Exhibition dates: 22nd December, 2012 – 7th April, 2013
Curator: Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Many thankx to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877) Group of Persons Selling Fruit and Flowers 1845 Salted paper print from a paper negative 6 11/16 x 8 1/4 inches (17 x 21cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the Robert A. Hauslohner Fund, 1967
Felice Beato (English born Italy, 1825-1913) Confucius, Canton, April 1860 April 1860 Albumen silver print 10 x 12 inches (25.4 x 30.5cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with funds contributed by Dr. Chaoying Fang, Harvey S. Shipley Miller and J. Randall Plummer, and with the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, 1978
Dorothy Norman (American, 1905-1997) Harbor II, (Osterville), Cape Cod 1930s Gelatin silver print Sheet: 2 7/8 x 3 7/8 inches (7.3 x 9.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1980
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dunes, Oceano 1936 Gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Louise Lawler (American, b. 1947) Living Room Corner Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Sr., 1984 Dye destruction print Sheet: 18 1/4 x 23 3/4 inches (46.4 x 60.3cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Henry S. McNeil, Jr., 1988
Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) Pink Lightning, Salton Sea 1985 Chromogenic print 18 5/16 x 23 1/16 inches (46.5 x 58.6cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1986
Joachim Koester (Danish active United States, b. 1962) Room of Nightmares #1 2005 Chromogenic print 18 7/8 x 23 7/8 inches (47.9 x 60.6cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Lynne and Harold Honickman
This exhibition presents a survey of photographs from the permanent collection and includes an important group of works by Dorothy Norman and her mentor Alfred Stieglitz, one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century American art. There are also early masterworks by Gustave Le Gray, whose images of light and motion inspired the Impressionists; Edward Weston; Julia Margaret Cameron; and Charles Aubry. These striking images are complemented by an array of modern and contemporary works that trace the medium’s history as a visual art form, including recent acquisitions by artists such as Florence Henri, Roy DeCarava, and Hiroh Kikai, many on view for the first time in Philadelphia.
The mainly black-and-white photographs reflect the strengths of the Museum’s photography collection, ranging from the 1840s to 2005. Nineteenth-century photographs include works by William Henry Fox Talbot, an early inventor of photography; a group of views from Felice Beato’s 1860 album China; and Rue des Prêtres Saint‑Étienne, de la rue Descartes by Charles Marville, who documented the narrow quarters of nineteenth-century Paris.
Post-World War II American and Japanese photography is seen through a number of works by Robert Frank including Jehovah’s Witness, Los Angeles (1955), Diane Arbus’s Untitled (6) (1970-71), and Masahisa Fukase’s Untitled(1976). The exhibition continues with contemporary photography by a broad range of international artists, including Joachim Koester’s Room of Nightmares #1 (2005) and Gerhard Richter’s Guildenstern (Rhombus II) (1998), a cunning investigation of the shared terrain between painting and photography.
The works by Norman and Stieglitz were made during the years of their creative exchange, from 1929 until Stieglitz’s death in 1946. These include a number of portraits, such as Norman’s cropped close-up Alfred Stieglitz IX, New York (1933); cityscapes and landscapes, as seen in Stieglitz’s New York from the Shelton (1935), showing the interplay of light and shadow on the skyscrapers of a changing New York skyline; and Norman’s Harbor II, Osterville, Cape Cod (1930s), a study in line and composition. These images are complemented by photographs made by their contemporaries, including Man Ray’s surrealist Marquise Casati (1922) and Florence Henri’s Portrait (c. 1930).
Press release from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website
Charles Marville (French, 1816-1879) Rue des Prêtres Saint-Étienne, de la rue Descartes c. 1865 Albumen silver print Image and sheet: 12 13/16 x 10 3/8 inches (32.5 x 26.4cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 2009
Dorothy Norman (American, 1905-1997) Alfred Stieglitz IX, New York 1933 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 2 5/8 x 2 11/16 inches (6.7 x 6.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1968
“Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention – and yet they vouchsafe our very existence.
The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there water and air. Living phenomena spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light, though that could just as easily suggest random coincidence as a Deity. Let’s just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example.
Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.”
Hiroshi Sugimoto
I have always admired the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, notably his visually poetic series Seascapes and Theaters. His large format photographs expose time through light in a single frame. Their deeply metaphysical and existential nature may be the ultimate distillation of the constructed form of the photographic landscape. “They are explorations of spiritual and physical boundary as much as an exploration of the phenomenology of the picture plane” (Anon. “Hiroshi Sugimoto – Seascapes,” on the C4 Contemporary Art website no longer available online). Like the movie theatre series (where he captures a whole movie on one single frame of film) the seascapes are about the luminosity of life, the enigmatic existence of body and earth imprinted onto film.
Unfortunately, you can only push an idea so far. Personally I feel this latest series of conceptual twiddles, Revolution (1990/2012, publicly displayed here for the first time) fall as flat as a tack. Sugimoto, in his use of the term “revolution”, refers to the “original meaning of the term in the sense of a “suspension” or “overturning of previously accepted laws or practices through new insights or methods.” The reorientation of the referent – of the world, in the world – is supposed to dissipate the Romantic image of the night, unsettling the certainty of the truth of the photograph as a visual record of the world. The photographs’ verisimilitude is supposedly turned on its head, transformed into abstract configurations of light and space through the conceptualisation of the artist. No new narratives are created. In fact the photographs could almost be called post-narrative, essential compositions that emphasise the insular loneliness of modern man’s experiences.
Perhaps they look better in the flesh, or better in a group; perhaps they have more “presence” in reality than they do in reproduction, for this self-styled “revolution” seems to be more a tinkering at the edges of an idea, not a fully realised body of inner work. This is a body of work in/evolution. Sugimoto’s legendary visualisation (his ability to transcend the photographic medium) which is used to create an iconic vision of a timeless state of consciousness, utterly fails him here. You only have to look at the two horizontal landscape photographs at the bottom of the posting to realise that something has not been (un)thought through with the rest of this work. A simple curve of the earth with attendant clouds and horizon line is all you need to suspend the ritual of photographic performance and referentiality. Another lesson from Minor White might have been in order at the time…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum Brandhorst for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the best-known photographic artists of our time. His celebrated international reputation is based on his photography, although in recent years he has become engaged with other genres: architecture, furniture, objects, and fashion all play an increasingly important role in his work. It is primarily his photography however, that important museums from all over the world have collected and displayed.
Sugimoto’s unique accomplishments in his genre contradict the medium’s conventional tasks – to record reality as precisely as possible. In Sugimoto’s work, one is confronted with the formal reduction of conceptual images, in which he addresses fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality. “I was concerned,” noted the artist in 2002, “with revealing an ancient stage of human memory through the medium of photography. Whether it is individual memory or the cultural memory of mankind itself, my work is about returning to the past and remembering where we came from and how we came about.” His pictures, which leave a lasting impression through their beauty and their auratic effect, interweave Japanese traditions with Western ideas. This East-West dialogue remains characteristic of his work today, which is captivating in its exceptional craftsmanship and strong aesthetic presence, and can exercise an almost magical effect on viewers.
Sugimoto has given this suite of works – publicly displayed here for the first time – the title Revolution, but he reveals a radically different understanding of the term in the fifteen large-format works. It is not political or social unrest to which Sugimoto alludes, but rather to the original meaning of the term in the sense of a “suspension” or “overturning” of previously accepted laws or practices through new insights or methods. From a technical perspective, the nature of the work is undeniably photographic. But in terms of how they are perceived and understood, these are pictures that would be more readily ascribed to a painterly or conceptual sphere. This transgression of medium is characteristic of Sugimoto’s approach, and also applies to Seascapes, the largest distinct corpus of works in his oeuvre. For over thirty years Sugimoto has depicted the sea, always in the same, archetypal way. These works deal with difference within the apparently identical, with morphological visualisation, and an iconic vision of a timeless state of consciousness. Dioramas, Theaters, Chambers of Horrors, Portraits, Architecture, Conceptual Forms, etc. are without doubt very important groups of work, but Seascapes composes the broad and consistent foundation upon which all of the artist’s other series are based.
The point of departure for the fifteen works entitled Revolution is a nocturnal seascape. A 90° clockwise rotation turns the horizons into vertical lines, dissipating the Romantic image of the night. Without changing the pictures’ material substance or subject, any obvious connotations are masked, their certainties denied by the transformation. At the same time, highly original abstract configurations emerge in their place. But it is finally the presence of the aesthetic which Sugimoto so forcefully brings to light in his new work. The process derives from conventional puzzles, but reveals in this case no new narrative moments, leading instead to hermetic compositions reminiscent of the work of American painters such as Barnett Newman.
The glorious paintings of Fritz Winter show a beautiful synergy with the abstract photographs. The relationship between painting and photography has always been a symbiotic one, a close mutualist relationship that has benefited both art forms.
This is fully evidenced in this outstanding posting, where I have tried to sequence the artworks to reflect the nature of their individuality and their interdependence.
Great blessings on the curators that assembled this exhibition: an inspired concept!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In his lesser known early work, the German painter Fritz Winter (1905-1976) made an obsessive analysis of the aesthetic aspects of light. As a Bauhaus student he was influenced by the international avant-garde’s boundless euphoria for light between Expressionism and Constructivism. The light of large cities with headlights, cinemas and illuminated advertisements gave a new impulse to aesthetics; x-rays, radioactivity and microphotography made it possible to perceive previously unknown sources of energy and natural phenomena.
In his pictures of light beams and crystals created in 1934-1936, Winter devoted himself with virtuosity to aspects such as the reflection, radiation and refraction of light. His virtually monochrome paintings incorporate crystal shapes and bundles of rays; they focus on the earth’s interior and the infinite expanse of the cosmos; they block the pictorial space with dark grids or lend it a glass-like transparency.
For the first time, 25 Licht-Bilder by Fritz Winter will be juxtaposed with an international selection of 40 of the earliest abstract photographs in history of art. In the 1910s to 1930s artists experimented with the most varied of photographic techniques to ascertain the genuine qualities of photography beyond the merely representative. The New Vision in photography and abstract painting become immediately obvious through the display of vintage prints and paintings side by side.
The exhibition combines 25 exceptional paintings by Fritz Winter from German museums and private collections as well as 40 international lenders of photographic works including Centre Pompidou, Paris, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Neue Galerie Kassel, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Munich and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website
Curator: Phillip Prodger, Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum
Many thankx to the Peabody Essex Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This summer, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) will unveil an exhibition shedding new light on one of history’s most iconic and beloved photographers. Ansel Adams: At the Water’s Edge features more than 100 photographs combining famous images with extraordinary lesser-known works that focus on the artist’s treatment and exploration of water in all its forms. Full of energy and dynamism, Adams’ photographs of seascapes, beaches, bays, tide pools, clouds and waterfalls provide a fresh perspective on the artist’s celebrated career. Ansel Adams: At the Water’s Edge was organised by the Peabody Essex Museum where it will be on view for its exclusive U.S. engagement from June 9 through October 8, 2012, and will then travel to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK.
“Throughout his life, Adams was drawn to the water for its visual potential, exploring where elemental forces meet,” says Phillip Prodger, exhibition curator and PEM’s curator of photography. “As an innovative Modernist, he explored seriality, motion and time, using a range of techniques to capture a definitively fluid and elusive substance.”
In this exhibition, drawn from the Ansel Adams Archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and other prominent private and institutional collections, viewers will have the opportunity to see the pictures that Adams made for himself. Both grand and intimate at turns, these personal, and sometimes experimental images express his thoughts about the natural world, and often push the boundaries between realism and abstraction. Ranging in size from 3 x 5-inch prints to 10 x 12-foot murals, many will be appearing publicly for the first time at the Peabody Essex Museum. Adams was one of the first photographers to work in the large-scale mural format which has now become standard among contemporary artists.
