Exhibition: ‘At the Window: The Photographer’s View’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 1st October 2013 – 5th January 2014

Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019)
Trolley – New Orleans
1955
Gelatin silver print
Image: 22.9 x 34cm (9 x 13 3/8 in.)
Trish and Jan de Bont

Another fascinating exhibition from the J. Paul Getty Museum that features classic photographs and some that I have never seen before. In my opinion, the two most famous photographs of windows have to be Minor White’s rhapsodic Windowsill Daydreaming, Rochester (1958, below) and Paul Strand’s Wall Street (1915, below, originally known as Pedestrians raked by morning light in a canyon of commerce) which, strangely, is not included in the exhibition. I can’t understand this omission as this is the seminal image of windows in the history of photography.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Wall Street
1915
Platinum print

In this photo, taken by morning light 1915, the recently built J.P. Morgan Co. building appears sinister and foreboding and dwarfs (perhaps consumes even) the humanity of suited men and women, their long shadows dragging behind them, walked alongside its facade.

Paul Strand studied under Lewis Hine and Alfred Steiglitz. Although he set up in New York as a portrait photographer, Strand often visited Stieglitz’s gallery to see the new European painting which it exhibited. In 1914-1915, under the influence of this new form of art, Strand turned from soft-focus Pictoralism towards abstraction. It was in this spirit that the above photo was taken, originally named, “Pedestrians raked by morning light in a canyon of commerce”. Strand did not intended to show Wall Street in a bad light, he admitted. However, as the Great Depression happened (criticism was squarely towards Wall Street back then as it is today) and Strand turned more communist, he later spoke of “sinister windows” and “blind shapes” inherent in the above picture.

The photo, now simply titled “Wall Street”, was one of six Paul Strand pictures Stieglitz published in Camera Work. In three of the six pictures, humanity strides out from abstract ideas, and each figure was a study in itself – an irregular item complimented by modular formats that surround it. Another set of eleven Strand photos were published in the magazine’s final issue in 1917, and those pictures, overwhelmingly endorsed by Stieglitz as ‘brutally direct’ made Strand’s reputation.

Alex Selwyn-Holmes. “Wall Street by Paul Strand,” on the Iconic Photos blog, December 2010 [Online] Cited 12/01/2021

Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985)
Girl at Gee’s Bend
1937
Silver gelatin print
Image: 40 x 49.7cm (15 3/4 x 19 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Edmund Collein (German, 1906-1992)
[Four Women Looking Through Window]
about 1928
Gelatin silver print
Image: 8.2 x 11.1cm (3 1/4 x 4 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ursula Kirsten-Collein, Berlin

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Wall Street Windows
about 1929
Gelatin silver print
Image: 29.8 x 19.2cm (11 3/4 x 7 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
[The Milliner’s Window]
before January 1844
Salted paper print from a Calotype negative
Image: 14.3 x 19.5cm (5 5/8 x 7 11/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Barn Window and Ice, East Jamaica, Vermont
1943
Gelatin silver print
Image (trimmed to mount): 19.4 x 24.3cm (7 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Aperture Foundation

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Rain Drops
1953
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20.2 x 25cm (7 15/16 x 9 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Christian K. Keesee
© The Brett Weston Archive

Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, b. 1944)
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Negative 1995; print 2009
Gelatin silver print
Image: 34.3 x 51.4cm (13 1/2 x 20 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Sebastião Salgado

In many respects, the window was where photography began. As early as 1826, the sill of an upstairs window in the home of the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce served as a platform for his photographic experiments. His View from the Window at Le Gras is today considered to be the first photograph. Since then, the window motif in photographs has functioned formally as a framing device and conceptually as a tool for artistic expression. It is also tied metaphorically to the camera itself which is, at its most rudimentary, a “room” (the word camera means “chamber”) and its lens a “window” through which images are projected and fixed. The photographs in At the Window: A Photographer’s View, on view October 1, 2013 – January 5, 2014 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, explore varying aspects of the window as frame or mirror – formally or metaphorically – for photographic vision.

“The Getty Museum’s extensive collection allows us to explore themes and subjects within the history of photography that highlight not only the most famous masters and iconic images they produced, but also less obvious subjects, methods and practitioners of the medium whose contributions have not yet been fully acknowledged. At the Window is one such an exhibition, and holds in store many surprises, even for those who know the field well,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The exhibition also allows us to celebrate a substantial body of work that was recently added to the collection with funds provided by the Museum’s Photographs Council, whose mission it is to help us support the growth of the collection, and a number of highly important loans from private collections.”

Shop Windows and Architecture

Featured in the exhibition is an exceedingly rare early photograph, William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Milliner’s Window (before January 1844) which depicts not an actual window but a carefully constructed one: shelves were placed outdoors and propped in front of black cloth, while various ladies’ hats were arranged to simulate the look of a shop display. Throughout the history of photography, actual shop fronts have been a popular subject and reflections in their windows a source for unexpected juxtapositions. This motif is well represented in the exhibition with photographs by William Eggleston, Eugène Atget, and Walker Evans.

Photographers have also taken an interest in the distinctive formal arrangements made possible by the architectural facades found in a cityscape. André Kertész’s Rue Vavin, Paris (1925), a view from his apartment window, is one of the first photographs he took upon arriving in Paris from Budapest. Photographers like Alfred Stieglitz carefully framed their views of urban exteriors, using the window as a unifying device within the composition.

The Window as Social Documentary

While windows provide an opportunity to observe life beyond a single room, the camera’s lens opens a window to the world at large. Arthur Rothstein believed in photography’s ability to enact social change – his Girl at Gee’s Bend (1937) features a young girl framed in the window of her log-and-earth home in Alabama, highlighting the schism between magazine images and the actual lives of most Americans at the time. Similarly, Robert Frank’s Trolley – New Orleans (1955) frames racial segregation through windows in a trolley, while Sebastião Salgado’s Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (negative 1995; print 2009) uses the barely separated windows of a housing structure to evoke the cramped quarters and dire economic situation of its inhabitants.

The Window as a Conceptual Tool

Artists have used the window in other novel ways, whether to create an enigmatic mood or suggest a suspenseful scene. In Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (2002) from the series Twilight, the image of a woman standing in a room and turned toward a window creates a suspended, unsettling moment of anticipation that is never resolved. In her Stranger series (2000), Shizuka Yokomizo actively engages subjects by sending letters to randomly selected apartment residents, asking them to stand in front of a window at a particular date and time in order to be photographed. Uta Barth’s diptych …and of time (2000), where the path of a window’s light and shadow is followed across the wall of the artist’s living room, illustrates something the artist phrased as “ambient vision.”

“The window has been a recurrent and powerful theme for photographers from the beginning of the medium,” explains Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “In a collection such as the Getty’s that is particularly rich in work by important photographers from the beginnings of the medium to the present day, the motif provides a unique way to travel through the history of photography.”

The Window in Photographs (Getty Publications, $24.95, hardcover) investigates the recurrence of windows both as a figurative and literal theme throughout the history of photography. From the very vocabulary we use to describe cameras and photographic processes to the subjects of world-renowned photographers, windows have long held powerful sway over artists working in the medium. When documented on film, windows call into question issues of representation, the malleability of perception, and the viewer’s experience of the photograph itself, and the window’s evocative power is often rooted in the interplay between positive and negative, darkness and light, and inside and out.

Yet despite the ubiquity of windows in photography, this subject has been rarely addressed head on in a single exhibition or publication. From the birth of the Daguerreotype to the development of digital imagery, this volume presents a full account of the motif of the window as a symbol of photographic vision. Its eighty featured colour plates, all drawn from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, allowing the window’s many uses in photography to be highlighted and explored stylistically. Including images from all-star contributors such as Uta Barth, Gregory Crewdson, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Minor White, The Window in Photographs is a remarkable examination of a theme that has inspired photographers for over a century. This book is published to coincide with the exhibition At the Window: The Photographer’s View at the J. Paul Getty Museum from October 1, 2013 to January 5, 2014.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Minor White (American, 1908-1976)
Windowsill Daydreaming, Rochester
Negative July 1958; print 1960
Gelatin silver print, selenium toned
Image: 28.6 x 22.2cm (11 1/4 x 8 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,
Purchased in part with funds provided by the Greenberg Foundation
© Trustees of Princeton University, Minor White Archive

Charles Swedlund (American, b. 1935)
Buffalo, NY
about 1970
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.7 x 15.9cm (7 3/8 x 6 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased in part with funds provided by an anonymous donor in memory of James N. Wood
© Charles Swedlund

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Penny Picture Display, Savannah / Photographer’s Window Display, Birmingham, Alabama / Studio Portraits, Birmingham, Alabama
1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 25.6 x 19.9cm (10 1/16 x 7 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Petit Bacchus, 61, rue St. Louis en l’Ile (The Little Bacchus Café, rue St. Louis en l’Ile)
1901-1902
Albumen silver print
Image: 22.1 x 17.8cm (8 11/16 x 7 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
[From My Window at the Shelton, North]
1931
Gelatin silver print
Image (trimmed to mount): 24.3 x 19.1cm (9 9/16 x 7 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Yuki Onodera (Japanese, b. 1962)
Look Out the Window, No. 18
2000
Gelatin silver print
Image: 59 x 49.2cm (23 1/4 x 19 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Yuki Onodera

Shizuka Yokomizo (Japanese, b. 1966)
Stranger (15)
1998-2000
Chromogenic print
Mount: 124.5 x 104.9cm (49 x 41 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Shizuka Yokomizo

Alex Prager (American, b. 1979)
Megan
2007
Chromogenic print
Framed: 125.7 x 62.9cm (49 1/2 x 24 3/4 in.)
Michael and Jane Wilson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled from the series Twilight
2002
Chromogenic print
Image: 122 x 152cm (48 1/16 x 59 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Trish and Jan de Bont
© Gregory Crewdson

Uta Barth (German, b. 1958)
Untitled (…and of time. #4)
2000
Chromogenic print
Image: 88.9 x 114.3cm (35 x 45 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 2000 Uta Barth

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
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Saturday 10am – 8pm
Sunday 10am – 5.30pm
Monday closed

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Exhibition: ‘Laure Albin Guillot (1879-1962), The Question of Classicism’ at The Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Exhibition dates: 5th June – 1st September 2013

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Nude Study
c. 1940
Collections Roger-Viollet / Parisienne de Photographie
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Six new images in this posting that I have not published before in a previous posting on this exhibition, at a different venue. I love her style and sensuality!

Marcus

Many thankx to The Musée de l’Elysée for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Louis Jouvet
c. 1925
Collections Roger-Viollet / Parisienne de Photographie
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Louis Jouvet (24 December 1887 – 16 August 1951) was a renowned French actor, director, and theatre director.

Overcoming speech impediments and sometimes paralysing stage fright as a young man, Jouvet’s first important association was with Jacques Copeau’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, beginning in 1913. Copeau’s training included a varied and demanding schedule, regular exercise for agility and stamina, and pressing his cast and crew to invent theatrical effects in a bare-bones space. It was there Jouvet developed his considerable stagecraft skills, particularly makeup and lighting (he developed a kind of accent light named the jouvet). These years included a successful tour to the United States.

While influential, Copeau’s theatre was never lucrative. Jouvet left in October 1922 for the Comédie des Champs-Élysées (the small stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées). In December 1923 he staged his single most successful production, the satire Dr. Knock, written by Jules Romains. Jouvet’s meticulous characterisation of the manipulative crank doctor was informed by his own experience in pharmacy school. It became his signature and his standby; “Jouvet was to produce it almost every year until the end of his life”.

