against its pane, or of poignant melancholy when he observed the world beyond his window transformed by the playful infinity of mist. His room with a view allowed him to capture, on film, his love of Prague. His photographs demonstrate both a precision and a depth of feeling, fitting odes to the rich history and architectural complexity of the Czech capital.

Through images that recount the narrative of his life, the viewer gains access to Sudek’s inner world, and an insight into his immediate environment, the views and objects he loved, his studio and garden. His endless walks in Prague found expression in the views of the city and its surroundings, as well as in photographs of its more sordid “suburbs”, a subject explored by other Prague artists. The eastern and northern areas of Bohemia, the Beskid Mountains and the Mionší forest were other destinations close to the photographer’s heart.

Text from Jeu de Paume

New ways of seeing

Although more influenced by prevailing photographic conventions in the beginning, Sudek came to show an openness to experimenting with new ways of composing and printing his images. In the late 1920s, Sudek photographed objects designed by modernist Ladislav Sutnar, thus creating angled views of furniture with reflective surfaces and ceramics of pure form.

Sudek’s most successful foray into modernism is his experimentation with grotesque (surreal) subjects such as mannequins, decaying sculptures and the accoutrements of the architect Otto Rothmayer’s garden. There is little doubt that in the fragmented figurative sculptures Sudek was recalling some of the human devastation that he witnessed on the battlefields of the First World War.

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Statue
c. 1948-1964
Gelatin silver print
9 × 14cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Dans le jardin [In the garden]
1954-1959
Gelatin silver print
17 × 23.3cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Labyrinthe sur ma table [Labyrinth on my table]
1967
Gelatin silver print
39 × 22.9cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Labyrinthe de verre [Glass Maze]
around 1968-1972
Gelatin silver print
39 × 22.9cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa. Don anonyme, 2010
© Succession de Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Sans titre (Nature morte sur le rebord de la fenêtre) [Untitled (Still life on the windowsill)]
1951
Montage par le photographe c. 1960.
Two silver gelatin prints, glass plate, lead
48.2 × 39.2cm
Musée des arts décoratifs, Prague.
© Succession de Josef Sudek

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Review: ‘Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain’ at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 31st May – 24th July, 2016

National Gallery of Australia touring exhibition

Curator: Shaune Lakin

Installation view of the exhibition Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne.
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan, The National Gallery of Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art

An independent vision

Pictorialism, Surrealism and Modernism: Light, geometry and atmosphere

This is the quintessential hung “on the line” exhibition from the National Gallery of Australia which features the work of two well respected Australian photographers, Max Dupain and Olive Cotton, showing over three gallery spaces at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne. Of its type, it is a superb exhibition which rewards repeated viewing and contemplation of the many superb photographs it contains.

While Dupain may be the more illustrious of the two featured artists – notable for taking the most famous photograph in Australian photographic history (Sunbaker, 1937, below); for being the first Australian photographer to embrace Modernism; and for bringing a distinctly Australian style to photography (sun, sea, sand) – it is the artist Olive Cotton’s work that steals almost every facet of this exhibition through her atmospheric images.

Dupain’s importance in the history of Australian photography cannot be underestimated. He dragged Australian photography from Pictorialism to Modernism in a few short years and met fierce resistance from the conservative camera clubs, stuck in the age of Pictorialism, because of it. He was the first to understand what Modernism meant for the medium in Australia, and how photographers would in future picture the country. He wanted to see the world through ‘modern’ eyes. As he observed, ‘(photography) belongs to the new age … it is part and parcel of the terrific and thrilling panorama opening out before us today – of clean concrete buildings, steel radio masts, and the wings of the air line. But its beauty is only for those who themselves are aware of the ‘zeitgeist’ – who belong consciously and proudly to this age, and have not their eyes forever wistfully fixed on the past.’ Dupain’s awareness of the ‘zeitgeist’ of modernity was coupled with a keen eye for composition, light and form (what Dupain later termed ‘passing movement and changing form’), and an understanding of photography’s expressive potential. Over the next 50 years he captured many memorable images, some of the most famous images ever taken of this sun burnt country.

Dupain started to hit his straps with his early cross-over images which contained elements of both Pictorialism and Modernism. His 1930s series of three photographs of Fire Stairs at Bond Street Studio (one of which is feature in the exhibition), and images such as Design – suburbia (1933, below) and Still life (1935, below) still possess that soft, raking light that was so beloved by Pictorialists, coupled with an implicit understanding of form, geometry and light. As fellow photographer David Moore observes, by the time of photographs such as Pyrmont silos (1935, below) and Through the Windscreen (1935), ‘any return to sentimental Pictorialism was precluded’. That sense of the European avant-garde, the aesthetics of contemporary European photography, the strength of industrial forms, imbues Dupain’s photographs with a crisp, clean decisiveness, that ‘symphony of forms and textures’. Whether it be the monumentalism of silos, or the monumentalism of bodies (such as in the classic Bondi, 1939), Dupain relished the opportunity to merge aesthetics with representation, pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible within the medium, believing that both representation and aesthetics could exist within the same frame. Evidence of this merging of can be seen in photographs such as Untitled [Factory chimney stacks] (1940, below) and Backyard, Forster, New South Wales (1940, below). These images are silent in their formalism… they are very quiet, and still, and rather haunting, beautiful in their tonality (with lots of yellow in the 8 x 10 and perhaps even small prints).

Dupain and Cotton both revel “in photography’s great capacity to make sense of the relations of light, texture and form as they exist in the present,” and evidence “a modernist concern with line, form and space; documentary photography’s interest in realism and ‘the living moment’; and the pictorial and formal attributes of commercial photography.” But as the press release insightfully observes, “Comparisons articulate and make apparent Dupain’s more structured – even abstracted – approach to art and to the world; similarly, comparisons highlight Cotton’s more immersive relationship to place, with a particularly deep and instinctual love of light and its ephemeral effects.” And this is where the photographs of Olive Cotton are so much more engaging, and alive, than those of Max Dupain.

While Dupain was busy running a commercial studio (with Cotton his assistant and for a couple of years his wife), Olive seems to have had more freedom to experiment, to express herself in a less structured way than her erstwhile husband. Walking around this exhibition my initial thoughts were wow, Olive Cotton, you are an absolute star. Photographs such as The way through the trees (1938, below), while not possessing the technical brilliance of a Dupain, possess something inherently more appealing – a sensitivity and feeling for subject that nearly overwhelms the senses. Truly here is a symphony of texture, light and form. The composition is a subtle paean, a song of praise to the natural and modern world – a world of geometry, textures, light and form. The rendition of this image, a performance of interpretation, is simply magnificent in its sensitivity to subject matter. The print is also glorious in its delicacy and colour. For me, this is what is so appealing about the work of Olive Cotton, an innate sensitivity that all of her photographs seem to possess – in composition, in proportion, in printing and in colour. Cotton maintained an independent vision forged out of experimentation, creating spaces for erotic imaginings, spaces for action and spaces for quiet contemplation. Her use of light and shade, of body and shadow, of classical and modernist motifs … is superlative. While Dupain’s photographs are more structured and more dazzling in a technical sense, Cotton’s photographs possess more “atmosphere”, a complex and insightful way of seeing and imaging the world which has few equals in the annals of Australian photography.

Below is a short transcription of a voice memo I made on my phone as I toured around the exhibition for the third time:

“What a great show this is, the photographs of Max Dupain and Olive Cotton. But it is the photographs of Olive Cotton that are the wonder of this exhibition. Photographs such as Orchestration in light (1937, below), Sky submerged (c. 1937) and especially The way through the trees (1938, below) are just masterpieces of complex seeing. A sort of… mmmm … an intimate previsualisation where there are hints of Pictorialism – dappled light, moss on the trees – and yet there is a geometric form to the composition that marks it as definitively Modernist. As the wall text states, “this exceptional landscape appears at first glance like a classic Pictorialist view of the Australian bush but typical of Cotton’s best pictures, this landscape merges Pictorialism’s stylistic and formal codes with those of a cosmopolitan modernist sensibility. Cotton pays particular attention to the similarly angled tree trunks, as well as the all over pattern of the spotted gums and the dapples of light, not bound or hemmed in dogma, Cotton created a view of being completely immersed in the landscape.” The colour of the print, there are hints of pinks and greens and beiges. When was it taken and printed, it must have been an early one, 1938 … and then again the beautiful tonality of it. Wow!

As with all of her best work Cotton is constructing her environment – through music, through geometry, through light. Over the city (1940, below), the light over the city, the shadow of the city, the silhouette of the city in outline, followed by Grass at sundown (1939, below) shooting contre jour, into the light. In Max after surfing (1937, below) there is evidence of Cotton’s understanding of the play of form, of light, of shadow and the composition of the pictorial plane into triangles, horizontals and verticals. This creates a sense of mystery within the four walls of the photograph. As art historian Tim Bonyhady observes, it ‘is not just one of the most erotic Australian photographs, but possibly the first sexually charged Australian photograph by a woman of a man’. The sensuality and atmosphere of the Cotton’s are just gorgeous. Olive Cotton just has such a marvellous grasp of the construction of the picture plane using form, texture and shadow… and feeling. If had a choice I would take away most of the Cotton’s (laughs), because I think they are just amazing…”

There are so many great images in this exhibition, from both Cotton and Dupain, that is hard to know where to start. I haven’t even mentioned images such as Dupain’s sensual but commercial Jean with wire mesh (c. 1935, below), his seminal Street at Central (1939, below) with its raking light and abstraction, or Cotton’s most famous image Teacup ballet (1935, below). I could go on and on. The only disappointment with the exhibition is that, for the uninitiated, there is little to place both photographers works in the context of their time and place, other than a few The Home magazines in a couple of display cases and the wall text. There is little sense of what a tumultuous period this was in Australian history – between two world wars, during a depression, with the advent of modernity, freedom of movement through cars, White Australia policy in full swing, meat and four veg on the table, women’s place in the home, the rise of vitalism and the cult of the bronzed Aussie body and the worship of nature and the outdoors, mateship and the beach as a place of socialisation. But that is the nature of such a classic, hung “on the line” exhibition. It would have been great to see some large photographs, floor to ceiling, of the environment from which all these nearly contextless (as in a particular time and place) images emerged but this is a minor quibble. In the end, I restate that this is a stunning exhibition that is a must see for any aficionado of great Australian photography. Go see it before it closes.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Word count: 1,685

Many thankx to The Ian Potter Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation images © Marcus Bunyan, The National Gallery of Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art.

“I like few people … to go into a room of strangers is a chore for me … I can effect a relationship, but afterwards, I think: was it worth it?”

Max Dupain

“Looking at the work of these two great Australian photographers together is enlightening; they were often shooting the same subjects, or pursuing subjects and pictorial effects in similar ways. Rarely do we get to see two great Australian artists working side-by-side in this way. And while Max Dupain’s reputation might now stand well above most other Australian photographers, this exhibition shows that Olive Cotton had a significant role to play in his development as a photographer, and was in many ways his equal.”