At the Water’s Edge provides a fresh look at Ansel Adams, as well-known and beloved pictures of rugged mountains, desert landscapes, and rocky cliffs blend with sparkling, spraying, whirling waters in all of their flowing power and reflective nuance. The undeniable attraction of water as a photographic subject captured Adams at an early age. The very first photograph Adams ever made, shown at PEM for the first time, features a watery pool at the Panama Pacific Exhibition of the 1915 World’s Fair, made when Adams was just 14 years old. Over time, his lens claimed the territory between Yosemite National Park and the Pacific, as well as Hawaii and Alaska, where he shot images shown in this exhibition.
Notably, he made a powerful group of photographs of New England, the only coastal location outside of California that Adams photographed steadily. Over a course of decades, he explored the coast from Connecticut to Maine, especially in Massachusetts, making repeated trips to Cape Cod and Boston’s North Shore.
Highlights
Visitors will have the opportunity to see rarely-viewed objects, including the print of Golden Gate before the Bridge that used to hang over Ansel Adams’ desk, and which he considered among his very best photographs. At the same time, stunning, oversized exhibition prints of iconic photographs including Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite, Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park and Stream, Sea, Clouds, Rodeo Lagoo, Marin County, California will be on display, among others.
One of the surprises revealed in At the Water’s Edge is Adams’ interest in using sequential imagery to freeze motion in time. An especially powerful example is the majestic surf sequence, San Mateo County Coast, California, 1940. Adams was possibly the first well-known photographer since Eadweard Muybridge to attempt to use photography in this way, employing seriality and sequence to create a cohesive narrative. Another series of photographs of Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, shows a different approach to sequentiality. A poignant exploration of form, movement and time, they can be viewed as Adams’ version of Monet’s haystacks. As with Monet, Adams visited Old Faithful at different times of day, photographing in varying light and changing atmospheric conditions.
Another unexpected addition is the exceedingly rare Japanese-style screen, Grass and Pool, 1948, dating from a period of tremendous creativity in Adams’ work. Standing on round metal feet, it was designed to be shown directly on the floor in a domestic environment. In subject and treatment, it was inspired by Asian painted screens in which picture planes are flattened and perspectives tilted. The three articulated panels can be angled to catch the light differently, the rhythm of the fold cleverly mirroring the angular pattern of the exposed grass.
For Adams, part of the appeal of creating such a work was thwarting conventional expectations about what a photograph might look like and where and how it could be shown. Like many modernists, Adams considered photographs not just as images but as objects – the craft and sheer physical presence of the work reinforced its significance as a work of art and the focus of contemplation.”
Press release from the Peabody Essex Museum website
Francis Frith (English, 1822-1898) The Pyramids of Dahshoor, From the East 1857 Albumen silver print 11.6 x 16.2cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
“Hence the photographer’s most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically.”
Edward Weston. The Complete Photographer. January 20, 1943
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sir John Frederick William Herschel (British, 1792-1871) Valley of the Saltina near Brieg at Entrance of the Simplon 1821 Graphite drawing made with the aid of a camera lucida 19.7 x 29.7cm (7 3/4 x 11 11/16 in.) Gift of the Graham and Susan Nash Collection The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Dr Samuel A. Bemis (American, 1793-1881) View within Crawford Notch, New Hampshire c. 1840 Daguerreotype The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Boston dentist Samuel Bemis, one of the first Americans to use a daguerreotype outfit successfully, practiced photography during his summer months in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. His landscape views of the area are the earliest surviving American photographs to depict untamed nature. Here he depicts a scene of rugged beauty.
An innovative amateur, Bemis was not a masterful technician of the complicated daguerreotype process. The dark tone of the sky and the light areas along the slope of the mountain indicate inadequate processing of the daguerreotype plate.
John Beasly Greene (American, 1832-1856) Thebes, Village of Ghezireh 1853-1854 Salted paper print from a waxed paper negative 9 1/8 x 12 inches The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
John Greene was an archaeologist, the well-to-do son of a banker from Boston who lived in Paris, and a photographer. By 1853 the twenty-one-year-old Greene had learned to use Le Gray’s waxed-paper process, the technique of choice for traveling Frenchmen. That same year he made the first of two expeditions to Egypt and Nubia, bringing back more than two hundred negatives of monuments and landscapes, some ninety-four of which, printed by Blanquart-Evrard in 1854, comprise the album “Le Nil, monuments, paysages, explorations photographiques par J. B. Greene.” So rare are these albums that we assume that Greene published them at his own expense. On his second trip, in 1854-1855, he not only photographed but also excavated, especially at Medinet-Habou. During an archaeological and photographic expedition to Algeria the following winter, this exceptionally talented young man died of an undisclosed illness.
Greene’s Egyptian landscapes are startlingly barren. Coalescing from large, softly nuanced tonal planes, the views seem to shimmer above the page almost to the point of evaporating, like distant desert mirages. Generally, Greene placed the geological or archeological structure of these pictures at a distance, surrounded by sand and sky. This, the most minimal of his visions, sums up the Egyptian landscape. Stretching between the great river and the endless expanse of sky, and between the great river and the desert, is a thin band of fertile earth – the ligament of life that gave rise to a great civilisation. That the picture functions like a diagram may owe to Greene’s knowledge of hieroglyphics; the Egyptian pictograph for “country” is a flat, floating disk, hardly more than a horizontal line.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Charles Marville (French, 1813-1879) Fontainebleau 1854 Salted paper print 15.9 x 21.3cm (6 1/4 x 8 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Francis Frith (English, 1822-1898) The Pyramids of Dashour 1856-1857 Albumen silver print 6.8 x 6.5cm (2 11/16 x 2 9/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Gift of Weston J. and Mary M. Naef
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Kelp on Tide Pool, Point Lobos 1939 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Rather than depicting a traditionally picturesque vista or capturing accurate perspective, photographers of the 20th century began to explore the various but particularly photographic ways that the natural world could be seen through the camera lens. Often this led to spatial experimentation. Taken at Point Lobos in California, this image by Edward Weston plays with the perception, and misperception, of space. The photographer cropped his photograph of a tide pool to show kelp puncturing the water’s surface in the foreground, while in the upper register an underwater landscape appears simultaneously near and far.
Callahan referred to this photograph, made shortly after an inspiring encounter with Ansel Adams, as “my first good picture.” Unlike Adams’s dramatic landscapes, Callahan’s composition focuses on an overlooked pedestrian setting in his native Detroit. Raising the horizon line, the artist achieved a delicate, calligraphic interplay among the reeds and telephone poles and their reflections across the surface of a bog.
In Focus: Picturing Landscape, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center, May 22 – October 7, 2012, offers a rich trove of landscape photography from some of the most innovative photographers in the genre. Drawn exclusively from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition brings together the work of twenty photographers, spanning the medium from the mid-1800s to the current decade, including Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Imogen Cunningham, William Garnett, John Beasly Greene, Eliot Porter, Clifford Ross, Toshio Shibata and Edward Weston.
“The range of photographs chosen for this exhibition were selected from hundreds of extraordinary landscape works in the Getty Museum’s photography collection with an eye towards the various ways that photographers have responded to the daunting challenge of depicting the natural landscape photographically,” says Karen Hellman, assistant curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition.
Since the invention of the medium, photographers have turned to the landscape as a source of inspiration. Changing artistic movements and continual technical advancements have provided opportunities for camera artists to approach the subject in diverse and imaginative ways. The Getty originally presented In Focus: The Landscape in June 2008, curated by Brett Abbott. Expanding on the first presentation of photographs, this second exhibition on landscape in the Getty Museum’s In Focus series examines how photographers have sought to capture the breadth and perspective of the landscape through a camera lens. The exhibition is organised around three main themes: nineteenth-century technical developments by photographers such as Francis Frith who captured intriguing views of the Egyptian Pyramids in the 1850s; works that show purely photographic approaches such as those by Edward Weston and Harry Callahan; and more recent ways in which photographers have framed the landscape to make environmental and conceptual statements.
One of the earliest works in the exhibition is actually not a photograph but a drawing made by Sir John Frederick Herschel in 1821 with the aid of a camera lucida, an optical device sometimes used as a drawing aid by artists of the period. The exhibition also includes a very early full-plate daguerreotype of a landscape made by Boston dentist Samuel Bemis in 1840. During the first decades of the 20th century, artistic experimentation flourished and tested the boundaries of the genre. Photographers such as Edward Weston and Harry Callahan sought to explore the landscape as abstraction and pure form. In the second half of the 20th century, photographers began to explore the landscape in more socially conscious ways. Eliot Porter devoted himself to publishing work in concert with conservation efforts. Virginia Beahan has delved into the landscape as a site of human history, rather than simply a subject of aesthetic contemplation.
Contemporary artists continue to be inspired by the rich tradition of landscape photography. Also included in the exhibition is a large-scale photograph by Clifford Ross from his 2006 Mountain series, produced from extremely high-resolution digital files in order to make prints that came as close as possible to replicating reality. Several works will be on view for the first time, including a photograph taken in the forest of Fontainebleau, outside of Paris, by Charles Marville in the 1850s, and a photograph from Point Lobos, California, by Wynn Bullock, as well as a work by the Japanese photographer Toshio Shibata acquired with funds from the Getty Museum Photographs Council.
In Focus: Picturing Landscape is the eleventh installation of the ongoing In Focus series of thematic presentations of photographs from the Getty’s permanent collection, and includes twenty-two works by twenty photographers.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Nature and photography have been linked since the inception of the medium. Whether driven by the challenge of capturing the expanse and perspective of a vista or by the myriad possibilities of creating a unique artistic experience, the act of depicting the natural landscape has inspired photographers from the 1800s to the present.
To create this image, photographer William Garnett piloted his plane over sand bars in Cape Cod. In addition to the natural beauty of the ocean, the photographer invites us to explore space and perception in a unique way. The undulating forms of the sandbars play with the boundaries between foreground and background. Changing tones of blue challenge us to know if we look at water, sky, or even a view from outer space.
Here Beahan and McPhee delve into the landscape as a site of human history and conflict. With the High Sierra as a backdrop, rusty remnants of the Manzanar relocation camp, used to detain Japanese Americans during World War II, occupy the foreground. In the middle ground stand the desiccated trunks of an orchard, part of an 1860s settlement that was abandoned after the land’s water was diverted in the 1920s to irrigate Los Angeles. The orchard, in turn, had uprooted a community of Paiute Indians, who had lived there for generations.
A persistent aspect of picturing a landscape has been the concept of the ideal. Recent photographers have framed nature not only to emphasise its beauty but also to highlight its unattainability in a modern context.
Photographer Clifford Ross was inspired to create this image of Mount Sopris while on a family holiday. In order to, as the photographer put it, “grab as much of the mountain as [he] possibly could in one shot,” Ross invented a camera, the R1, which exposes 9 x 18 inch aerial film. When processed by hand and scanned, the negatives produce files with a hundred times higher resolution than those made with the average professional digital camera. Yet even though he pursues a near replica of reality, Ross also manipulates the digital file to re-create the landscape as he remembers experiencing it. Viewers have the ability to examine the scene in greater detail than they might even in person.
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
Exhibition dates: 3rd August – 30th September, 2012
Co-curators: MGA Curator Stephen Zagala and MGA Curatorial Assistant Stella Loftus-Hills
Artists: Andrew Browne, John Cato, Jo Daniell, John Delacour, Peter Elliston, Joyce Evans, Chantel Faust, Susan Fereday, Anthony Figallo, George Gittoes, John Gollings, Graeme Hare, Melinda Harper, Paul Knight, Peter Lambropoulos, Bruno Leti, Anne MacDonald, David Moore, Grant Mudford, Harry Nankin, Ewa Narkiewicz, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Jozef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski, Robert Owen, Wes Placek, Susan Purdy, Scott Redford, Jacky Redgate, Wolfgang Sievers, David Stephenson, Mark Strizic and Rick Wood.