Jouvet began an ongoing close collaboration with playwright Jean Giraudoux in 1928, with a radical streamlining of Giraudoux’s 1922 Siegfried et le Limousin for the stage. Their work together included the first staging of The Madwoman of Chaillot in 1945, at the Théâtre de l’Athénée, where Jouvet served as director from 1934 through his death in 1951.

Jouvet starred in some 34 films, including two recordings of Dr. Knock, once in 1933 and again in 1951. He was professor at the French National Academy of Dramatic Arts. He had a heart attack while at his beloved Théâtre de l’Athénée and died in his dressing room on August 16, 1951. Jouvet is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. The Athénée theatre now bears his name.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Louis Jouvet in a scene from Entrée des artistes (Marc Allegret, 1938)

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Off-print for the Mayoly-Spindler laboratory, Paris
c. 1940
Pivate collection, Paris

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Advertisement for the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre
c. 1940
Private collection, Paris

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Jean Cocteau
1939
Private collection, Paris
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Trailer for Beauty and the Beast by Jean Cocteau, narrated by Cocteau himself

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Hubert de Givenchy
1948
Collections Roger-Viollet / Parisienne de Photographie
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

The Fashion Designer and His Muse – Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962), a “resounding name that should become famous”, one could read just after World War II. Indeed, the French photographic scene in the middle of the century was particularly marked by the signature and aura of this artist, who during her lifetime was certainly the most exhibited and recognised, not only for her talent and virtuosity but also for her professional engagement.

The exhibition presented at the Musée de l’Elysée in collaboration with the Jeu de Paume gathers a significant collection of 200 original prints and books by Laure Albin Guillot, as well as magazines and documents of the period from public and private collections. A large number of the original prints and documents on show come from the collections of the Agence Roger-Viollet, in collaboration with Parisienne de Photographie, which acquired Laure Albin Guillot’s studio stock in 1964. Made up of 52,000 negatives and 20,000 prints, this source has made it possible to question the oeuvre and the place that the photographer really occupies in history. The photographer’s work could appear as a counter-current to the French artistic scene of the 1920s to 40s, whose modernity and avant-garde production attract our attention and appeal to current tastes. It is however this photography, incarnating classicism and a certain “French style” that was widely celebrated at the time.

If Laure Albin Guillot’s photography was undeniably in vogue between the wars, her personality remains an enigma.

Paradoxically, very little research has been carried out into the work and career of this artist. Her first works were seen in the salons and publications of the early 1920s, but it was essentially during the 1930s and 40s that Laure Albin Guillot, artist, professional and institutional figure, dominated the photographic arena. As an independent photographer, she practised several genres, including portraiture, the nude, landscape, still life and, to a lesser degree, documentary photography. Technically unrivalled, she raised the practice to a certain elitism. A photographer of her epoch, she used the new means of distribution of the image to provide illustrations and advertising images for the press and publishing industry.

She was notably one of the first in France to consider the decorative use of photography through her formal research into the infinitely tiny. With photomicrography, which she renamed “micrographie”, Laure Albin Guillot offered new creative perspectives in the combination of art and science. Finally, as member of the Société des artistes décorateurs, the Société française de photographie, director of photographic archives for the Direction générale des Beaux-Arts (forerunner of the Ministry of Culture) and director of the project for the Cinémathèque nationale, president of the Union féminine des carrières libérales, she emerges as one of the most active personalities and most aware of the photographic and cultural stakes of the period.

Organised in four parts, the exhibition explores the various aspects of Laure Albin Guillot’s work

Portraits

Laure Albin Guillot began her career in the early 1920s with portraits and fashion photography. Already, her trademark was elegance, her method was quite systematic and she used various artifices: pared-back decor, close-ups, limited depth of field, simple lighting. The sought-after effect of interiority and intimacy was accentuated by inspired poses that translate the sitter’s character as is done by painters. She accepted being compared to the Pictorialists. At the start she was quite close to them in her form and technique, following an aesthetic whose expression was facilitated by her use of lenses that blur (Opale and Eïdoscope). Her sessions were short (never more than twenty minutes), the lamps were positioned to supplement each other and not a detail was left in the shadow thanks to a weaker lighting facing the first; while claiming not to go beyond a certain naturalism, she improved the natural: contours are softened, the diffused light is flattering.

In the exercise of the nude, the photographer privileged the mastery of form over inspiration, she sought a poetic purity, a dematerialisation of the body through the power of the spirit; her nudes are constructed by light, they tend towards the ideal. In complete contrast to the importance of character in the portrait, its reduction to a visual form makes the model into a collection of lines, the face is pushed into the corners, almost rubbed out. Laure Albin Guillot did not practise a fragmented language, she proposed fluid forms that appear simple but in reality are highly worked. The reference to statuary is assumed and provides a wide variety of uses for the photographs, each containing several.

A Decorative Art

After 1918, Paris rediscovered its artistic vocation and the “French style” triumphed at the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts industriels et modernes. Alongside the artists and craftsmen, Laure Albin Guillot exhibited an exceptional series of portraits of decorators. She herself made some kakemonos [a Japanese unframed painting made on paper or silk and displayed as a wall hanging], starting from stylised photographs and, inspired by Japanisation, she had some of her photographs inserted into lacquered wood as screens or fire guards.

In 1931, her book Micrographie décorative won her instant international recognition; the work is a visual curiosity, playing on the ambiguity between the origins of the photographic subject and the nature of the reproduced image. The twenty plates of diatoms, minerals and plants taken through a microscope are as much aesthetic propositions as the magisterial culmination of a reflection shared with her late husband, himself a collector of microscopic preparations. This much publicised publication triggered a series of glowing articles that enthused on the fusion between science and art. The micrographs were declined in wallpaper, silks, bindings and assorted objects. In the debate between partisans and detractors of photography as art, she provided her answer: according to her, photography is a decorative art. Micrographie décorative was to be published with a preface by Paul Léon, Director of Fine Art, in homage to Albin Guillot, deceased in 1929.

Advertising Photography

In 1933, Laure Albin Guillot published Photographie publicitaire (Advertising Photography). This book is one of the rare theoretical works written by a French photographer between the wars. At the time she was known for her portraits, her decorative proposals, her fashion photographs and advertising images. But she was also an institutional figure, director of both the photographic archives of the Beaux-Arts (the future Ministry of Culture) and the Cinémathèque nationale.

Laure Albin Guillot was fully aware of the media and commercial stakes developing around the cinema, radio and the illustrated press. Based on her own experience, she tried with this book to define the role that photography could play in the world of advertising that was taking shape. From the end of the 1920s, she carried out a large number of advertising illustrations. She thus elaborated a repertory of simple, effective and easily understandable visual diagrams. A large proportion of her work concerned luxury products such as fine watchmaking, jewellery or fashion. But she also carried out numerous advertisements for the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries, the newest and most dynamic industrial sectors of the time.

Books and Bibliophile Editions

Laure Albin Guillot’s work was published extensively. The photographer did not work only for the press but also for book publishers, whether it was a matter of portraits of writers for the frontispiece of novels or photographs used here and there in collective works. Between 1934 and 1951, she illustrated no less than eleven books of varying type and subject: novel, school textbook, guide to the Musée du Louvre, prayer book, etc.

In parallel, in collaboration with Paul Valéry, Henry de Montherlant, Marcelle Maurette and Maurice Garçon, she made sumptuous “artist’s books” combining literature and photography. It was with a real strategy of promoting her work that the photographer undertook these works, which were mostly sold by subscription. Their fabrication, luxury and rarity made them true collectors’ pieces at a time when a photography market did not exist (“I made photography an accepted part of bibliophilia,” she would write at the end of her life).

Exhibitions and artist’s books were intimately linked in her method: their publication was heralded by the presentation at a salon or a gallery of sets of prestigious proofs (the large majority pigmented proofs from Ateliers Fresson). Thus, the large-format prints exhibited in this section showing roads or landscapes were probably destined to appear in albums finally not published.

Press release from the The Musée de l’Elysée website

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Micrography, Hippuric Acid
c. 1931
Collection société française de photographie
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Untitled
c. 1935-1940
Collection du Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Paris, 2012
Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Nude Study
1939
Bibliothèque nationale de France
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Nude Study
c. 1938
Collections Roger-Viollet / Parisienne de Photographie
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Les tierces alternées, illustration for Les préludes de Claude Debussy
1948
Musée français de la photographie / Conseil général de l’Essonne, Benoît Chain
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Claude Debussy – Prelude No.10: La cathedrale engloutie – Krystian Zimerman

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Phone: + 41 21 316 99 11

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Photograph: ‘Gregor Arax – Pierre Laurent’ 1948

June 2013

Gregor Arax (Krikor Djololian) (European born Turkey, 1897-1975)
Pierre Laurent
1948
Nice, France

A photograph that I have been scanning for Nick Henderson, the negative of which he bought at auction. A great negative, well exposed, with an unusual background for a physique photograph. American? English? French would you believe. And the only way I know that is my enlarging discarded newspaper at bottom left. It’s fascinates me the information that can be found in old photographs by enlarging details!

More information

Nick says the information on the auction was this:

“Original vintage photographic negative by the renowned French physique photographer Gregor Arax of Pierre Laurent taken in Nice 1948.”

Gregor Arax was France’s greatest physique photographer.

“Gregor Arax of Arax Studio… was a ~~Greek~~ national [this is incorrect, he was born in Turkey], who photographed male nudes in Paris from the 1930’s to 1960’s. He photographed many of the elite bodybuilders of his time, including Steve Reeves.” (text from Vintage Male Physique blog)

More fantastic photographs by Arax can be found on the Vintage Male Physique blog and the Homodesiribus blog.

Finally some more information below on Gregor Arax only published in 2021! He is not Greek as stated above but was born in Turkey.

I wish I knew who the author was, I would like to thank them for the information.

Greatest of all bodybuilding photographers

“Krikor Djololian, as Gregor Arax was officially called, was born on 27 February 1897 in Adapazar (Turkey) in the bosom of a very humble and poor family…

In 1922, Krikor and his mother, Mariam, emigrated to Paris, where he resumed his activities as a photographer. He opens a studio at 9 Rue Papillon which he calls Studio Arax. At the beginning of the 1930s it moved to number 31 Boulevard Raspail. During this stage he devoted himself to studio portraits, ballroom dance championships and working as a photojournalist, collaborating with numerous Armenian and Parisian publications portraying the social life of the Parisian Armenian community. At this stage of his working life, an interest in photographing the French capital during the war, the liberation of Paris and the postwar period will also resurface.

From 1934 to 1975, with a short hiatus caused by the Second World War, he began to collaborate with the British magazine Health and Strength. During this time, he traveled the roads of France in his curious and unique car (a Fiat 500 that was better known by the alias of baby mouse), to photograph and immortalize the winners of the bodybuilding competitions of the federations of ‘physical culture’ in France, and occasionally in Belgium, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. …

A few years after the end of the Second World War, photography related to the cult of the body grew steadily, thus emerging the true Golden Age for physical culture magazines. Obviously, the editors realized the commercial vein of this new photographic product, acquired mostly by an elite public, with great purchasing power, who did not skimp on expenses and who, always or almost always, received them clandestinely under the title of artistic magazines. This product led magazines to publish increasingly sensual and erotic images, but always without showing genitalia, however, those who wanted to get full nude photos (which included erections and rarely explicit sexual acts) could get them by asking for them custom made.