Shaune Lakin

Gallery one

Installation views of the exhibition Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing at left in the bottom image, Max Dupain’s Bawley Point landscape (1938) and at middle, Dupain’s Untitled [Factory chimney stacks], 1940
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan, The National Gallery of Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art

Installation views of the exhibition Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing in the bottom image, Max Dupain’s famous Sunbaker (1937) at second right
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan, The National Gallery of Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art

Installation views of the exhibition Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing in the bottom image Olive Cotton’s most famous photograph, Teacup ballet (1935) at left
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan, The National Gallery of Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art

Installation view of the exhibition Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing Max Dupain’s Jean with wire mesh (c. 1935) at right
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan, The National Gallery of Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art

Gallery two

Installation views of the exhibition Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing in the bottom image, a cabinet with view of The Home magazine (April 1st 1933 right) which feature the photographs of Max Dupain
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan, The National Gallery of Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art

Gallery three

Installation views of the exhibition Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing in the bottom image, Max Dupain’s Street at Central (1939) left, followed by his Thin man (1936) and Olive Cotton’s Fashion shot, Cronulla sandhills (Max Dupain photographing model) (1937) at right
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan, The National Gallery of Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art

Installation views of the exhibition Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne. Photos: © Marcus Bunyan, The National Gallery of Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art

Olive Cotton (1911-2003) and Max Dupain OBE (1911-1992) were pioneering modernist photographers. Cotton’s lifelong obsession with photography began at age eleven with the gift of a Kodak Box Brownie. She was a childhood friend of Dupain’s and in 1934 she joined his fledgling photographic studio, where she made her best-known work, Teacup Ballet, in about 1935. Throughout the 1930s, Dupain established his reputation with portraiture and advertising work and gained exposure in the lifestyle magazine The Home. Between 1939 and 1941, Dupain and Cotton were married and she photographed him often; her Max After Surfing is frequently cited as one of the most sensuous Australian portrait photographs. While Dupain was on service during World War II Cotton ran his studio, one of very few professional women photographers in Australia. Cotton remarried in 1944 and moved to her husband’s property near Cowra, New South Wales. Although busy with a farm, a family, and a teaching position at the local high school, Cotton continued to take photographs and opened a studio in Cowra in 1964. In the 1950s, Dupain turned increasingly to architectural photography, collaborating with architects and recording projects such as the construction of the Sydney Opera House. Dupain continued to operate his studio on Sydney’s Lower North Shore until he died at the age of 81. Cotton was in her seventies when her work again became the subject of attention. In 1983, she was awarded a Visual Arts Board grant to reprint negatives that she had taken over a period of forty years or more. The resulting retrospective exhibition in Sydney in 1985 drew critical acclaim and has since assured her reputation.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind
c. 1939
Gelatin silver photograph

PHOTOGRAPH NOT IN EXHIBITION

Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind appears to have been the only print Cotton made of this image. It was found in the late 1990s and has been shown only once, in an exhibition at the AGNSW in 2000 where it was also used on the catalogue cover. It was unusual for Cotton to print so large, yet it is entirely fitting that this monumental head and shoulder shot of a beautiful young woman should be presented in this way. The subject was a model on a fashion shoot at which Cotton was probably assisting. Cotton often took her own photographs while on such shoots and used them for her private portfolio. The photograph transcends portraiture, fashion and time to become a remarkable image of harmony with the elements.

Cotton took the title for this photograph from an 1895 poem by English poet Laurence Binyon, ‘O summer sun’:

O summer sun, O moving trees!
O cheerful human noise, O busy glittering street!
What hour shall Fate in all the future find,
Or what delights, ever to equal these:
Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind,
Only to be alive, and feel that life is sweet?1

A photographer whose work straddles pictorialism, modernism and documentary, Cotton maintained an independent vision throughout her working life, based on the close observation of nature. Her understanding of the medium of photography was not to do with capture, but rather ‘drawing with light’.

1. 1915, ‘Poems of today’, English Association, London p 96

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website © Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911 - 2003) 'Max' c. 1935 from the exhibition 'Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain' at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, May - July, 2016

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Max
c. 1935
Gelatin silver photograph
14.8 x 14.5cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1998

In this highly abstracted portrait, Cotton seems to present Dupain as an athlete – perhaps, with his strangely extended arms, a hammer thrower, in an image that predates by at least two years Dupain’s own photographs of athletes outdoors. It is likely that Cotton photographed her friend in this way because of the graphic pictorial effect she wished to achieve. Cotton exploits the shape of the Rolleiflex camera’s square-format film: Dupain’s body cuts across the right-hand corner of the picture, from which his overstretched forearms (the shape and tone of which were the result of much dodging and burning in the darkroom) create a diagonal oblique angle that is classically modernist. A similar conflation of diagonal lines, which was common to the ways that modern life in Australia at the time was represented in advertising and architectural photography, can also be seen in pictures such as Surf’s edge and Teacup ballet.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain put his lack of clannishness down to a temperament which inclined to the stoic and an early life as an only child. He relished the solitude of his darkroom, familiar places and routines and the early morning calm of Sydney Harbour, where he rowed his scull until prevented by ill health in the early 1990s. He was not a joiner or follower of teams; he was republican in politics and agnostic. Philosophically, Dupain mixed rationalism and a less defined alliance with the passionate exhortation to live directly in one’s environment, body and heart. This philosophy was espoused by poets and writers such as D.H Lawrence, from the movement known in the 1920s and 1930s as Vitalism.

Although he acknowledged that he was a bit of a loner by temperament, portraiture was a significant part of Max Dupain’s personal and professional work. He included some dozen or so portraits in his selection for his 1948 monograph, fifty plates showing ‘my best work since 1935’. Dupain’s images, including many portraits especially of the 1930s to 1960s, have stamped the public image of this era of rapid progress and increasing cultural sophistication in Australia. Portraiture was at the top stratum of Dupain’s first three decades of work but volume decreased markedly from the 1960s, when Max Dupain and Associates, his business, began to specialise in architectural and industrial commissions.

‘Vintage Max’ by Gael Newton, 1 June 2003

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Sunbaker' 1937 from the exhibition 'Max and Olive: The photographic life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain' at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, May - July, 2016

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Sunbaker
1937
Gelatin silver photograph
37.7 x 43.2cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
The photographer’s shadow (Olive Cotton and Max Dupain)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver photograph
16.6 x 15.2cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
The sleeper
1939
Gelatin silver photograph
29.2 x 25.0cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1987

The sleeper 1939, Olive Cotton’s graceful study of her friend Olga Sharp resting while on a bush picnic, made around the same time as Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, presents a different take upon the enjoyment of life in Australia. The woman is relaxed, nestled within the environment. The mood is one of secluded reverie.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Untitled [Olive Cotton in Wheat Fields]
Nd (probably late 1930s)
Gelatin silver photograph

PHOTOGRAPH NOT IN EXHIBITION

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Max
1939
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Cotton shot this portrait of fellow Australian photographer, Max Dupain during their brief marriage at their home in Longueville on Sydney’s lower north shore. Dupain is captured affectionately in the portrait, represented as at once casual through pose and, as industrious on account of his rolled up sleeves and the Rolleiflex TLR camera which hangs from his neck. It is indicative of the combination of a working and personal relationship Cotton and Dupain shared during the late 1930s when they operated a commercial studio together. The couple separated in 1941 but Cotton went on to manage the Dupain Studio while Max was away serving as a camouflage officer during the Second World War 1.

1. Ennis H 2005, ‘Olive Cotton: photographer’, National Library of Australia, p. 6

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website © Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Max after surfing
1937
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 2006

This intimate study of Dupain, who Cotton was romantically involved with at the time, first appeared in the mid-1990s; Cotton did not include it in her reassessment of her oeuvre in the mid-1980s that involved making prints of her best images. For many commentators, this remains a radical image in the history of Australian photography. For the art historian Tim Bonyhady, it ‘is not just one of the most erotic Australian photographs, but possibly the first sexually charged Australian photograph by a woman of a man’. This is the only known vintage print of the image, which inexplicably carries the signature and a message from the fashion photographer George Hoyningen‑Huene, who visited Sydney in December 1937 and spent time with Dupain. It suggests perhaps that Hoyningen-Huene was present when Cotton made the print.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max after surfing is a portrait of Dupain taken in 1939, around the time of their brief marriage. While the photograph was taken indoors, the sharply delineated contrast and the dramatic interplay between light and shade evoke harsh sunlight. The work is loaded with suggestion and emotional intimacy. As art historian and curator Helen Ennis noted in 2000, the close vantage point and the tension between visible form and dense shadow ‘creates a space for erotic imaginings’.

A photographer whose work straddles Pictorialism, modernism and documentary, Cotton maintained an independent vision throughout her working life, based on the close observation of nature. Her understanding of the medium of photography was not to do with capture, but rather ‘drawing with light’.

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website © Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Jean with wire mesh
c. 1935
Gelatin silver photograph
46.0 x 34.5cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 2006

This portrait of Jean Lorraine, a close friend of Cotton, was one of many taken of her by Cotton and Dupain. This photograph is notable for its technical virtuosity – Dupain’s control of the variegated light across Jean’s body, beautifully lyrical and sensuous, is masterful. It also reflects Dupain’s active interest in the work of Man Ray, whose earlier Shadow patterns on Lee Miller’s torso (1930) was no doubt an influence. Like Man Ray’s image of his lover, Dupain’s portrait of Jean is also notable for its eroticism. While Dupain might have argued that this photograph was a study of light falling on surfaces, the light and shade take particular pleasure in the form of Jean’s naked torso. This eroticism has been underplayed throughout the history of the picture, not surprising given the nature of the relationships involved: when it was published in The Home in February 1936, Jean with wire mesh was known simply as a Photographic study. Dupain printed at least two versions of this shot, another with Jean’s eyes open.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Girl with mirror
1938
Gelatin silver photograph
Image 31.7 x 29.9cm
Sheet 32.6 x 30.6cm
Purchased 1987

The photographs Cotton took while attending Dupain’s fashion shoots often focussed on the graphic effects created by light rather than fashion or the dynamics of the shoot itself. Cotton’s role as assistant left her free to explore personal interests, without the imperative of getting a shot for the assignment. This image of a model attending to her make-up, seemingly absorbed in her own image, is primarily concerned with the patterns created by light falling on sand dunes and the way they contrast with the decorative print of her clothing. It is notable that the image we see in the mirror is not the model’s face, but the patterns created by light hitting the sand. As Cotton later remembered, ‘I took it mostly because I really liked the pattern in the sand and the contrasting pattern in the left-hand corner’, which includes a series of diagonal shadows cast by Dupain’s tripod.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
The floater
1939
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Australia
Purchased 1976

Two versions of this image of a woman floating in water were printed by Dupain, so like Sunbaker it held particular interest for him. It acknowledges one of the great moments in avant-garde photography, André Kertész’s iconic study of underwater distortion Underwater swimmer (1917). As with Kertész, Dupain’s interest was with the visual effects created by light hitting the water and the impact of this on the contours of the swimmer. In his personal copy of the anthology Modern Photography (1931), Dupain highlighted the writer G.H. Saxon Mills’ claim that photography’s value existed in both its capacity to record the world and the optical effects it found or created – ‘its … symphony of forms and textures.’

Wall text

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Fashion shot, Cronulla sandhills (Max Dupain photographing model)
1937
Cronulla, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Gelatin silver photograph
Image 30.4 x 38.5cm
Sheet 40.2 x 48.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1988

As the studio assistant, Cotton accompanied Dupain on fashion shoots to attend to models, doing their make-up and helping with costume changes. She often used these opportunities to take her own photographs, including this wonderful image of Dupain photographing the model Noreen Hallard for David Jones. As well as producing a striking image of Dupain and Hallard at work, Cotton was interested in the landscape in which they operated, paying particular attention to the pattern created by their footsteps in the sand.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Olive Cotton and Max Dupain are key figures in Australian visual culture. They shared a long and close personal and professional relationship. This exhibition looks at their work made between 1934 and 1945, the period of their professional association; this was an exciting period of experimentation and growth in Australian photography, and Cotton and Dupain were at the centre of these developments.

This is the first exhibition to look at the work of these two photographers as they shared their lives, studio and professional practice. Looking at their work together is instructive; they were often shooting the same subjects, or pursuing subjects and pictorial effects in similar ways. Comparisons articulate and make apparent Dupain’s more structured – even abstracted – approach to art and to the world; similarly, comparisons highlight Cotton’s more immersive relationship to place, with a particularly deep and instinctual love of light and its ephemeral effects.