There are some excellent works in this interestingly themed exhibition at the Monash Gallery of Art. Unfortunately the exhibition, the theme and the work are let down by two curatorial decisions. Before I address those issues I will give my insight into some of the work presented:
~ A wonderful print of Sisters of Charity, Washington DC by David Moore (1956) where the starched cornettes of the sisters reminded me of paper doves. The kicker or punctum in this image is the hand of one of the sisters pointing skywards/godwards
~ A wonderful David Stephenson Star Drawing. I always like photographs from this series. Taken in Central Australia using as many as 72 multiple exposures, Stephenson used a set of rules for each exposure – deciding on the length and amount of exposure and how far he would rotate the camera between each exposure before embarking on the creation of each image. The construction of the image was pre-determined but because of the movement of the earth and stars over a couple of hours, the result always incorporated an element of chance. Stephenson draws with light that is millions of years old, the source of which may not exist by the time the light falls on Stephenson’s photographic plate (the star might be dead)
~ John Gollings Untitled from the Bushfire series. Beautiful, luminous black and white silver gelatin prints of tracks in bushfire affected areas. These aerial photographs make the surface of the earth seem like the surface of the skin complete with hairs and wrinkles. In process they reference the New Topographics exhibition of 1975, where the mapping of the landscape is etched into the surface of the photographic print, where the pictorial plane records the environment like the marks on an etching plate. “The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion.”
~ The beautiful Scott Redford Urinal photographs where the subject becomes secondary to the abstract visual elements as the flash bounces off the metal surfaces. Tight camera angles and a limited colour palette cause an almost transcendent composition. The swirls and markings and the sword-like quality of the central image (see below) remind me of Excalibur rising from the lake, dripping water.
~ Four photographs by John Cato, one each from Petroglyph 1971-79, Waterway 1971-79, Proteus 1971-79 and Tree – a journey 1971-79. These were incredibly beautiful and moving photographs, abstractions of the natural world. You need to be reminded what an amazing artist John was, one of the very best Australian photographers, his poetic photographs are cosmological in their musicology and composition
~ Two photographs from Paul Knight’s outstanding Cinema curtain series (below). For me there was a textural, sensory experience here, an intimacy with the subject matter that forced me to focus on the surface of the photograph, the flat plane of the photographic print, itself a highly abstract form. Amazing
~ My particular favourite in the exhibition were the unknown to me works of the artist Jozef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski (see the two images below). These photographs were the most delightful surprise of the exhibition – landscapes of the mind that had great feeling and focus, felt movement, space, flow of light and energy. This was wonderfully nuanced work that I wanted to see more of
Some excellent work then that was let down by two curatorial decisions.
The first was the amount of work in the exhibition by each artist – a couple of prints here, another three small prints there – that really never gave the viewer chance to fully engage with the outcomes that the artist was trying to achieve nor explore the process that the artist was using. I know this was a group exhibition trying to highlight work from the collection but a more useful contribution would have been less artist’s in the exhibition with greater work from each, allowing for a more focused exhibition.
Far more serious, however, was the lack of any text that placed the work in a socio-cultural context. At the beginning of the exhibition there was 5 short paragraphs on a wall as you enter the space with mundane insights such as:
~ Photographic language engages the senses and imagination and challenges the way we “look” at the world
~ Through the use of cropping and obscure angle the familiar is made unfamiliar
~ Colour, shape and form (geometric patterns) are important
~ Some artists’ eliminate the camera altogether through photograms, scanner, collage
~ Use of multiple exposures, distortion, mirroring
~ By drilling down into the substances and processes of photography we can reflect on the very nature of photography itself
~ Exploring geometry and patterns found in nature and the built environment or alluding to more intangible themes such as time, mortality and spirituality
I have précised the five paragraphs but that’s all you get!
The only other information comes from brief wall texts accompanying each artist and these sound bites really don’t give any social and cultural context to the artist, the time they lived in or the social themes that would have influenced the work.
For example, who would know from this exhibition that the artist John Cato was one of the first photographers in Australia to create visual tone poems using images of the Australian landscape, one of the first to work in sequences of images and who would go on to be a teacher of great repute, helping other emerging photographic artists at a critical time in the development of Australian art photography. Nobody.
Also, I wanted to know more about the “substances” and “processes” of photography in regard to photographic abstraction. There was no serious theoretical enquiry, no educational component offered to the viewer here.
While money might be tight there is really no excuse for this lack of creditable, researched, insightful information. You don’t need a catalogue, all you need is a photo-stated 4-6 page essay to be given to visitors (if they desire to have one, if they want the information). It doesn’t take money it takes will to inform and educate the viewer about this important aspect of Australian photographic history. For a subject so engaging this was most disappointing.
In this particular case the curators really did drop the abstract ball.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Monash 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.
While John Gollings is best known for his work as an architectural photographer, he has produced a number of works that hone in on the Australian landscape. This aerial photograph looks down onto a landscape that has been scorched by bushfire. Viewed from above, without any horizon line to give a sense of scale or orientation to the terrain, this charred topography takes on the appearance of hairy, stubbled skin. Gollings uses this ambiguity to great effect, making the dirt tracks look like wounds that have scarred the surface of the earth, and the effects of smoke and ash look like bruises. In this respect, the use of aerial photography has allowed the images to be read as abstract ciphers of ecological trauma.
In a career spanning over 40 years, David Stephenson has consistently used photography to transcend visible reality, photographing built and natural environments to explore abstract, intangible themes such as time, mortality and spirituality. Stephenson made these Star drawings in Central Australia, overlaying as many as 72 different exposures to make one work. For each photograph he used a list of predetermined rules. For instance, he would decide on the length and number of exposures and how far he would rotate his camera between each exposure before embarking on the creation of each image. The images, each of which took a couple of hours to produce, were in this sense pre-planned; however, the amount of variables involved such as the movement of the earth and the stars during each shoot, meant the result always incorporated an element of chance. Interested in the idea that photography is essentially drawing with light, Stephenson’s series of experimental abstract patterns is not so much about documenting the night sky as it is about conceptually exploring the nature of light, time and photography itself.
The function of the stage curtain in the cinema was to help suspend the illusion of reality in the moving image of the film. The idea being that the plain white screen behind the curtain was never seen without the moving image on it. So the illusion always existed behind the curtain and was simply masked-off from us by it. This is partly why the image was alway projected onto the curtain for a moment before it was opened, to ensure that we never saw the dead white screen. These works use this function of the cinema stage curtain as a way of engaging with the meta-reality offered by the flat-plane of a photographic print. Utilising the lure of aesthetics and pattern to bring the viewer onto the folded membrane of the curtain and onto the essentially flat plane of the print. Both give way to a potential of volume.
Text from the Paul Knight website [Online] Cited 21/09/2012. No longer available online
Originally trained as a painter, Jozef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski was interested in the advancement of art materials and techniques. He worked across a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, electronic sound and light projections. He was also interested in combining different art forms and experimented with blending photography with music and sound.
Ostoja-Kotkowski played a key role in the development of experimental photography as well as electronic art in Australia. While his subjects were taken from the real world, they were photographically distorted and abstracted so that many became unrecognisable. He used this technique to create the series Inscape 871, examples of which are exhibited here. Inscape refers to an inner landscape, or images of the mind, while 871 refers to the month and year the works were completed. This series was included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition Frontiers (1971), which featured five Australian experimental photographers.
Like much of Chantal Faust’s photographic work, her series Milk was produced using a digital flatbed scanner, a method that allowed her to generate photographs without the use of a camera. The series documents milk being drunk from a bowl and can be linked to the tradition of 1960s and 1970s ‘process art’. During the late 20th century, photography was often employed by artists who wanted to document performance-based art actions and activities. Faust’s ‘action’ of slurping milk from a bowl is a playful extension of this tradition.
Drawing on MGA’s collection of Australian photographs, Photographic abstractions highlights the work of 33 Australian artists who use photography to achieve abstract effects. Ranging from modernist geometric abstraction and the psychedelic experiments and conceptual projects of the 1970s, through to recent explorations of pixelated pictorial space, this exhibition surveys a rich history of abstract Australian art photography. Photography is traditionally recognised for its ability to depict, record and document the world. However, this exhibition sets out to challenge these assumptions. As co-curator of the exhibition and MGA Curator Stephen Zagala states, “The artists in this exhibition are less concerned with documenting the world and more interested in engaging the senses, exciting the imagination and making the ordinary appear extraordinary.”
Some artists have eliminated the camera altogether, preferring the effects that can be achieved with photograms and digital scans. Other artists have experimented with multiple exposures, mirrored images, irregular lenses and the printing of the usually discarded stubs of negatives. Co-curator and MGA Curatorial Assistant Stella Loftus-Hills says, “Photography has always been tied to abstraction. Some of the first photographs ever produced were abstract and subsequent photographers have sought out abstract compositions in their work.”
One highlight of the exhibition is a selection of works by the iconic Australian photographer David Moore, who experimented with abstract photography alongside his more well-known figurative work. In Moore’s Blue collage (1983) the process of cutting bands of colour from existing photographs to create a new composition celebrates the artist’s imagination above and beyond the camera’s ability to capture content.
Artists include Andrew Browne, John Cato, Jo Daniell, John Delacour, Peter Elliston, Joyce Evans, Chantel Faust, Susan Fereday, Anthony Figallo, George Gittoes, John Gollings, Graeme Hare, Melinda Harper, Paul Knight, Peter Lambropoulos, Bruno Leti, Anne MacDonald, David Moore, Grant Mudford, Harry Nankin, Ewa Narkiewicz, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Jozef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski, Robert Owen, Wes Placek, Susan Purdy, Scott Redford, Jacky Redgate, Wolfgang Sievers, David Stephenson, Mark Strizic and Rick Wood.
Redford’s photographs of urinals… dialogue with art historical motifs that precede discourses of minimal art and postmodern understandings of the abject. In representing the site of male urination, they evoke the oxidation paintings of Andy Warhol, who directed young men to piss onto canvases prepared with copper oxide, resulting in compelling abstract imagery… All of that is in Redford’s photographs and at the same time they are completely empty and quiet and contemplative… They are pure sensory experience like rainfall, even transcendent in their purity. They are concerned with beauty, but they are beyond debates about beauty. They are indifferent and in this they are transcendent.
Chapman, Christopher. “Scott Redford’s urinals,” in Redford, Scott et.al. Bricks are Heavy (exhibition catalogue). Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, pp. 6-7.
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150 Australia Phone: +61 3 8544 0500
You can’t get much better than this to start a posting: Baltz, Friedlander, Winogrand, Nixon, Baldessari, Adams, Eggleston and Shore. I recall seeing my first vintage Stephen Shore at the American Dreams exhibition at the Bendigo Art Gallery last year. What a revelation. At the time I said,
“Two Stephen Shore chromogenic colour prints from 1976 where the colours are still true and have not faded. This was incredible – seeing vintage prints from one of the early masters of colour photography; noticing that they are not full of contrast like a lot of today’s colour photographs – more like a subtle Panavision or Technicolor film from the early 1960s. Rich, subtle, beautiful hues.”
You can get an idea of those colours in the image posted here. Like an early Panavision or Technicolor feature film.
Perhaps there is something to this analogue photography that digital will never be able to capture, let alone reproduce…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Pinakothek der Moderne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
American photography forms an extensive and simultaneously top-quality focal point in the collection, of which a selected overview is now being exhibited for the first time. The main interest of young photographers, who have been examining changes in political, social and ecological aspects of everyday American life since the late 1960s, has been the American social landscape. They have developed new pictorial styles that define stylistic devices perceived as genuinely American while at the same time being internationally recognised. Whereas Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Larry Clark, who are now considered classical modern photographers, have remained true to black-and-white photography, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore in particular have established colour photography as an artistically independent form of expression. The exhibition brings together around 100 works that, thanks to the Siemens Photography Collection and through acquisitions, bequests and donations, are now part of the museum’s holdings. True stories covers a spectrum from the street photography of the late 1960s to New Topographics and pictures by the New York photographer Zoe Leonard, taken just a few years ago.
“A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their work betrays a sympathy for the imperfection and frailties of society. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it.” With the exhibition New Documents in spring 1967, John Szarkowski, the influential curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, rang in a new era in American photography. Those photographers represented, including Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in addition to Diane Arbus, stood for a change in attitude within documentary photography that was conditioned exclusively by the subjective viewpoint of an individual’s reality. The object of photographic interest lay in the American social landscape and its conditions. It was less concerned with the natural landscape and its increasingly cultural reshaping than with the urban or urbanised space and how people move within it. In so doing, the New Documentarians rejected any obviously explanatory impetus, turning instead to the everyday and commonplace.
The exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape that was staged in the mid 1970s at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, represented a countermovement to this subjective form of expression. Their protagonists, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Stephen Shore, also pleaded for a documentary approach and were influenced by figures such as Walker Evans und Robert Frank, but considered themselves rooted in the tradition of 19th-century topographical photography in particular. The prime initiator of this working method, that was expressly not governed by style, is the Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha. Their central aim is a distanced and seemingly analytical depicition, free of judgement; their topic, the landscape altered by mankind. It is the image of the American West in particular, so much conditioned by myths and dreams but long since brought back to reality as a result of commercial and ecological exploitation, that is visible in their works.
The decisive quantum leap to establishing the position of colour photography was made by the Southerner William Eggleston in his exhibition in 1976, also held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the publication of the William Eggleston’s Guide. The harsh public criticism of his pictures was not to do with his use of colour but the fact that Eggleston photographed things and everyday situations – on the spur of the moment and in a seemingly careless manner – that, until then, had not been considered worthy of being photographed turning them into exquisite prints using the expensive and complicated dye-transfer process. In Eggleston’s cosmos of images that is strongly influenced by motifs and the light of the Mississippi Delta, colour constitutes the picture. The “rush of colour” championed by this exhibition led to the comprehensive implementation of colour photography in the field of artistic photography in the years that followed, starting in the USA and then in Europe – and especially in Germany.
An artistic attitude became established at the end of the 1970s that, with recourse to existing picture material from art, film, advertising and the mass media, formulated new pictorial concepts and, in the same breath, opened up traditional artistic and art-historical categories such as authorship, originality, uniqueness, intellectual property and authenticity to discussion. Appropriation Art owes its decisive influences to the artist John Baldessari, who lives and teaches in California. One of its most famous representatives is Richard Prince, who became famous in particular as a result of his artistic adaptation of advertising images. Concept art in the 1960s and ’70s similarly makes use of photography, both as part of an artistic practice using the most varied of materials and as a unique medium for documenting campaigns, happenings and performances. As works by Dan Graham and Zoe Leonard clearly show, the previously precisely delineated boundaries between photography that alludes to its own intrinsically, media-related history and the use of photography as an artistic strategy, have become more fluid.
Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website
Shore was a consummate New York City boy who dropped out of high school when he was 17 and instead spent his time watching and making films and photographing Andy Warhol and his compatriots at his studio, the Factory. But a 1969 trip to Amarillo, Texas, to visit the family of his friend Michael Marsh set him on a new path, spurring a decade of road trips exploring the United States. His itineraries usually included Amarillo, and its people and buildings appear throughout his photographs from the time. “I loved Amarillo, not just what it looked like but the way people hung out – the pace of the life, the car culture, the barbecue joints,” he said. This stark, frontal portrait of the Sunset drive-in conveys the withering Texas heat that has peeled the facade’s paint, as well as a sense of forlornness and neglect that proved prescient when the drive-in closed two years later.
Anonymous text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023) on the American Carter Museum of American Art website Nd [Online] Cited 12/09/2012. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Exhibition dates: 27th March – 9th September, 2012
Curator: Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
WARNING: this posting contains photographs of nudity. If you do not like please do not look.
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Franck-François-Genès Chauvassaignes (French, 1831 – after 1900) Untitled [Female Nude in Studio] 1856-1859 Salted paper print from glass negative 19.1 x 15.2cm (7.5 x 6 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1998 Public domain
This corner of a painter’s atelier somewhere in France in the middle of the nineteenth century is scarcely tethered to time or place; it could as easily be a loft in New York today or, had photography existed four centuries earlier, a studio in the Italian Renaissance. What is surprising here is the absence of even the thinnest disguise – no swags of drapery, elaborate coiffure, or skeins of beads as are commonly found in the work of other purveyors of “studies for artists.” Here, the model is utterly naked. With her intelligent head and dirty feet, this young woman helped found the matter-of-fact modelling sorority joined a decade later by Édouard Manet’s Olympia.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin (French, 1800 – after 1875) Untitled [Two Standing Female Nudes] c. 1850 Daguerreotype Visible: 14.5 x 11.1cm (5 11/16 x 4 3/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Anonymous Gift and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997 Public domain
Although Moulin was sentenced in 1851 to a month in jail for producing images that, according to court papers, were “so obscene that even to pronounce the titles… would be to commit an indecency,” this daguerreotype seems more allied to art than to erotica. Instead of the boudoir props and provocative poses typical of hand-coloured pornographic daguerreotypes, Moulin depicted these two young women utterly at ease, as unselfconscious in their nudity as Botticelli’s Venus.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Seated Female Nude] c. 1850 Daguerreotype 9.1 x 6.9cm (3 9/16 x 2 11/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005 Public domain
This daguerreotype was surely intended to serve artistic purposes, but the odd twist of the body and the strange relationship of the three visible limbs seem to render it inappropriate for artistic emulation. Such tension between an artistic ideal and realistic means – between the classicism of an academic pose and the awkwardness of the camera’s rendering of human movement – seems emblematic of the dilemma faced by the nascent medium striving to be an art.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) [Standing Female Nude] c. 1853 Salted paper print from paper negative 12 x 16cm (4 3/4 x 6 5/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1993 Public domain
A student of the painter Jean François Millet (1814-1875) and a lithographer of scenes of daily life, costume, and erotica in the 1820s and 1830s, Vallou reportedly took up photography in the early 1840s. Because his early photographs have not been identified, it has been assumed that they depicted naked women, a subject for which it was to improper to acknowledge authorship.
Between 1851 and 1855, Vallou made a series of small-scale paper photographs of female nudes that he marketed (and legally registered) as models for artists. Vallou’s nudes have long been associated with those of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), who is known to have used photographs in his painting process. Though no absolute one-to-one correspondence can be pointed to, there are some striking similarities in pose, and the heavy, soporific quality of Vallou’s models is very close to Courbet’s concept of the nude.
Text from the Metropolitan Muesum of Art website
Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874) Untitled [Seated Female Nude] 1853-1854 Albumen silver print from glass negative 6 13/16 × 4 11/16 in. (17.3 × 11.9cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Kravis Gift, 2005 Public domain
Durieu was a lawyer and early advocate and practitioner of photography in France who, in 1853-1854, made a series of photographic studies of nude and costumed figures as models for artists. The French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix helped him pose the figures and later praised the prints, from which he sketched, as “palpable demonstrations of the free design of nature.” While the painter saw the accurate transcription of reality as a virtue of photography, Durieu knew that a good photograph was not simply the result of the correct use of the medium but, more significantly, an expression of the photographer’s temperament and vision. In an important article he emphasised the interpretative nature of the complex manipulations in photography and explained that the photographer must previsualise his results so as to make a “picture,” not just a “copy.”
This photograph proves Durieu’s point: through the elegant contours of the drapery, the smooth modelling of the flesh, and the grace and restraint of the pose, the picture attains an artistic poise that combines Delacroix’s sensuality with Ingres’s classicism, and rivals both.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Charles Alphonse Marlé (French, 1821 – after 1867) Untitled [Standing Male Nude] c. 1855 Salted paper print from paper negative 25.7 x 17.6cm (10 1/8 x 6 15/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Ezra Mack Gift and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
Marlé’s photograph was probably intended as an aid for painters and sculptors. The jury-rigged arrangement of podium, books, and potted tree, as well as the painting held in the background by a studio assistant, may strike the modern viewer as an incongruous contrast to the heroic gesture of the model. Marlé and those who bought his photograph, however, would have been absorbed by the grand academic pose and likely would have thought the awkward accoutrements of little consequence.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Nadar (French, Paris 1820 – 1910 Paris) [Standing Female Nude] 1860-1861 20.2 x 13.3cm (7 15/16 x 5 1/4 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991 Public Domain
Famed for his portraits of writers, artists, and left-wing politicians, Nadar is known to have photographed only three female nudes. This one was made at the behest of the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme to assist in the process of painting Phryné before the Areopagus, displayed at the Salon of 1861. Gérôme’s painting depicts the moment when the famous courtesan Phryné, on trial for impiety, is suddenly unveiled by her lawyer; persuaded by Phryné’s divine beauty, the jurors acquit her.
Like Phryné, who is said to have modelled for the ancient Greek painter Apelles and other artists of antiquity, Nadar’s model, Marie-Christine Leroux (1820-1863), was widely sought by artists of her time and was the basis for the character Musette in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Depicting the human body has been among the greatest challenges, preoccupations, and supreme achievements of artists for centuries. The nude – even in generalised or idealised renderings – has triggered impassioned discussions about sin, sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty, especially when the chosen medium is photography, with its inherent accuracy and specificity. Through September 9, 2012, Naked before the Camera, an exhibition of more than 60 photographs selected from the renowned holdings of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveys the history of this subject and explores some of the motivations and meanings that underlie photographers’ fascination with the nude.
“In every culture and across time, artists have been captivated by the human figure,” commented Thomas P. Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan. “In Naked before the Camera, we see how photographers have used their medium to explore this age-old subject and create compelling new images.”
The exhibition begins in the 19th century, when photographs often served artists as substitutes for live models. Such “studies for artists” were known to have been used by the French painter Gustave Courbet, whose Woman with a Parrot (1866), for instance, is strikingly similar to photographer Julien Vallou de Villeneuve’s Female Nude of 1853. Even when their stated purpose was to aid artists, however, the best of these 19th-century photographs of the nude were also intended as works of art in their own right. Two recently acquired photographs, made in the mid-1850s by an unknown French artist, are striking examples. Not only are they larger than all other photographic nudes from the time, they stand out due to an extraordinary surface pattern that interrupts the images and suggests a view through gossamer or a photograph printed on finely pleated silk rather than paper. The elegant Female Nude harkens back to an Eve or Venus and is vignetted by the camera lens as if seen through a peephole, while her male counterpart is shown in strict profile in a pose that recalls precedents from antiquity. Each figure draws from the past while being presented in a strikingly modern way, without any equivalent among other 19th-century studies for artists.
Not all photographers of the nude were motivated by artistic desire. The second section of Naked before the Camera includes photographs made for medical and forensic purposes, as ethnographic studies, as tools to analyse anatomy and movement, and – not surprisingly – as erotica. The lines between such categories were not always clearly drawn; some photographers called their images “studies for artists” merely to evade the censors, while viewers of the G. W. Wilson Studio’s Zulu Girls (1892-93) or Paul Wirz’s ethnographic photographs of scantily clad Indonesians from the 1910s and 1920s were undoubtedly titillated by the blending of exoticism and eroticism.
Beginning in the fertile period of modernist experimentation that followed on the heels of World War I, photographers such as Brassaï, Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, André Kertész, and Bill Brandt found in the human body a perfect vehicle for both visual play and psycho-sexual exploration. In Distortion #6 (1932) by André Kertész, a woman’s body is stretched and pulled in the reflections of a fun-house mirror – a figure from a Surrealist dream that stands in stark contrast to the images of perfect feminine beauty by earlier photographers.
In mid-20th-century America, photographers more often communicated an intimate connection with their subjects. Following the example of Alfred Stieglitz’s famed portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, photographers such as Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, and Emmet Gowin made many nude studies of their wives. Callahan’s photograph of his wife and daughter, Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago (1954), for instance, gives the viewer access to a private, tender moment of intimacy.
In the wake of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the AIDS crisis that began in the 1980s, artists began to think of the body as a politicised terrain and explored issues of identity, sexuality, and gender. Diane Arbus’s Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. (1963) and A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. (1968), Larry Clark’s untitled image (1972-1973) from the series Teenage Lust, and Hannah Wilke’s Snatch Shot with Ray Gun (1978) are among the works featured in the concluding section of the exhibition.
Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Nude with Mirror] c. 1850 Daguerreotype Dimensions: visible: 7 x 5.7cm (2 3/4 x 2 1/4 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997 Public domain
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) [Reclining Female Nude] c. 1853 Salted paper print from paper negative 11.8 x 16.0cm (4 5/8 x 6 5/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1993 Public domain
A student of the painter Jean François Millet and a lithographer of scenes of daily life, costume, and erotica in the 1820s and 1830s, Vallou reportedly took up photography in the early 1840s, but his early photographs have not been identified. Perhaps they depicted naked women, a subject for which it was improper to acknowledge authorship.