Curiously, in a country as puritanical as the United States was then, it is where the greatest demand arises, which causes photographic studios to proliferate. Arax is quickly claimed by North American publications attracted by his talent and his already consolidated reputation, and without thinking much he joins the bandwagon by expanding his business with a new portfolio of more artistic than sporty physical models, and with a style of posing that he produced. images that used to show frontal nudes with total naturalness, dedicating a large part of their production to these images. In order to carry out the sale by mail of this type of images but to expose the genitals, Arax devised the system of covering with a thin layer of gouache in the shape of a false fig leaf the virile attributes of the model, which disappeared easily with a little water once in the hands of the buyer. …

But if all these years were very prosperous for Arax, they were also quite tumultuous when a group of photographers like him brought to life that phenomenon called photo. beefcake. This word immediately conjures up the image of a young man flaunting his physique, but has actually been used as a blanket term for a genre of photography that is as American as jazz music and yet was actively repressed by the Bureau itself. United States Post Office and censored by law enforcement officials, who believed that the nude male form was inherently pornographic. In the early 1970s, ARAX was so fed up with these persecutions that he went so far as to say: “Comparing my photography to pornography is like comparing classical music to rock and roll.”

Anonymous. “Greatest of all bodybuilding photographers,” on the World Today News website, May 30, 2021 [Online] Cited 21/09/2022

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Exhibition: ‘Concrete – Photography and Architecture’ at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich

Exhibition dates: 2nd March – 20th May 2013

Anonymous photographer
Hardstrasse with Hardbrücke in construction
1972
Gelatin silver print
8.8 x 12.6cm
Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

When creating this archive, so much of my time is spent cleaning up clearly inadequate media images, an example of which can be seen below. I have become very adept at this process and my thoughts are this: would you want to be the artist whose work is displayed to the public in a remarkably decomposed manner, one not up to a standard of any artist who cares about their prints and reputation? I certainly would not. It is a wonder to me that museums and galleries spend thousands of dollars staging exhibitions and producing costly catalogues and yet cannot spend a tiny proportion of time, money and care on their media images to promote artist and said exhibition. I had to spend a lot of time on over half of these images to bring them up to presentable standard.

Having said that, there are some cracking photographs in this posting. The Sugimoto is sublime, Walker Evans so muscular, Lucien Hervé a masterpiece of light and texture, and Moriz Nähr a symphony of light and tone, to name but a few. I hope you enjoy all the effort it takes to bring these images to you.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Michael Wesely (German, b. 1963)
Canadian Embassy, Leipziger Platz, Berlin (5.2.2003 – 28.4.2005)
 C-print
125 x 175cm
Galerie Fahnemann, Berlin
© Michael Wesely/Courtesy Galerie Fahnemann

Michael Wesely (born 1963 in Munich) is a German art photographer who is best known for his photos of cities, buildings, landscapes, and still lives of flowers taken with a special ultra-long exposure technique. …

Wesely’s works deal with the subject of time and the change that takes place over time. Due to the extremely long exposure and the special bulb he uses, those elements that move the least dominate his images, while those moving will later be seen as transparent figures or the outlines of newly erect buildings overlapping. The pictures “reveal the passage of time by showing the changing skyline, the skeletons of cranes. the rise of new buildings, and the disappearance of others. Beams of sunlight, the residue of the ever-changing positions (tithe earth and sun, are also evident, like a palimpsest of seasons”. Everything that ever happened on the scene during exposure (during weeks, months, or even up to two or three years) will be seen in one single picture. Wesely’s photographs have been described as a metaphor on the change of Berlin after 1989 because “at once strikingly energetic and ghostly and uninhabited. This formal paradox aptly describes Berlin, which had only been unified for ten years at the time the images were taken. In that way, the photographs offer a larger commentary on time’s passage.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
The Bridge of Sighs, St. John’s College,  Cambridge
1845
Salt print from calotype negative
16.4 x 20.6cm
Museum Folkwang Essen

Charles Marville (French, 1813-1879)
24, Rue Bièvre, Paris
1865-1869
Albumin print
27.4 x 36.6cm
Collection Thomas Walther

Lucien Hervé (Hungarian, 1910-2007)
Le Corbusier: Façade of the Secretariat Building, Chandigarh, 1961
1961
Gelatin silver print
25.5 x 25.4cm
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
© Estate Lucien Hervé

Lucien Hervé is considered to be one of the great architectural photographers of the 20th century. He collaborated with Le Corbusier from 1949 until the architect’s death in 1965, developing a great rapport. Le Corbusier even once pronounced Hervé to have ‘the soul of an architect.’ In 1949, Hervé travelled from Paris to Marseille to see Le Corbusier’s recently designed housing complex, Unité d’Habitation. Awed by the groundbreaking modern design, Hervé took 650 photographs of it in a single day and it was from then onwards they worked closely with one another.

Through light and shadow, he defined the dialogue between substance and form. By delineating a strong contrast between the light and shadows in his subject as well as placing emphasis on building details, Hervé was able to communicate the depth of a room, the surface of a wall, or the strength of a building’s framework.

Born 1910 in Hungary, Hervé (born László Elkán) moved to Paris at the age of 19 and earned French citizenship in 1938. During World War II, he was captured by the Germans, escaped and became a member of the French Resistance under the name of Lucien Hervé, which he kept thereafter. After the war he left politics behind to write for art journals. It was one of his editors, in fact, who suggested he visit Unité d’Habitation. Hervé began experimenting with photography, over or underexposing images and often severely cropping them to attain unusual compositions following the work of avant-garde artists such as Piet Mondrian, László Moholy-Nagy, and Alexander Rodchenko.

Text from the Michael Hoppen Gallery website

F. C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021)
“Op Art” bathing suit by Sinz, Vouliagmeni/Greece
1966
Gelatin silver print
50 x 50cm
F.C. Gundlach, Hamburg
© F.C. Gundlach

Laurence Bonvin (Swiss, b. 1967)
Blikkiesdorp, Cape Town, South Africa
2009
Inkjet print
40 x 50cm
Courtesy the artist
© Laurence Bonvin

Laurence Bonvin (born 1967 in Sierre) is a Swiss photographer and director living between Berlin, Valais and Lisbon. Her documentary approach has for many years focused on the phenomena of transformation in urban and natural environments.

Architectures and cities are both volumes and images alike. We experience them directly, physically and sensually, as well as through pictures. Pictures speak a language of their own. They offer a discourse that is quite unlike the physical experience of architecture. They transform volume into surface; distil matter into forms and signs – rarely, if ever, leaving it as it is. That is probably why so many architects try to get involved in determining the image of their buildings. Concrete – Photography and Architecture seeks to approach the singular and complex relationship between architecture and photography in light-hearted, narrative and dialectical ways. The exhibition explores issues of history and ideology, as well as the specifics of form and material, in the photographic image.

The visual appeal of destroyed or dilapidated buildings is also addressed, as are their powerful demonstrations of power and exclusivity, fragility and beauty. To what extent does photography influence not only the way architecture is perceived, but also the way it is designed? How does an image bring architecture to life, and at what point does it become uncanny? How do settlements develop into cities? Or, in sociological terms: how do work and life interconnect differently in, say, Zurich and Winterthur, as opposed to, say, Calcutta? And how do skyscrapers and living spaces translate into the flat, two-dimensional world of photography?

Concrete – Photography and Architecture is not, however, chronologically arranged. Instead, it is based on compelling positions, counterpositions and thematic fields that connect various concrete, fundamental and historical aspects. Alongside everyday buildings and prestigious architecture, structured by horizontal and vertical axes, alongside homes and houses, utopian fantasies, design and reality, an important aspect of the exhibition is the compelling appeal of architectural decay due to the passage of time, through both natural and deliberate destruction. It is almost as though photography were providing a moral reminder even such magnificence and presence, whether hewn in stone or cast in concrete, has its weaknesses too.

Architecture has always been an important platform for the frequently heated discussion of ideas and views, zeitgeist and weltanschauung, everyday life and aesthetics. Architecture is the bold materialisation of private and public visions, functionality and avant-garde art alike. It is, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, ideology in stone. Photography and architecture both play an undisputed role in our everyday lives. They confront us on a daily basis, often without our even noticing, and they influence how we think, act and live in subliminal and lasting ways. Concrete – Photography and Architecture provides visual answers to the question of what it is that makes up the intimate yet complex relationship between architecture and photography, architect and photographer.

The exhibition presents more than 400 photographs and groups of works from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Domenico Bresolin and Charles Marville as well as Germaine Krull, Lucia Moholy and Julius Shulman, and spanning an arc to contemporary works by Georg Aerni, Iwan Baan, Luisa Lambri and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Projects such as the long-term observations of Schlieren photography or Wolfgang Scheppe’s Migropolis show how the art of photography is playing an increasingly important role as an instrument of research and knowledge. The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated book published by Scheidegger & Spiess, with some 300 colour and black-and-white pictures, essays by Jochen Becker, Johannes Binotto, Verena Huber Nievergelt, Michael Jakob, Nicoletta Leonardi, Lorenzo Rocha, Caspar Schärer, Aveek Sen and Urs Stahel as well as a conversation with Annette Gigon, Meret Ernst and Armin Linke.

Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website

Guido Guidi (Italian, b. 1941)
#1176 01 29 1997 3:30PM Looking Southeast
From Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion
1997
C print
19.5 x 24.6cm
Courtesy the artist
© Guido Guidi

Guido Guidi (born January 1, 1941) is an Italian photographer. His work, spanning over more than 40 years, has focused in particular on rural and suburban geographies in Italy and Europe. He photographs places that are normally overlooked. His published works include In Between Cities, Guardando a Est, A New Map of Italy and Veramente. …

Guidi began experimenting in the late 1960s with pseudo-documentary images that interrogated photography’s objectivity. Influenced by neorealist film and conceptual art, in the 1970s he began investigating Italy’s man-altered landscape. Working in marginal and decayed spaces with an 8×10 large format camera, he creates dense sequences intended as meditations on the meaning of landscape, photography, and seeing. Later he investigated the life and death of modernist architecture, with projects on Scarpa, van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Photography for Guidi is something autobiographical. It is synonymous with inhabiting, and the camera is the instrument that allows him to observe, appropriate and collect what lies beyond his doorstep.