This exhibition focuses on the key period in each of their careers, when they made many of their most memorable images. Keenly aware of international developments in photography, Cotton and Dupain experimented with the forms and strategies of modernist photography, especially Surrealism and the Bauhaus, and drew upon the sophisticated lighting and compositions of contemporary advertising and Hollywood glamour photography.

They brought to these influences their own, close association with the rich context of Australian life and culture during the 1930s and ’40s. Their achievement can be characterised, borrowing terms they used in discussions of their work, as the development of a ‘contemporary Australian photography’: a modern photographic practice that reflected their own, very particular relationships to the world and to each other.

Lives

Cotton and Dupain’s friendship stretched back to childhood summers spent at Newport Beach, NSW, where their families spent summer holidays. They were both given their first cameras – Kodak Box Brownies – by relatives as young teenagers, and spent days together wandering around taking photographs. They shared a similar commitment to photography as teenagers and young adults: both made and published or exhibited photographs while at school, and in 1929 they became members of the Photographic Society of New South Wales. But their approach to achieving the ‘professional life’ of a photographer took different paths: Dupain undertook a formal apprenticeship with the Pictorialist master Cecil Bostock between 1930-33, while Cotton studied arts at Sydney University with the idea of becoming a teacher and photographed after hours.

Cotton and Dupain became romantically involved in 1928 and married in 1939; they separated in 1941 and eventually divorced in 1944. In spite of these personal vicissitudes, Cotton and Dupain remained professionally connected. Cotton managed the Dupain studio from late 1941-45, while he worked with the Department of Home Security’s Camouflage Unit during the Second World War. On his return, Cotton left Sydney and spent the rest of her life in relative isolation near Cowra, NSW, where she raised her family of two with husband Ross McInerney and, between 1964 and 1983, operated a small studio. And while Dupain returned from the war to develop his reputation and significance as Australia’s most recognised twentieth-century photographer, his work was deeply affected by his experience of the war and took on a completely different complexion to his work from the previous decade.

Studio

In 1934, Dupain opened a studio in a rented room at 24 Bond Street, Sydney; Cotton joined him as his assistant soon after. By 1936, the Dupain studio’s business had expanded to the extent that it moved into larger premises in the same building, before relocating in early 1941 to a whole floor of a building at 49 Clarence Street.

Their positions at the Dupain studio were clearly defined – he was the photographer, she the studio assistant. Even so, Cotton and Dupain each maintained distinct but in some ways closely aligned practices, both in and out of the studio. Cotton did not tend to take photographs commercially until after she took over the management of the Dupain studio in late 1941, when photographs were circulated in her name. Before then, she made use of the studio’s equipment after hours, including Dupain’s large Thornton Pickard camera; her work was exhibited and published on occasion, both locally and internationally.

At the same time, Dupain’s photographs became increasingly widely-seen and influential. Sydney Ure Smith’s iconic monthly magazine The Home regularly published Dupain’s portraits, documentary work, social photographs (often actually taken by Cotton), and fashion and product photographs made for clients such as David Jones. When Dupain went to war, the studio continued to operate successfully under Cotton’s management. While some long-standing clients such as David Jones took their business elsewhere, Cotton took some of her most important pictures in the early 1940s, and her increasing confidence at this time can be identified across images of the city, industry and labour.

Dialogue

Cotton and Dupain were active members of Sydney’s network of young artists and photographers, of which the Dupain studio was a centre. Along with their contemporaries, including figures like Geoffrey Powell, Damien Parer and Lawrence Le Guay, they staked a claim for photography as a vital part of contemporary culture, exhibiting photographs alongside other artworks at venues like Sydney’s David Jones Gallery.

Their networks included members of Sydney’s progressive architectural, design, publishing and advertising communities, with whom they often collaborated. The threads of influence within this complex network of making, exhibiting, publishing and commissions were intricate. It is possible, for example, to see Dupain’s strong visual style affect those around him. His interest in surrealist style, which really took hold in 1935, can be identified in work by other, often lesser photographers working at the time, and indeed in the design of The Home, which published his work in editorial and advertisements. There were also times when Cotton indicated certain directions for Dupain. For example, her images of bodies outdoors, which cleverly pulled together classical and modernist motifs, predate similar images by Dupain.

It is clear also that Cotton and Dupain were engaging in dialogue within their own work. Their shared interest in photographing form, texture and shadow is seen across many pictures throughout the mid- to late 1930s. Their pictures also engage critically with photography as a medium, in images that draw attention to the photograph as a double of its subject, and in pictures that seem to play with photograph’s stillness. As Dupain later remembered, together they ‘shared the problems of photography’.

Contemporary Australian Photography

What were ‘the problems of photography’ that Dupain and Cotton sought to settle? In the most straightforward sense, they involved the assumption that Australian photographers were yet to completely embrace or realise the medium’s potential, which rested in careful attention to its aesthetic possibilities, recognition of its mechanical origins, and negotiation of the particular way the medium engaged notions of objectivity and subjectivity. Their solution to these problems involved a progressive photographic practice that intended to release photography from the shackles of history and orthodoxy, and to revel in photography’s great capacity to make sense of the relations of light, texture and form as they exist in the present.

Cotton’s and Dupain’s solution to ‘the problems of photography’ was to make work that made a feature of the medium’s modernity, and the strange way that mechanics, physics and aesthetics come together in modern photography to look at the world and to find beauty in it. They did this in a way that remained firmly footed in their own, very particular place in the world and history. In terms of style, their solution integrated legacies of Pictorialism – especially its interest in the atmospheric effects found in landscape – with a range of other, often competing modes and styles: a modernist concern with line, form and space; documentary photography’s interest in realism and ‘the living moment’; and the pictorial and formal attributes of commercial photography.

It is possible that, for the first time, Australian photography found in the work of Cotton and Dupain a contemporary expression: a photographic practice that emerged from, responded to and expressed the mood, ambitions and sensibility of its time.

Press release from The Ian Potter Museum of Art

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Street at Central
1939
Gelatin silver photograph
45.6 x 37.5cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1976

Two different versions of this photograph. Notice the different cropping and colour of each image, and how it adds emphasis to the light and to the shadows of the people.

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Teacup ballet
1935
Gelatin silver photograph
37.5 x 29.5cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1983

‘This picture evolved after I had bought some inexpensive cups and saucers from Woolworths for our studio coffee breaks to replace our rather worn old mugs. The angular handles reminded me of arms akimbo, and that led to the idea of making a photograph to express a dance theme.

When the day’s work was over I tried several arrangements of the cups and saucers to convey this idea, without success, until I used a spotlight and realised how important the shadows were. Using the studio camera, which had a 6 ½ x 4 ½ inch ground glass focusing screen, I moved the cups about until they and their shadows made a ballet-like composition and then photographed them on a cut film negative. The title of the photograph suggested itself.

This was my first photograph to be shown overseas, being exhibited, to my delight, in the London Salon of Photography in 1935.’ Olive Cotton 1995 1

Olive Cotton and Max Dupain were childhood friends and, although she graduated in English and mathematics from the University of Sydney in 1934, her interest in photography led her to work in Dupain’s studio from this year. Cotton was employed as a photographer’s assistant in the studio, however she worked assiduously on her own work and continued to exhibit in photography salon exhibitions. Tea cup ballet is one of Cotton’s most well-known photographs and yet it is somewhat eccentric to her main practice, being at first glance typically modernist with its dramatic lighting and angular shapes. Her longstanding interest in organic forms provides a deeper reading. The abstraction of form by the lighting and the placement of the cups and saucers enables the relationship to dancers on a stage to become clear.

1. Ennis H 1995, ‘Olive Cotton: photographer’, National Library of Australia, Canberra p. 25

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website © Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

Among Cotton’s most famous photographs, Teacup ballet has very humble origins. It was taken after hours in the Dupain studio and used a set of cheap cups and saucers Cotton had earlier bought from a Woolworths store for use around the studio. As she later recounted: ‘Their angular handles suggested to me the position of “arms akimbo” and that led to the idea of a dance pattern’. The picture uses a range of formal devices that became common to Cotton’s work, especially the strong backlighting used to create dramatic tonal contrasts and shadows. The picture achieved instant success, and was selected for exhibition in the London Salon of Photography for 1935.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Shasta daisies
1937
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1987

Celebrated Australian photographer Olive Cotton was given her first Box Brownie by her family for her eleventh birthday (1922) and continued to experiment with taking and developing pictures throughout the 1920s. By the early 1930s Cotton had mastered the Pictorialist style so popular at the time and was on her way to establishing her own approach which also incorporated Modernist principles. The recurrent themes of landscape and plant-life are important to the photographer’s approach, which photography scholar Helen Ennis describes as Cotton’s concern for the ‘potential for pattern-making’.

Shasta daisies is an interesting and rare combination of natural form and a highly-constructed scenario, the flowers having been photographed in Cotton’s studio and carefully arranged for the camera. Cotton, in the 1995 book, wrote of the photograph: “I chose to photograph these in the studio because out of doors I would have had less control of the lighting and background. I examined the composition very carefully through the studio camera’s large ground glass focussing screen and – the view from the camera’s position being slightly different to my own – made as many rearrangements to the flowers as seemed necessary. I then used (apart from a background light) one source of light to try and convey a feeling of outdoors.” Shasta daisies is important within Cotton’s oeuvre for uniting her interest in plants in their natural ‘outdoors’ environment with her enquiry into photographic form and space.

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Homage to D.H. Lawrence
1937
Gelatin silver photograph
45.8 x 33.9cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1982

Dupain admired vitalist philosophies, which argued that modern identity had become fragmented and asserted the importance of the integration of body and emotion, of sensual and emotional experience. He was attracted to the work of British writer D.H. Lawrence, especially his insistence on the ‘thingness’ of things as a way of embodying a properly integrated mind and body. This photograph uses surrealist juxtaposition to draw together a copy of Lawrence’s Selected poems, a flywheel (representing the modern world) and a classical bust, recalling the idealised relationship of natural and sensual worlds in ancient Greece and Rome. Other images incorporating classical busts appeared in the pages of the Modern Photography annuals, but Dupain makes them his own, lifted above mere pastiche.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911 – 2003)
Orchestration in light
1937
Gelatin silver photograph
Image 24.1 x 27.4cm
Sheet 25.4 x 28.2cm
Purchased with assistance from the Helen Ennis Fund
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Cotton took this landscape early one morning at Wullumbi Gorge in the New England tablelands, during a camping trip with Dupain. It is remarkable for both the way the light transforms the landscape into quivering energy and the way Cotton makes sense of that enigmatic experience in pictorial form. As its title suggests, the photograph recalled for Cotton – who trained as a musician as a girl – a musical composition, particularly ‘the beautiful graduation in tone going from a bass tone to a high treble at the top of the picture’.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
The patterned road
1938
Gelatin silver photograph
24.6 x 28.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1983

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Bawley Point landscape
1938
Gelatin silver photograph
29 x 26.6cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1982

This landscape, one of many taken by Dupain on the south coast of New South Wales, was made in the same year as Cotton’s similar study of shadow and landscape, The patterned road (above). These two landscapes share an interest in what Dupain later termed ‘passing movement and changing form’. Although Dupain rarely published or circulated his landscapes at this time, pictures such as Bawley Point landscape certainly relate to a broad range of other images, perhaps most notably still lifes and nudes, that articulated an Australian modernist photography through the interplay of light passing through openings. These images find monumental stillness in movement and strong shadows, which quite literally ‘double’ their subject.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Over the city
1940
Gelatin silver photograph
32.2 x 30.3cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1987