Between 1851 and 1855, however, Vallou made a series of photographs of female nudes that he marketed (and legally registered) as models for artists. Vallou’s nudes have long been associated with those of Gustave Courbet, who is known to have used photographs in his painting process. Although no absolute one-to-one correspondence can be pointed to, the heavy soporific quality of Vallou’s models is very close to Courbet’s concept of the nude, and the reclining figure displayed here is strikingly similar in pose to the painter’s Woman with a Parrot (1866), on view in the galleries for nineteenth-century painting.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Nu féminin allongé sur un canapé Récamier (Female nude lying on a Recamier sofa) c. 1856 Albumen silver print from glass negative 21.7 x 32.9cm (8 9/16 x 12 15/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005 Public domain
The central figure in French photography of the 1850s, Le Gray was a master of many genres including landscape and seascape, architectural photography, and portraiture. Only four nude studies by Le Gray are known, however, each in a single example. In this striking image, the photographer departed from the usual academic treatment of the nude, such as he might have learned from his years in the painting studio of Paul Delaroche, in favor of a more psychologically charged spirit. The daybed’s velvet upholstery, the tassels on the pillow, and the heavy curtain fabric have a reassuring and familiar presence, but the serpentine locks of hair evoke Medusa and hint at strangulation, while the legs and feet cross and tense in the manner of a crucifixion. Withdrawn in sleep – or is it death? – the beautiful young woman reminds one of a drowning victim, an Ophelia freshly recovered from the Seine, a theme favoured by the painters and poets of Paris.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Standing Female Nude] c. 1856 Salted paper print from collodion glass negative 43.4 x 28.3cm (17 1/16 x 11 1/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Edwynn Houk and Hans P. Kraus Jr., Alfred Stieglitz Society, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Anonymous, Adam R. Rose and Peter R. McQuillan, Joseph M. Cohen, Susan and Thomas Dunn, Kurtz Family Foundation, W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, Christian Keesee Charitable Trust, and Robert A. Taub Gifts; and Funds from various donors, 2012 Public domain
The original impulse behind these boldly ambitious figure studies may have been to aid a painter or sculptor, but they are nonetheless without parallel in the early history of photography. Enlarged to the size of drawn académies – drawings of the live model that were a standard part of art instruction in France – their scale alone sets them apart from the more modest productions of Vallou de Villeneuve, Durieu, and other artists of the 1850s. More unusually, the images are interrupted by a surface pattern that gives the impression that the photographs are printed on finely pleated silk rather than paper – likely the result of a technical error. Instead of wiping clean his glass-plate negatives and starting over as virtually all other photographers would have done, this artist recognised that the pattern created a veil that, like time or memory, removed the images from their merely utilitarian purpose and elevated them from the mundane to the realm of art.
Just as the eye and mind may be pleasantly torn between bravura brushwork and the ostensible subject of a painting, there is a tension here between the beauty of the subject – the elegant female draped in gossamer; the strict profile and geometric setting of the male – and the visible traces of their creation, such as the flowing surface pattern and the strong vignetting of the female, which suggests a view spied through a peephole.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Standing Male Nude] c. 1856 Salted paper print from collodion glass negative 43.4 x 28.4cm (17 1/16 x 11 3/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Edwynn Houk and Hans P. Kraus Jr., Alfred Stieglitz Society, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Anonymous, Adam R. Rose and Peter R. McQuillan, Joseph M. Cohen, Susan and Thomas Dunn, Kurtz Family Foundation, W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, Christian Keesee Charitable Trust, and Robert A. Taub Gifts; and funds from various donors, 2012 Public domain
Oscar Gustav Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Ariadne 1857 Albumen silver print from glass negative Mount: 16 1/16 in. x 13 1/16 in. (40.8 x 33.2cm) Image: 8 1/4 x 6 1/2 in. (21 x 16.5cm); oval Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005 Public domain
Working in a place – Victorian England – where any photographic nude was considered offensive because the process implied not only the “nastiness” of the artist and vendor, but also “the degradation of the person who serves as model on the occasion,” Rejlander sought to ally his work with that of noted painters. This nude study is one of a series based on figures in the work of Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Rubens, Murillo, and Gainsborough; the precedent here is Titian’s Venus and Adonis, and Rejlander’s intention was to show how the painter adhered to or strayed from the ways a real body can twist and turn. Critic A. H. Wall defended the propriety of Rejlander’s Studies from the Nude, saying, “Refined and ennobled by art, real beauty, palpable flesh and blood, speaks of nothing but its own inherent loveliness.”
Such references to painting did not always afford adequate protection, however. Writing of Rejlander’s famous Two Ways of Life, photographer and critic Thomas Sutton wrote, “There is no impropriety in exhibiting such works of art as Etty’s Bathers Surprised by a Swan or the Judgment of Paris but there is impropriety in allowing the public to see photographs of nude prostitutes, in flesh-and-blood truthfulness and minuteness of detail.”
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Female Nude with Mask] c. 1870 Albumen silver print from glass negative 26 x 19.1cm (10 1/4 x 7 1/2 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005 Public domain
Even as she seems to part her tresses to expose her naked body, the model here masks her face in an effort to conceal her identity. While drawing, painting, and sculpture of the human figure commonly involve elements of transformation, idealisation, or the combination of features from various models, photography usually presents a recognisable image of its subject. It was not uncommon, therefore, for models who routinely posed nude for artists in other media to hide their faces when standing naked before the camera. For the viewer – not always an artist looking for help in figure drawing – the mask added an element of erotic frisson.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Louis Igout (French, 1837-1881)(Photographer) A. Calavas (French)(Editor) Plate from Album d’Études – Poses c. 1880 Albumen silver prints from glass negatives Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993 Public domain
This album is an excellent example of the type of photography produced in the nineteenth century as an aid to artists in the study of contour, modelling, and proportion, and as a vocabulary of expression, gesture, and pose sanctioned by the art of antiquity and the Old Masters. Groupings representing Cain and Abel, the Drunken Silenus, Hercules and Antaeus, the Dying Gaul, the Cnidian Aphrodite, and others are recognisable among the photographs. Single prints showing sixteen small images, such as the page shown here, served as a type of stock catalogue, allowing clients to survey a broad range of possible poses and order larger prints of those which best served their needs.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Louis Igout (French, 1837-1881)(Photographer) A. Calavas (French)(Editor) Plate from Album d’Études – Poses (details) c. 1880 Albumen silver prints from glass negatives Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993 Public domain
Thomas Eakins (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1844–1916 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) [Thomas Eakins and John Laurie Wallace on a Beach] c. 1883 Platinum print 25.5 x 20.4cm (10 1/16 x 8 1/16 in.), irregular Metropolitan Museum of Art David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1943 Public domain
The great American painter and photographer Thomas Eakins was devoted to the scientific study of the human form and committed to its truthful representation. While he and his students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were surrounded by casts of classical sculpture, Eakins declared that he did not like “a long study of casts. … At best they are only imitations, and an imitation of imitations cannot have so much life as an imitation of life itself.” Photography provided an obvious solution.
This photograph, in which Eakins and a student affected the elegant contrapposto stances of classical sculpture, was probably taken during an excursion with students to Manasquan Inlet at Point Pleasant, New Jersey, during the summer of 1883. Valuing his photographs not only as studies for paintings but also for their own sake, Eakins carefully printed the best images on platinum paper. In this case, he went to the additional trouble of enlarging the original, horizontally formatted image and cropping it vertically to better contain the perfectly balanced figures.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Albert Londe (French, 1858-1917) Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (French, 1849-1933) [Male Musculature Study] c. 1890 Albumen silver print Image: 14.9 x 9.6cm (5 7/8 x 3 3/4 in.) Mount: 14.9 x 9.9cm (5 7/8 x 3 7/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro, 2012
Author of a treatise on the importance of the camera in medical practice, Albert Londe declared, “the photographic plate is the scientist’s true retina.” In collaboration with a laboratory director and professor of anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts, Londe found that photographs intended for physiological analysis could also serve artistic applications. Their careful portraits of athletes – whether taken with stop-action cameras specially designed by Londe or in static poses such as the example here – were used in scientific texts on musculature and became templates for illustrations to aid artists in rendering ideally proportioned figures.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Guglielmo Plüshow (Italian born Germany, 1852–1930) [Young Male Nude Seated on Leopard Skin] 1890s-1900s Albumen silver print from glass negative 22.2 x 16.2cm (8 3/4 x 6 3/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum Accession Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
Censors have long struggled to keep pace with evolving technology and expanding distribution networks of photographic erotica. In nineteenth-century France, government officials regularly seized thousands of photographs similar to the daguerreotype displayed here, which were deemed lewd.
Male nudity has frequently been subject to stricter control than pornography featuring women. The Arcadian photographs of Plüshow and his cousin and student Wilhelm von Gloeden were avidly collected in the late nineteenth century, but in the 1930s many of their prints and negatives, considered deviant by the Italian Fascist government, were destroyed. For much of the twentieth century, it was illegal in the United States to mail photographs that might be judged prurient, forcing photographers to mask genitalia and pubic hair with strategic props or with overpainting that could be easily removed by purchasers. Sale of erotic male physique magazines and bodybuilder pin-ups, ostensibly circulated to promote fitness, was legalised in a 1962 Supreme Court ruling, which concluded that “portrayals of the male nude cannot fairly be regarded as more objectionable than many portrayals of the female nude that society tolerates.”
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853–1914) Assasination of C. Lecomte 711 Rue des Martyrs 1901-1908 From Album of Paris Crime Scenes Gelatin silver print Overall: 24.3 x 31cm (9 9/16 x 12 3/16in.) Page: 23 x 29cm (9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001 Public domain
Alphonse Bertillon, the chief of criminal identification for the Paris police department, developed the mug shot format and other photographic procedures used by police to register criminals. Although the images in this extraordinary album of forensic photographs were made by or under the direction of Bertillon, it was probably assembled by a private investigator or secretary who worked at the Paris prefecture. Photographs of the pale bodies of murder victims are assembled with views of the rooms where the murders took place, close-ups of objects that served as clues, and mug shots of criminals and suspects. Made as part of an archive rather than as art, these postmortem portraits, recorded in the deadpan style of a police report, nonetheless retain an unsettling potency.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853–1914) Untitled 1901-1908 From Album of Paris Crime Scenes Gelatin silver print Overall: 24.3 x 31cm (9 9/16 x 12 3/16in.) Page: 23 x 29cm (9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001 Public domain
Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853–1914) Untitled 1901-1908 From Album of Paris Crime Scenes Gelatin silver print Overall: 24.3 x 31cm (9 9/16 x 12 3/16in.) Page: 23 x 29cm (9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001 Public domain
Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) [Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington] c. 1916 Gelatin silver print 8.8 x 6.3cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
Rebelling against the narrow values of upper-class Edwardian society, Lady Ottoline Morrell, an eccentric hostess to Bloomsbury, surrounded herself in London and on her estate at Garsington with a large circle of friends including Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster. These images of an improvised dance show Lady Ottoline’s ten-year-old daughter, Julian, and her slightly older companions embroiled in a naked whirl, pagan in its exuberance, that reflects the emancipated attitudes of the photographer’s circle.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) [Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington] c. 1916 Gelatin silver print 8.8 x 6.2cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
In his early attempts to merge the realism of photography with the expressive effect of abstract art, Weston honed in on close-up details of his subjects. That the faces of his models were often cropped or averted served practical as well as aesthetic purposes, enabling the photographs to be read as figure studies rather than as individual portraits while also protecting the privacy of the friends and lovers who served as models.
One of the most radically abstract of Brassaï’s nudes, this image was published in 1933 in the inaugural issue of the avant-garde magazine Minotaure. With the figure’s head and legs cut off by the picture’s edges, the twisting, truncated torso seems to float in space like an apparition – an ambiguous, organic form with an uncanny resemblance to a phallus. This transformation of the female figure into a fetish object is a hallmark of Surrealism that reflects the important influence of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory on European art of the early twentieth century.