“Guidi was a leading voice in the resurgence of Italian photography of the 1970s and 1980s”. “Since then, working mostly in colour with a large-format camera, he has patiently returned to the same places – his native Romagna and the area around Venice – documenting the shift from a rural to a post-industrial landscape.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

Tobias Zielony (German, b. 1973)
Le Vele di Scampia
2009
Blu Ray photoanimation
8.57 min
Courtesy Koch Oberhuber Wolff, Berlin
© Tobias Zielony/ KOW

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Seagram Building, New York City
1997
Gelatin silver print
58.4 x 47cm
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
© Hiroshi Sugimoto/Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi Tokyo

Aage Strüwing (Danish, 1913-1989)
Arne Jacobsen: Rødovre Town Hall
1955
Gelatin silver print
23.7 x 17cm
EPFL Archives de la construction moderne, Lausanne
© Estate Strüwing

Moriz Nähr (Austrian, 1859-1945)
 Stiegenhaus im Haus Stonborough-Wittgenstein [Staircase in the house Stonborough-Wittgenstein] (composite cleaned)
1928

Moriz Nähr (Austrian, 1859-1945)
 Stiegenhaus im Haus Stonborough-Wittgenstein (Staircase in the house Stonborough-Wittgenstein)
1928
Silbergelatine Abzug
13.8 x 8.9cm
Albertina, Wien
© Estate Moriz Nähr

Moriz Nähr (1859-1945) is one of the most important innovators of photography in “Vienna around 1900”. His photographic oeuvre is mentioned today in the same breath as that of the famous Parisian photographer Eugène Atget. Nähr enjoyed a life-long artist’s friendship with Gustav Klimt and was connected with the artist through a special network of eminent personalities from the arts, culture and philosophy. Numerous portrait photographs of Klimt emphatically document the two artists’ bond. Klimt was also inspired by Nähr’s photographic motifs, as illustrated by the conformities in the photographer’s pictures and Klimt’s painting Beech Forest I created in 1902. The legends surrounding Moriz Nähr are based on the one hand on his close ties with Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession and on the other hand on his connections with the family of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the imperial Habsburg family, especially with the heir to the throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who appointed him court photographer in 1908. Owing to his work as a freelance photographer as well as to his various commissions, he has left behind a multi-faceted oeuvre comprising not only landscape-, architecture-, and portrait photography but also street photography (Scenes from the Naschmarkt, 1918) as well as photographs documenting exhibitions (Vienna Secession).

Anonymous. “Moriz Nähr: Photographer of Viennese Modernism,” on the Leopold Museum website 2018 [Online] Cited 14/07/2024

Haus Wittgenstein, also known as the Stonborough House and the Wittgenstein House) is a house in the modernist style designed and built on the Kundmanngasse, Vienna, by the Austrian architect Paul Engelmannand the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In November 1925, Wittgenstein’s sister Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein commissioned Engelmann to design and build a large townhouse. Margaret also invited her brother to help with the design in part to distract him from an incident that had happened while he had been a primary school teacher: he had hit a boy for getting an answer wrong and the boy had collapsed. The architect was Paul Engelmann, someone Wittgenstein had come to know while training to be an Artillery Officer in Olmutz. Engelmann designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos: three rectangular blocks. Wittgenstein showed a great interest in the project and in Engelmann’s plans and poured himself into the project for over two years. He focused on the windows, doors, door knobs, and radiators, demanding that every detail be exactly as he specified, to the point where everyone involved in the project was exhausted. One of the architects, Jacques Groag, wrote in a letter: “I come home very depressed with a headache after a day of the worst quarrels, disputes, vexations, and this happens often. Mostly between me and Wittgenstein.” When the house was nearly finished he had a ceiling raised 30mm so the room had the exact proportions he wanted.

Waugh writes that Margaret eventually refused to pay for the changes Wittgenstein kept demanding, so he bought himself a lottery ticket in the hope of paying for things that way. It took him a year to design the door handles, and another to design the radiators. Each window was covered by a metal screen that weighed 150 kg, moved by a pulley Wittgenstein designed. Bernhard Leitner, author of The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein, said of it that there is barely anything comparable in the history of interior design: “It is as ingenious as it is expensive. A metal curtain that could be lowered into the floor.”

The house was finished by December 1928, and the family gathered there that Christmas to celebrate its completion. Describing the work, Ludwig’s eldest sister, Hermine, wrote: “Even though I admired the house very much, I always knew that I neither wanted to, nor could, live in it myself. It seemed indeed to be much more a dwelling for the gods than for a small mortal like me”. Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s brother, disliked it, and when Margaret’s nephew came to sell it, he reportedly did so on the grounds that she had never liked it either. Wittgenstein himself found the house too austere, saying it had good manners, but no primordial life or health. He nevertheless seemed committed to the idea of becoming an architect: the Vienna City Directory listed him as “Dr Ludwig Wittgenstein, occupation: architect” between 1933 and 1938.

After World War II, the house became a barracks and stables for Russian soldiers. It was owned by Thomas Stonborough, son of Margaret until 1968 when it was sold to a developer for demolition. For two years after this the house was under threat of demolition. The Vienna Landmark Commission saved it – after a campaign by Bernhard Leitner – and made it a national monument in 1971, and since 1975 it has housed the cultural department of the Bulgarian Embassy.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Lala Aufsberg (German, 1907-1976)
Cathedral of Light
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
24 x 18cm
Town Archive Nuremberg
© Photo Marburg

Lala Aufsberg (actually, Ida Louise Aufsberg, born 26 February 1907 in Sonthofen, May 18, 1976) was a well-known art photographer. After attending primary school and six years of school for Higher daughters in Immenstadt she began training for the 1932 photo dealer in Oberstdorf. After completion of the training Lala Aufsberg moved to Nuremberg, where she worked in the photographers’ studios of Seitz and Rosemary. In 1931 she joined the photo club of friends of photography in Nuremberg.

From April 1938 Lala Aufsberg attended the State School of Applied Arts and Crafts in Weimar, Department Lichtbildnerei at Walter Hege. In July 1938, she passed the exam for the master photographer’s craft, and in the same year returned to Sonthofen and opened a photographic studio. In the years 1937 and 1938 she documented the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg (see above photograph). She received her first artistic job in the years 1941-1942, in which she photographed the murals in churches and monasteries in Carinthia and Styria. Owned by the University of Marburg “German documentation center for art history” – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (listed in UNESCO Archives Portal) acquired 1976/1977 and 1996, the Lala-Aufsberg archive with about 46,000 art history, black and white negatives in sizes 6 x 6 and 9 x 12 and 103,000 photos.

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
 Chrysler Building under construction, New York
1929
Gelatin silver print
16.8 x 8.3cm
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45 CH-8400
Winterthur (Zürich)

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11am – 6pm
Wednesday 11am – 8pm
Closed on Mondays

Fotomuseum Winterthur website

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Exhibition: ‘Gilles Caron, The Conflict Within’ at The Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Exhibition dates: 30th January – 12th May 2013

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Battle of Dak To, Vietnam, November 1967
1967
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Dead at 30

Died so young

Probably at the barrel of a snub nosed gun.

Guilt, narcissism, parody or irony

Doesn’t matter now

He’s dead…

Photos live on

Many thankx to the Musée de l’Elysée Lausanne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Transport of a victim of the famine of the Civil War in Biafra, July 1968
1968
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Protest rue Saint-Jacques, Paris, 6 May 1968
1968
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Demonstration at the first anniversary of the Soviet repression of “Spring in Prague”, Czechoslovakia, 21 August, 1969
1969
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
American Patrol during the Vietnam War 1967
1967
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Israeli Soldiers at the Wailing Wall at the end of the Six Day War in 1967
1967
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
General Moshe Dayan June 1967
1967
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Visual memory of an epoch, Gilles Caron (1939-1970) has chronicled the greatest contemporary conflicts through his images (Six-Day War, Vietnam War, Biafra and Northern Ireland conflicts, May 68, Prague Spring…), a commitment that eventually cost him his life while on assignment in Cambodia. Called up as a parachutist to serve in the Algerian War, Caron became a witness to the brutality inflicted on civilians. Through photojournalism, he sought to cross to the other side in order to contribute to a better understanding of how populations caught up in the spiral of war were living.

His initial heroic vision of war photography soon turned into a reflection on the purpose of his job: can the role of witness, mere spectator, be satisfying? He is one of the first photographers to suffer symptoms from this inner moral conflict, and one of the first to practice a form of introspective disenchantment that led the reporter to gradually turn his camera on him, to become the object of the photographic narrative.

In the early stages of his career, during the Six-Day War and in Vietnam, he chose to focus on inactive figures, soldiers or prisoners absorbed in their thoughts, writing or meditating. During the Biafra War, Caron seemed particularly compassionate for the condition of children and other victims. In May 68 and in Northern Ireland, he was mainly interested in emblematic actors – demonstrators throwing stones or Molotov cocktails – as incarnations of urban guerilla. His inventiveness was never more visible than in his reports on street fighting where, through his lens, demonstrations seemed transformed into choreographies.

A war reporter, regularly exposed to extreme conditions, Caron was however not indifferent to the spectacle of the sixties, the Nouvelle Vague and the young musical scene. He would on occasion photograph on the film sets of Godard or Truffaut and even worked as a fashion photographer. These ventures into cinema and fashion might seem quite remote from the rest of his work but they clearly influenced his formal language, as demonstrated in his reports on the protests in the Latin Quarter or Ulster. The exhibition ends with an anti-heroic portrait of the photojournalist. Essential for the history of photojournalism, this conclusion proves that Caron’s conscience, along that of other photojournalists, became quite an unhappy one at the end of the 60s. Guilt, narcissism, parody or irony… In the end, it is difficult to figure out what image of themselves reporters are making.

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Battle of Dak To, Vietnam, November – December 1967
1967
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Daniel Cohn-Bendit facing a CRS in front of the Sorbonne, Paris, 6 May 1968
1968
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité

The Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, abbreviated CRS, are the general reserve of the French National Police. They are primarily involved in general security missions but the task for which they are best known is crowd and riot control.

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Protest rue Saint-Jacques, Paris, 6 May 1968
1968
© Fondation Gilles Caron

The exhibition presented at the Musée de l’Elysée is Caron’s first major retrospective. Comprising 150 prints and archival documents from the Fondation Gilles Caron, the collection of the Musée de l’Elysée and private collections, the exhibition is an opportunity to rediscover in six parts one of the major photojournalists of the 20th century through an original approach.

1. Heroism

Here and Now: Named the “French Capa” by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Caron’s images highlighting the different scenes of military operations are evidence to his audacity and talents as a reporter.

2. Making History?

The contemplative soldier: This section illustrates a recurring theme in Caron’s work of individuals who are absorbed, and/or made fragile and vulnerable by their surrounding events: military prisoners, civilian victims, soldiers shown reading or in reflection, become iconographic images of unedited, and spontaneous moments of stillness.

3. Sympathy

Compassionate Icons: In these photographs, beginning with the war in Biafra and extending across Caron’s travels one sees the deep sensibility of the photographer unfold in his images as Caron must face the very real pain of others. The images of children, starving and void of childhood innocence whom have been sacrificed in conflict mark the beginning of concerned photographic iconography.

4. Demonstrations and guerrilla

The iconography of revolt: In the images of revolt, be that workers, farmers, or students, Caron gives particular iconic importance to the figure of the “lanceur”: like David against Goliath. This representation of the body in action is like a repeated choreography which is performed spontaneously across the fronts of rebellion in Paris, on May 1968, Londonderry (Northern Ireland) and Prague.

5. Nouvelle Vague

Young and passionate in the 60s: In addition to his work in areas of conflict, famine, and war, Caron also gives photography a unique view of the youth of the 1960’s. With images of famous muses (actresses and singers) as well as of university students, and youth on the street, Caron shows his talents for fashion photography and film stills developed during his work with Truffaut and Godard.

6. The last image

Looking at the reporter: After Biafra and Chad, doubt took hold of Caron. The lens of the camera turns back upon the reporter, and these images document the work of the photojournalist in the field. These portraits leave viewers with a mixed message, this is his own profession but the images are in no way heroic portrayals of the work of the photojournalist.