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Grass at sundown
1939
Gelatin silver photograph
Primary Insc: Signed and dated l.l. pencil, “Olive Cotton ’39”. Titled l.r. pencil, “Grass at sundown”.
Printed image 28.9 x 30.8cm
Sheet 30.0 x 31.6cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of the artist 1987

Max Dupain (Australia, 1911-1992)
Design – suburbia
1933
Gelatin silver photograph
29.4 x 23.6cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1982

This early image proudly displays the influence of the work of pictorialist photographers that Dupain knew well, most notably the Sydney-based photographer, Harold Cazneaux. At the time Dupain made this image, he was serving an apprenticeship in the commercial studio of Cecil Bostock, a Pictorialist and founding member with Cazneaux of the Sydney Camera Circle in 1916. Dupain’s interest in the pictorial effects created by light passing through apertures (here, the posts and beams of a suburban fence) seems to remember similar images of light streaming through blinds and pergolas by Cazneaux, who Dupain called ‘the father of modern Australian photography’. The fascination with capturing light as it passes through openings will stay with Dupain throughout his life, though the focus will sharpen as he moves away from the diffused effects favoured by art photographers in the early decades of the century.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain (Australia, 1911-1992)
Still life
1935
Gelatin silver photograph
29.0 x 20.8cm
Purchased 1982

While the subject of this photograph seems to be a simple, lidded pail (which featured in a number of Dupain’s still lifes) seen in morning light, it is actually an exercise in abstraction. Of most interest to Dupain is the complex network of diagonal lines created by light, shadow and timber boards. The picture reflects the pleasure Dupain took in the pictorial effects created by light (he was fond of quoting the Belgian photographer Léonard Misonne’s dictum, ‘the subject is nothing, light is everything’), and at the same time expresses the fundamental principle upon which his photographic practice was always based. While the image of light passing through apertures is an analogy for the way the camera operates, the still life also embodies photography’s expressive potential. As Dupain later stated, ‘with still-life you can arrange or rearrange or do what you like, it becomes a very, very personal exercise that you have total control over’.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Pyrmont silos' 1933, printed later

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Pyrmont silos
1935
Gelatin silver photograph
Printed image 25.2 x 19.2cm
Sheet 31.2 x 26.2cm
Mount 42.4 x 32.0
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1976

Max Dupain was the first Australian photographer to embrace Modernism, and took a number of photographs of Pyrmont silos in the 1930s. There were no skyscrapers in Sydney until the late 1930s so the silos, Walter Burley Griffin’s incinerators and the Sydney Harbour Bridge were the major points of reference for those interested in depicting modern expressions of engineering and industrial power. Olive Cotton’s Drainpipes 1937 shows the precisely formed circles and curves of the pipes, interspersed with slivers of light and long shadows.

In almost text-book fashion, this image reflects Dupain’s assimilation of the aesthetics of contemporary European photography, which he encountered in publications such as the Das Deutsche Lichtbild [The German photograph] and Modern Photography annuals, the 1932 edition of which was edited by Man Ray. While Dupain’s relationship to the contemporary world was complicated, he nonetheless advocated for the latest photographic trends out of Europe and America, and for photographing modern, industrial subjects; as he asserted in 1938, ‘great art has always been contemporary in spirit’. Writing in 1975 about this image for Dupain’s retrospective at the Australian Centre for Photography, fellow photographer David Moore, who had worked with Dupain in the late 1940s, saw it as a turning point in Dupain’s career, believing that here ‘his awareness of the strength of industrial forms was confirmed with confident authority … From this moment any return to sentimental Pictorialism was precluded’.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Pyrmont silos is one of a number of photographs that Dupain took of these constructions in the 1930s. In all cases Dupain examined the silos from a modernist perspective, emphasising their monumentality from low viewpoints under a bright cloudless sky. Additionally, his use of strong shadows to emphasise the forms of the silos and the lack of human figures celebrates the built structure as well as providing no sense of scale. Another photograph by Dupain in the AGNSW collection was taken through a car windscreen so that the machinery of transport merges explicitly with industrialisation into a complex hard-edge image of views and mirror reflections. There were no skyscrapers in Sydney until the late 1930s so the silos, Walter Burley Griffin’s incinerators and the Sydney Harbour Bridge were the major points of reference for those interested in depicting modern expressions of engineering and industrial power.

Dupain was the first Australian photographer to embrace modernism. One of his photographs of the silos was roundly criticised when shown to the New South Wales Photographic Society but Dupain forged on regardless with his reading, thinking and experimentation. Some Australian painting and writing had embraced modernist principles in the 1920s, but as late as 1938 Dupain was writing to the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Great art has always been contemporary in spirit. Today we feel the surge of aesthetic exploration along abstract lines, the social economic order impinging itself on art, the repudiation of the ‘truth to nature criterion’ … We sadly need the creative courage of Man Ray, the original thought of Moholy-Nagy, and the dynamic realism of Edouard [sic] Steichen.”1

1. Dupain, M 1938, “Letter to the editor,” in Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website © Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Backyard, Forster, New South Wales
1940
Gelatin silver photograph
30.5 x 30.5cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1983

This highly formal view of the backyard of a hotel in the coastal town of Forster embodies Dupain’s sense of Australian modernist photography. The picture’s frontalism and overriding use of horizontals and verticals acknowledge that the camera faced its subject face-to-face and that the view has been consciously framed. But as the title of the photograph makes clear, it is also a record of a particular place. In his personal copy of G.H. Saxon Mills’ essay ‘Modern photography’, which greatly assisted Dupain to conceptualise his own sense of a contemporary photographic practice, Dupain highlighted and annotated with a question mark the following statement: ‘”modern” photography means photography whose aim is partly or wholly aesthetic, as opposed to photography which is merely documentary or representational.’ Dupain believed that both were possible within the same frame.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
[Factory chimney stacks]
1940
Gelatin silver photograph
49.0 x 38.4cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1983

Dupain highlighted the writer G.H. Saxon Mills’ claim that photography’s value existed in both its capacity to record the world and the optical effects it found or created – ‘its … symphony of forms and textures.’

These factory chimney stacks are reduced to their most simple and direct form, which is shown free of any distraction. As Dupain noted, borrowing from the great American architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the ‘mission of the photograph is to clarify the subject’. The choice of subject matter was influenced by an essay by the English journalist, G.H. Saxon Mills, written in 1931 and read by Dupain soon after: ‘(photography) belongs to the new age … it is part and parcel of the terrific and thrilling panorama opening out before us today – of clean concrete buildings, steel radio masts, and the wings of the air line. But its beauty is only for those who themselves are aware of the ‘zeitgeist’ – who belong consciously and proudly to this age, and have not their eyes forever wistfully fixed on the past.’

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
The way through the trees
1938
Gelatin silver photograph
29.6 x 29.0cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of the artist 1987

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
An old country homestead, Western Australia
1946
Gelatin silver photograph

PHOTOGRAPH NOT IN EXHIBITION

The Ian Potter Museum of Art
The University of Melbourne,
Corner Swanston Street and Masson Road
Parkville, Victoria 3010

Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm

The Ian Potter Museum of Art website

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Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: England, 1994

June 2016

I finally got around to scanning some more of my black and white archive, this time further photographs from a trip to England in 1994 forming a new sequence. The photographs picture my now ageing mother (these were taken over 20 years ago), an English fair, medieval tiles and Highgate Cemetery, among other subjects.

The image of my mother plays off against a land that is noting an absence – maybe an absence of a certain type of yang force… even the “strong draught horse” seems to come from another time.

My friend and mentor Ian Lobb said of the sequence: “Wow – that is really good Marcus”. Praise I value highly indeed.

The photographs form a sequence and should be viewed horizontally. Please click on the long small image below to see them in this format, and then click again to enlarge the images.

Unfortunately, WordPress only allows vertical presentations of images in this blog format that I am using – but I have still presented them for you to see in the posting below in horizontal form.

Please click on the first image below to see the spacing of the sequence, and click again to enlarge the sequence.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.

All images © Marcus Bunyan. Please click the photographs for a larger version of the image. Please remember these are just straight scans of the prints, all full frame, no cropping !

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
England
1994
Second sequence

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Maman
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Bridge, Chatsworth House
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Covered figure with graves
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
IOTA, 1893, Napoli, Cantanese Domenico, age 14 with gravestones
1994
Gelatin silver print

December 20th 1893, a mounted messenger galloped into Boscastle with news that a large ship was driving ashore, but by 4 pm the 1000-ton iron barque IOTA of Naples had crashed under the great Lye rock off Bossiney Cove. Her crew leapt for the rocks, but two fell and were crushed under the barque’s bilges, while Domenico Cantanese, aged fourteen, was swept away… Only the body of the young cabin boy was recovered from the sea, he’s buried in the windswept graveyard of St Materiana Church Tintagel, where a wooden cross and a lifebuoy bearing his name and ‘Iota, Napoli, 1893’ still marks his grave.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
An English fair
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Medieval tiles
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Esther
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Three crosses four graves, Highgate Cemetery
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
An English fair
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Death’s pathway
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Descending
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Landscape, Chatsworth House
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
An English fair
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Two graves, Highgate Cemetery
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Five angels
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
An English fair
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Medieval tiles
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Covered figure with flowers
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
An English fair
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Tree, Highgate Cemetery
1994
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive page

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Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: England, 1994

August 2015

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Lake District, England
1994
Silver gelatin print

I finally got around to scanning some more of my black and white archive, this time from a trip to England in 1994. Beautiful, poignant and funny (people wearing their solidarity with people living with HIV/AIDS, with ribbons on their crotch), these images make me laugh and reflect at the same time. To all those that we have lost, we remember them.

Dr MarcusBunyan

All images © Marcus Bunyan. Please click the photographs for a larger version of the image. Please remember these are just straight scans of the prints, all full frame, no cropping !

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Lake District, England
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Manchester Mardi Gras
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Lake District, England
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Manchester Mardi Gras
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Manchester Mardi Gras
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Manchester Mardi Gras
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Lake District, England
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Manchester Mardi Gras
1994
Silver gelatin print

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive page

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Selection of images part 1

April 2015

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Fifth Avenue Houses' 1936

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Fifth Avenue Houses (5th Avenue and 8th Street)
1936, printed later
Silver gelatin print

A selection of interesting images.

The Vanishing Race by Edward S. Curtis is simple, yet one of the best. Their shadows seem more substantial than their owners.

Any photographer worth their salt would recognise the light on the foliage in a certain location that they know, but the chance of it being as perfect as this are about a billion to one. Notice how the original frame extends the synthesis of man and landscape as well. Such a great amalgam of image and frame, such a perfect marriage where one complements the other without the frame being overpowering, as though the frame were an extension of the image (and organic nature of the landscape).

The line of the riders in the image … they would have virtually ridden over the photographer and the tripod if they had kept that line! And the outrider – magnificent!!

Marcus

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) 'The Vanishing Race' 1904

Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952)
The Vanishing Race – Navaho
1904
Orotone (in original frame)

“The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other… consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time.”

~ Edward S. Curtis

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Surf Sequence #4
1940, printed later
Silver gelatin print

Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024)
Redding Stream, Redding, Connecticut
1968, printed later
Gelatin silver print

Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024)
Nautilus Shell, Ipswich, Mass
1960
Silver gelatin print

Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024)
Two Leaves, Brewster, New York
1963
Silver gelatin print

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Eleanor, Port Huron
c. 1954
Silver gelatin print

With her raven hair and ripe figure, Eleanor Callahan is one of the most recognisable models in the history of 20th-century photography, an inseparable part of both the life and work of one of its most renowned artists. Clothed and standing among trees in a public park, or nude and turned to the wall while clutching a radiator in an empty room, she served as a formal element within Mr. Callahan’s austere compositions as well as a symbol of womanhood. From 1941 to his death in 1999, she allowed herself to be photographed by him, without complaint, hundreds of times…

“He just liked to take the pictures of me,” she told an interviewer in 2008. “In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.”