Brassaï made his name as a chronicler of the night, with images that ranged from reflections on wet cobblestones to the denizens of bars and brothels. Like so many of his photographs, Introductions at Suzy’s was not an impromptu scene caught by an undetected observer but rather a carefully constructed tableau meant to highlight the dynamic between buttoned-up bourgeois clients and Suzy’s bevy of prostitutes, naked but for their bracelets and high heels. The “client” was actually Brassaï’s friend and bodyguard; the “girls,” however, were not stand-ins.
A keen observer of Parisian nightlife in the 1930s, Brassaï was drawn to the visual conundrums and optical innuendos of everyday life. The play of reflections and absences in this image, made in a Paris brothel, suggests the materialization of subconscious impulses. Evoking Freud’s definition of desire as the sensation arising from a perceived absence of remembered pleasure, this blatantly sexual scene suggests but withholds a specific narrative.
Although Kertesz had long been interested in mirrors, reflections, and the idea of distorting the human figure, he did not seriously investigate their photographic possibilities until 1933, when the risqué French magazine Le Sourire commissioned him to make a series of figure studies. Using a funhouse mirror from a Parisian amusement park, Kertesz, who had never photographed nudes before, spent four weeks making about two hundred negatives.
Kertész accentuated the narrow ribcage and long waist of the ideal contemporary woman by photographing his model in a carnival mirror. If the top half of this beautiful nude resembles those Modigliani painted, the swell of the haunch recalls Mannerist nudes and their nineteenth-century revivals, especially Ingres’ grande odalisque.
Man Ray’s photograph of an arm is cropped so abstractly that it seems to metamorphose into other body parts – a knee, a calf, a thigh – or into some utterly unidentifiable yet heroic form. This image appeared on the cover of Formes Nues (1935), which also included the work of Brassaï, László Moholy-Nagy, Franz Roh, and George Platt Lynes, among others.
In the magazine’s introduction, Man Ray wrote, “were it not for the fact that photography permits me to seize and to possess the human body and face in more than a temporary manner, I should quickly have tired of this medium.”
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, New York 1896 – 1959 Laguna Beach, California) Nude with Mask and Hat c. 1936 Carbro print 43.3 x 30.0cm (17 1/16 x 11 13/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1977
Outerbridge was a successful commercial photographer, but although he found such work stimulating, he also made photographs as a means of personal expression throughout his career. Photographing nude models in colour in the 1930s was challenging – not only in the difficulty of correctly capturing skin tones using complicated new processes, but also because finding a venue to publish or exhibit the work was unlikely. Although he began by posing his models in the manner of painted masterpieces, Outerbridge’s compositions became increasingly provocative in the late 1930s. The sexualised charge and commercial palette of works such as this were not in keeping with attitudes of the period and were not shown during the artist’s lifetime.
In his nightmarish tableaux of mutilated and reassembled dolls posed in domestic interiors, Bellmer grappled with the base condition of the human body and with the bodily fragment as fetish object. Mannequins and dolls – simultaneously familiar and strange – supplied the material for his primal expressions of terror and awe, which often evoked the innocent violence and latent sexuality of childhood games. Whether they are read as Freudian emblems of the uncanny or as ominous harbingers of Nazi atrocities, Bellmer’s images exemplify the Surrealist view of the female body as the source of simultaneous fascination and revulsion.
Charis Wilson, the model for this series, admitted to being shocked upon seeing Weston’s nudes for the first time, as she had previously known only the romantically retouched photographs of depilated bodies then popular. In studying Weston’s work she found, “I couldn’t get past the simple amazement at how real they were. Then I began to see the rhythmic patterns, the intensely perceived sculptural forms, the subtle modulations of tone, of which these small, perfect images were composed. And I began to appreciate the originality of the viewpoint that had selected just these transitory moments and made them fast against the current of time.”
By 1950, Penn was a well-known Vogue portrait and fashion photographer but had already made, privately, a major series of nudes – a personal but lesser-known body of work. During the week, he photographed models wearing fashionable clothes for the magazine, but weekends and evenings he made studies of female nudes. The women were full-bodied and the photographs unorthodox, recalling the form and spirit of archaic fertility idols.
Muses throughout his career, Callahan’s wife and daughter played, posed, and aged before his lens. With their attention to the physicality of light, however, Callahan’s photographs transcend mere family portraiture by calling attention to the simple beauty of life’s fleeting moments. “He just liked to take the pictures of me,” Eleanor recalled in her nineties. “In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.”
Eleanor Callahan died in February 2012 at the age of ninety-five.
Arbus’s interest in the tension between revelation and concealment comes into starkest focus in the portraits she made at Sunshine Park, a family nudist camp in New Jersey. While nudism might be considered the ultimate form of exposure, it often required a different kind of cover-up. As the artist remarked in an unpublished article written for Esquire magazine in 1966: “For many of these people, their presence here is the darkest secret of their lives, unsuspected by relatives, friends, and employers in the outside world, the disclosure of which might bring disgrace.”
Sexuality and mortality – which many would say are central preoccupations of humankind – are key to Morrisroe’s biography and art. The son of a drug-addicted mother, a teenage hustler, and a precocious punk queer, Morrisroe carried a bullet (shot by a disgruntled john) in his chest from the age of eighteen and consequently walked with a limp that added one more element to his outsider self-image. Sex and death were persistent themes in his work, with pronounced poignancy after his 1986 AIDS diagnosis. In this work, Morrisroe has taken a page from a gay S&M magazine, cut out the shapes of two naked men, and used the sheet as a negative to print a unique image in which the figures – literally absent – appear as dark silhouettes against a netherworld of sexual activity.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
Exhibition dates: 27th June – 23rd September, 2012
Curators: Dr. Martin Engler, Head of the Collection of Contemporary Art, with Dr. Jana Baumann serving as co-curator
Installation view of the exhibition Painting in Photography. Strategies of Appropriation at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing Victor Burgin’s Office at Night (Red), 1985 (below)
“To understand the production of art at the end of tradition, which in our lifetime means art at the end of modernism, requires, as the postmodern debate has shown, a careful consideration of the idea of history and the notion of ending. Rather than just thinking ending as the arrival of the finality of a fixed chronological moment, it can also be thought as a slow and indecisive process of internal decomposition that leaves in place numerous deposits of us, in us and with us – all with a considerable and complex afterlife. In this context all figuration is prefigured. This is to say that the design element of the production of a work of art, the compositional, now exists prior to the management of form of, and on, the picture plane. Techniques of assemblage, like montage and collage – which not only juxtaposed different aesthetics but also different historical moments, were the precursors of what is now the general condition of production.”
“Art Byting the Dust” Tony Fry 1990 1
They said that photography would be the death of painting. It never happened. Recently they thought that digital photography would be the death of analogue photography. It hasn’t happened for there are people who care enough about analogue photography to keep it going, no matter what.
As the quotation above astutely observes, the digital age has changed the conditions of production updating the techniques of montage and collage for the 21st century. Now through assemblage the composition may be prefigured but that does not mean that there are not echoes, traces and deposits of other technologies, other processes that are not evidenced in contemporary photography.
As photography influenced painting when it first appeared and vice versa (photography went through a period known as Pictorialism where where it imitated Impressionist painting), this exhibition highlights the influence of painting on later photography. Whatever process it takes photography has always been about painting with light – through a pinhole, through a microscope, through a camera lens; using light directly onto photographic paper, using the light of the scanner or the computer screen.
As Paul Virilio observes, no longer is there a horizon line but the horizon square of the computer screen, still a picture plane that evidences the history of art and life. Vestiges of time and technology are somehow always present no matter what medium an artist chooses. They always have a complex afterlife and afterimage.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I really don’t think it is a decomposition, more like a re/composition or reanimation.
PPS. Notice how Otto Steinert’s Luminogramm (1952, below), is eerily similar to some of Pierre Soulages paintings.
1/ Fry, Tony. “Art Byting the Dust,” in Hayward, Phillip. Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century. London: John Libbey and Company, 1990, pp. 169-170
Many thankx to the Städel Musuem for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Victor Burgin (British, b. 1941) Office at Night (Red) 1985
In a conceptual, analytical visual language, Burgin, who originally started out as a painter, refers to Edward Hopper’s painting “Office at Night” from 1940. It shows a New York office at night, in which the boss and secretary are still at work and alone. Burgin’s picture is part of a series about this depiction of a couple by Hopper (and the special role of the female motif in his work). Burgin’s picture consists of three panels, each of which uses a fictional register: letters (word), color (red is traditionally the color for lust and love) and photographic image (secretary).
Installation view of the exhibition Painting in Photography. Strategies of Appropriation at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing at left, Thomas Ruff’s Substrat 10 (2002, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Painting in Photography. Strategies of Appropriation at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing at centre, Wolfgang Tillmans Paper drop (window) (2006, below)
From 27 June to 23 September 2012, the Städel Museum will show the exhibition “Painting in Photography. Strategies of Appropriation.” The comprehensive presentation will highlight the influence of painting on the imagery produced by contemporary photographic art. Based on the museum’s own collection and including important loans from the DZ Bank Kunstsammlung as well as international private collections and galleries, the exhibition at the Städel will centre on about 60 examples, among them major works by László Moholy-Nagy, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, and Amelie von Wulffen. Whereas the influence of the medium of photography on the “classic genres of art” has already been the subject of analysis in numerous exhibitions and publications, less attention has been paid to the impact of painting on contemporary photography to date. The show at the Städel explores the reflection of painting in the photographic image by pursuing various artistic strategies of appropriation which have one thing in common: they reject the general expectation held about photography that it will document reality in an authentic way.
The key significance of photography within contemporary art and its incorporation into the collection of the Städel Museum offer an occasion to fathom the relationship between painting and photography in an exhibition. While painting dealt with the use of photography in the mass media in the 1960s, today’s photographic art shows itself seriously concerned with the conditions of painting. Again and again, photography reflects, thematises, or represents the traditional pictorial medium, maintaining an ambivalent relationship between appropriation and detachment.
Numerous works presented in the Städel’s exhibition return to the painterly abstractions of the prewar and postwar avant-gardes, translate them into the medium of photography, and thus avoid a reproduction of reality. Early examples for the adaption of techniques of painting in photography are László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895-1946) photograms dating from the 1920s. For his photographs shot without a camera, the Hungarian artist and Bauhaus teacher arranged objects on a sensitised paper; these objects left concrete marks as supposedly abstract forms under the influence of direct sunlight. In Otto Steinert’s (1915-1978) non-representational light drawings or “luminigrams,” the photographer’s movement inscribed itself directly into the sensitised film. The pictures correlate with the gestural painting of Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism. A product of random operations during the exposure and development of the photographic paper, Wolfgang Tillmans’ (b. 1968) work “Freischwimmer 54” (2004) is equally far from representing the external world. It is the pictures’ fictitious depth, transparency, and dynamics that lend Thomas Ruff’s photographic series “Substrat” its extraordinary painterly quality recalling colour field paintings or Informel works. For his series “Seascapes” the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) seems to have “emptied” the motif through a long exposure time: the sublime pictures of the surface of the sea and the sky – which either blur or are set off against each other – seem to transcend time and space.
In addition to the photographs mentioned, the exhibition “Painting in Photography” includes works by artists who directly draw on the history of painting in their choice of motifs. The mise-en-scène piece “Picture for Women” (1979) by the Canadian photo artist Jeff Wall (b. 1946), which relates to Édouard Manet’s famous painting “Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère” from 1882, may be cited as an example for this approach. The camera positioned in the centre of the picture reveals the mirrored scene and turns into the eye of the beholder. The fictitious landscape pictures by Beate Gütschow (b. 1970), which consist of digitally assembled fragments, recall ideal Arcadian sceneries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The photographs taken by Italian Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) in the studio of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) “copy” Morandi’s still lifes by representing the real objects in the painter’s studio instead of his paintings.