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Civil War in Biafra, Nigeria, November 1968
1968
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Vietnam, November 1967
1967
© Fondation Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Filmmaker and photographer Raymond Depardon, during the Civil War in Biafra, Nigéria, August 1968
1968
© Fondation Gilles Caron

The Musée de l’Elysée
18, avenue de l’Elysée
CH – 1014 Lausanne
Phone: + 41 21 316 99 11

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Monday, 10am – 6pm
Closed Tuesdays

The Musée de l’Elysée website

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Exhibition: ‘Laure Albin Guillot: The Question of Classicism’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 26th February – 12th May 2013

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

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Estampe pour F. Marquis chocolatier-confiseur, Paris (Print for F. Marquis chocolate maker, Paris)
Sans date (without date)
Collection particulière, Paris

The ravishing sensuality of the nudes make all the hours spent assembling this archive worthwhile!

Marcus

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

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Étude publicitaire (Advertising study)
Sans date (without date)
Collection Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Les tierces alternées, illustration pour les Préludes de Claude Debussy (The third alternative, illustration for Claude Debussy Preludes)
1948
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Publicité pour la pommade-vaccin Salantale (Advertisement for Salantale ointment vaccine)
1942
Bibliothèque nationale de France

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Micrographie
1929
Collection particulière, Paris
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Micrographie, bourgeon de Frêne (coupe)
1930
Collection Société française de photographie
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Micrographie
1929
Collections Roger-Viollet / Parisienne de Photographie
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (Paris, 1879-1962), a “resounding name that should become famous”, one could read just after World War II. Indeed, the French photographic scene in the middle of the century was particularly marked by the signature and aura of this artist, who during her lifetime was certainly the most exhibited and recognised, not only for her talent and virtuosity but also for her professional engagement.

Organised in four parts, the exhibition, Laure Albin Guillot: The Question of Classicism allows one to discover her art of portraiture and the nude, her active role in the advertising world, her printed work and, at last, a significant gathering of her “micrographies décoratives”, stupefying photographs of microscopic preparations that made her renown in 1931. The exhibition presented at the Jeu de Paume gathers a significant collection of 200 original prints and books by Laure Albin Guillot, as well as magazines and documents of the period from public and private collections, such as the Parisienne de Photographie, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée Nicéphore Niépce (Chalon-sur-Saône) and the Musée Français de la Photographie (Bièvres).

A large number of the original prints and documents on show come from the collections of the Agence Roger-Viollet, which acquired Laure Albin Guillot’s studio stock in 1964. This archive, which now belongs to the City of Paris, recently became accessible after a long inventory process. Made up of 52,000 negatives and 20,000 prints, this source has made it possible to question the oeuvre and the place that the photographer really occupies in history. The photographer’s work could appear as a counter-current to the French artistic scene of the 1920s to 40s, whose modernity and avant-garde production attract our attention and appeal to current tastes. It is however this photography, incarnating classicism and a certain “French style” that was widely celebrated at the time.

If Laure Albin Guillot’s photography was undeniably in vogue between the wars, her personality remains an enigma. Paradoxically, very little research has been carried out into the work and career of this artist. Her first works were seen in the salons and publications of the early 1920s, but it was essentially during the 1930s and 40s that Laure Albin Guillot, artist, professional and institutional figure, dominated the photographic arena. As an independent photographer, she practised several genres, including portraiture, the nude, landscape, still life and, to a lesser degree, documentary photography. Technically unrivalled, she raised the practice to a certain elitism. A photographer of her epoch, she used the new means of distribution of the image to provide illustrations and advertising images for the press and publishing industry.

She was notably one of the first in France to consider the decorative use of photography through her formal research into the infinitely tiny. With photomicrography, which she renamed “micrographie”, Laure Albin Guillot thus offered new creative perspectives in the combination of art and science. Finally, as member of the Société des artistes décorateurs, the Société Française de Photographie, director of photographic archives for the Direction générale des Beaux-Arts (forerunner of the Ministry of Culture) and first curator of the Cinémathèque nationale, president of the Union Féminine des Carrières Libérales, she emerges as one of the most active personalities and most aware of the photographic and cultural stakes of the period.

Press release from the Jeu de Paume website

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Illustration pour ‘Le Narcisse’ de Paul Valéry
1936
Collection particulière, Paris
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Lucienne Boyer
1935
Collections Roger-Viollet / Parisienne de Photographie
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Autoportrait
1935
Collection Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Jean Cocteau
1939
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Hubert de Givenchy
1948
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Étude de nu
1930s
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Étude de nu
1939
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Étude de nu
1939
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Nudite de Jeune Femme (Nude of a Young Woman)
c. 1950
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Étude de nu
1935
Collections Roger-Viollet / Parisienne de Photographie
© Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet

Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962)
Sans titre [women with crossed legs on a plinth]
1937
Collection musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône

Jeu de Paume
1, Place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
métro Concorde
Phone: 01 47 03 12 50

Opening hours:
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From Wednesday to Sunday: 11am – 7pm
Closed Monday

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Exhibition: ‘Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop’ at The National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exhibition dates: 17th February – 5th May 2013

Unknown photographer (American)
He Lost His Head
Nd

Further images from this impressive exhibition devoted to the art of photographic manipulation before the advent of digital imagery from its second stop, at The National Gallery of Art, Washington.

See the first posting on this exhibition.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830-1901)
Fading Away
1858
Albumen silver print from glass negatives

“I am far from saying that a photograph must be an actual, literal, and absolute fact … but it must represent truth. Truth and fact are not only two words, but, in art at least, they represent two things. A fact is anything done or that exists – a reality. Truth is conformity to fact or reality – absence of falsehood. So that truth in art may exist without an absolute observance of facts.”

~ Henry Peach Robinson

Henry Peach Robinson (British, 1830-1901)
She Never Told Her Love
1857
Albumen silver print from glass negative
18 x 23.2cm (7 1/16 x 9 1/8in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2005

Consumed by the passion of unrequited love, a young woman lies suspended in the dark space of her unrealised dreams in Henry Peach Robinson’s illustration of the Shakespearean verse “She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek” (Twelfth Night II, iv, 111-13). Although this picture was exhibited by Robinson as a discrete work, it also served as a study for the central figure in his most famous photograph, Fading Away, of 1858.

Purportedly showing a young consumptive surrounded by family in her final moments, Fading Away was hotly debated for years. On the one hand, Robinson was criticised for the presumed indelicacy of having invaded the death chamber at the most private of moments. On the other, those who recognised the scene as having been staged and who understood that Robinson had created the picture through combination printing (a technique that utilised several negatives to create a single printed image) accused him of dishonestly using a medium whose chief virtue was its truthfulness.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Wm. Notman & Son, Montreal, Eugène L’Africain, William Notman
Red Cap Snow Shoe Club, Halifax, Nova Scotia
c. 1888
Collage of albumen prints with applied media
71.1 x 83.8cm (28 x 33 in.)
McCord Museum, Montreal

Notman established his first photography studio in Montreal in 1856 and relentlessly expanded his operations over the next two decades. At its peak, his company had twenty-four branches throughout Canada and New England, making it the most successful photographic enterprise in North America at the time. Notman specialised in composite portraits of large groups, including sporting clubs, trade associations, family gatherings, clergymen, and college graduates, some featuring more than four hundred figures. Each figure in a group was photographed separately in the studio then printed at the proper scale and pasted onto a painted background, as in this portrait of a Nova Scotia snowshoe club. The entire collage was then re-photographed. The final, relatively seamless tableau could then be printed and sold in a variety of sizes and formats.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
 The Pond – Moonrise
1904
Platinum print with applied colour  image
39.7 x 48.2cm (15 5/8 x 19 in.)
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Permission Estate of Edward Steichen. All rights reserved

Using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen achieved prints of such painterly seductiveness they have never been equaled. This view of a pond in the woods at Mamaroneck, New York is subtly coloured as Whistler’s Nocturnes, and like them, is a tone poem of twilight, in-distinction, and suggestiveness. Commenting on such pictures in 1910, Charles Caffin wrote in Camera Work: “It is in the penumbra, between the clear visibility of things and their total extinction into darkness, when the concreteness of appearances becomes merged in half-realised, half-baffled vision, that spirit seems to disengage itself from matter to envelop it with a mystery of soul-suggestion.”

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999)
Max Ernst
1946
Gelatin silver print
19.2 x 23.97cm (7 9/16 x 9 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation

The National Gallery of Art presents the first major exhibition devoted to the art of photographic manipulation before the advent of digital imagery. Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop will be on view in the West Building’s Ground Floor galleries from February 17 through May 5, 2013, following its debut at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (from October 11, 2012, through January 27, 2013). In June it travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

“Following in its tradition of exhibiting and collecting the finest examples of photography, the Gallery is pleased to present some 200 photographs from the 1840s through the 1980s demonstrating the medium’s complicated relationship to truth in representation,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “We are grateful to the many lenders, both public and private, who have generously shared works from their collections – especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest lender and the organiser of this fascinating exhibition.”

The Exhibition

This is the first major exhibition devoted to the history of manipulated photography before the digital age. While the widespread use of Adobe® Photoshop® software has brought about an increased awareness of the degree to which photographs can be doctored, photographers – including such major artists as Gustave Le Gray, Edward Steichen, Weegee, and Richard Avedon – have been fabricating, modifying, and otherwise manipulating camera images since the medium was first invented. This exhibition demonstrates that today’s digitally manipulated images are part of a continuum that extends back to photography’s first decades. Through visually captivating pictures created in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, Faking It not only traces the medium’s complex and changing relationship to visual truth, but also significantly revises our understanding of photographic history.

Organised thematically, the exhibition begins with some of the earliest instances of photographic manipulation – those attempting to compensate for the new medium’s technical limitations. In the 19th century, many photographers hand tinted portraits to make them appear more vivid and lifelike. Others composed large group portraits by photographing individuals separately in the studio and creating a collage by pasting them onto painted backgrounds depicting outdoor scenes. As the art and craft of photography grew increasingly sophisticated, photographers devised a staggering array of techniques with which to manipulate their images, including combination printing, photomontage, overpainting, ink and airbrush retouching, sandwiched negatives, multiple exposures, and other darkroom magic.

The exhibition presents a superb selection of manually altered photographs created under the mantle of art, including 19th-century genre scenes composed of multiple negatives, stunning Pictorialist landscapes from the turn of the 19th century, and the pre-digital dreamscapes of surrealist photographers in the 1920s and 1930s. A section of doctored images made for political or ideological ends includes faked composite photographs of the 1871 Paris Commune massacres, anti-Nazi photomontages by John Heartfield, and falsified images from Stalin-era Soviet Russia. The show also explores popular uses of photographic manipulation such as spirit photography, tall-tale and fantasy postcards, advertising and fashion spreads, and doctored news images.

The final section features the work of contemporary artists – including Duane Michals, Jerry Uelsmann, and Yves Klein – who have reclaimed earlier techniques of image manipulation to creatively question photography’s presumed objectivity. By tracing the history of photographic manipulation from the 1840s to the present, Faking It vividly demonstrates that photography is – and always has been – a medium of fabricated truths and artful lies.