Text from Richard B. Woodward. “Eleanor Callahan, Photographic Muse, Dies at 95,” on the New York Times website 28th February 2012. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Potato truck in the field near Shafter, California
1937
Ferrotyped silver print

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Fish Market near Birmingham, Alabama
1936
Silver gelatin print

Robert Doisneau (French, 1912-1994)
Le gardien des géants du Nord
Nd
Silver gelatin print

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Christopher Street Shop
late 1940s
Silver gelatin print

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
But Lately I Find a Sliver of a Mirror is Simply to Slice an Eyelid
1979-1980
Silver gelatin print

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Untitled, Rome, Italy
1977-1978
Silver gelatin print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Fan, December 1937
1937
Silver gelatin print

“I am an amateur and I intend to stay that way for the rest of my life.”

~ André Kertész

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Fort Peck Dam, Montana
1936
Silver gelatin print

This photograph became an icon of the machine age, not only because it was printed as the cover of the first issue of Life magazine (November 23, 1936), but also because it showed the power of modern technology to dwarf humankind. The giant buttresses and what seem to be crenellated battlements (actually the supports for an elevated highway) are meant to be as raw and impressive as the towering walls of ancient monuments. The engineers on the spillway provide the necessary indication of scale.

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Terminal Tower [Cleveland]
c. 1928
Silver gelatin print

“I stood on the deck to watch the city [Cleveland] come into view. As the skyline took form in the morning mist, I felt I was coming to my promised land … columns of machinery gaining height as we drew toward the pier, derricks swinging like living creatures. Deep inside I knew these were my subjects.”

~ Margaret Bourke-White 1927

François Kollar (Hungarian, 1904-1979)
Double-impression of the Eiffel Tower
1931
Solarised silver gelatin print

In this unique and widely-reproduced photograph, the French modernist photographer has overlaid positive and negative images of the magnificent Eiffel Tower. The iconic structure is depicted from an unusual perspective, thrusting upward, with Kollar’s special solarised effect.

Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967)
X-ray of Ajax, the sword swallower
1928
Silver print
18 × 11 inches (45.7 × 27.9cm)
With a New York X-ray lab credit in the negative

Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967)
Marcellus Golden Models
1933
Silver print
11 1/4 × 8 7/8 inches (28.6 × 22.5cm)
With Kelty’s credit and title in the negative

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Exhibition: ‘The Sievers Project’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 13th June – 31st August, 2014

Artists: Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoë Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo, Meredith Turnbull, Wolfgang Sievers

Curators: Naomi Cass and Kyla McFarlane

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967) 'Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield' 2014 (installation view)

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield
2014
3 panels of 9, 6 and 6 selenium toned, fibre-based, gelatin silver prints

Curated by CCP Director Naomi Cass and Kyla McFarlane, this intelligent exhibition features the work of six early career artists who respond in diverse ways to renowned Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007). It was a joy to see again the large vintage silver gelatin, almost clinically composed photographs by Sievers. The light, tonality and stillness of the images make them seem mythic, modern and monumental.

Each artist offers a unique “take” on Sievers influence on Australian photography and design, including his interest in refugees and human rights issues and the representation of the dignity of labour (although the machine is more often represented in Sievers work with a distinct lack of human presence and the act of work itself).

My personal favourites were Phuong Ngo’s intimate silver gelatin photographs in four groups of sweat shop workers in Vietnam, people on boats coming to Australia, photographs of textile workers in Australia and photographs of his mother. Phuong Ngo’s shared stories of young Vietnamese refugees and the journeys taken by their mothers told through photographs is very moving, but only after you are told what the four bodies of images are about. Positioned in the small Gallery Four it was also difficult to associate this installation with the rest of the exhibition. Initially I thought it was a separate exhibition until the linkages were told, the light dawned, and the connections were made.

While Cameron Clarke’s photographs of Ford factory workers and machinery are meticulously lit and digitally observed, producing a strong body of work, it is Jane Brown’s gridded analogue triptych which steals the show (see photographs above and below). These are superbly rich and textured photographs, beautifully seen and resolved within the shifting mise-en-scène. Brown’s images kinetically flow from one image to another even as they are self contained within a modernist grid. In some instances the artist has used the same photograph within the triptych but cropped in a different manner, which pushes and pulls the viewer into a different perspective on the subject matter. This is highly intelligent art making that observes the self contained nature and monumentality of Sievers work and reworks it, lucidly commenting on the dis/integration of these spaces and industries in the present day.

This series of work is the best sequence of photographs I have seen this year and any institution worthy of their salt should snap up these works for their collection.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Director Naomi Cass and the CCP for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan 2014

Installation photographs of Jane Brown's 'Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield' 2014 (installation view details) at the exhibition 'The Sievers Project' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photographs of Jane Brown Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield 2014 (details) at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967) 'Staircase. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield, 2014' 2014 from the exhibition 'The Sievers Project' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne, June- August, 2014

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Staircase. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield, 2014
2014
Fibre-based, gelatin silver print

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967) 'Mining machinery, Line of Lode Miners Memorial Complex, Broken Hill 2014-06-10' 2014 from the exhibition 'The Sievers Project' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne, June- August, 2014

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Mining machinery, Line of Lode Miners Memorial Complex, Broken Hill 2014-06-10
2014
Brown toned, fibre-based, gelatin silver print
Courtesy the artist

Installation photograph of Jane Brown’s work at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Gears for the Mining Industry, Vickers Ruwolt, Burnley, Victoria, 1967
1967
Gelatin silver photograph
49.6 x 39.3cm
National Library of Australia, Wolfgang Sievers Photographic Archive

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Sulphuric Acid Plant Electrolytic Zinc, Risoon, Tasmania, 1959
1959
Gelatin silver photograph

Installation photograph of the work of Meredith Turnbull (foreground) and Zoë Croggon (rear wall) at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
John Holland Constructions, Ginninderra Bridge (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
70 cm x 86cm
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria [7] (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria [18] (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Westgate Bridge (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

“Six early career artists, working in photography through to installation, have responded in diverse ways to renowned Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007), icon of 20th century Australian photography. Sievers’ commercial practice exemplifies mid-century positivism and modernity, and the myth-making role of photography. As a German Jewish immigrant, he had a strong interest in refugees and human rights issues as well as an expressed commitment to representing the dignity of labour. The Sievers Project presents key historical works as a context for engaging the past through the present.

Photographers Jane Brown and Cameron Clarke have followed in his footsteps to industrial clients Sievers photographed and valorised, finding sites that are visually dynamic within industries now in decline. Through her intrepid, research-based practice, Therese Keogh has developed a materially-rich work from the starting point of a single, anomalous photograph Sievers took at the Roman Forum in 1953. Meredith Turnbull draws on his connections with Melbourne’s design community in the 1950s and 60s, including Gerard Herbst and Frederick Romberg. In Sievers’ photographs of industrial sewing machines and their machinists, Phuong Ngo finds shared stories of young Vietnamese refugees and the journeys taken by their mothers. Zoë Croggon positions fragments of Sievers’ iconic architectural photographs against found photographs of the human body in movement.”

Text from the CCP website

Foreword to the catalogue

The Sievers Project follows a number of exhibitions over the last five years where CCP has opened up a vista on contemporary practice by exhibiting early work by living artists such as Bill Henson, Kohei Yoshiyuki and Robert Rooney, as well as historical photography, alongside contemporary work. As a commissioning exhibition we have titled this a ‘project’ to point towards the year-long research period integral to the exhibition, capturing the curatorial gesture of inviting early career artists to engage with the past.

The Sievers Project represents a significant curatorial endeavour for CCP, the tale of which is recounted in the Introduction. It would simply not have taken place were it not for the willingness and generosity of Julian Burnside AO QC to participate, through allowing the artists research access to his Wolfgang Sievers collection and lending work from it for the exhibition, as well as contributing an essay for this catalogue.

I acknowledge the artists for setting out on this project and for returning with thoughtful and excellent work. It has been a pleasure to both engage with and exhibit the work of Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoë Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo and Meredith Turnbull.

The Sievers Project has been dignified by contributions by a number of experts and I wish to acknowledge Professor Helen Ennis, Australian National University School of Art who has also contributed a catalogue essay; Madeleine Say, Picture Librarian, Eve Sainsbury, Exhibitions Curator and Clare Williamson, Senior Exhibitions Curator, State Library of Victoria; Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria and Professor Harriet Edquist and Kaye Ashton, Senior Coordinator, RMIT Design Archives, who all took time to speak about Sievers and share his work with the artists.

Opportunities to commission artists are relatively rare and funding through the inaugural Early Career Artist Commissions Grant from the Australia Council has enabled the project. CCP is pleased to acknowledge this recognition and support. We are delighted that Lovell Chen Architects & Heritage Consultants have provided further critical support to realise the project, for which we are grateful. We see a germane link between Lovell Chen and the premise of The Sievers Project.

The Besen Family Foundation are champions for enabling CCP to produce catalogues for selected exhibitions. I acknowledge the Foundation for their long-standing and generous engagement with CCP. We thank the National Library of Australia for providing permission to reproduce Sievers’ work in this catalogue.

The Sievers Project has provided a welcome opportunity for CCP to engage with colleagues in the fi eld of architecture and we are delighted to acknowledge a partnership with the Robin Boyd Foundation to present public programs. We are grateful to Tony Lee from the Foundation for his interest in the project.

Without doubt CCP’s ability to both present contemporary art well and look after artists is greatly enhanced through the longstanding and generous support of Tint Design and Sofi tel Melbourne on Collins. CCP is pleased to present a parallel exhibition of The Sievers Project at the 2014 Melbourne Art Fair and we thank the Melbourne Art Foundation for enabling CCP to bring the exhibition to broad new audiences. For the Art Fair exhibition we are also indebted to Christine Downer, previous CCP Board member and current supporter, for the loan of a major Sievers work.

The Sievers Project has been ably assisted by Philippa Brumby, curatorial intern. Co-curator Dr Kyla McFarlane and I thank Philippa for her wide-ranging skills over a substantial period of time. Lastly, I acknowledge Kyla for her excellent curatorial work and for the pleasure of collaborating with such a playful, dedicated and steely intellect.

Naomi Cass, Director, CCP

And what about his Legacy?

A response to this necessarily combines elements of certitude and speculation. Sievers himself was totally committed to ensuring his legacy as a photographer. He spent years meticulously cataloguing and documenting his work and was assiduous in placing as much of it as he could in major photography collections around the country – art galleries and libraries. The bulk of his archive, a staggering 65,000 negatives and prints, was acquired by the National Library where it has been digitised and is available online to users in perpetuity. But there is another aspect to his preoccupation with legacy that has troubled me over the years – his desire to control the readings of his work, to ensure that he ‘owned’ the contextualisation and interpretation of it. As I see it, some of the framing narratives he constructed were retrospective and are misleading because they are not borne out by the evidence, that is, by the photographs themselves. This is especially apparent in his insistence that the relationship between ‘man and machine’ was central to his industrial photography. In my assessment of his enormous archive, images that extol this interaction are actually relatively few in number. They are outweighed by thousands and thousands of other industrial scenes in which the worker is locked into the dreary, repetitive tasks associated with mass production, or is not present at all having been displaced by machines that are far more efficient than humans will ever be. In other words, the bulk of Sievers’ own photographs contradict his central tenet of the dignity of labour in the modern machine era. The most important aspect of his legacy is undoubtedly his photographs and the astonishingly vast, high quality body of architectural and industrial work he produced between 1938 and the early 1970s. My view is that his black and white photography is the best although he did not agree with me, arguing that his colour photography, with its expressive and dramatic qualities, was equally fine. For me, it is his black and white images that are visionary, their precision, clarity and drama embodying the belief in progress that underpinned modernity. I would also suggest Sievers’ legacy isn’t confined to his photography. As a man he cared deeply about the world and wanted it to be better. He was closely involved in the restoration of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s buildings in Berlin in the 1990s and in the re-evaluation of his own father’s reputation (Professor Johannes Sievers was an expert on Schinkel and had used his young son’s photographs in his books on the architect in the 1930s). Wolfgang donated his photographs to fund-raising campaigns for human rights and remained a passionate antiwar activist until his death.