Another appropriative strategy sees the artist actually becoming active as a painter, transforming either the object he has photographed or its photographic representation. Oliver Boberg’s, Richard Hamilton’s, Georges Rousse’s and Amelie von Wulffen’s works rank in this category. For her series “Stadtcollagen” (1998-1999) Amelie von Wulffen (b. 1966) assembled drawing, photography, and painting to arrive at the montage of a new reality. The artist’s recollections merge with imaginary spaces offering the viewer’s fantasy an opportunity for his or her own associations.
The exhibition also encompasses positions of photography for which painting is the object represented in the picture. The most prominent examples in this section come from Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) and Louise Lawler (b. 1947), both representatives of US Appropriation Art. From the late 1970s on, Levine and Lawler have photographically appropriated originals from art history. Levine uses reproductions of paintings from a catalogue published in the 1920s: she photographs them and makes lithographs of her pictures. Lawler photographs works of art in private rooms, museums, and galleries and thus rather elucidates the works’ art world context than the works as such.
Beate Gütschow (German, b. 1970) PN #1 2000 C-Print, mounted on aluminium dibond Acquired in 2013, property of Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Eigentum des Städelschen Museums-Vereins e.V.
… these images do not evoke a sense of the sublime. On closer inspection, not only is the virginity of nature lost forever, but the innocence of perception is also denied. The natural realms presented here are simply too beautiful to be true. The beauty, wildness, and potentially threatening aspects of nature have been skillfully merged into a decorative whole, as they were in landscape painting from the 17th through to the 19th century. Beate Gütschow’s photographic works reproduce traditional patterns of depiction, incorporating landscape elements that recall compositions by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Jacob van Ruisdael (1628-1682), Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), John Constable (1776-1837), and Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810). The subjects portrayed by these landscape painters were based on an idealised worldview, the construction of which reflected the dominant philosophical ethos of their time. The artists themselves, however, presented this ideal in a manner bordering on the absolute. …
Beate Gütschow photographs landscapes with a medium-format analog camera, then converts the images into digital files. From this archived material she then constructs new landscapes in Photoshop, basing their spatial arrangements and compositional structures on the principles of landscape painting. As part of this subsequent editing process, she adjusts the light and colours in the images, applying lighting techniques from the realm of painting to her photographs. Because Gütschow uses only the retouching tool and other traditional darkroom techniques offered by Photoshop, not its painting tools, the photographic surface is preserved and the joins between the component parts are not immediately visible. These digital tools make it possible to employ a painterly method without the resulting picture being a painting. The viewer is given the impression that this is a completely normal photograph. When, however, an ideal landscape is presented in the form of a photograph, it appears more unnatural than the painted version of the same view. In this way, Gütschow’s work explores concepts of representation, colour, and light – the formal attributes of painting and photography – as well as the distinctions between documentation and staging.
Extract from Gebbers, Anna-Catharina. “Larger than Life,” in Beate Gütschow: ZISLS. Heidelberg, 2016, pp. 8-17. Translated by Jacqueline Todd [Online] Cited 23/08/2022. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Luigi Ghirri (Italian, 1943-1992) L’atelier de Giorgio Morandi, Bologne 1989
Luigi Ghirri (5 January 1943 – 14 February 1992) was an Italian artist and photographer who gained a far-reaching reputation as a pioneer and master of contemporary photography, with particular reference to its relationship between fiction and reality.
Amelie von Wulffen (German, b. 1966) Untitled (City Collages, VIII) 1998 Oil paint, photographs on paper 42 x 59.7cm Acquired in 2009 with funds from the Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert, property of Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Eigentum des Städelschen Museums-Vereins e.V.
The starting point for Amelie von Wulffen’s city collages is the urban architecture which she has photographed herself. These photographs are affixed to a surface and then processed pictorially: the artist alienates the perspective, adds abstract patterns and confronts the scene with quirky objects. The painted forms and unreal connections intervene in the relationship to reality of the supposedly objective photograph. The combination of photograph and painting is accompanied by a reflection on the characteristics of the medium concerned. The photographic reproduction of a situation which has been experienced may adequately record the place but not necessarily the memory. With this in mind, the artist sees painting as a suitable medium to equip photography with an authentic means of expression. During the chemical process of photography, real objects are registered on the light-sensitive material, just as the mood of the place and the memory of the artist are translated into the painting process. With regard to form, Wulffen reveals a wealth of references to Constructivism, Surrealism and Dadaism.
In our “Art after 1945” series, artists introduce their artworks in the Städel collection. In this episode Amelie von Wulffen explains her series “Stadtcollagen”.
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) Picture for Women 1979 Cibachrome transparency in lightbox 204.5 × 142.5cm (80.5 in × 56.1 in)
Picture for Women is a photographic work by Canadian artist Jeff Wall. Produced in 1979, Picture for Women is a key early work in Wall’s career and exemplifies a number of conceptual, material and visual concerns found in his art throughout the 1980s and 1990s. An influential photographic work, Picture for Women is a response to Édouard Manet’s Un bar aux Folies Bergère and is a key photograph in the shift from small-scale black and white photographs to large-scale colour that took place in the 1980s in art photography and museum exhibitions. …
Picture for Women is a 142.5 by 204.5 cm Cibachrome transparency mounted on a lightbox. Along with The Destroyed Room (1978), Wall considers Picture for Women to be his first success in challenging photographic tradition. According to Tate Modern, this success allows Wall to reference “both popular culture (the illuminated signs of cinema and advertising hoardings) and the sense of scale he admires in classical painting. As three-dimensional objects, the lightboxes take on a sculptural presence, impacting on the viewer’s physical sense of orientation in relationship to the work.”
“Mexican documentary photography is imbued with a revolutionary spirit and validated by the investment of the photographer in the subject itself, as though the image ‘is’ the country ‘is’ the photographer.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 10th March – 8th July, 2012
Curator: Jessica S. McDonald, Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA
List of Photographers Included: Katya Brailovsky, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Carrillo, Alejandro Cartagena, Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gomez, Pia Elizondo, Dave Gatley, Oscar Fernando Gomez, Héctor Garcia, Lourdes Grobet, Graciela Iturbide, Geoffrey James, Mark Klett, Pablo Lopez Luz, Elsa Medina, Susan Meiselas, Enrique Metinides, Pedro Meyer, Tina Modotti, Rodrigo Moya, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Paolo Pellegrin, Antonio Reynoso, Daniela Rossell, Mark Ruwedel, Victoria Sambunaris, Alec Soth, Paul Strand, Yvonne Venegas, Brett Weston, Edward Weston, and Mariana Yampolsky.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking Worker, Assassinated) 1934 Gelatin silver print 19.2 x 23.8cm
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) La buena fama durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping) 1939 Gelatin silver print 20.3 x 25.4cm
Compilation by Dr Marcus Bunyan
“There is no one ‘Mexican photography,’ but one strand that runs throughout is a synthesis of aesthetics and politics. We see that with Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and we still see it in work made decades later.”
Jessica S. McDonald
One of my early heroes in photography was Manuel Alvarez Bravo whom I rate as one of the best photographers that has ever lived, up there with Atget and Sudek. His photograph Parabola optica (Optical Parable, 1931, below) lays the foundation for an inherent language of Mexican photography: that of a parable, a short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson. Many Mexican photographs tell such stories based on the mythology of the country: there are elements of the absurd, surrealism, macabre, revolution, political and socio-economic issues, also of death, violence, beauty, youth, sexuality and religion to name but a few – a search for national identity that is balanced in the photographs of Bravo by a sense of inner peace and redemption. This potent mix of issues and emotions is what makes Mexican photography so powerful and substantive. In the “presence” (or present, the awareness of the here and now) of Mexican photography there is a definite calligraphy of the body in space located in most of the work. This handwriting is idiosyncratic and emotive; it draws the viewer into an intimate narrative embrace.
Two famous photographs by Bravo illustrate some of these themes (Apollonian / Dionysian; utopian / dystopian). When placed together they seem to have a strange attraction one to the other (see photographs above).
Unlike most Australian documentary photography where there is an observational distance present in the photographs – a physical space between the camera/photographer and the subject – Mexican documentary photography is imbued with a revolutionary spirit and validated by the investment of the photographer in the subject itself, as though the image is the country is the photographer. There is an essence and energy to the Mexican photographs that seems to turn narrative on its head, unlike the closed loop present in the tradition of Australian story telling. The intimate, swirling narratives of Mexican photography could almost be termed lyrical socio-realist. The halo of the golden child of Yvonne Venegas’ Nirvana (2006, below) menaced by the upturned forks is a perfect example.
Some of the themes mentioned above are evidenced in the photographs in this posting. Not the placid nude or heroic pyramid of Weston but the howl of the masked animal and surrealism of Our Lady of the Iguanas demands our close engagement.I only wish Australian photographers could be as forthright in their investigation of the morals and ethics of this country and our seemingly never ending search for a national identity (other than war, mateship, the beach, sport and the appropriation of Aboriginal painting exported as the Australian art “identity”).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to SFMoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
From March 10 through July 8, 2012, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present the exhibition Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser. Exploring the distinctively rich and diverse tradition of photography in Mexico from the 1920s to the present, the exhibition showcases works by important Mexican photographers as well as major American and European artists who found Mexico to be a place of great artistic inspiration.
Organised by SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Photography Jessica S. McDonald, the selection of more than 150 works draws from SFMOMA’s world-class photography holdings and highlights recent major gifts and loans from collectors Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser. The presentation reflects the collections’ particular strengths, featuring photographs made in Mexico by Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston, along with works by key Mexican photographers including Lola Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Carrillo, Héctor Garcia, Lourdes Grobet, Graciela Iturbide, Enrique Metinides, Pedro Meyer, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, and Mariana Yampolsky.
The exhibition begins with the first artistic flowering of photography in Mexico after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and goes on to look at the explosion of the illustrated press at midcentury; the documentary investigations of cultural traditions and urban politics that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; and more recent considerations of urban life, globalisation, and issues particular to the U.S.-Mexico border region. Rather than attempting to define a national style, the exhibition considers the range of approaches and concerns that photographers in Mexico have pursued over time. As McDonald notes, “There is no one ‘Mexican photography,’ but one strand that runs throughout is a synthesis of aesthetics and politics. We see that with Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and we still see it in work made decades later.”
As arts and culture flourished in Mexico after the Revolution, many European and American artists were drawn to the country. Among them were Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, who arrived in Mexico in 1923. Inspired by what they saw there, Weston and Modotti in turn motivated Mexican photographers to pursue the medium’s artistic possibilities; their influence helped “give Mexican photographers confidence that art photography was a viable path,” says McDonald. Hence, the exhibition opens with a selection of works made in Mexico by Modotti, Weston, his son Brett Weston, and Paul Strand during the 1920s and 1930s.
One of the Mexican photographers encouraged by Modotti and Weston was Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who went on to become one of the most influential photographers and teachers in the country’s history as well as a key figure in the broader international history of the medium. The exhibition features a substantial number of major works by the photographer, many of them donated or loaned to SFMOMA by Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser. In considering Alvarez Bravo’s career, the exhibition illuminates the birth and development of a tradition of art photography in Mexico. The presentation also includes a selection of works by Alvarez Bravo’s first wife, Lola Alvarez Bravo, an important photographer in her own right who established a successful commercial and artistic practice.
In mid-20th-century Mexico, as in the United States and Europe, earning an adequate income as an art photographer was an unlikely proposition. Instead, many photographers made a living through photojournalism, contributing to the numerous illustrated publications in circulation during this period. In the decades following the Revolution, there was great interest in traditional ways of life and in defining what it meant to be Mexican. Some photographers, such as Manuel Carrillo, created images documenting the nation’s traditions and celebrating its common people. Others, like Hector Garcia and Rodrigo Moya, rejected this sentimental approach, focusing instead on contemporary concerns and the political and social turbulence that continued to influence post-revolutionary Mexican life.
The late 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of critical theory and a new interest in investigating the nature of photography as a medium; in Mexico as elsewhere, there were more opportunities to study photography and to pursue noncommercial projects. A number of Mexican photographers, such as Lourdes Grobet, Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, created extended documentary series. Iturbide lived among indigenous people and recorded the details of their daily lives; Grobet focused on wrestling and the cultural concept of the mask; Ortiz Monasterio captured gritty, dystopian views of Mexico City. The exhibition draws extensively on gifts from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser to represent directions in Mexican photography of the 1970s and 1980s.