Press release from the National Gallery of Art website

Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901)
Seated man with Brattle Street Church seen through window
1850s
Daguerreotype
21.6 x 16.5cm (8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.)
The Isenburg Collection at AMC Toronto

George Washington Wilson (Scottish, 1823-1893)
Aberdeen Portraits No. 1
1857
Albumen silver print from glass negative

Unknown (American)
[Decapitated Man with Head on a Platter]
c. 1865
Tintype with applied colour
8.4 x 6cm (3 5/16 x 2 3/8 in.)
© International Center of Photography, Gift of Steven Kasher and Susan Spungen Kasher, 2008

Unidentified photographer (American)
Susan M. Davis
1865
Salted paper print from glass negative, with applied color

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Cape Horn, Columbia River, Oregon
1867, printed 1880-1890
Albumen silver print from glass negatives
52.3 x 40.4cm (20 9/16 x 15 7/8 in.)
© George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester

Watkins, the consummate photographer of the American West, combined a virtuoso mastery of the difficult wet plate negative process with a rigorous sense of pictorial structure. For large-format landscape work such as Watkins produced along the Columbia River in Oregon, the physical demands were great. Since there was as yet no practical means of enlarging, Watkins’s glass negatives had to be as large as he wished the prints to be, and his camera large enough to accommodate them. Furthermore, the glass negatives had to be coated, exposed, and developed while the collodion remained tacky, requiring the photographer to transport a traveling darkroom as he explored the rugged virgin terrain of the American West. The crystalline clarity of Watkins’s remarkable “mammoth” prints is unmatched in the work of any of his contemporaries and is approached by few artists working today. Here the clouds have been printed in (compare to the work below)

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Cape Horn, Columbia River, Oregon
1867
Albumen silver print from glass negative
52.1 x 39cm (20 1/2 x 15 3/8 in.)

J.C. Higgins and Son (American)
Man in bottle
c. 1888
Albumen print
13.5 x 10cm (5 5/16 x 3 15/16 in.)
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Susan and Thomas Dunn Gift, 2011

Unknown Photographer (German)
Ein kräftiger Zusammenstoss (A Powerfull Collision)
1914
Gelatin silver print
8.7 x 13.7cm (3 7/16 x 5 3/8 in.)
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2010

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Le simulateur
1936
Gelatin silver print
29.2 x 22.9cm (11 1/2 x 9 in.)
Collection of The Sack Photographic Trust for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Maar’s haunting photomontages of the mid-1930s evoke a mood of oneiric ambiguity. Here, the world is turned literally upside-down: a boy bends sharply backward, echoing the curve of the vaulted ceiling on which he stands. On the print, Maar scratched out the figure’s eyes, exploiting Surrealism’s strong association of blindness with inner sight.

Bill Brandt (English born Germany, 1904-1983
London (Multiple Exposure Nude)
1956
Gelatin silver print with applied media

Weegee (Arthur Felig) (American born Hungary, 1899-1968)
Times Square, New York
1952-1959
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 17.8cm (8 x 7 in.)
© International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993

Famous for his gritty tabloid crime photographs, Weegee devoted the last twenty years of his life to what he called his “creative work.” He experimented prolifically with distorting lenses and comparable darkroom techniques, producing photo caricatures of politicians and Hollywood celebrities, novel variations on the man-in-the-bottle motif, and uncanny doublings and reflections, such as this striking image, which he described as “Times Square under 10 feet of water on a sunny afternoon.”

Jerry N. Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1976
Gelatin silver print
49.3 x 36cm (19 7/16 x 14 3/16 in.)
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1981
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ © Jerry N. Uelsmann

Jerry Norman Uelsmann (June 11, 1934 – April 4, 2022) was an American photographer.

As an emerging artist in the 1960s, Jerry Uelsmann received international recognition for surreal, enigmatic photographs (photomontages) made with his unique method of composite printing and his dedication to revealing the deepest emotions of the human condition. Over the next six decades, his contributions to contemporary photography were firmly established with important exhibitions, prestigious awards and numerous publications. Among his awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment, Royal Photographic Society Fellowship, and Lucie Award.

Uelsmann described his creative process as a journey of discovery in the darkroom (visual research laboratory). Going against the established practice of previsualization (Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and others), he coined a new term, post-visualization. He decided the contents of the final print after rather than before pressing the shutter button. Uelsmann constructed his dreams like a visual poet with results that often seemed emotionally more real than the factual world. By the 1980s he became one of the most collected photographers in America. His work influenced generations of both analog and digital photographers. Although he admired digital photography, he remained completely dedicated to the alchemy of film photography in the black and white darkroom.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Kathy Grove (American, b. 1948)
The Other Series (After Kertész)
1989-1990
Gelatin silver print
19.7 x 15.2cm (7 3/4 x 6 in.)
Purchase, Charina Foundation Inc. Gift, 2010
© Kathy Grove

In the late 1980s Grove, an artist who supports herself as a professional photo retoucher, began seamlessly altering images of famous works of art, using bleach, dyes, and airbrush to remove the female figure from each image and leaving the rest of the scene intact. Her cunning excisions mimic the process by which art historians, echoing the culture at large, have erased the achievements of actual women while enshrining Woman as a blank screen upon which the ideas and desires of both artist and viewer are projected. If photographs are presumed to represent the truth, Grove’s pictures remind us to ask: Whose truth?

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston – Posting Part 4

Exhibition dates: 11th November 2012 – 3rd February 2013

Anonymous photographer
Under blue & gray – Gettysburg
July 1913
Photo shows the Gettysburg Reunion (the Great Reunion) of July 1913, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Part 4 of the biggest posting on one exhibition that I have ever undertaken on Art Blart!

As befits the gravity of the subject matter this posting is so humongous that I have had to split it into 4 separate postings. This is how to research and stage a contemporary photography exhibition that fully explores its theme. The curators reviewed more than one million photographs in 17 countries, locating pictures in archives, military libraries, museums, private collections, historical societies and news agencies; in the personal files of photographers and service personnel; and at two annual photojournalism festivals producing an exhibition that features 26 sections (an inspired and thoughtful selection) that includes nearly 500 objects that illuminate all aspects of WAR / PHOTOGRAPHY.

I have spent hours researching and finding photographs on the Internet to support the posting. It has been a great learning experience and my admiration for photographers of all types has increased. I have discovered the photographs and stories of new image makers that I did not know and some enlightenment along the way. I despise war, I detest the state and the military that propagate it and I surely hate the power, the money and the ethics of big business that support such a disciplinarian structure for their own ends. I hope you meditate on the images in this monster posting, an exhibition on a subject matter that should be consigned to the history books of human evolution.

**Please be aware that there are graphic photographs in all of these postings.** Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Memorials

25. Photographs in the “Memorials” section range from the tomb of an unknown World War I soldier in England, by Horace Nicholls; and a landscape of black German crosses throughout a World War II burial site, by Bertrand Carrière; to an anonymous photograph of a reunion scene in Gettysburg of the opposing sides in the Civil War; and Joel Sternfeld’s picture of a woman and her daughter at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, in 1986. (8 images)

Horace Nicholls (English, 1867-1941)
The Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey, London, November 1920
1920
Silver gelatin print
© IWM (Q 31514)

In order to commemorate the many soldiers with no known grave, it was decided to bury an ‘Unknown Warrior’ with all due ceremony in Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day in 1920. The photograph shows the coffin resting on a cloth in the nave of Westminster Abbey before the ceremony at the Cenotaph and its final burial.

Bertrand Carrière (Canadian, b. 1957)
Untitled
2005-2009
From the series Lieux Mêmes [Same Places]

Joel Sternfeld (American, b. 1944)
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C.,
May 1986
Chromogenic print, ed. #1/25 (printed October 1986)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Target Collection of American Photography, gift of the artist
© 1986 Joel Sternfeld

Remembrance

26. The last gallery in the exhibition is “Remembrance.” Most of these images were taken by artists seeking to come to terms with a conflict after fighting had ceased. Included are Richard Avedon’s picture of a Vietnamese napalm victim; a survivor of a machete attack in a Rwandan death camp, by James Nachtwey; a 1986 portrait of a hero who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, by Houston native Gay Block; and Suzanne Opton’s 2004 portrait of a soldier who survived the Iraq War and returned to the United States to work as a police officer, only to be murdered on duty by a fellow veteran. The final wall features photographs by Simon Norfolk of sunrises at the five D-Day beaches in 2004. The only reference to war is the title of the series: The Normandy Beaches: We Are Making a New World. (33 images)

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Napalm Victim #1, Saigon, South Vietnam, April 29, 1971
1971
Silver gelatin print
© Richard Avedon

Gay Block (American, b. 1942)
Zofia Baniecka, Poland
1986
From the series Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, a record of non-Jewish citizens from European countries who risked their lives helping to hide Jews from the Nazis
Chromogenic print, printed 1994
Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Clinton T. Wilour in honour of Eve France

Zofia Baniecka (born 1917 in Warsaw – 1993) was a Polish member of the Resistance during World War II. In addition to relaying guns and other materials to resistance fighters, Baniecka and her mother rescued over 50 Jews in their home between 1941 and 1944.

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1948)
A Hutu man who did not support the genocide had been imprisoned in the concentration camp, was starved and attacked with machetes. He managed to survive after he was freed and was placed in the care of the Red Cross, Rwanda, 1994
1994
Silver gelatin print
© James Nachtwey / TIME

World Press Photo of the Year, prize singles

A Hutu man at a Red Cross hospital in Nyanza, Rwanda. His face was mutilated by the Hutu ‘Interahamwe’ militia, who suspected him of sympathising with the Tutsi rebels.

Liberated from a nearby Hutu camp, where mainly Tutsis were incarcerated, starved, beaten, and killed, this man did not support the genocide and was thus subjected to the same treatment. Starved and attacked with machetes, he had managed to survive, though he was unable to speak and could barely walk or swallow when this photo was made.

Jibran Abbasi. “Mutilated By The Hutu ‘Interahamwe’ by James Nachtwey,” on the Business Recorder website April 5, 2017 [Online] Cited 27/07/2024

Simon Norfolk (British born Nigeria, b. 1963)
Sword Beach
2004
From the series The Normandy Beaches: We Are Making a New World
Chromogenic print, ed. #1/10 (printed 2006)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Gift of Bari and David Fishel, Brooke and Dan Feather and Hayley Herzstein in honor of Max Herzstein and a partial gift of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica
© Simon Norfolk / Gallery Luisotti

WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY Extended Info

Other photographs from the exhibition

Alexander Gardner (American, 1821-1882)
Scouts and Guides to the Army of the Potomac, Berlin, MD, October, 1862
October 1862
Albumen silver print
Photograph by Alexander Gardner, from “Incidents of the War. Guide to the Army of the Potomac,” from Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Washington
Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, Record Group 165, National Archives Still Picture Branch, College Park, Maryland

Alexander Gardner (American, 1821-1882)
The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter / Dead Confederate soldier in the devil’s den, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
July 1863
Albumen paper print copied from glass, wet collodion negative
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Josiah Barnes (Australian, 1858-1921)
Embarkation of HMAT Ajana, Melbourne, July 8, 1916
1916
Gelatin silver print from original glass half-plate negative (printed 2012)
On loan from the Australian War Memorial

Wesley D. Archer (American, d. 1952)
Just as he left the burning plane
1933
From the publication Death in the Air: The War Diary and Photographs of a Flying Corps Pilot

The typewritten script of a First World War pilot’s diary with a large number of photographs was submitted to the publishers William Heinemann and published by them in 1933. Heinemann stated on the book’s jacket that the diary contained no names, dates, or anything that could reveal the identity of the writer or the squadron in which he served. The publishers understood that the diarist was killed in action in 1918 and that it was in deference to the wishes of those who were close to him that his diary should be published.

So remarkable were the photographs that their veracity was immediately questioned, but no proof of their authenticity or otherwise could be ascertained. It was not until 1983 that a collection of documents, photographs and artifacts was presented to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Some of the photographs were recognized as being those of the mystery diarist and the truth was soon revealed.

The author was Wesley Archer, an American with Canadian parents who served with the RFC in the First World War, and the photographs and diary had been faked.