What would he have thought about this project?

I suspect that he would have been thrilled to know that his contribution to Australian life and photography is the touchstone for the six photographers involved in the project and that his work continues to be appreciated.

Professor Helen Ennis is Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at ANU School of Art, Canberra.

Installation photographs of the exhibition 'The Sievers Project' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photographs of the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photograph of the work of Therese Keogh (detail) in the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photograph of the work of Meredith Turnbull (detail) in the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Therese Keogh. 'In the Forum Romanum (after Sievers)' 2013 (installation view)

Therese Keogh
In the Forum Romanum (after Sievers) (installation view)
2013
Graphite on paper
Courtesy the artist

Cameron Clarke
Loui Nedeski, Ford Motor Company, Geelong
2014
Archival inkjet print
50 x 63cm
Courtesy the artist

Cameron Clarke. 'Küsters Washer, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta' 2014

Cameron Clarke
Küsters Washer, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta (detail)
2014
Archival inkjet print

Cameron Clarke. 'Theis Dye Jets, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta' 2014

Cameron Clarke
Theis Dye Jets, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta (detail)
2014
Archival inkjet print

Phuong Ngo (Australian, b. 1983)
Untitled
2014
from the Mother Vietnam series
Inkjet print
Courtesy the artist

Centre for Contemporary Photography

No permanent exhibition space at the moment

Centre for Contemporary Photography website

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Exhibition: ‘Jeff Wall: Tableaux, Pictures, Photographs, 1996-2013’ at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 1st March – 3rd August, 2014

Curator: Hripsimé Visser

Installation view of 'Jeff Wall: Tableaux, Pictures, Photographs, 1996-2013' at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Installation views of Jeff Wall: Tableaux, Pictures, Photographs, 1996-2013 at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Photos: Gert Jan van Rooij

What an absolutely beautiful space to show your work. Can you just imagine what you would create if you had the chance!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Stedelijk Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
Volunteer
1996
Gelatine silver print
221.5 x 313cm
Courtesy of the artist

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
The Flooded Grave
1998-2000
Transparency in lightbox
225.5 x 282 x 25cm
Courtesy of the artist

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
Invisible man by Ralp Ellison, The Prologue
1999-2000
Transparency in lightbox
174 x 250 x 25cm
Courtesy of the artist

Jeff Wall: Tableaux, Pictures, Photographs, 1996-2013 presents recent work in colour and black and white, and features the new, previously unseen diptych Summer Afternoons (2013). It is the first major photography exhibition to be presented at the Stedelijk following its reopening in 2012.

Since the 1980s, Wall has produced critically acclaimed work in the form of colour transparencies backlit by fluorescent light strips and presented in lightboxes. He was one of the first artists to make photographs on a large scale. The standard lightbox was created for the primary purpose of outdoor advertising. In Wall’s work, this medium became a platform for his figurative tableaux, street scenes and interiors, landscapes and cityscapes. Wall explores themes such as the relationships between men and women and the boundary between metropolis and nature. He offers social commentary on violence and cultural miscommunication, and conjures seductive nightmarish fantasies and personal memories. These scenes provide the basis for photographic reconstructions of Wall’s experience. They derive their inherent suspense from a combination of extreme realism and sometimes elaborate artifice.

The exhibition hinges on the year 1996, which marked a turning point in Wall’s production: It was the first year that he produced black-and-white prints on paper. More immediately than the lightboxes, the black-and-white photographs suggest new relations of his work to documentary themes and aesthetics. But Wall also orchestrates the content of these images, employing tools borrowed from filmmaking. Wall sees photographs as autonomous, independent images and, strictly speaking, all his works are created using photographic means. At the same time, he analyses and expands the visual language of photography by adding elements from painting, cinema, theatre. In choosing his themes, Wall deconstructs common ideas and assumptions, including those relating to his own work. He has, for instance, also shot many “unstaged” images.

Curator Hripsimé Visser said: “Jeff Wall is first and foremost an ‘artist’s artist,’ he is well- known and much loved by other artists, as well as critics. With this exhibition, the Stedelijk hopes to create broader public awareness of Jeff Wall as one of the artists who uniquely and enduringly defined photography as a fine art medium. Wall’s work is classic, yet entirely contemporary at the same time. His themes are both commonplace and tension-filled. What at first seems straightforward and intelligible is also complex and enigmatic. Wall carefully selects his mode of display to be produced with an incredible eye for detail. The large scale of the images is a natural, integral feature of the work.”

Jeff Wall himself chose the title of this exhibition. It is a reference to the layers that can be found in his work. He says, “‘Tableau’ refers to the free-standing, autonomous object we look at from a distance, often when it is hanging on the wall in front of us. ‘Picture’ relates to that special and isolated image within the entire spectrum of image production available in a culture. And ‘photograph’ identifies it in the technical sense, and as medium, distinct from other ways of making tableaux or pictures.” Wall aims to present each photo as an independent, unique image, intended to be seen hanging on a wall, not as reproductions in a book. As such, Wall arranged this presentation to give each individual artwork the space it needs. The monumental scale of the work encourages viewers to experience the space that is evoked in the images. At the same time, the themes and formal and stylistic qualities of the different images prompt viewers to draw comparisons between them.

The exhibition will fan out across the Stedelijk’s former Hall of Honor, two adjacent gallery spaces in the historic building, and the Van den Ende Foundation Gallery in the new wing of the museum. Jeff Wall: Tableaux Pictures Photographs 1996-2013 was curated by Hripsimé Visser, in close collaboration with the artist and in collaboration with Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaeck, Denmark. The exhibition will travel to both museums.

Jeff Wall grew up in Vancouver and studied at the University of British Columbia and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Since the late 1970s, he has been considered one of the art world’s most innovative contemporary photographers. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2013), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007), and Tate Modern, London (2005), among others. The Stedelijk Museum first presented Wall’s work in 1985.

Press release from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam website

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
Overpass
2001
Transparency in lightbox
214 x 273.5 x 25cm
Courtesy of the artist

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
In Front of a Nightclub
2006
Transparency in lightbox
226 x 360 x 30cm
Courtesy of the artist

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
Knife Throw
2008
Inkjet print
195 x 267cm
Courtesy of the artist

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
Boy Falls From Tree
2010
Colour photograph
234.3 x 313.7cm
Courtesy of the artist

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
Boxing
2011
Colour photograph
222.9 x 303.5cm
Courtesy of the artist

Forum: Jeff Wall – Artist Talk – 01-03-14

As part of the Public Program in conjunction with Jeff Wall: Tableaux Pictures Photographs 1996-2013 exhibition, the Stedelijk Museum is honoured to present a new stedelijk|forum afternoon with an artist talk by Jeff Wall, introduced by Hripsimé Visser (curator Photography, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam).

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Museumplein 10

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 10pm

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam website

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Exhibition: ‘Emmet Gowin’ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 14th May – 27th July, 2014

Curator: Carlos Gollonet

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) 'Nancy, Danville (Virginia)' 1969 from the exhibition 'Emmet Gowin' at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, May - July, 2014

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Nancy, Danville (Virginia)
1969
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin is a superlative photographic artist. His images possess a unique sensuality that no other artist, save Frederick Sommer, dare approach.

His own family was an early significant subject matter, one to which only he had ready access. “I was wondering about in the world looking for an interesting place to be, when I realised that where I was already interesting.”1

I feel (imperative word) that the photographs of his family are his strongest work for they image an intimate story, and Gowin is nothing if not a magnificent storyteller. Look at the beauty of images such as Nancy, Danville (Virginia) (1969, above) or Ruth, Danville (Virginia) (1968, below) and understand what awareness it takes – first to visualise, then capture on the negative, then print these almost mystical moments of time.

As Gowin observed in his senior thesis, which was predicated upon the necessary co-ingredients of art and spirituality, “Art is the presence of something mysterious that transports you to a place where life takes on a clearness that it ordinarily lacks, a transparency, a vividness, a completeness.”2 He complemented this understanding of art and spirituality with an interest in science. He was in harmony with the physicists and the scientists, finding them to be the most poetic people of the age.3 Inspired by Sommer, Gowin perfected his printing technique through a respect for the medium, respect for the materials and conviction as to what the materials were capable of doing.4

“Sommer freely shared with Gowin his knowledge of photographic equipment, materials, chemicals and printing techniques and Gowin often repeats Sommer’s admonition to him: “Don’t let anyone talk you out of physical splendour.” Over the years Gowin developed methods of printing born from patient experimentation and a love of craft. His background in painting and drawing taught him that there are many solution to making a finished work of art… which he often builds to achieve the most satisfying integration of elements: “The mystery of a beautiful photograph really is revealed when nothing is obscured. We recognise that nothing has been withheld from us, so that we must complete its meaning. We are returned, it seems directly, to the sense and smell of its origin… A complete print is simply a fixed set of relationships, which accommodates its parts as well as our feelings. Clusters of stars in the sky are formed by us into constellations. Perhaps I feel that this constellation has enough stars, and doesn’t need any more. This grouping is complete. It feels right. Feeling, alone, tells us when a print is complete.””5

His later more universal work, such as the landscapes and aerial photographs, are no less emphatic than the earlier personal work but they are a second string to the main bow. The initial impetus of this work can be seen in the book Emmet Gowin Photographs as a development from still life photographs such as Geography Pages, 1974 (p. 62). This second theme took Gowin longer to develop but his photographs are no less powerful for it. His photographs of Petra possess the most amazing serenity of any taken at this famous site; his photographs of Mount St Helens after the volcanic eruption and the aerial photographs of nuclear sites and aeration ponds are among the strongest aerial photographs that I have ever seen. Gowin’s experimentation with the development of the negative, using different times and developers; his experimentation with the development of the print, sometimes using multiple developers and monotones or strong / subtle split toning (as can be seen in the photographs below) is outstanding. His poetic ability rouses the senses and is munificent but for me these photographs do not possess the “personality” or significance of his earlier family photographs. But only just, and we are talking fractions here!

“These photographs of the tracings of human beings reveal mankind not as a nurturer but as a blind and godlike power. Even his latest aerial agricultural landscapes made on route to nuclear sites have a magnificent indifference to human scale. For Gowin, confrontation of man’s part in the creation of ecological problems would seem to require the most transcendental point of view, and as his subjects have become more difficult and frightening, he has created his lushest and most seductive prints.”6

Gowin is an artist centred in a space of sensibility. An understanding of the interrelationships between people and the earth is evidenced through aware and clearly seen images. Gowin digs down into the essence of the earth in order to understand our habituation of it. How we fail to change the course we are on even as we recognise what it is that we are doing to the world. When the stimulus is constantly repeated there is a reduction of psychological or behavioural response and this is what Gowin pokes a big stick at. As he observes,

“We are products of nature. We are nature’s consciousness and awareness, the custodians of this planet… We begin as the intimate person that clings to our mother’s breast, and our conception of the world is that interrelationship. Out safety depends on that mother. And now I’m beginning to see that there’s a mother larger than the human mother and it’s the earth; if we don’t take care of that we will have lost everything.”7

I was luck enough to meet Emmet Gowin when he visited Australia in 1995. He had an exhibition in the small gallery in Building 2 in Bowens Lane at RMIT University, presented a public lecture and held a workshop with about 20 students. I remember I was bowled over by his intensity and star power and I admit, I asked a stupid question. The impetuousness of youth with stars in their eyes certainly got the better of me. Now when I look at the work again I am still in awe of the works sincerity, spirituality, sensuality and respect for subject matter. No matter what he is photographing.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Gowin, Emmet quoted in Chahroudi, Martha. “Introduction,” in Emmet Gowin Photographs. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990, p. 10.
2/ Ibid., p. 9.
3/ Ibid., p. 11.
4/ Ibid., p. 11.
5/ Gowin quoted in Kelly, Jain (ed.,). Darkroom 2. New York, 1978, p. 43 quoted in Chahroudi, Martha. “Introduction,” in Emmet Gowin Photographs. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990, p. 11.
6/ Chahroudi, Op. cit., p. 15.
7/ Ibid., p. 15.