Since the 1990s, the attention of many Mexican photographers has turned away from cultural traditions and rural landscapes and toward the cities and suburbs where many Mexicans now live. Works by Katya Brailovsky, Alejandro Cartagena, Pablo Lopez Luz, Daniela Rossell, and Yvonne Venegas reflect this interest in the changing social landscape, looking at issues of wealth and class, urbanization and land use, and the effects of the globalised economy. The exhibition closes with contemporary international photographers’ perspectives on U.S.-Mexico border issues. Images by Mark Klett, Victoria Sambunaris, and Alec Soth consider the border as landscape, while works by Elsa Medina, Susan Meiselas, and Paolo Pellegrin document the experiences of migrant workers and people trying, successfully or unsuccessfully, to cross into the United States.
About Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Based in Los Angeles, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser have a deep and longstanding interest in Mexican photography, which they have been collecting since 1995. The photography department at SFMOMA has benefited greatly from their generosity: they have donated more than 175 works to the museum over the last six years. Their recent major gift of Mexican work, including over 50 photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, and others, has created an ideal opportunity for SFMOMA to present this exhibition exploring photography in Mexico.
Hector Garcia Cobo (August 23, 1923 – June 2, 2012) was a Mexican photographer and photojournalist who had a sixty-year career chronicling Mexico’s social classes, Mexico City and various events of the 20th century, such as the 1968 student uprising. He was born poor but discovered photography in his teens and early 20s, deciding to study it seriously after his attempt to photograph the death of a co-worker failed. He was sent to the Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas by magazine director Edmundo Valdés who recognised García’s talent. Most of García’s career was related to photojournalism, working with publications both inside and outside of Mexico. However, a substantial amount of his work had more artistic and critical qualities. Many of these were exhibited in galleries and museums, with sixty five individual exhibitions during his lifetime. This not only included portraits of artists and intellectuals (including a famous portrait of David Alfaro Siqueiros at Lecumberri Prison) but also portraits of common and poor people. He was also the first photojournalist to explicitly criticise Mexico’s elite, either making fun of them or contrasting them to the very poor.
Lourdes Grobet Argüelles (25 July 1940 – 15 July 2022) was a Mexican contemporary photographer, known for her photographs of Mexican lucha libre wrestlers.
Grobet spent some time as a painter before focussing on photography. Her photography led her to explore lucha libre, and she spent a lot of time getting to know the luchadores (wrestlers). Grobet did some theatre and video, and published several books. Grobet’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, and she received many grants and awards for her work.
Career
Kati Horna introduced Grobet to the world of photography, though the main influences in her early career were Mathias Goeritz, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, El Santo and others. Grobet studied as a painter in Mexico for some time and then took a trip to Paris in 1968; it changed her life and the way that she viewed the art world.
While she was in Paris, Grobet visited many art galleries and discovered kinetic art; because of this, she liked working with multimedia. She spent some time working at a jazz concert, controlling lighting and kinetic projections. When Grobet returned to Mexico, she decided that she wanted to focus on photography; after she got back home, she decided to burn all of her old work and start over.
In 1981 Grobet released her first set of photographs. At the beginning of her career in photography, she was part of a group called Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía (Mexican Council of Photography), formed by Pedro Meyer in 1977. With her participation in this group, she was able to revitalise photography in Mexico,[citation needed] which led to a movement called the Grupos. Grobet was focused on establishing a community-based perspective.
Grobet spent some time with indigenous people during a time of great struggle for them. She took the time to learn more about them and photograph them in a theatrical way. She wanted to relate to indigenous people using her artistic initiative, so they made costumes and scenery of their own and she then took their photos. Later on, Grobet took interest in the Mayan culture. Wanting to learn more about the Mayans she went to the suburbs; while this was not a common thing to do, she wanted to steer clear of any tourists. She wanted to get accurate information about the people she documented and explore an area less traveled. She discovered temples that were made by an unknown civilisation and she decided they were to be called the Olmayazetec.
After her education and her travels, Grobet came back to México City. She once again started to explore her childhood interest of luchadores. She found that there was very little information pertaining to the luchadores, and so she decided that she wanted to make them more known to the world.
Grobet spent thirty years devoted to taking pictures of the luchadores and studying their way of life. She spent time photographing lucha libre wrestlers inside and outside of the ring, both in their masks, but also in their own homes. Grobet wanted to show that they lived normal lives, just like everyone else. She got very close with well known Lucha Libre wrestlers such as: El Santo, Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, Sagrada, Octagon, Misioneros de la Muerte, Los Perros del Mal, and Los Brazos. Influenced greatly by Mathias Goeritz, the Polish sculptor from Gdańsk, and by Gilberto Aceves Navarro, a Mexican master of art murals, who were her teachers, Grobet worked on pictures of El Santo, one of the most important Mexican wrestlers, and a hero of lucha libre who starred in more than 50 films. Since 1975, she has published more than 11,000 photographs of the sport, including those on the sport in the United States since the 1930s, and as an important part of Mexican popular culture, adopting a sociological attitude. The sport involves many costumes and masks, leading it to a sport-carnival air which is much appreciated by Mexicans.
She also ventured into cinema. In her 2013 movie Bering. Balance and Resistance, Grobet questions the political separation between the Big Diomede Island (Russia) and the Little Diomede Island (USA) in the Bering Strait, a border between the United States and Russia. Showing the consequences of the separation between both Islands. After the American-Soviet conflict of the 21st century, the Beringia region was divided in two, which caused the separation of complete Nanook families and also, paradoxically, separated the place where the first human beings that populated the American continent crossed.
Grobet has had over one hundred exhibitions of her photographs, both group and solo exhibitions. She had her work exhibited at the London Mexfest festival in 2012. She won an award at the Second Biennal in Fine Art Photography. In 1975, for the exhibition Hora y media, she transformed a gallery into a photographic laboratory. She developed the photographs, but without fixing them, and displayed them on three walls. While the public looked at the photographs, the lights from the gallery made it look like they disappeared.
In 1977, Grobet presented Travelling, an exhibition of photography on an escalator. Among her other works were Paisajes pintados, Teatro campesino, Strip Tease.
Mariana Yampolsky (Mexican, 1925–2002) Caricia (Caress) 1989 Gelatin silver print 13 3/8 x 17 1/2 in (34 x 44.5cm) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948) Shortie on the Bally, Barton, VT 1974 Gelatin silver print
The exhibition closes with contemporary international photographers’ perspectives on U.S.-Mexico border issues. Images by Mark Klett, Victoria Sambunaris, and Alec Soth consider the border as landscape, while works by Elsa Medina, Susan Meiselas, and Paolo Pellegrin document the experiences of migrant workers and people trying, successfully or unsuccessfully, to cross into the United States.
![Fritz Winter (German, 1905-1976) 'Stufungen [Gradations]' 1934](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/fritz-winter-stufungen-1934-web.jpg "Fritz Winter (German, 1905-1976) 'Stufungen [Gradations]' 1934")
![Fritz Winter (German, 1905-1976) 'Weiß in Schwarz [White in Black]' 1934](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/fritz-winter-weic39f-in-schwarz-1934-web.jpg "Fritz Winter (German, 1905-1976) 'Weiß in Schwarz [White in Black]' 1934")
![Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) '[Detroit]' 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/harry-callahan-detroit.jpg "Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) '[Detroit]' 1941")
![Franck-François-Genès Chauvassaignes (French, 1831 - after 1900) 'Untitled [Female Nude in Studio]' 1856-1859 from the exhibition 'Naked Before the Camera' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - September, 2012](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/chauvassaignes_seated-nude-web.jpg "Franck-François-Genès Chauvassaignes (French, 1831 - after 1900) 'Untitled [Female Nude in Studio]' 1856-1859 from the exhibition 'Naked Before the Camera' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - September, 2012")
![Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin (French, 1800 - after 1875) 'Untitled [Two Standing Female Nudes]' c. 1850 from the exhibition 'Naked Before the Camera' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - September, 2012](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/moulin_two-nudes-standing-web.jpg "Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin (French, 1800 - after 1875) 'Untitled [Two Standing Female Nudes]' c. 1850 from the exhibition 'Naked Before the Camera' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - September, 2012")
![Unknown photographer (French) '[Seated Female Nude]' c. 1850](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/seated-female-nude.jpg "Unknown photographer (French) '[Seated Female Nude]' c. 1850")
![Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) '[Standing Female Nude]' c. 1853](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/julien-vallou-de-villeneuve-standing-female-nude.jpg "Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) '[Standing Female Nude]' c. 1853")
![Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874) 'Untitled [Seated Female Nude]' 1853-1854](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/durieu_nude_ph8976-web.jpg "Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874) 'Untitled [Seated Female Nude]' 1853-1854")
![Charles Alphonse Marlé (French, 1821 - after 1867) 'Untitled [Standing Male Nude]' c. 1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/marle_standing-male-nude-web.jpg "Charles Alphonse Marlé (French, 1821 - after 1867) 'Untitled [Standing Male Nude]' c. 1855")
![Nadar (French, Paris 1820 - 1910 Paris) '[Standing Female Nude]' 1860-1861](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/nadar-standing-female-nude.jpg "Nadar (French, Paris 1820 - 1910 Paris) '[Standing Female Nude]' 1860-1861")
![Unknown photographer (French) '[Nude with Mirror]' c. 1850](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/nude-with-mirror.jpg "Unknown photographer (French) '[Nude with Mirror]' c. 1850")
![Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) '[Reclining Female Nude]' c. 1853](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/julien-vallou-de-villeneuve-reclining-female-nude.jpg "Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) '[Reclining Female Nude]' c. 1853")
![Unknown photographer (French) '[Standing Female Nude]' c. 1856](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/standing-female-nude.jpg "Unknown photographer (French) '[Standing Female Nude]' c. 1856")
![Unknown photographer (French) '[Standing Male Nude]' c. 1856](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/standing-male-nude.jpg "Unknown photographer (French) '[Standing Male Nude]' c. 1856")
![Unknown photographer (French) '[Female Nude with Mask]' c. 1870](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/female-nude-with-mask.jpg "Unknown photographer (French) '[Female Nude with Mask]' c. 1870")
![Albert Londe (French, 1858-1917) Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (French, 1849-1933) '[Male Musculature Study]' c. 1890](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/male-study.jpg "Albert Londe (French, 1858-1917) Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (French, 1849-1933) '[Male Musculature Study]' c. 1890")
![Guglielmo Plüshow (Italian born Germany, 1852–1930) '[Young Male Nude Seated on Leopard Skin]' 1890s-1900s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/plushow-young-male-nude-seated-on-leopard-skin.jpg "Guglielmo Plüshow (Italian born Germany, 1852–1930) '[Young Male Nude Seated on Leopard Skin]' 1890s-1900s")
![Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) '[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]' c. 1916](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/cavendish-bentinck-morrell-cavorting-by-the-pool-at-garsington.jpg "Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) '[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]' c. 1916")
![Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) '[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]' c. 1916](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/cavendish-bentinck-morrell-cavorting-by-the-pool-at-garsington-a.jpg "Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) '[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]' c. 1916")
![Edward Weston (American, Highland Park, Illinois 1886 - 1958 Carmel, California) '[Nude]' 1925](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/weston-nude.jpg "Edward Weston (American, Highland Park, Illinois 1886 - 1958 Carmel, California) '[Nude]' 1925")
![George Platt Lynes (American, East Orange, New Jersey 1907–1955 New York) '[Male Nude]' 1930s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/lynes-male-nude-1.jpg)
![Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Untitled [Two Men in Silhouette]' c. 1987](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/16_morrisroe_untitled-web.jpg "Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Untitled [Two Men in Silhouette]' c. 1987")
![Oliver Boberg (German, b. 1965) 'Unterführung' [Underpass] 1997](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/r_p_oliver-boberg-unterfuehrungdruckbar-web.jpg "Oliver Boberg (German, b. 1965) 'Unterführung' [Underpass] 1997")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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