Text from the Google Books website

For more information on the faked photographs see the article “How dramatic images of WWI dogfights in the skies of Europe were FAKED by a conman who was just looking to make some money”.

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Soldier
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print, printed by Gunther Sander, 1960s
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Gift of John S. and Nancy Nolan Parsley in honour of the 65th birthday of Anne Wilkes Tucker
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK StiftungKultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London 2012

Arkady Shaikhet (Soviet, 1898-1959)
Partisan Girl
1942
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Marion Mundy
© Arkady Shaikhet Estate, Moscow

Anonymous photographer
U.S. Department of Defense
US Coast Guard crew of cutter Spencer watched as a depth charge exploded near U-175, North Atlantic, 500nm WSW of Ireland, 17 Apr 1943
17 April 1943
Public domain

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Wounded, dying infant found by American soldier in Saipan Mountains
June 1944
Gelatin silver print
© W. Eugene Smith

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
World War II. The Pacific Campaign. The Battle of Iwo Jima (Japanese island). US Marine demolition team blasting out a cave on Hill 382. Iwo Jima. February, 1945
1945
Gelatin silver print
© W. Eugene Smith

Joseph Schwartz (American, 1913–2013)
Hold the Phone – Two Marine wiremen on Iwo Jima race across an open field, under heavy enemy fire to establish field telephone contact with the front lines
February 19, 1945, printed early 1950s
Gelatin silver print mounted on board
18 13/16 × 14 15/16 in. (47.8 × 37.9cm)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Museum purchase funded by Knox Nunnally at “One Great Night in November, 2009,” in honor of Houston trial lawyer Joe Reynolds, a U.S. Marine who fought on Iwo Jima

Anonymous photographer
U.S. Department of Defense / USMC Official Photograph
PLASMA WARD – Navy doctors and corpsmen administer to wounded Marines at an aid station established in a gully on Iwo Jima. The high casualty rate in this operation required the use of gallons of plasma and whole blood sent by air from the West Coast
1945
Gelatin silver print
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

U.S. Navy Photographic Team
U.S. and British Warships Anchored in Sagami Wan, Outside of Tokyo Bay, Japan, on the Day the Allied Ships Entered Japanese Waters
27th August 1945
Gelatin silver print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Laura and Tony Visage in honor and memory of William A. Visage and his fellow soldiers in Battery “E” of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, U.S. Army Air Corps

Matsumoto Eiichi (Japanese, 1915-2004)
Shadow of a soldier remaining on the wooden wall of the Nagasaki military headquarters (Minami-Yamate machi, 4.5km from Ground Zero)
1945
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
© Matsumoto Eiichi

Unknown photographer
A pair of M-40 155mm Gun Motor Carriages of Battery B, 937th Field Artillery Battalion, providing fire support to U.S. Army 25th Infantry Division, Munema, Korea
26 November 1951
Gelatin silver print
U.S. Department of Defense

Cathy LeRoy (French, 1944-2006)
Corpsman In Anguish
1967
Gelatin silver print

Her pictures from Vietnam were stunning. Her photos from Battle of Hill 881 evoked “ghosts of Iwo Jima and Pork Chop Hill,” Time magazine wrote in May 1967. Her photos of corpsman Vernon Wike during the battle was a triptych of an all-too-familiar scene: in the first, Wike has two hands on his friend’s chest, trying to staunch the wound; in the second, he tries to find a heartbeat; in the third frame, “Corpsman In Anguish”, he realised the man is dead.

LeRoy herself came very close to death two weeks later. Her Nikon barely stopped a piece of mortar shrapnel that ripped open her chest. She said that she thought the last words she would ever hear were, “I think she’s dead, sarge.” During the Tet offensive in 1968, LeRoy was briefly captured by the North Vietnamese during the battle for Hue. LeRoy’s photos of her captivity later made the cover of Life, ‘A Remarkable Day in Hue: the Enemy Lets Me Take His Picture’. She was the first person to take photos of North Vietnamese Army Regulars behind their lines.

Anonymous. “Corpsman In Anguish | Cathy LeRoy,” on the Iconic Photos website January 13, 2014 [Online] Cited 27/07/2024

A licensed parachutist, Leroy jumped with the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade into combat during Operation Junction City in February of 1967. It was in this action, the battle for Hill 881, that Leroy photographed U.S. Navy Corpsman Vernon Wike as he rushed to the aid of a fallen comrade. “Corpsman in anguish” is the third frame of a series that Leroy shot, capturing the unimaginable grief of war. Later, in an interview for the documentary “The Hill Fights”, Wike recounted the moment that Leroy photographed.

“I know there was chaos going on around me, but there was no sound,” she says. “… I knew he didn’t have a chance, but I still got p—–d off when he died.” Leroy describes the aftermath as the corpsman “lost in this nightmare landscape” grabbed the fallen marine’s M16 and charged a Viet bunker alone in a hail of obscenities. The fallen marine was a man called “Rock”, a New Yorker from Puerto Rico. Earlier that day he had told Wike that he only had 60 days left “in country” – his deployment in Vietnam.

Anonymous. “Giving War a Face: Catherine Leroy,” on the Dismal Nitch website September 04, 2020 [Online] Cited 27/07/2024

Philip Jones Griffiths (Welsh, 1936-2008)
Called “Little Tiger” for killing two “Viet Cong women cadre” – his mother and teacher, it was rumored, Vietnam
1968
Gelatin silver print
The Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
© Philip Jones Griffiths / Magnum Photos

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Young Catholic demonstrator on Londonderry Wall, Northern Ireland
1969
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Foundation Gilles Caron and Contact Press Images
© Gilles Caron

Rafael Wollmann (Argentinian, b. 1958)
British Marines surrender to Argentinean troops in Malvinas/Falklands
April 2, 1982, printed 2012
Inkjet print
15 7/8 × 20 in. (40.4 × 50.8cm)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Gift of Rafael Wollmann

David Leeson (American, b. 1957)
Death of a Soldier, Iraq
March 24, 2003
Inkjet print, printed 2012
Courtesy of the artist

Ziv Koren (Israeli, b. 1970)
A sniper’s-eye view of Rafah, in the Southern Gaza strip, during an Israeli military sweep
2006
Inkjet print, printed 2012
© Ziv Koren/Polaris Images

Goran Tomasevic (Serbian, b. 1959) /Reuters
SHOOTING. Sgt. William Olas Bee, a US Marine from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has a close call after Taliban fighters opened fire near Garmser in Helmand Province of Afghanistan May 18, 2008. The Marine was not injured.
2008

Tomašević began photographing the war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia from 1991 for daily newspaper Politika. In 1996 he joined the world’s largest news agency, Reuters, covering the simmering political tensions in Kosovo and the anti-Milošević demonstrations in his hometown of Belgrade since mid-1990s. During three-month NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Tomašević was the only photographer working for foreign press to spend the duration of the conflict in Kosovo.

Tomašević moved to Jerusalem in 2002, covering the second Palestinian intifada. During the U.S. led invasions of Iraq in 2003, his picture of a U.S. Marine watching the toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue became one of the most memorable images of the war. He often returned to Iraq as sectarian violence escalated and regularly photographed America’s other war in Afghanistan. His sequence of photographs of U.S. Marine Sergeant Bee narrowly escaping Taliban bullets became an iconic image in U.S. war history.

Tomašević moved to Cairo in 2006 and was at the heart of Reuters’ coverage of the Arab Springs. In Libya, his image of a fireball that spewed up after an air strike on pro-Gaddafi fighters became an iconic image of the Libyan war, gracing the front pages of more than 100 newspapers around the globe. He stayed in Cairo until 2012. His raw pictures of rebel fighters battling pro-Assad forces among the ruins of Aleppo and Damascus during the Syrian Civil War have won international acclaim, as did his coverage of the bloody siege on a Nairobi shopping mall in Kenya. Tomašević worked for Reuters until 2022.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1001 Bissonnet Street
Houston, TX 77005

Opening hours:
Wednesday 11am – 5pm
Thursday 11am – 9pm
Friday 11am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 6pm
Sunday 12.30pm – 6pm
Closed Monday and Tuesday, except Monday holidays
Closed Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

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Exhibition: ‘Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour’ at Somerset House, London

Exhibition dates: 8th November 2012 – 27th January 2013

Curator: William E. Ewing

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Harlem, New York, 1947
1947
Gelatin silver print / printed 1970s
Image: 29.1 x 19.6cm
Paper: 30.4 x 25.4cm
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, Courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

They may be channelling the master, but none does it like Cartier-Bresson. There is a spareness and spatial intensity to Cartier-Bresson’s work that is absolutely his own. Look at the photograph directly above (Harlem, New York, 1947). A railing leads the eye in bottom right, echoed by the bottom jamb of the window. The opening is set for the old man to perform complete with curtains, talking stage right. The jamb zig zags above a trilby-wearing, cigarette-smoking man’s head leading to a wire mesh fence that takes the eye out of the frame on the left. The two men, lower than the old man in the framed window, look in a completely different direction to him.

Counterpoise. The image pulls in two directions. Above their head a series of cantilevered staircases ascends to the heavens, thought ascending. A masterpiece.

So many of the other photographers in this posting crowd the plane with people looking in all directions, closed off foregrounds or tensionless images. Images that are too complex or too simple. There is an opposition to Cartier-Bresson’s images that is difficult for the viewer to resolve neatly, yet they appear as if in perfect balance. Look at Brooklyn, New York, 1947 towards the bottom of the posting. Nothing in this still life is out of place (from the light to the multiple, overlapping shadows and the out of focus elements of the composition) yet there is humbling agony about the whole thing. It is almost is if he is saying, “cop a load of this, this is what I can see.” And what a fabulous eye it is.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Ernst Haas (Austrian-American, 1921-1986)
New Orleans, USA,
1960
Chromogenic archival print
50 x 35cm
© Ernst Haas Estate, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Snow
1960
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Cat next to red car, New York,
1973
Type C prints
18 x 12 inches
© Estate of Helen Levitt

“I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner.”

~ Alex Webb

Jeff Mermelstein (American, b. 1957)
Untitled (Package Pile Up, New York City)
1995
Chromogenic print
© Jeff Mermelstein
Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art, New York

Carolyn Drake (American, b. 1971)
Birthday party at Olympia, a gated community, Wellington, Florida
2005
Digital Pigment Print
© Carolyn Drake / Magnum Photos

Carolyn Drake (American, b. 1971)
Hotel room. Zhetisay, Kazakhstan. Carolyn Drake
2009
Digital Pigment Print
© Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos

Andy Freeberg (American, b. 1958)
Sean Kelly, Art Basel Miami
2010
From the series Art Fare
Artist: Kehinde Wiley
63 x 43cm
Pigment ink print
© Andy Freeberg
Courtesy Kopeikin Gallery

Carolyn Drake (American, b. 1971)
New Kashgar. Kashgar, China
2011
30.48 x 20.32cm
Digital Light Jet print
© Carolyn Drake 2012

Positive View Foundation announces its inaugural exhibition Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour, to be held at Somerset House, 8 November 2012 – 27 January 2013. Curated by William A. Ewing, the exhibition will feature 10 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs never before exhibited in the UK alongside over 75 works by 15 international contemporary photographers, including: Karl Baden (US), Carolyn Drake (US), Melanie Einzig (US), Andy Freeberg (US), Harry Gruyaert (Belgium), Ernst Haas (Austrian), Fred Herzog (Canadian), Saul Leiter (US), Helen Levitt (US), Jeff Mermelstein (US), Joel Meyerowitz (US), Trent Parke (Australian), Boris Savelev (Ukranian), Robert Walker (Canadian), and Alex Webb (US).