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.”

“There is a profound silence that whines in the ear, a breathless quiet, as if the light or something unheard was breathing. I hold my breath to make certain it’s not me. It must be the earth itself breathing.

Emmet Gowin

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) 'Edith and Ruth, Danville (Virginia)' 1966 from the exhibition 'Emmet Gowin' at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, May - July, 2014

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith and Ruth, Danville (Virginia)
1966
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Barry, Dwayne and Turkeys, Danville, Virginia
1970
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin, the catalog accompanying a retrospective now touring in Spain, is a great introduction to the artist’s works and a great keepsake for a fan. The writings by Keith Davis, Carlos Gollonet and Gowin himself identify the photographer’s humanist and spiritual roots and detail his journey from 1960’s-era people pictures focused on his wife, Edith and family in Danville, VA, to aerial photographs of ravaged landscapes, like the nuclear test grounds in Nevada, and his most recent project archiving tropical, nocturnal-moths.

While his disparate bodies of work may look like geologic shifts in subject matter, Gowin talks in the book about the spiritual quest he’s on, and his realisation that humankind inhabits the land, and that the land is a vital part of who we are. To my eye, what holds all the works together is Gowin’s never-ceasing focus on non-conventional beauty. His way of photographing both people and the wasted landscapes plays up the dark sublime. These are not traditional pretty pictures, but they are exquisitely beautiful. All Gowin photos smoulder with emotion and feel like they were snapped with a breath held, bated with desire.

Roberta Fallon. “Emmett Gowin – From family of man to mariposas nocturnas at Swarthmore’s List Gallery,” on The Artblog website, March 22, 2012 [Online] Cited 05/07/2014. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Noël, Danville (Virginia)
1971
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Danville (Virginia)
1971
Gelatin silver print
7 3/4 x 9 7/8″ (19.7 x 25.1cm)
Gift of Judith Joy Ross
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Danville (Virginia)
1970
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Newtown (Pennsylvania)
1974
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Ruth, Danville (Virginia)
1968
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Chincoteague Island (Virginia)
1967
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

From May 14th to July 27th 2014, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson will hold an exhibition of the American photographer Emmet Gowin. This important retrospective is showing 130 prints of one of the most original and influential photographer of these last forty years. This exhibition shows on two floors his entire career: his most famous series from the end of the sixties, the moths’ flights and the aerial photographs. The exhibition organised by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with Fondation HCB is accompanied by a catalogue published by Xavier Barral edition.

Born in Danville (Virginia) in 1941, Emmet Gowin grows up in Chincoteague Island, in a religious family. His father, a Methodist minister gives him a righteous discipline and a strict education, while his mother, musician, was a gentle, nurturing presence. During his spare time, Emmet encounters the surrounding landscape and begins drawing.

He completes his high school education and enrols in a local business school in 1951 and works at the same time at the design department of Sears, the multinational department store chain. In 1961, Gowin enters in the Commercial Art Department at Richmond Professional Institute, where he studies drawing, painting, graphic design, and history of Art. After a few months, he realises that photography is the best mean of expression and gives him the possibility to seize the Fate and the Unexpected.

Gowin’s early photographic influences came in the form of books and catalogues such as Images à la Sauvette by Henri Cartier-Bresson, History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall or Walker Evans’s American Photographs. Emmet Gowin acquires his first Leica 35mm in 1962 and after two years spent observing the Masters of photography, he finally feels ready to affirm his own photographic style. In 1963, he goes for the first time in New York and meets Robert Franck who encouraged him.

The first Gowin’s portfolios realised in 1965, is technically simple in approach. While the subjects vary considerably, all are drawn from everyday life: kids playing outdoors, Edith’s family, adults in the streets or squares, cars and early pictures of Edith. They get married in 1964. Edith Morris and Emmet Gowin are born in the same city but they grew up in totally different families. Edith’s one, was more exuberant and emotionally close than Emmet’s. As we can discover in the first floor of the exhibition, Edith and her family are the heart of the photograph’s creative universe. As mentioned by Carlos Gollonet, curator of the exhibition, Gowin’s work, seen cumulatively, is a portrait of the artist.

In 1965, they move to Providence, and Emmet begins his studies with Harry Callahan at Rhode Island School of Design. He begins to consistently use a 4 x 5 inch view camera from this time on. This bigger negative produced prints with beautiful transparent details and correspondingly finer and smoother tonal scale.

Just before his first son’s birth, Elijah, in 1967, Emmet and Edith moved to Ohio, where he begins teaching at the Dayton Art Institute. This marks the start of a teaching career that spans more than four decades. He concentrates his work on Edith and let us going through his private life and proposes a very personal artistic vision of this work: I do not feel that I can make picture impersonally, but that I am affected by and involved with the situations which lead to, or beyond, the making of the pictures. In these years, he met Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Frederik Sommer, who would become his close friend and mentor.

At the end of the 1960’s, Gowin begins making circular images of Edith, her family, and their own household, both indoors and out. The Gowin’s second son, Isaac, born in 1974, was the subject – both before and after birth – of many of these circular 8×10 inch photographs, which give the impression of looking through a keyhole. At the beginning of the 1970’s, the exhibitions at the Light Gallery and MoMA mark a significant step toward his American success. In 1973, he’s appointed Lecturer at Princeton University. He is later appointed Full Professor, a position he will hold until his retirement in 2009. He inspired a new generation of photographers such as Fazal Sheikh, David Maisel or Andrew Moore.

From 1973, Gowin goes back to sources, nature and landscape and introduces the idea of Working Landscapes in which the contributions of many generations, overtime, shape the use and care of the land. He travels in Europe, Ireland and Italy, where he discovered the ancient Etruscan city of Matera. His first monograph, Emmet Gowin: photographs, is published in 1976. In 1982, the Queen Noor of Jordan, one of Gowin’s students at Princeton, invites him to photograph the archeological site of Petra. Some of these photos are exhibited on the second floor of the foundation. Later, he continues making views of nature and traveled overseas, reverting to a traditional rectangular format. His interest in gardens and the historical balance between nature and human culture stimulates a dedication to a larger landscape, recorded first from the ground and then from the air. He photographs the incredible destruction of the Mount St. Helens volcano, Washington, and spent years recording the inhabited – and often scarred – face of the American West. Gowin is not an environmental activist. Nonetheless, once he comes to know and experience these landscapes his acute moral and intellectual sense is also conveyed in his images. He wants to show the conflict that exists in our relationship with nature. “It is not a call for an action … It’s a call for reflection, meditation and consideration to be on a more intimate basis with the world.”

Over the past few years, Gowin has constantly photographed nocturnal moths. His scientific interest has led him to catalog thousands of species working alongside with biologists in tropical jungles. By chance, he traveled with a cutout silhouette of Edith in his wallet or luggage and produced a series of photographs in which Edith is once again the principal subject, in this case through her silhouette. They recall the instrument known as the physionotrace, a forerunner of the earliest photographs which was used to male silhouette reproducing the images of loved ones. Those images, printed on handmade paper with the silver image gold toned confirm that Emmet Gowin is one of the finest photographers of any period.

Press release from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Old Handford City Site and the Columbia River, Handford Nuclear Reservation, near Richland (Washington)
1986
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

The aerial photos, taken while flying over bomb test sites and waste water catchment basins and other scenes of industrial/military destruction are almost abstract to the eye. They are also very beautiful. Getting nose to nose with these works and reading the title card, however, allows the slowly-dawning realisation that you are looking at a full blown horror. This suite of works dates from 1980 when Gowin took to the air to view the aftermath of the Mt. St. Helens volcanic eruption in Washington state and was taken with the way things not visible from “human” space below revealed themselves from above. In 1986 he started exploring man-made industrial inroads into the land from the air, flying over Hanford Reservation, for one, where nuclear reactors and chemical separation plants made scars on the land like nothing nature had done. These are truly devastating pictures, and what makes them more so is the thought that this is the tip of the iceberg and that many other sites on earth bear the scars of man-made intrusion.

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Aeration Pond, Toxic Water Treatment Facility, Pine Bluff, AK (Arkansas)
1989
Toned gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Golf Course under Construction (Arizona)
1993
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Aerial view: Mt. St. Helens rim, crater and lava dome
1982
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Every Time less than the pulsation of the artery

Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years.

For in this Period the Poet’s Work is Done, and all the Great

Events of Time start forth & are conceiv’d in such a Period

Within an Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery. …

For every Space larger than a red Globule of Man’s blood,

Is visionary, and is created by the Hammer of Los:

And every Space smaller than a red Globule of Man’s blood opens

Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow…

William Blake. From “Milton”

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
The Khazneh from the Sîq, Petra (Jordan)
1985
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Newtown (Pennsylvania)
1994
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Danville (Virginia)
1963
Gelatin silver print
© Emmet Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith and Moth Flight
2002
Digital ink jet print
19 x 19cm (7 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Charina Endowment Fund
© Emmet and Edith Gowin
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

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Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘The Songs of Eternity’, 1994

July 2014

These are really important photographs for me.

As Minor White’s artist book The Temptation of St. Anthony is Mirrors (1948) is a visual love poem to Tom Murphy, so my artist book The Songs of Eternity (1994) is a visual love poem to my then long-time partner Paul. Both are exceedingly rare books: there are two copies of White’s book and there is one copy of mine.

The prints are even more beautiful in the flesh (so to speak).

Marcus

All images © Marcus Bunyan. Please click the photographs for a larger version of the image. Please remember these are just straight scans of the prints, all full frame, no cropping !

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.

*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

The Songs of Eternity

Images and poetry by M. Bunyan 1994

I stood at the edge of the precipice / and peered in as William Blake would say

The timepiece of eternity / swung hands through all the hours

so how naive I’ve been / not to see its powers

Did I deceive / or was I led

What a rude awakening / throughout my head

Many fabulous things were said /

many a doubt was in silence bled …

Nothing is certainty but the change – I was must be strong to attain

Depth, spirit, integrity and the rest

This affirmation I will confirm – not in conformity but in my own special way

Not this way nor that but my own path / that one day will whisper gently in my ear

Be strong, for we have much to say / when the sea becomes the sky.