The extensive showcase will illustrate how photographers working in Europe and North America adopted and adapted the master’s ethos famously known as ‘the decisive moment’ to their work in colour. Though they often departed from the concept in significant ways, something of that challenge remained: how to seize something that happens and capture it in the very moment that it takes place.

It is well-known that Cartier-Bresson was disparaging towards colour photography, which in the 1950s was in its early years of development, and his reasoning was based both on the technical and aesthetic limitations of the medium at the time. Curator William E. Ewing has conceived the exhibition in terms of, as he puts it, ‘challenge and response’. “This exhibition will show how Henri Cartier-Bresson, in spite of his skeptical attitude regarding the artistic value of colour photography, nevertheless exerted a powerful influence over photographers who took up the new medium and who were determined to put a personal stamp on it. In effect, his criticisms of colour spurred on a new generation, determined to overcome the obstacles and prove him wrong. A Question of Colour simultaneously pays homage to a master who felt that black and white photography was the ideal medium, and could not be bettered, and to a group of photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries who chose the path of colour and made, and continue to make, great strides.”

Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour will feature a selection of photographers whose commitment to expression in colour was – or is – wholehearted and highly sophisticated, and which measured up to Cartier-Bresson’s essential requirement that content and form were in perfect balance. Some of these artists were Cartier-Bresson’s contemporaries, like Helen Levitt, or even, as with Ernst Haas, his friends; others, such as Fred Herzog in Vancouver, knew the artist’s seminal work across vast distances; others were junior colleagues, such as Harry Gruyaert, who found himself debating colour ferociously with the master; and others still, like Andy Freeberg or Carolyn Drake, never knew the man first-hand, but were deeply influenced by his example.

Press release from Somerset House website

Fred Herzog (Canadian born Germany, 1930-2019)
Man with Bandage, Vancouver, Canada
1968

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Madison Avenue, New York City
1975
Archival Pigment Print
© Joel Meyerowitz 2012
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Camel Coats, Fifth Avenue, New York
1975
Archival Pigment Print
© Joel Meyerowitz 2012
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, US
1981

Fred Herzog (Canadian born Germany, 1930-2019)
Crossing Powell 2
1984
Ink jet print

Harry Gruyaert (Belgian, b. 1941)
Province of Brabant, Flanders region, Belgium
1988
© 2015 Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos

Harry Gruyaert is known for his extraordinary photographic work with color. Born in Antwerp in 1941, he originally dreamed of becoming a film director. In the late 1970s, Pop art and a trip to Morocco inspired him to become one of the first photographers in Europe to devote his work entirely to color photography. Gruyaert’s cinematographic background instilled in him an aesthetic conception of photography. Rather than telling stories or documenting the world through his lens, he searches for beauty in everyday elements. His images are simply snapshots of magical moments in which different visual aspects, primarily color, form, light and movement, spontaneously come together in front of his lens.

Text from the Magnum website

Jeff Mermelstein (American, b. 1957)
Unitled ($10 bill in mouth) New York City, 1992
1992
Chromogenic print
20 x 16 in.
© Jeff Mermelstein
Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art, New York

“My process is linked to everyday life. Only on rare occasions do I go out specifically to ‘shoot’. My best photographs were taken going to or from work, or some other destination. Sometimes a picture appears that helps me sum up a strange mood or thought that I’ve struggled with for weeks. Other times my work is more documentary in nature.

Photographing in public keeps me awake and aware, always looking around, in awe at what we humans are up to. In a time when staged narratives and rendered images are popular, I am excited by the fact that life itself offers situations far more strange and beautiful than anything I could set up.”

~ Jeff Mermelstein

Andy Freeberg (American, b. 1958)
Nina Menocal, Armory Show
2011
From the series Art Fare
Pigment ink print
© Andy Freeberg
Courtesy Kopeikin Gallery

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Brooklyn, New York, 1947
1947
Gelatin silver print / printed in 2007
Image: 19.8 x 29.8cm
Paper: 22.9 x 30.4cm
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, Courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Terrace Rooms & Courtyard Rooms, Somerset House
Strand, London, WC2R 1LA

Opening hours:
10am – 6pm daily

Somerset House website

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Exhibition: ‘Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates at the MMA: 11th October 2012 – 27th January 2013

Unidentified American artist
Two-Headed Man
c. 1855
Daguerreotype
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

What a fascinating subject. Having completed multiple exposure work under the black and white enlarger I can attest to how difficult it was to get a print correctly exposed. I was using multiple negatives, moving the piece of photographic paper and printing in grids. Trying to get the alignment right was quite a task but the outcomes were very satisfying. Of course today these skills have mainly been lost to be replaced by other technological skills within the blancmange that is Photoshop. Somehow it’s not the same. My admiration for an artist like Jerry Uelsmann will always remain undimmed for the undiluted joy, beauty and skill of their analogue imagery.

I will post different photographs in this exhibition from the National Gallery of Art hang when I receive them!

See the second posting on this exhibition.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

George Washington Wilson (Scottish, 1823-1893)
Aberdeen Portraits No. 1
1857
Albumen silver print from glass negative
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011

Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830-1901)
Fading Away
1858
Albumen silver print from glass negatives
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom

Unidentified artist
De Torbechet, Allain & Cie (publisher)
Man Juggling His Own Head
c. 1880
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Collection of Christophe Goeury

Maurice Guibert (French, 1856-1913)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as Artist and Model
c. 1900
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

F. Holland Day (American, 1864-1933)
The Vision (Orpheus Scene)
1907
Platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom

Unidentified American artist
Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester

Unidentified American artist
Dirigible Docked on Empire State Building, New York
1930
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2011

While digital photography and image-editing software have brought about an increased awareness of the degree to which camera images can be manipulated, the practice of doctoring photographs has existed since the medium was invented. Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first major exhibition devoted to the history of manipulated photography before the digital age. Featuring some 200 visually captivating photographs created between the 1840s and 1990s in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, the exhibition offers a provocative new perspective on the history of photography as it traces the medium’s complex and changing relationship to visual truth.   The exhibition is made possible by Adobe Systems Incorporated.   The photographs in the exhibition were altered using a variety of techniques, including multiple exposure (taking two or more pictures on a single negative), combination printing (producing a single print from elements of two or more  negatives), photomontage, overpainting, and retouching on the negative or print.   In every case, the meaning and content of the camera image was significantly transformed in the process of manipulation.

Faking It is divided into seven sections, each focusing on a different set of motivations for manipulating the camera image. “Picture Perfect” explores 19th-century photographers’ efforts to compensate for the new medium’s technical limitations – specifically, its inability to depict the world the way it looks to the naked eye. To augment photography’s monochrome palette, pigments were applied to portraits to make them more vivid and lifelike. Landscape photographers faced a different obstacle: the uneven sensitivity of early emulsions often resulted in blotchy, overexposed skies. To overcome this, many photographers, such as Gustave Le Gray and Carleton E. Watkins, created spectacular landscapes by printing two negatives on a single sheet of paper – one exposed for the land, the other for the sky. This section also explores the challenges involved in the creation of large group portraits, which were often cobbled together from dozens of photographs of individuals.   For early art photographers, the ultimate creativity lay not in the act of taking a photograph but in the subsequent transformation of the camera image into a hand-crafted picture.

“Artifice in the Name of Art” begins in the 1850s with elaborate combination prints of narrative and allegorical subjects by Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson. It continues with the revival of Pictorialism at the dawn of the twentieth century in the work of artist-photographers such as Edward Steichen, Anne W. Brigman, and F. Holland Day.   “Politics and Persuasion” presents photographs that were manipulated for explicitly political or ideological ends. It begins with Ernest Eugene Appert’s faked photographs of the 1871 Paris Commune massacres, and continues with images used to foster patriotism, advance racial ideologies, and support or protest totalitarian regimes. Sequences of photographs published in Stalin-era Soviet Russia from which purged Party officials were erased demonstrate the chilling ease with which the historical record could be falsified. Also featured are composite portraits of criminals by Francis Galton and original paste-ups of John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi photomontages of the 1930s.

“Novelties and Amusements” brings together a broad variety of amateur and commercial photographs intended to astonish, amuse, and entertain. Here, we find popular images of figures holding their own severed heads or appearing doubled or tripled. Also included in this light-hearted section are ghostly images by the spirit photographer William Mumler, “tall-tale” postcards produced in Midwestern farming communities in the 1910s, trick photographs by amateurs, and Weegee’s experimental distortions of the 1940s.   ”Pictures in Print” reveals the ways in which newspapers, magazines, and advertisers have altered, improved, and sometimes fabricated images in their entirety to depict events that never occurred – such as the docking of a zeppelin on the tip of the Empire State Building. Highlights include Erwin Blumenfeld’s famous “Doe Eye” Vogue cover from 1950 and Richard Avedon’s multiple portrait of Audrey Hepburn from 1967.

“Mind’s Eye” features works from the 1920s through 1940s by such artists as Herbert Bayer, Maurice Tabard, Dora Maar, Clarence John Laughlin, and Grete Stern, who have used photography to evoke subjective states of mind, conjuring dreamlike scenarios and surreal imaginary worlds.   The final section, “Protoshop,” presents photographs from the second half of the 20th century by Yves Klein, John Baldessari, Duane Michals, Jerry Uelsmann, and other artists who have adapted earlier techniques of image manipulation – such as spirit photography or news photo retouching – to create works that self-consciously and often humorously question photography’s presumed objectivity.

Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

William Mortensen (American, 1897-1965)
Obsession
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
18.4 x 14.5cm
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1975

Maurice Tabard (French, 1897-1984)
Room with Eye
1930
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1962

Wanda Wulz (Italian, 1903-1984)
Io + gatto (Cat + I)
1932
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Alinari / Art Resource © Wanda Wulz

John Paul Pennebaker (American, 1903-1953)
Sealed Power Piston Rings
1933
Gelatin silver print
1934 Art and Industry Exhibition Photograph Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass.
© John Paul Pennebaker

George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955)
The Sleepwalker
1935
Gelatin silver print with applied media
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© The Estate of George Platt Lynes

Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
Hearst over the People
1939
Collage of gelatin silver prints with applied media
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

Grete Stern (Argentinian born Germany, 1904-1999)
Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home
1948
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2012
Courtesy of Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche, Buenos Aires

Erwin Blumenfeld (American born Germany, 1897-1969)
“Doe Eye” Vogue cover
1950

Yves Klein (French, 1928-1962)
Photographed by Harry Shunk (German, 1924-2006) and János (Jean) Kender (Hungarian, 1937-2009)
Leap into the Void
1960
Gelatin silver print
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1992
© Yves Klein / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Photograph Shunk-Kender © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Judy Garland
1960
Silver gelatin photograph
Copyright Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Draft Johnson for President
c. 1968
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
Copyright Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images.

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Audrey Hepburn, New York, January 1967
1967
Collage of gelatin silver prints, with applied media, mylar overlay with applied media

Jerry N. Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1969
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2011
© Jerry N. Uelsmann

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943)
Red Stripe Kitchen
1967-1972, printed early 1990s
From the series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home”
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 2002
© Martha Rosler

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
Phone: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
Sunday – Tuesday 10am – 5pm
Closed Wednesdays

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 10.00am – 5.00pm

National Gallery of Art website

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