Strong in your arms I become your scent

Lying in my bed the sheets of flowers enfold me

Trusting in my heart I know

Today Yesterday Tomorrow

The Songs of Eternity

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Shroud
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

I stood at the edge of the precipice / and peered in as William Blake would say

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul, shadows
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

The timepiece of eternity / swung hands through all the hours

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Eternal timepiece
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

so how naive I’ve been / not to see its powers

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul, head covered
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Did I deceive / or was I led

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Pendent #1
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

What a rude awakening / throughout my head

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Many fabulous things were said /

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

many a doubt was in silence bled …

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Suspension #1
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Nothing is certainty but the change – I was must be strong to attain

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Chyralis' 1994 from the series 'The Songs of Eternity'

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Chrysalis
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Depth, spirit, integrity and the rest

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Décolleté
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

This affirmation I will confirm – not in conformity but in my own special way

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul, doorway (for Georgia O’Keeffe)
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Not this way nor that but my own path / that one day will whisper gently in my ear

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Pendent #2
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Be strong, for we have much to say / when the sea becomes the sky.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Shadow, wreath
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Strong in your arms I become your scent

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Madonna, male
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Lying in my bed the sheets of flowers enfold me

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Suspension #2
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Trusting in my heart I know

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul, wreath and hands
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Today Yesterday Tomorrow

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
1994
From the series The Songs of Eternity
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive page

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Exhibition: ‘A Way of Life – Swedish Photography from Christer Strömholm until Today’ at Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden

Exhibition dates: 1st February – 18th May, 2014

Curator: Anna Tellgren, curator of photography, Moderna Museet

Featured photographers: Yngve Baum, Martin Bogren, Stina Brockman, Anna Clarén, Dawid, Ann Christine Eek, Agneta Ekman, JH Engström, Nan Goldin, Neil Goldstein, Catharina Gotby, Denise Grünstein, Kenneth Gustavsson, Walter Hirsch, Gerry Johansson, Rune Jonsson, Eva Klasson, Nina Korhonen, Tuija Lindström, Anders Petersen, Håkan Pieniowski, Marco Plüss, Inta Ruka, Ulf Simonsson, Gunnar Smoliansky, Christer Strömholm, Lars Tunbjörk, Odd Uhrbom, John S. Webb.

Kenneth Gustavsson (Swedish, 1946-2009) 'Berlin' 1983 from the exhibition 'A Way of Life – Swedish Photography from Christer Strömholm until Today' at Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden, February - May, 2014

Gustavsson’s photographs are characterised by a strong personal expression. With tireless consistency, he sought his inner visions in urban environments such as New York, Berlin and Paris. His exceptional talent for creating everyday magic makes him timeless and always topical. The eighties were Gustavsson’s most creative period. His photographs from Belfast are an extraordinary visual interpretation of conditions in a city wracked by terror and violence.

Kenneth Gustavsson grew up in a suburb north west of Stockholm. Between 1964 and 1967 he studied photography at the Fotoskolan in Stockholm, where the photographer Christer Strömholm was head, at the same time as Anders Petersen. After graduation in 1967, he and Petersen co-founded the Saftra photo agency (Saftra Reportage Fotografi).

The Swedish photo magazine Foto published Gustavsson’s work in the 1960s. Together with Anders Petersen, Gustavsson portrayed the Stockholm slums in an exhibition at the Stockholm City Museum in 1969. After not working in photography for most of the 1970s, a feature in ETC magazine in 1983 revived Gustavsson’s career and he went on to complete assignments in Belfast, Chicago, Reykjavik and New York for ETC. In 1984 he was awarded FOTO magazine’s Photographer’s Price.

The critic Gerry Badger has said of Gustavsson’s work that “it certainly is very post-war, deeply existential and luminously poetic. And, like most good photography, it is a beguiling exploration of the human condition and our relationship with the world.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

Another posting on an eclectic subject that this archive likes to promote, this time on Swedish photography… a subject that I knew very little about.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thanks to the Moderna Museet Malmö for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Tuija Lindström (Finnish-Swedish, 1950-2017) 'Pia' 1983

Tuija Lindström belongs to the great legends of Swedish photography. Her images gained great recognition when exhibited in a group show at Camera Obscura. Lindström’s work was at this time centred on a narrative with focus on a female experience where the male gaze and patriarchal structures were investigated. This theme also characterised the photographic series ‘The Girls at Bull’s Pond’ (1991), which can be counted as Tuija Lindstrom’s real breakthrough. Other subject matters in her work revolves around memories and recollections, time and social issues.

Tuija Lindström’s work is characterised by material experiments inherent to the medium and the darkroom becomes a place for meditative, alchemical operations. Here the presences of the darkroom functions as a kind of performance art. A place of evasion where the craftsmanship evoke the sometimes coarse images soft shades, deep blacks and contrasts.

In 1992 Lindström was appointed professor at the Photo Academy, now the School of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gothenburg, where she came to teach until 2002. As the first woman on record Tuija Lindström is significant for the introduction of a more artistic and theoretical photography where philosophy and art history were incorporated in the training. An achievement that meant a step away from the documentary tradition that for a long time had characterised Swedish photography.

Text from the Female Artists in History Facebook page [Online] Cited 19/03/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Martin Bogren (Sweden, b. 1967) 'No title'. From the series 'Lowlands' 2011

In the 1990s, Martin Bogren developed a personal approach of documentary photography by following Swedish musicians and artists on stage, tour, and studio. His first book “The Cardigans – Been It”, published at the top of the group’s success in 1996 , reveals his work and launches his career. Martin Bogren however aims at going beyond assignments and music field : he focuses on more personal photographic work.

Travels encounters, (Notes, 2008, Italia, 2016), joy of first discoveries (Ocean, 2008), or teenage spleen (Lowlands, 2011, Tractors boys, 2013, Embraces, 2014) : his works reveal a vivid desire to avoid boredom and to reach an elsewhere. He gets in contact with his subjects as a silent witness, as a subtle and caring observer. Through grainy black-and-white and highly grey nuanced photographs, he succeeds in combining a documentary approach with a sensitive affirmation of his subjective vision.

Martin Bogren “manages not to disrupt the world into which he immerses himself, with decency, with attention and acuity, and with respect, without judging – holding his breath (…) One thinks, of course, of all those photographers who – from Robert Franck onwards, from Anders Petersen to Michael Ackerman – have known how to give us the gift of their way of looking, telling us that they wanted to show nothing more than what they needed to show and to say.” (Christian Caujolle, Foreword to Tractor Boys, 2013)

Text from the Vu website [Online] Cited 19/03/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Christer Strömholm (1918-2002) is a predominant figure of Nordic photography and has inspired generations of young photographers. His images of the transsexuals of Place Blanche in Paris is some of his most known work. Included in the exhibition are photographers that have followed in the footsteps of Strömholm. Works, taken from the Moderna Museet collection, by photographers such as Yngve Baum, Agneta Ekman, Ann Christine Eek, Gunnar Smoliansky and not least Anders Petersen, who has most prominently carried on the Strömholm legacy.

“This is an exciting exhibition not only due to its extensive selection but also because we are experimenting with intersecting three separate exhibitions into one entirety,” says John Peter Nilsson, Director, Moderna Museet Malmö. The exhibition also highlights three contemporary photographers. J.H. Engström (b. 1969) has been seen as a successor to Christer Strömholm and Anders Petersen, his Tout va bien is the newest series to be featured. Anna Clarén (b. 1972) is just like Engström part of a generation of photographers that emerged in the late 1990’s. In her bright colour photos we meet people and spaces close to the photographer. Martin Bogren (b. 1967) is the third contemporary photographer, he is active in Limhamn and his series Lowlands (2011) tells a personal tale, in black and white, about a small village in the Skåne countryside.

“It’s fantastic to be able to show an important part of Swedish modern photography history using the Moderna Museet collection. Martin Bogren, Anna Clarén and J. H. Engström are all three contemporary photographers that are good examples of how strong and exciting the Nordic photography scene is right now,” says Anna Tellgren, curator of the exhibition.

The title of the exhibition comes from a quote taken from a lecture by Christer Strömholm. He explains that “… for me, working with photographic images is a way of life. When I think of it, and when I look carefully at my images, all of them, each in its particular way, are nothing but self-portraits, a part of my life.” That approach has shaped all photographers represented in the exhibition. Several self-portraits, portraits of friends and some portraits of Christer Strömholm can be found in the selection.

Press release from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Anna Clarén (Swedish, b. 1972) 'No title'. From the series 'Holding' 2006

This work might be regarded as a diary documenting my life during a period when I took pictures 24/7, even in the night I let the shutter be wide open, exposing while I was asleep. The people in the pictures are persons that are close to me; parents, my sister, my closest friends, my self and also some people I only met by accident on the street.

In this work I use external, concrete attributes, things and events to describe interior associations, an imaginary reality. A reality which for me is entirely real.

The title of the book is a term derived from psychiatry, which means that each and every child should be entitled to a loving and caring environment by her or his parents. This child will enter life with the feeling of being held. Held by her parents, her self and by life itself.

The one child that for any reason grows up in a family where this love is not possible, will, as an adult, constantly find herself in an endless, desperate search for holding. And in some cases will experience a feeling of falling.

The search for somewhere to hold on to will express itself in various ways; symbiotic love affairs, destructiveness, escaping, a constant feeling of alienation, of being outside.

The book’s story is, in many ways, a self portrait, but deep down inside, human beings are very alike. In our searching, the questions, confusions, we may find a universal strand of humanity; the difference between us lies often in the answers. And therefore, this work is a self portrait with universally human questions / stories.

Anna Clarén. “Holding,” on the Josef Chladek website [Online] Cited 19/03/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Christer Strömholm (Swedish, 1918-2002) 'Hotel Central, Paris' 1951/1981 from the exhibition 'A Way of Life – Swedish Photography from Christer Strömholm until Today' at Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden, February - May, 2014

Christer Strömholm is one of the great personalities of Swedish photography. Born in Stockholm, he discovered photography via graphic art in the late 1940s. His photographs from this period are hard black-and-white compositions featuring walls, shadows and minimalist settings. During his sojourns in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, he developed a style reminiscent of street photography, and this is also where he produced his famous portraits of transsexuals at Place Blanche. Strömholm also went on numerous photographic expeditions to places around the globe in the early 1960s, including Spain, Japan, India and the USA. Early in his career, he began teaching at Kursverksamheten in Stockholm, and his classes eventually became the legendary Fotoskolan, from which some 1,200 students graduated between 1962 and 1974. Strömholm’s photographs and methods have inspired many generations of Swedish photographers, but he did not become known to the broader public until 1986, with the major exhibition 9 Seconds in My Life at Moderna Museet.

Text from the Lens Culture website [Online] Cited 19/03/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Christer Strömholm (Swedish, 1918-2002)
Hotel Central, Paris (Self-portrait)
1951-1981
© Christer Strömholm/Strömholm Estate

Christer Strömholm (Swedish, 1918-2002) 'No title' 1963/c. 1985

Anders Petersen (Swedish, b. 1944) 'Marlene' from the series 'Café Lehmitz' 1967-1970/1986

“To me, it’s encounters that matter, pictures are much less important.”

“I can’t describe reality; at the most, I can try to capture things that seem to be valid, the way I see them.”

Anders Petersen

J. H. Engström (Swedish, b. 1969) 'No title' from the series 'Tout va bien' 2014

Swedish artist JH Engström (born 1969) is an inveterate bookmaker. Most recently, his published works have explored ideas of place and home, including “Sketch of Paris” (Aperture, 2013), “La Résidence” (2010), “From Back Home” (2009) and “CDG/JHE” (2008). After more than a decade of such thematic projects, “Tout Va Bien” returns to the looser, more associative approach of Engström’s critically acclaimed volume “Trying to Dance” (2003). The source for these photographs is nevertheless strongly autobiographical, as well as vividly metaphorical; a reemphasis of the artist’s belief in photography’s potential as visual poetry. The sequencing is highly charged with contrasts: black-and-white images mix with colour; the gentle beauty of coastal rocks clashes with a flash-lit image of the bright, blood-red placentas from the birth of his twins. The book leaves it to the viewer to map his or her own network of meaning from image to image, page to page.

Text from the Aperture website [Online] Cited 19/03/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Moderna Museet Malmö
Gasverksgatan 22 in Malmö

Moderna Museet Malmö is located in the city centre of Malmö. Ten minutes walk from the Central station, five minutes walk from Gustav Adolfs torg and Stortorget.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11 – 17
Mondays closed

Moderna Museet Malmö website

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